Even today, politics is based on power relationships and the kind of calculations that have been canonized since the rise of the nation-state. Get a group of Washington practitioners together and you will still hear echoes of the old saw that “politics is the art of the possible.”

But this kind of thinking, in our new situation, has already brought mankind to the brink of disaster and promises to destroy political life altogether. It is so clearly anachronistic, at least to the young, that the newest postwar generation to come to maturity simply refuses to play the game. To their ears, even the soaring political rhetoric of John F. Kennedy sounds hollow and unconvincing. I recently heard a brilliant college student charge that the President's famous “Ask not what your country can do for you …” smacked of fascism. Taken literally that, of course, was nonsense; yet I think I know what the young man was trying to get at.