I first became aware of politics, in the ordinary sense, during the presidential election of 1948. My parents and their friends belonged to the Democratic Party and had voted for Roosevelt. It was what they called their “mass work”—going to where the people were, in order to lead them to something better. This had been the Party line since the days of the Popular Front, when under orders from Moscow the comrades abandoned their “ultra left” position and stopped calling Roosevelt a fascist. “Communism is twentieth-century Americanism,” the Party leader Earl Browder had said, promoting the spirit of cooperation...