There was not for Kennan the rude identification with the broad mass of the people that Lukacs marks as the defining trait of nationalism, but rather the tie to country and land that was for him most significant in determining his loyalties and strong sense of duty. This distance from “the people” seems to have been in one sense temperamental—Kennan was not a man who relished crowds—and in another sense philosophical and political. Coming of age in the 1920s and ’30s, Kennan developed a “distaste for democracy,” and his convictions during this period “involved a critique of parliamentarism and democracy.” In retrospect, some of his enthusiasms for authoritarian and corporatist regimes, whether of Austria or Portugal, may seem misplaced, but if ever there were a time when popular government revealed itself in all its weaknesses, fecklessness, and potential for degeneration it was probably during these decades. Certainly in our own time we could stand to have more Kennanesque skepticism of the virtues of democracy and less unchecked enthusiasm for its wonder-working powers.

At the same time, Kennan possessed a historian’s understanding of the vital difference between regimes and ideologies on the one hand and nations and cultures on the other: he perceived and valued this distinction between the Nazi government and the German people, so often blurred together then and now; he recognized that Soviet policy would be guided by Russian nationalist goals and informed by Russian historical precedents; and he foresaw that the victory of the Chinese Communists ensured that a national rivalry with the Russians would prevail over ideological unity. Kennan also predicted, correctly, that the nations of central and eastern Europe would prove “indigestible” to the Soviets because of the diverse national cultures that would not be long suppressed by official doctrine and imperial domination. This insight in turn informed his thinking about how to check Soviet power. Understanding nations, their histories, and their cultures mattered far more for understanding the world and shaping foreign policy than did ideologically centered analysis.  

Even more challenging to the conventional categories of American politics, and part of the reason why the burgeoning conservative movement would subsequently have little to do with him, was his attitude toward mass expressions of anticommunism. “I deplore the hysterical sort of anticommunism which, it seems to me, is gaining currency in our country,” he said in a speech at the University of Virginia. Today, among those who know Kennan’s name, his name is synonymous with containment and, by extension, anticommunism, and undoubtedly Kennan was as strongly anticommunist as any in his contempt for that ideology, so much so that he regarded the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union to be a mistake and grievous moral compromise. And yet, it was clear to him that there was potential for great danger from the excessive fear of a thing just as there was from the thing itself. As Lukacs puts it elsewhere in the book, “the ideology of anticommunism is a half-truth; and (again because of human nature) half-truths are more insidious and dangerous than are lies.”