But I was not broadened enough to take what Philip and his circle offered. Had their offerings stayed on the level of the first parties I attended with Philip, matters might have been different. I can take any amount of talk, and there ran through their rapid-fire conversations phrases that, exploding like firecrackers, drew my attention: “the political state” (as distinct from the economic and social state—they were drawing such distinctions then); “the omnicompetent state”; “responsibility in areas of cultural autonomy.” Of course I had ideas as to meanings, but nothing they said really coalesced into concepts. I was not moved either to agreement or disagreement. I simply heard. In later meetings, however, I began to listen and to understand, but not what it was expected I would understand. Rather the opposite. I began to comprehend that they talked like people who had a vested interest in a democratic catastrophe. It was not Communism’s strength and validity, its constructive and health-seeking activities on which they based their arguments: it was democracy’s weaknesses. They rejoiced in the economic depression because they saw in it the beginning of democracy’s total collapse. The ideal, they said, was security _and_ freedom (and I agreed with this), but under “your system”—they were talking directly to me and to Hakely, a young but grizzled silversmith apprentice—“there is neither.” They were too smart actually to make capitalism and democracy synonymous, so I could judge only that this equating one with the other was a deliberate effort to confuse. And I was confused, and I showed it in childish exasperation at the way in which they pointed out, with a kind of glib, cold fervor, every weakness, every failure, every instance of corruption and discrimination and injustice, and how these affected one personally, and especially the Negro. The inference was plain that in the “omnicompetent state,” the “service state” (which were equated), these things would not be. But when I pressed for proof of their inferences, Philip and the intellectual leaders of the cell withdrew into taunts and challenges and were not percipient enough to see how dangerously they threatened my self-esteem. The idea of democracy was itself not particularly dear to me then, but I resented the doubts cast on my inherited assumptions about it. If anything, I resented democracy for leaving me and itself so defenseless; but I hated Communism for putting me on the defensive. My anger and frustration carried over from one meeting to the next, for though their arguments were basically weak, I had no answers to them. After the fifth meeting, I was certain that I was through with the Communists and all their works.