His political biography shows the nature of his alignments: social disillusionment with both capitalism and Marxism; embracement of pacifism, and
then the abandonment of it during the rise of American isolationism and European fascism in the 1930s; the championing of U.S. intervention in World War II and a cold war
stratagem to contain Soviet power; and indictment of the pretensions of American messianism and scientism when the U.S. first intervened militarily in Viet Nam under John F. Kennedy.