For those who lived in these countries it was clear that slowly—too slowly, of course—the ideological vigilance weakened, the crude dichotomies were losing their clarity, the new was fighting the old with less zeal. With the disappearance of the ideological smokescreen reality began to disclose itself in all its richness and complexity. The world, in short, was becoming more and more interesting. In liberal democracy we have been, unfortunately, observing a reverse trend. The ideological smokescreen is becoming more dense and more impenetrable than before.
