Thunder on the Right

...This is the real reason for Crawford's writing the book, although he carefully subordinates criticism to chronicle at most points...

...He dis- closes the New Right strategy to build on fear and insecurity, especially among lower-middle-class Americans from the South, the West, and the Midwest, against trigger-issues like busing, abor- tion, gun control, homosexuals, wom-en's liberation, the Panama Canal, and so on...

...I enjoyed Crawford's book and learned a great deal from it...

...Nonetheless, I am grateful he wrote it...

...Many years ago, in her book' on The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt discussed the crisis of the modern Bankrupt faith & ramshackle culture party system, both in its class-based con- tinental form and in its interest group Anglo-American model...

...I find it interesting that this is precisely the model taken for pastoral strategy by the Catholic church in many parts of the Third W~orld, where it lives under right- wing persecution...

...She referred to this principle eventually as the "council system," and saw its roots in the work- ers' councils which rose and were repres- sed at various points in capitalist and communist political history...

...Re- building community, then, as well as new forms of community institutions, may be a better long range strategy for resisting the American and indeed the global New Right...

...Indeed the New Right gained strength precisely because it copied the tactics of the New Left...

...Alan Crawford has done the American people an important service by writing probably the most extensive survey of the American New Right available today...

...But it is invaluable...

...In his fourth, characteristically slim~ collection, Tenebrae, Hill continues to present pow- erfuUy compressed poems, in which he considers the difficult but necessary task of seeking a moral ideal in the bankrupt culture of present-day Christianity...

...Both the New Left and the New Right are presently competing for leadership within this populist groundswell...

...He sees the leaders using the issues in- strumentally to build a power base...

...The book's thirteen chapters can be grouped into three clusters, although the author does not explicitly so group them...

...He sees them feeding on confusion and re- sentment, but building nothing in their place except mindless power...

...Crawford does a masterful job of chronicling the genesis and structure of the New Right...

...The same historical conditions which gave rise to a New Left in the sixties inevitably gave rise to a New Right in the seventies...

...Both may be described as new forms of political technology, since both are based on skillful use of mass media and computerized mailing lists...

...Only toward the end, as he reviews the political significance, does he make his criticism strongly...

...His book is also a low-keyed attack on the New Right, but from a conservative, rather than a liberal or socialist perspec- tive...

...The second cluster (chapters 5-8) probes four key themes in New Right propaganda--defense of family, anti-elitism, the centrality of media, and anti-bigness...

...For in-stance, referring to his slain self in the third section of "The Pentecost Castle," the speaker, bewildered and angry, ad- dresses Christlike observers--perhaps Commonweal: 602...

...he quotes Yeats, the grim- mer Yeats who knew that "it is terrible to desire and not/possess, and terrible to possess/and not desire...

...The poet describes the dark night of his religious desire in an epigraph to the opening poem ofTenebrae, "The Pente- cost Castle...

...He fears, and rightfully so in my opinion, that the mobilization of the reck...

...If anything, the material is so thorough that it becomes a bit tedi- ous to read...

...The third and final cluster (chapters 9-13) addresses the political significance of the New Right--its im- plications for the Republican and Demo- cratic parties, its use of the politics of grievance or resentment, its roots in American populism rather than authentic conservativism, and its fundamental threat to democracy...

...Both are also symptoms of the end of a political era, where underdeveloped communications and transportation technology required that the democratic process be organized through the mediating institution of the classical political party...

...In Catholic pastoral strategy, this principle is referred to as the "basic Christian community...

...I further believe he is correct in warning of the totalitarian danger from the New Right--a danger which is still weak, but growing...

...More reflection on this priniciple, on the wider global experience, and on the structural cause of the rise of the New Right, would be a helpful supplement to Alan Crawford's important, but limited study...

...As a clas- sic conservative who treasures mediating institutions to guarantee the checks and balances required by a stable social or- der, he is disturbed by the New Right call for direct democracy through popdlar in- itiatives which by-pass normal institu- tions...

...TENEBRAE Geoffrey Hill Houghton Mifflin, $4.50, 48 pp...

...But in Crawford's judgment, the New Right only preys on the constituencies behind these issues, and is not ultimately concerned with the issues themselves...

...For Craw- ford, the movement represents in the final analysis the drive of blind political technology, which could turn against its own constituency...

...He does not state it so crassly, but he indicates the call for direct democ- racy will lead instead to dictatorship...

...In his early poem "Annunciations" he de- scribes this beautiful necessity, which continues to trouble and attract him in his new work: So it is required...

...A return to old forms of checks and balances may prove insufficient to the challenge before us...

...He brings key New Right leaders like Richard Viguerie, Paul Weyrich, and Howard Philips, and key New Right or- ganizations like the Heritage Founda- tion, Moral Majority, Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress, and count- less others into public scrutiny...

...But paradoxically while the revolution in communications and transportation has uprooted the political party from its original source in community, it has simultaneously laid the foundation for alternative populist initiatives...

...Joe l.lolland T HE "NEW RIGHT" is a disturbing development in American polities...

...The first cluster (chapters 1-4) describes the structure of the New Right--its or- ganizational, financial, and cultural structure...

...Gnarled in both belief and unbelief, Hill expresses a range of complex emotions...

...less resentments of mass society will lead not to populist empowerment, but to a strengthening of the "imperial presi- dency...

...so we bear witheSS, Despite ourselves, to what is beyond us, Each distant sphere of harmony forever Poised, unanswerable...

...She called not for a return to old forms, but for the development of a new political principle, one which would be an antidote to to- talitarianism and which would provide the seed for a new society...

...Sofar the Ne~v Right has been more successful...

...Gary Zebs'un G EOFFREY HILL is one of England's strongest poets, extending the intellectual/visionary tradition of Mil- ton, Donne, and Blake...

...But I find his solution not adequate to the danger...