Notes on the New Right

...But they have been aided by a consensus that we already know what makes the New Right tick...

...The harsh nativist lines of the old-stock-versus-new-stock conflict faded during the McCarthy era when anti-Communism provided a link between the previously warring groups...

...The lack of a liberal commitment to free and open discussion through democratic debate can be seen in the two most controversial reforms of the seventies, busing and abortion...

...In a similar vein, ordinary people of all stripes are truly baffled by the change from equality of opportunity, which they came to accept, to affirmative action which justified "experiments" like busing...

...It is now feminists and liberals who insist on censoring textbooks to ensure the correct perspective...

...can anyone recognize the New Right in that picture...

...Instead of rushing in with quick fixes, I suggest that liberals devote themselves to addressing two modest problems while we wait to see how long it takes Reagan to fall on his face...

...But having said that, the liberals fail to see that the disorders wrought by capitalism leave the norms of family life unscathed...

...speaking as a fiscal conservative in 1932, but the words were less important than the image of F.D.R...

...In the immortal words of Richard Nixon, it wants the whole enchilada...

...4. Normative versus behavioral deviance AT MEETING AFTER MEETING I've observed liberals and leftists scratching their heads and asking how is it possible for Ronald Reagan, a divorced man, to represent family values...

...The left is as likely as the right to quote with approval Paine's comments on government...

...He has four children, but is a grandfather just once...

...Writing about John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, Kendall warned that ". . . when we elevate freedom of thought and speech to the position of society's highest good, it ceases to merely be freedom of thought and speech, and becomes - to a great many important matters - the society's ultimate standard of order...

...Heidi has recently been banned from the San Francisco schools on the grounds that it was anti-female...

...Hofstadter, you may recall, dispatched the Old Right off to cloud-cuckoo land...

...The appeal of the free-enterprise Utopia is far more persistent and compelling to Americans than its left-wing rivals because, unlike the Utopias of the left, elements of its vision small-town cooperation, or the free interchange of the marketplace appear regularly in the daily lives of part of the population...

...Whole books have been spent mapping out the ties between its various political organs and there has been an endless flow of breathless articles charting the ebb and flow of its power...

...Borrowing his categories from Adorno's The Authoritarian Personality, he took the right out of its historical context and turned it into a psychological category which existed across time and space...

...It was necessary, Kendall believed, to accept a majoritarian conception of truth if society was to maintain its equilibrium...

...Or that they will panic into reconstructing their politics in the manner of a market research religion which tries to combine the best features of the ten greatest theologies...

...He's been divorced," they wail...

...It has, in its appeal to the family, a mechanism which can shape the character of the individuals who are to fulfill its Utopian hopes...

...The Harris poll told a different story...

...Its long grouse against the twentieth century was, he suggested, part of the flawed provincial perspective of a native American Protestantism which had been unable to reconcile itself to the immigration, urbanization, and industrialization which had overtaken the nineteenth-century ideal of America...

...But Hofstadter's own critique shared the quality of what he was decrying...

...Or to take another example, how can Planned Parenthood present itself as a champion of freedom of choice when it insists on mandatory sex education for the public schools...

...Hofstadter criticized the right for its belief that it was in possession of timeless truths which had been violated by a succession of evil conspiracies...

...The philosopher of the New Right, Wilmoore Kendall, argued that it was right and proper for Athens to put Socrates to death...

...Behaviorally they're right...

...Oliver Wendell Holmes put his finger on the matter when he explained,' 'It has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies but to be one...

...Harris found that on a whole host of social issues, from prayer in the public schools to support for trimming the federal budget and reducing welfare programs, the electorate was far closer to Goldwater than Johnson...

...Traditionally, resentful conservatives looked to Congress as a guardian of local interests and a shield against the centralized intrusions of the presidency...

...Since high standards are so difficult to live up to, it is important to be tolerant of an individual's peccadillos, just as long as they aren't too extreme...

...That dismissal would not be nearly so dangerous if so many people who are not part of the New Right didn't share many of the same misgivings about the collapse of traditional American values and virtues...

...Kendall argued that if someone insisted on contravening the mores of a society, the society - in order to protect itself - had no choice but to deal harshly with the transgressor...

...Robert Bauman of Maryland was found to have engaged in some questionable sexual practices, he confessed his failing to his constituents, and at least some conservatives forgave him...

...And there are several examples of religious conservatives' recommending right-wing politicians known for doubtful financial habits over honest liberals...

...In the 1940s the charges of treason hurled at professional liberals appeared plausible to many blue-collar Americans because the experimental approach liberals brought to politics appeared to be based on a lack of loyalty to any fixed principles...

...Unlike the radical, the rightist doesn't need to project a sharp break into a cloudy future...

...She and other conservatives are spending far more time these days in a frontal intellectual and political assault than in spinning the gossamer theories which served to comfort them during their long internal exile...

...Liberals rightfully see this as hypocrisy without understanding the meaning of what they've stumbled across...

...It took two published incidents of homosexual promiscuity before conservative constituents of a Mississippi congressman gave up on him...

...For the street corner conservative, abortion, welfare, and sexual promiscuity all involve unacceptable compromises with the personal loyalty that is at the root of their day-to-day morality...

...The hostility toward the federal government and its political wards which was associated with conservative Protestants is now widely held throughout the white population...

...Conservatives, you see, are far more tolerant of people whose actions lead them astray than of people whose ideas challenge the basic consensus they see as necessary to organize society...

...Until the late thirties the Republicans were frozen in shock by their fall from grace...

...The deep-seated patriotism of the American working class derives in significant measure from the importance of loyalty in day-to-day life, in the emphasis on family and solidarity at work...

...Can liberals stand on the shoulders of the best that has come before them without turning into pale, Burkean reflections of their conservative rivals...

...Condescension, or outright hostility, has made it easy for reporters to evade the idea-feelings of the radically conservative...

...Liberals by contrast have to rely on the inherent goodness of people...

...For all I know the devilish plots continue, but the right as a whole is paying less and less attention to them...

...The foreign-policy hostilities and anti-Communist witch hunts of the forties obscured the fact that the debate over loyalty was in part a class conflict over the basic code people ought to live by...

...He argued that the right was primarily motivated by resentment or what he called status anxiety...

...Goldwater the candidate was repudiated, but on a local level conservatism was intact and even thriving...

...Americanism is derived from the Enlightenment belief in the sufficiency of God-given individual reason, which provides the basis on which men voluntarily come together to organize themselves...

...To be an American for the right has meant to share in the vision of a largely stateless society of free self-regulating individuals...

...They were like the victims of a natural disaster traumatized by watching their most familiar surroundings slide away...

...It is this fear of normative chaos which links Kendall's fervent support of Joe McCarthy to the majoritarian intolerance of the New Right...

...The willingness of liberals to support government by judiciary when it suits their goals puts them in a poor position to lecture others about the need for a free and open society...

...And finally how do liberals, congenitally tied to experimentalism, propose to address the need for heritage and tradition, played on so effectively by the right...

...The New Right envies the way liberals have used the political system to serve their ends...

...In place of off-the-wall conspiracy theories, we have the economic models, fiscal hypotheses, and voting analyses of successful young intellectuals and politicians aiming to remake the country in the image of their business sponsors...

...Is there a liberal response...

...Kendall and his acolyte William Buckley feared that an open market in ideas, in which every idea was given its day, would lead to social disorder...

...Where the right was once fearful of being able to retain its own provincial privileges, it is now confidently looking to reshape the entire political system to serve its interests...

...The liberal love affair with growth and change can, from another angle, look like a dangerous instability...

...Nativism, the belief in the hereditary national proprietorship of Protestant America is no longer a driving force in our political life...

...There is a fascination with the political musculature of the New Right which isn't matched by a concern with what lies beneath the surface...

...Society," he said, "performs for itself everything which is ascribed to government...

...They see it, unfairly or not, as the product of elitist arrogance which is willing to ride roughshod over the ties which bind them to their neighborhoods and schools...

...Diminished in place and prestige, the Old Right was ever on the defensive, reflexively throwing up its hands to ward off the next blow from the feds in Washington and the apostles of modernism in general...

...This vision of a society without priests or masters and in which sovereign individuals govern themselves without the corrupting hand of bureaucracy is, however naive, still extremely attractive...

...In place of the small town hick alternatively cowering and snarling before his enemies, we have the hyper-aggressive Sun-Belt businessman and his companion, the new-wave, blown-dry Republican politico, who are sure they know what's best not only for themselves but for the whole country...

...In sum, the new alignment has pitted the society against its own government...

...Market and corporate decisions can destroy communities and uproot families on a scale grander than that of the most purblind Washington planner...

...Conservatives argue that without the market as a crucible of character, the personal virtues necessary for a civilized life disappear...

...In America conservatism is based on hereditary religious, ethnic, and racial groups...

...The "great" political development of the last fifteen years is the story of how the heirs of the new-stock immigrants joined with their rivals in regarding liberal inter-ventionism, rightly or wrongly, as a threat to their day-to-day well being...

...FRED SIEGEL, a historian, teaches in the communications department at Queens College, CUNY...

...But today conservatives criticize Congress as the province of the special interests and they look to a plebiscitary presidency as the vehicle of their conservative counter-New Deal...

...This criticism is bitterly resented, and it makes the "reformer" and not the capitalist the chief object of ire...

...How do liberals propose to encourage individual character and what used to be called a virtuous citizenry...

...Leave aside the fact that such an account ignores the very real policy issues which agitated the forties...

...If treason is no longer at the center of right-wing concerns, loyalty is...

...The Smiths may have to move from Duluth to Dallas, but wherever they go it will be New Class social engineers who will be criticizing the family as the seedbed of inequality and pathology...

...They point to the growing incivility and even sheer criminality which is more and more common in everyday life as the proof of their argument...

...Hence Reagan's following words: "The time is now, my fellow Americans, to recapture our destiny, to take it in our own hands...

...Coercion was essential, then, if naturally diverse minds were to form a common tendency...

...And secondly the leaky wall between norms and behavior is seen as practically valuable...

...In California, for instance, some areas which went very strongly for LBJ also voted to repeal the state's fair housing laws by a better than two-to-one margin...

...When they revived they were still shuddering from the winds of change and they consoled themselves by drawing upon a tradition of bizarre conspiracy theories to explain their wrongful loss of status...

...It is now legitimate to dismiss the new political currents as merely an updated version of the same old nativist quackery, by merely citing Hofstadter...

...The notes that follow address that danger by updating Hofstadter's categories to sketch out the chains of political sentiment which link/divide the Old Right and the New, and the New Right and those who have drifted away from liberalism...

...Then came the Depression and the usurpation of their throne by an alien power...

...Hofstadter, unintentionally, dehumanized and depoliticized the debate between left and right...

...as the author of a grand political transformation...

...Liberals, having finally grown sensitive to the inroads conservatives have made by playing on the fears of family breakdown, have argued that the chief threat to the family is the caprice of the market and not the impositions of the New Class...

...And inflation has done far more to pull women away from their children than feminism...

...and it is the possession of this time-honored vision which allowed the right to feel central to the nation even when it was pushed to the political periphery...

...If there are no affirmative answers to these questions, then there is a good chance that Reaganism will long outlive the failures of Reagan.ill long outlive the failures of Reagan...

...The grass-roots opposition to statism and extensive social welfare programs was undiminished even when the Great Society was riding high in the Washington saddle...

...He quoted F.D.R...

...The vision has survived corporate capitalism...

...Radicals who preach the virtues of neighborhood government and a "humane scale" society testify to the breadth of its appeal...

...Leave aside your objections for a moment...

...There was an unintended irony here...

...There is for conservatives of all varieties a remarkable strain of behavioral tolerance...

...When the logic of civil rights rightly and necessarily led the federal government increasingly to impose itself on the organization of life in the localities, hometown conservatism was moved into the national arena and the groundwork was laid for the right wing revival...

...Working-class and lower-middle-class people in general are far less skilled at the antagonistic cooperation which characterizes a great deal of professional and upper-middle-class work...

...2. The dividing lines are different this time IN EUROPE CONSERVATISM was based on hereditary classes...

...It seems no more attracted to such fantasies than the left, some of whose most respected spokesmen were convinced that John Anderson was an agent of the Trilateral Commission...

...A decade later the Goldwater campaign of '64 was the final attempt by Protestant America to single-handedly reassert its pre-New Deal dominance...

...When strongly pro-family Rep...

...More striking is the case of the Georgia professor who was jailed with the support of the ACLU for being unwilling to reveal how he voted on a tenure case for a female colleague...

...At the same time upper-middle and upper-class Protestants have increasingly moved into the Democratic party, the new vehicle for moralism, while the lower strata of all stripes are increasingly joined in a common resentment toward federal policy and its new ward, black America...

...Hypocrisy thus becomes a virtue...

...Once upon a time liberals, seeking to criticize this numerical interpretation of right and wrong, could present themselves as the heirs of open-mindedness a la Mills or John Dewey...

...His daughter ran off with a rock group...

...4. Treason and loyalty Internal conspiracy was the central preoccupation of the Old Right...

...Most recently their resentment was born of Depression-era failure...

...Goldwater, unwilling and unable to reach out beyond his core constituency, was smashed...

...4. Concluding questions THERE IS A danger that liberals, cajoled by the flattery of history and the desire to be on the winning side with the majority, will adopt me-tooism before Reagan's policies are given a chance to fail...

...To be sure, a hard line anti-Communism persists and there are still conspiratorial overtones to the epithet "Eastern Establishment," but even Phyllis Schlafly, who was said by Hofstadter to embody the paranoid style, has taken to peddling a more above-the-board brand of politics...

...The abstracted numericalism of busing has reversed the symbolism which built support for civil rights...

...A son dances...

...In short, Hofstadter the historian indicted the right for being ahistorical...

...For the non-professional, loyalty is essential to both identity and decency...

...Unfortunately that's no longer possible...

...Censorship in the name of a "good" cause and the denial of individual conscience are no longer confined to the right...

...One final point here...

...3. The negative Utopia Beneath THE endless whining of the Old Right, first towards the New Deal and then towards the Great Society, there was a positive, even Utopian vision of what the country ought to be...

...In both cases the liberal federal courts imposed a sweeping change on the country without the benefit of extended public discussion...

...Briefly, by the 1920s the Republicans had governed the country for nearly seventy years and come to look upon themselves as the hereditary rulers of the land...

...This is part of a great political reversal...

...Instead of images of black children being attacked by racists, the daily fare pictures white children, like the three white girls who have recently become a cause celebre in Louisiana, as victims of a judicial body count...

...The fear is that if a man isn't loyal to his own seed or spouse or is unwilling to take care of his family obligations, he will be incapable of the reliability necessary for mutual loyalty...

...The right also has a second advantage...

...Their articles are filled with signature phrases like "rage against the modern world" and an "inability to cope with the complexities of the twentieth century" that hark back to what turns out to be the source of the consensus, Richard Hofstadter's celebrated set of essays in The Paranoid Style in American Politics, the last of which was written more than a decade and a half ago...

...A proposition which led Ring Lardner to remark that when the bet is on humanity, the odds are always nine to five against...

...Moving deftly back and forth across two centuries of American history Hofstadter seemed to show that the effluvia emitted by McCarthyism was part of a deep-fibered psychological flaw in the American character...

...Its adherents were convinced of the existence of a vast, insidious, preternaturally effective international conspiratorial network designed to perpetrate acts of the most fiendish character...

...It is virtuous on the first count because it implies you have a set of standards to deviate from, unlike liberals whose experimentalism supposedly leaves them bereft of any moral anchors...

...The same issue showed up in an even more extreme form in the South Dakota senate race where George McGovern, a veteran, an ordained Christian minister, a husband married for thirty-five years, and the father of five, was successfully depicted as anti-American, anti-family and anti-Christian by an opponent who wasn't a vet, wasn't a minister, and wasn't even married...

...1. From resentment to envy Resentment was the prime political emotion of the crabbed provincials of Hofstadter's text...

...he can simply point to the need to purify and heighten what he already sees as good around him...

...The unfortunate legacy of The Paranoid Style has been to make it unnecessary to look afresh at the ideas and emotions motivating the Tight...

...LBJ's victory was so overwhelming that many liberals including the normally astute Richard Rovere saw it as the end of conservatism in America...

...And therein lies the hidden meaning of Reagan's penultimate appeal to the nation in his acceptance speech...

...In fact the Trilaterals have achieved a position on the left similar to that once occupied in the forties by World Federalism on the right...

...Overwhelmed and resentful, at best they wanted to be left free of federal "meddling" to run their towns, businesses, and workers in the manner to which they were accustomed...