Reviews

...Partly because they won't take seriously the ideas of their subjects, and partly because they adhere to a technological rendering of the idea of progress, Lipset and Raab don't even consider the possibility that a stable agrarian society might be superior to a chaotic industrial one...

...To us it all sounds pretty strange—and not very appealing—but it was hardly "a mimicry of Hitlerian anti-Semitism...

...He was fully prepared to "kill" the Bank of the United States before it killed him, even if he had to bury economic stability with the "Monster...

...They also note periodic "marriages of convenience" between "elitist preservatists" and "antielitist preservatists...

...But what has to be said, finally, is that the form and structure of Harvey Swados's novel also represents a kind of standing fast— against the idea of free-form fiction as the only kind...

...Others (including Winrod) who advocated this legislation granted that evolution could be taught in private schools and perhaps at public universities...

...The strength of the novel is that the adult characters never vanish into abstractions...

...BOOKS He earnestly believed that the turmoil of the thirties signalled the imminent (but temporary) triumph of the Antichrist, to be followed by the physical reappearance of Jesus, the final judgment of mankind, and the millennium...

...This interpretation seems plausible only if we ignore the historical context...

...Against the proposition that to write well and true about radicals and revolution you have only to feel free, jot it down, sell the book, take the money, and run...

...They talk about revolution, some of them do something about it, but all of them remain their sadcomic, vital-weary, idealistic-cynical selves...

...In one of the standard books ignored by Lipset and Raab, Marvin Meyers has illustrated the Jacksonian desire to defend a "chaste republican order...

...This status anxiety leads them to embrace the ahistorical frame of mind which pluralists commonly assign to young leftists...

...Abraham Maslow has claimed that "wishes for safety, for belongingness and identification, for close love relationships and for respect and prestige" are human "needs in the same sense that water and amino acids are needs...

...So, too, the women come on more strongly, helping, hurting their men...

...The opponents of slavery found "an outlet in moral political action against the 'immorality' of a society which rejected them...

...The chapter on the "bigoted twenties" contains the fullest account of what the authors call "virulent fundamentalism...

...the debatable question is which side holds the shotgun in these affairs...

...Elsewhere, they flatly declare in the text that American cities have "never been the center" of "evangelical Protestant culture," but they cite in their notes Timothy Smith's Revivalism and Social Reform, a monograph written to challenge this stereotype...

...Lipset and Raab, for instance, consider interest-group politics inherently more reasonable than status politics...

...Perhaps this is why the first half of the book reads like an afterthought...

...Stripping Jefferson of his "libertarian halo," Professor Leonard Levy has shown that even our third president tried to pack federal grand juries (particularly during the trial of Aaron Burr), acquiesced in a military dictatorship over New Orleans, used troops without constitutional sanction to enforce the Embargo Act, and urged political tests for faculty at the University of Virginia...

...When the fundamentalists damned Nietzsche's barbaric German philosophy, they only modified a theme made popular by George Creel, the government official who advertised America during World War I. Similarly, General Curtis LeMay's ideas about foreign policy bear an impeccable ancestry...

...Although this great fear had been dismissed by historians until Bailyn reexamined the revolutionary pamphlets, it was taken seriously both by the colonists and by their British friends—including William Pitt and Edmund Burke...

...An assignment like that—after all that has been said in the form of history, memoir, essay, novel—what teacher would give it out or student take it on nowadays...

...BOOKS Almost always, however, they tell us that the trend obliges evangelical Christianity to decline —perhaps to balance the ever-rising middle class...

...When the fundamentalists said that students who valued Darwin more than Revelation were likely to develop new standards of behavior, they were more perceptive— and/or more candid—than the modernists who claimed that the word of science was morally neutral...

...Not only are these terms emotionally loaded, but they share a serious analytical drawback...

...No return to the old-time newsreel at the Dos Passos theater...

...Nevertheless, they close with the warning that the growth of "monistic ideology among youth," both Left and Right, may have been "the most important and destructive aspect of the decline of political civility in the 1960s...

...Standing Fast is a good, honest, felt novel, a farewell to the Old Left, people and politics...

...As Coughlin, Winrod did like certain aspects of Hitler's regime, particularly its antagonism to Communism, its opposition to "Jewish" power, and its supposed defense of Christian faith and morals...

...Like the term "fundamentalism," this category is used with sweeping imprecision...

...Determined to portray a tolerant center besieged by right- and left-wing radicals, the authors underestimate what might be termed the "monism of the middle...

...Why not, then, rounding into middle age, before too much time makes for too much distance, have a last try at teacher-student in the workshop, an assignment to oneself to put right that time when young radicals started out bravely (and foolishly) to organize a better (they thought socialist) world...

...Although he was Wallace's running mate, the old soldier endorsed birth control and abortion reform (issues often dodged by the pluralist practitioners of interestgroup politics...

...The authors interpret "extremism" in terms of pluralist social theory...

...Jefferson himself thought that his adversaries were plotting to establish a monarchy, and as late as 1820 he voiced suspicions that the Missouri Compromise was a symptom of royalist machinations...

...The trade union spurts ahead on the basis of collective bargaining, not ideology...

...Rather, they blandly assert that "continuous change, pushed to its limits" is "the quickest way to enlarge the democratic society...

...Some psychiatrists who investigate extreme behavior of a different kind try to find the rationale behind even psychotic thinking...

...Though financially secure, they fear that "populist" movements will undermine the high status of intellectuals...

...they are prime candidates for membership in right-wing "extremist" groups...

...We are still too close to the children of the radicals of the forties—children now apolitical, Weathermen, socialist, solid bourgeois, Consciousness IIIers doing their own things...

...Lipset and Raab maintain that the "monists," Left and Right, sometimes share ideological premises, including "isolationism" and "opposition to Wall Street Banking...

...We have all observed political "marriages of convenience...

...Paul does not come through much more strongly than the conventional, or troubled, children of the others...

...If we say that change threatens man's "identity" or his "sense of self," we can grasp why he might support a "symbolic" protest instead of looking to his interests, narrowly conceived...

...Completely ignoring Creel, they pass over A. Mitchell Palmer in two paragraphs—the same amount of space allotted to a tiny Antimasonic revival after the Civil War...

...The authors argue that a feeling of "status anxiety"—the sense that one's power, influence, and importance are being eroded by "secular endemic change"—is the chief motivation for "extremism" on the Right...

...The book's narrow perspective is explicit in the title...

...His group, the Defenders of the Christian Faith, "was overlaid with a mimicry of Hitlerian anti-Semitism that differed in kind and emphasis from the traditional nativist patterns of bigotry...

...But the authors don't bother to be careful...

...PRECURSORS AND FORERUNNERS abound as the authors write their way through the KnowNothings, the American Protective Association, the first Ku Klux Klan, and the Populists...

...They also outline the post-1968 split in the AIP, and discuss the failure of erstwhile Wallaceites to win office on their own...

...Declaring that "the most interesting and important thing" about every individual is his philosophy, his "more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means," James paid close attention to the weirdest ideas...

...To understand "extremism," we might supplement The Politics of Unreason by reading the work of William James, a social scientist who believed in a pluralistic universe as well as a pluralistic social order...

...DESPITE ITS FLAWS as a piece of scholarship— or perhaps because of them—The Politics of Unreason points toward significant questions about how we "reasonable" people look at "extremists...

...Lest they be dubbed "extremists"—or "preservatists" at best—persons who are "somehow out of joint with their society" must grin and bear it as they are swept into the pluralist version of "the dustbin of history...

...But they don't bother to look closely at what "extremists" say because they are disposed from the outset to dismiss their ideas as nonsense...

...American society, they tell us, is composed of varied interest groups, which usually get on pretty well by compromising their interests in "pragmatic" fashion...

...But, by translating those two limpid words into a different (though still normative) social science vocabulary, we can see that the authors' judgment is based on a narrow conception of what makes men tick...

...Both groups suffered from "status anxiety" because "the Jacksonians and the common man" were about to take over the government, "with the skeptic and the new urban workingman in the wings...

...He professed this belief throughout his life, even while denouncing "Jewish Communism...

...LIPSET AND RAAB START WITH THE FEDERALISTS, telling us that they represented "the camp of displacement and preservatism" at the turn of the 18th century...

...It is a poorly researched and tortured attempt to force the square peg of "monism" into the round hole of American history...

...The main tone was still that of moralistic fundamentalism, and no cogent plan was offered for the reorganization of the economy or society...

...Weave together their tangled personal lives and those large public events all "of us" know by heart—the tough, good fight in the CIO to organize the industrial unions...

...The point of my little game is to emphasize that their mode of analysis can be used to discredit any kind of deviance or discontent—even their own...

...don't neglect those who managed to stay whole and stand fast...

...Moreover, if "monism" is defined as a "politically repressive" program, then the Republicans also possessed a well-developed monistic streak...

...Both men, however, emphasized that an autocratic government that was necessary to control decadent Europeans was not appropriate in the righteous United States...

...The opening 250 pages of The Politics of Unreason contain a survey of American politics from the 1790s to the 1950s which purports to demonstrate that right-wing "monism," propelled by "status anxiety," has long been a significant force in the United States...

...And, perhaps because he suffered more than his share of status—and other—anxieties, James never forgot that even "the sanest and best among us are of one clay with the lunatics and prison inmates...

...The authors simply do not pay enough attention to the ideological and tactical lessons which "extremists" have learned from liberals...

...Tell it as it was...

...One way or another, the members of the little group, the faction, have come together, formed their New Party (nicely invented by Swados from bits and pieces of the Old Left), and set out to organize along socialist lines the growing number of workers in the plants...

...Numerous theological conservatives (including Gerald Smith) did not support legal action to bar Darwinism from the schools...

...He has consistently attempted to study the far Right as part of a comprehensive analysis of American politics, arguing that the Right shares with the far Left an intolerance of the amicable group conflict that characterizes pluralist democracy...

...They would, in short, pay attention to what Roosevelt had to say...

...Pluralism" and American History THE POLITICS OF UNREASON, by Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab...

...Despite their attacks on "Zionist conspiracies," both Gerald Winrod and Gerald L. K. Smith (whom Lipset and Raab designate "the dean of American anti-Semitism") denied any intention to interfere with the constitutional rights of individual Jews...

...he merely wanted to do the job efficiently...

...Moreover, Lipset and Raab seem to have accepted the flimsy standards of evidence we usually encounter in right-wing periodicals...

...the betrayal of American socialism by the Communist party...

...Even the defects become virtues in a way...

...and the word can be used with care to classify certain theological conservatives...

...Indeed, the authors are so fond of their model as an explanation for "unreasonable" political beliefs and activities that they obscure what is realistic (even by pluralist standards) about right-wing and "preservatist" strategies...

...On the other hand, if the Whigs were "preservatists," it doesn't seem to have affected their policy decisions...

...Charles Coughlin, for instance, was "a kind of prototype for American fascism" or "at Ieast fascist in style...

...My point of course is not that Lipset and Raab are, inherently, incompetent scholars...

...Historians and social scientists could profit by adopting an analogous perspective in their studies of the far Right...

...Although the authors still can't make much sense out of revivalists like Carl McIntyre and Billy Hargis, they do offer a subtle examination of the John Birch Society...

...It is about Paul, the sensitive son of the dentist Irwin...

...Standing Fast rings true, holds up...

...The section on George Wallace and the American Independent party is the best in the book...

...Paul dies tragically in Harlem, murdered by young blacks from the same neighborhood where he has worked so well and compassionately with the community...

...But to say that everybody in a society suffers from "status anxiety," and that everybody therefore yields to "extremist" behavior doesn't explain very much...

...The fruits of this heritage range from the rhetoric of republican virtue to a certain respect for civil liberties...

...In an unfootnoted paragraph they say that Huey Long "was described by various observers as having a fascist potential...

...Furthermore, the authors' notion that interest politics is more reasonable than "symbolic" protest is itself open to question...

...As the political dream recedes, the family, with all its fractures, comes on stronger, a center holding, where things do not fall apart as swiftly...

...Not only were they more firmly committed than the Democrats to industrial growth and internal improvements, but some of their leaders were early advocates of American expansionism...

...the confusion of the pacifists after Pearl Harbor when World War II had to be both right (Nazism meant what it said) and wrong (all wars are...

...Each group grants the other's right to exist, and guarantees its access to the "open marketplace of ideas...

...Joe stays worker-organizer, going all the way, yet plagued with personal problems and intellectual doubts...

...Nor do they discuss liberal participation in what Christopher Lasch calls the "cultural cold war...

...IN THIS NOVEL, we begin in Buffalo, just before the war...

...Nor can they quite decide where to put Huey Long's "monism...

...Although Lipset and Raab reiterate the familiar and generally sound thesis that the United States, lacking a feudal heritage, has always been a liberal society, they miss the irony that some of our most notorious right-wingers have been affected by the liberal tradition...

...then return to come to terms with inner-city New York, in teaching and social work...

...Like many contemporary scholars, they assure us that something vaguely described as agrarian, religious, decentralized old America invariably will be urbanized, secularized, and centralized...

...Perhaps to remind us of the persistent threat of left-wing "extremism," the authors include a section on abolitionism, describing it as a manifestation of "Protestant moral emphasis acting on a socially displaced elite from New England...

...Carrying their ahistorical review of the American past into the Jacksonian period, Lipset and Raab further weaken their case by passing over scholarship that disputes their preconceptions...

...Time and again," Lipset and Raab explain, "the more educated and established segments of the American public have pulled away from right-wing movements when they became explicitly monistic...

...Certainly they would not write about Franklin Roosevelt without critically examining the secondary literature and scrupulously reading his speeches...

...Combining dispensational theology and the rhetoric of republican virtue, Winrod said that Americans could avoid much of the wrath of the Antichrist if they repudiated the New Deal and returned to the Founding Fathers' ideals...

...Lipset and Raab are true to form...

...On first hearing, it almost sounds like common sense...

...After noting that "the monistic impulse quickened" in the late 19th century, and suggesting that World War I "legitimated" attacks on "un-American" activities, Lipset and Raab move on to lengthy discussions of the 1920s and 1930s...

...When the Federalists and Jeffersonians interpreted the world in conspiratorial terms, they were merely using the idiom that had dominated political discourse for 60 years...

...This portion of The Politics of Unreason is more thoughtful, more fully researched, and better written than the "historical" section...

...The authors finally intimate that he "resembled Mussolini in fostering Ieftist demagogy, while basically maintaining the existing system of privilege...

...Long active in the movement to convert Jews to Christianity, Winrod thought that roughly a third of the world's Jewish population would embrace Jesus during the final tribulation...

...Lipset and Raab have not examined Long's speeches or Winrod's sermons...

...Trying to salvage a "stable agrarian society," the Populist "preservatists" look pretty silly too...

...This time, the forces of "monism" gathered in the Antimasonic party, "a sociological precursor of movements like the Ku Klux Klan and McCarthyism...

...Vito just keeps painting, Bill and his wife Margaret just keep working in the labor movement, different ways of standing fast, believing stubbornly in something...

...FINALLY, The Politics of Unreason suggests that we must take a closer look at the connection between "extremists" and the pluralist mainstream...

...On the contrary, he seems to have erred by holding some of its opinions too dear after they had gone out of fashion...

...That's another novel...

...Let me quickly say that this final jeu d'esprit about the authors' "monism" should not be taken literally...

...but they would have learned that abolitionists were not necessarily radical, evangelical, or antiinstitutional...

...The authors show that Wallace ran best among former Goldwater supporters and among people who didn't vote in 1964...

...FEW SCHOLARS HAVE INFLUENCED our thinking about "extremism" as much as Seymour Martin Lipset, professor of social relations at Harvard...

...Fundamentalism" wanders through 500 pages, from Antimasonry to Billy James Hargis, as a catchall label...

...For example, Gerald Winrod's father was an evangelist in Wichita...

...They are undoubtedly thoughtful and tolerant men...

...They all lead us to conceptualize "bigotry" from the viewpoint of the victim who is, of course, deserving of sympathy...

...Lipset and Raab say that they are studying the politics of unreason...

...Lipset and Raab are aware that movements in the center of the political spectrum are not above politically repressive activities...

...a certain clumsiness and heaviness in the narrative reflects precisely the period narrated, those years of endless meetings in upstairs lofts, the talk heavy with expressions like "class struggle" and "building up cadres...

...He perceived, moreover, that the "healthy-minded" can be as intolerant as the "sick souls...

...New York: Doubleday...

...When change threatens their social position, these people are likely to join "symbolic" protest movements that affirm their status, instead of backing organizations concerned with their economic welfare...

...Again, this is a simplistic analysis of a complex situation...

...In an effort to document his theoretical premises, Lipset has joined with Earl Raab, a member of the San Francisco Human Rights Commission, to compile a massive volume about "right-wing extremism...

...But they quickly discovered that the American "genius" for ambiguity did not apply to them...

...This "modernization" process is so commonly thought to be inevitable that modernization theorists rarely bother to spell out the details...

...But the authors do not push these insights far enough...

...WRITE a long, flowing political novel about a small group of Old Left, Anti-Stalinist socialists, tracing their paths from a youthful idealism in the late thirties to a weariness in the early sixties...

...But he gave full credit to the State Department for teaching him that Communism must be contained...

...And Andrew Jackson was BOOKS no paragon of pluralism...

...On the whole the authors' understanding of American denominationalism extends little farther than a vague notion that Episcopalians are classier than other folks...

...More important, all "extremists" seem to accept a way of looking at the world similar to what Richard Hofstadter called the "paranoid style...

...It is apparently more or less synonymous with such fuzzy phenomena as "Protestant moralism" and the "evangelical middle class...

...socialists do have families, and families stay together or come apart, Marxist or whatever...

...And even though Norm and Fred and Vera and Sy and Bill and Big Boy rejoice in the victory of the CIO, the exhilaration of the Reuther days, they are on the way to seeing what Big Boy, a black tightly controlled organizer up from the South, has always said— pragmatism is going to count more than socialism...

...no new-style, either, no cosmic looking backward at those muddled, failed radicals as if you were Norman Mailer (whose great gift is sometimes flawed, to quote the poet Warren Lenz, by a passion for sucking the existential egg...

...Instead, they have relied on selected secondary works, usually ransacking these for quotations while paying little heed to their arguments...

...even so, its participants honestly confronted tough intellectual issues...

...We are told that Gerald Winrod of Kansas, the "son of a small-town evangelist," moved from preaching to politics during the thirties, and that he became `overtly pro-Nazi" after a 1933 visit to Germany...

...Without endorsing Maslow's biological analogy, we can conjecture that people join "extremist" movements to gratify perfectly reasonable wants that go unattended in a "rational," pluralist society...

...Now the term "fundamentalism" is derived from a series of booklets—The Fundamentals—published between 1909 and 1912 by an interdenominational group of Protestants...

...Although my complaints about the chapters on the twenties and thirties may seem like the quarrels of an antiquarian, they have a deeper significance...

...As much as any dispensational Christian, the two authors think they know which way history is going...

...These are probably the two weakest chapters in the book, particularly disappointing because the authors fail to use the extensive primary sources that survive from the period...

...In the end standing fast is going to have to outweigh letting go (or getting worse—Paul's funeral and Kennedy's assassination occur the same day, foreshadowing the grimmer late sixties...

...First of all, we should be wary of such adjectives as "bigoted," "prejudiced," "anti-Semitic," and "anti-Catholic...

...They shun compromise and try to shut down the marketplace of ideas...

...No more than that, but that's a great deal...

...It is true that the Antimasons tended to be egalitarian and religious, but there is little reason to suppose that the Democratic party swarmed with freethinkers—especially in those states where it eventually captured the Antimason vote...

...This kind of behavior is the "antipluralist nub" of "extremism" (or "monism," a term the authors favor as a synonym...

...Indeed, the authors admit that their views crystallized "in reaction to the McCarthyism of the early 1950's...

...In the face of sensitive historical accounts by Paul Carter, Willard Gatewood, and Ernest Sandeen, all suggesting that evangelical Christians were more anxious about their souls than about their status, Lipset and Raab simply ascribe the fundamentalist controversy to the "waning dominance" of rural and smalltown America...

...Just as "fundamentalism" doesn't mean "fundamentalism," "fascism"—you guessed it—doesn't seem to mean "fascism" either...

...Moreover, what they casually call Winrod's "moralistic fundamentalism" carried with it a complicated theology, on which he based all of his opinions...

...But the similarity was again superficial...

...The third question raised by The Politics of Unreason is just how "monistic" are American "extremists...

...From then on it is not so much downhill as sideways, through the war and into the fifties...

...Consequently, they reduce deeply felt religious sentiments and social attitudes to "cultural baggage" and "trappings" that happen to get invested with symbolic significance during status crises...

...They know that Lincoln's campaign workers alluded ominously to Stephen Douglas's Catholic wife...

...I think he succeeds, in an old-fashioned book, working against the grain of now-fiction...

...Don't go on to the disintegration, the hollow nonwar against poverty and the escalating all-too-real war in Vietnam...

...Originally intending to study the far Right since World War II, the authors expanded their work after discovering an "ideological link" between contemporary movements and earlier "extrem BOOKS isms...

...Stop there, with President Kennedy shot dead in Dallas...

...it wasn't Boston or San Francisco, but when Lipset and Raab call it a "small town," they tell us more about their own biases than about Kansas demography...

...and that Franklin Roosevelt denounced some of his detractors as "copperheads...

...Although these theories sound like social science, they are usually full of unexamined normative judgments...

...The fundamentalist controversy is a case in point...

...Unable themselves to believe in conspiracy theories, Lipset and Raab refuse to work their way into the minds of those people who consider such things eminently reasonable...

...Extremist" movements, however, are basically "inimical to a pluralism of interests and groups, inimical to a system of many nonsubmissive centers of power and areas of privacy...

...Lipset and Raab might respond to this criticism by saying that the Jeffersonians were merely reacting to their own anxieties caused by increasing status...

...But, especially if we want to promote tolerance and minimize social strains, it is at least as important to understand the "bigot...

...Basically, the fundamentalists wanted to shield their own children from evolutionary doctrine and to defend their personal faith against the ravages of "secular endemic change...

...Their Christians begin to decline in the 1790s, find "history against them" in the 1920s, and are still sinking today...

...These criticisms are meant to underscore the authors' sloppy research methods and the narrowness of their analytical framework...

...They denounce McCarthyism as mass politics without mentioning Harry Truman's internal security program...

...Not only do the authors think that they know where history is heading, but they are generally pleased with the direction...

...The campaign by Winrod and his allies to drive evolution from the public schools may have been a symbolic crusade...

...The Federalists blamed their troubles on a foul international conspiracy—personified by the Bavarian Illuminati—and they passed the Alien and Sedition Acts to intimidate the opposition...

...For the first time the right wing included "American fascists" as well as such traditional "nativist" groups as the Klan, the Black Legion, and some newly politicized preachers...

...Christians could understand the arrival of the last age (or dispensation) only by studying the prophetic books of the Bible, especially Daniel and Revelation, which predicted specific events as well as general trends...

...the story sags now and again...

...Be evenhanded: include those in the New Party who messed up and sold out...

...Aside from its suppositions about human nature, Lipset and Raab's "status anxiety" interpretation of "the politics of unreason" is normative in another way: it rests on a teleological reading of history...

...8.95...

...it does not occur to them that this process could be the quickest way to deprive some groups of their most cherished institutions...

...Literally convinced that the blue eagle of the NRA was kin to the Beast of Revelation, 13, Winrod campaigned for senator to call America back to God...

...LeMay was not a status-anxious cold warrior who despised the Ivy League elite...

...By "logical extension" their moralistic approach to social issues leads them to accept "extensive theories of evil conspiracy...

...It starts slowly, almost as if there were an intention to lose you deliberately: look, if these people turn you off completely with their compulsion to make speeches in the midst of family crisis, even in bed no less, then quit here...

...On the whole it betrays that ahistorical (or antihistorical) temperament which Lipset has condemned among young radicals...

...The leader of a lower-class protest movement whose ideology was "in the populist tradition," Long was personally a "pure species demagogue...

...Those "preservatists" who feel especially challenged by newly influential groups or are particularly disturbed by modified social mores turn to "backlash politics" as a way to "reverse or stem the direction of change...

...His proposal to defoliate Vietnam was less enlightened...

...His tribute to C. Wright Mills remains, in my opinion, one of the finest essays ever printed in DISSENT...

...the notion that some Jews would be "saved" during the Second Coming had been basic to dispensational Protestantism since the 18th century...

...If we begin to place "prejudiced" opinions within the configuration of the "bigot's" total world view, we will better comprehend his anger...

...Elsewhere they vaguely hint that Gerald L. K. Smith "was reported to make anti-Semitic statements in private...

...After rendering the familiar (if questionable) thesis that McCarthyism was a symptom of antielitist, antipluralist passions, Lipset and Raab devote four long chapters to contemporary right-wing movements...

...These descriptions hardly provide a nuanced introduction to the beliefs and activities of Coughlin, Long, or Winrod...

...BOOKS But the time is the defense boom, work plentiful and wages up after the harrowing days of the Depression...

...These establishment-sponsored enterprises may not have been "explicitly monist," but they were nonetheless repressive...

...If we adapted the analytical scheme of The Politics of Unreason to interpret liberal "extremism," we could infer that Lipset and Raab are among the "monists of the middle...

...the dreary cold-war politics of the late forties...

...In a phrase which defies my understanding, Lipset and Raab assure us that toward the end of the thirties Coughlin adopted "a more overt fascist-like posture...

...the Eisenhower blandness, and the McCarthyist misery of the fifties...

...With the children, however, it is another matter...

...We find it easier to sympathize with a family on relief than with the fellow who suffers from mere "status anxiety...

...and that they frequently adopt the same tactics, "such as a working impatience with dissent...

...If Norm, the intellectual-writer of the group doesn't always stand fast, he does hold on to his integrity, emerging into the sixties as one of those influential journalists of the New Frontier...

...Second, it is about time that we openly admit the limited usefulness of "status anxiety" interpretations of discontent...

...It is not surprising that a man holding these views did not bother to create a "cogent plan" for economic reconstruction...

...They claim that the two major parties absorb "extremist" ideas simply to co-opt right-wing rivals, and that the thinking man's "d8mocratic restraint" usually saves him from the "monism" that afflicts his lower-class brethren...

...But there is a catch to this analysis...

...The answer to both questions is Harvey Swados...

...It ought to be widely read—at least by "us...

...Unfortunately for the Lipset-Raab thesis, the Jeffersonian Republicans were at least as fond of conspiracy theories as their Federalist rivals...

...BOOKS Most Americans, Lipset and Raab tell us in the concluding sections, are not deeply committed to a tolerant, pluralist social order...

...For years he has been teaching writing at Sarah Lawrence, at San Francisco State, now at the University of Massachusetts...

...If you read on, though, you will see that it does work...

...Indeed, Bernard Bailyn has shown that the ideological basis of the American Revolution was a belief, inherited from the English republican tradition, that there existed "a comprehensive conspiracy against liberty in the English-speaking world...

...Lipset and Raab express some confidence, however, that the spread of education has raised the national level of democratic restraint...

...I have deliberately chosen the word "survey" because this treatment can be called "history" only in the very loose sense that it deals with the past...

...The first writer to apply the concept of a "radical Right" to American social movements (in 1951), he later proposed a theory of "workingclass authoritarianism...

...The authors recognize that "mystical European fascism" did not win much of a following in the United States, but they never explain what they mean by an American "fascism...

...For even longer he has been a worker in and a student of the labor movement, writing about trade union people, men and women on the line, intellectuals enmeshed in a hundred different varieties of the Left...

...It is not surprising, therefore, that they deem "extremists" unreasonable for having "more of a stake in the past than in the present...

...While pointing to Mary Ann Buitrago's master's thesis as their chief source on Winrod, they overlook the connection she draws between his prophetic writings and his politics, as well as her verdict that his views did not alter "in any significant way" after two trips to Germany...

...An argument can be made that "preservatists" are sometimes more pluralist than the pluralists...

...the brief surge of hope for liberalism in the early sixties (civil rights...

...656 pp...

...Fred, the literary man, gets captured, and then cut up by TV which has made him a pop culture hero...

...Their values were caricatured in the press, their ideas were ridiculed in the classroom, and their clergymen were eased out of influential positions in the denominations...

...Some evidence indicates that the "established elements" of society are the ultimate source of "extremist" beliefs, not just BOOKS occasional co-participants in hysteria...

...that a Democratic administration conducted the Red Scare of 1919...

...It has its structural problems...

...What they consider abnormal was standard during the 1790s...

...Harry goes full-circle from high-powered organizer to high-powered wheeler-dealer in business...

...Here the story is no longer "about us...

...Threatened by "distasteful social change and political impotence," they responded "with the basic model of monistic logic which was also to be repeated in similar instances throughout American history...

...Lipset and Raab see the 1930s as a turning point for "extremism...

...It is at best confusing to say that the Whigs were "essentially more conservative" than the Democrats...

...STANDING FAST, by Harvey Swados...

...Far from rejecting the "legitimized ambiguity" which Lipset and Raab call "the genius of American society," they want to take advantage of it...

...Throughout, keep the faith in sturdy, honest prose...

...Believing that political debates are doctrinal struggles "between good and evil for man's soul," ideologues at both extremes deny the "legitimized ambiguity" that is "the genius of American society...

...Finally, if the authors had consulted Aileen Kraditor's Means and Ends in American Abolitionism or Martin Duberman's The Antislavery Vanguard, they still might not agree that William Lloyd Garrison and his allies had to choose (as Kraditor puts it) between "agitation and silence...

...Sy and Bernice stick it out for a long while, then try Israel (can't the kibbutz be socialism...

...Nor do they hint that some values from the "past" might be well worth preserving...

...The Antimasons sometimes formed alliances with the displaced elite in the Whig party, an organization that fostered "a program of cultural preservatism...

...The problem is that Lipset and Raab want to force 18thcentury situations into 20th-century categories...

...Much of what the authors say is distorted or factually wrong...

...Fundamentalists, residents of small towns, and the poorly educated are particularly deficient in what the authors call "democratic restraint...

...And for those who think American youth will lead us into the joyous revolution of Consciousness III, the authors give sobering evidence of Wallace's appeal to young voters...