The "New American Right"

...A superficial inference would be that Parsons really proposes to go to the root of the matter...

...Workers, small businessmen, oil barons, professionals, the old middle class and the new middle class, early immigrants, city dwellers and suburbanites, liberals, populists, conservatives and radicals, Catholics, Jews and Protestants, young and old, upward-mobile, downard-mobile, and immobile: all, all are implicated...

...One might have supposed, naively, that "far-reaching change in the structure of our society" would entail other conditions, perhaps a "circulation of the elite" calculated to put business where it belongs...

...We have an insight, but only one in a barrelful...

...By way of compensation, The New American Right is sprinkled with tributes to Walter Lippmann for his perspicacity in foreseeing how it would happen...

...It would hardly do to be flamboyant in inconspicuous planes, yachts and hotels where business is transacted with the least possible ostentation.—B.R.] From Bell to Parsons, every essayist agrees that the rightist eruption in American politics is in some measure traceable to a group like the discontented classes...

...But no...

...The latter have been advancing in the world, but not fast enough, for there are barriers to their full: acceptance...

...Thus, "A Democratic President would only have polarized the parties and given the extreme Republican wing the license to lead the attack...

...Why did it reach epidemic proportions...

...From New England comes the Puritan spirit, from the West bumptious parvenus and old-fashioned vigilantism, from the North status anxiety on every level, and from the South an expectable hostility to freedom (although here Viereck is on firmer ground than Glazer and Lipset when he introduces one of his many paradoxes: "Often untypical or tardy about new trends, the South is more opposed to the good cause of Negro rights and to the bad cause of McCarthyism than the rest of the nation...

...I don't...

...This is multidimensionality run riot...

...But as it happens, that's not the way it happened...

...That's the trouble...

...He favors and says he has consistently favored "farreaching change in the structure of our society," than which nothing could be more intrinsically radical...

...What could be more crucial than the outcome of the struggle between the Strategic Air Command and the Army Ground Forces...

...Each of their articles, as they have appeared in magazines like Partisan Review, The New Leader, The American Scholar and The Yale Review, has been individually impressive, despite disagreements one might have...

...Like the rest of us, they were and remain a bit frightened, and wish at least to understand certain aspects of our recent political history...

...After all, neither Eisenhower nor Stevenson nor their respective parties differ very much...

...As long as the underlying population remained quiet and inert, New Dealers could semisurreptitiously "put over" the welfare state and international ism...

...The familiar proposition that there is now no working class in the U.S...

...Many more examples of wit and wisdom could be cited...

...A great many elderly and retired people who "were not raised in the do-it-yourself tradition" can't adjust to the present prosperity...

...Since then, even with civil liberties scaled down and their diminution too often taken for granted, Senator McCarthy himself has gone into eclipse...

...Who they are remains unclear and must remain unclear...

...Otherwise the circular reasoning they all use would have to be abandoned...

...But for the misfortune that so large a part of this utopia has already materialized, its explicit formulation by Parsons might be rather terrifying...

...I1 The forces of darkness gather in every corner of America...

...Instead they are still exercised about too much interest in public policy...

...A villainous role is tacitly assigned to social mobility as such...

...The liberals' indifference, we learn, is a serious matter...

...My emphasis—B.R...

...Our initial bewilderment, partly dispelled, is finally restored...

...The sociologist Talcott Parsons, for one, wants something done about it...

...Criterion Books...

...they must be taken...

...But several writers, notably Lipset, also remark that the extreme right attracts Catholics, a fact they ask us not to gloss over out of fear or politeness...

...So, those going down meet those coming up, les extremes se touchent, and by their fusion they produce McCarthyism...

...If not, it is doomed to ineffectiveness and the perpetuation of dangerous internal conflict...

...So it would seem that only the Quakers are possibly exempt—though there is nothing in the method used by the contributors to The New American Right that couldn't take care of that, too, in case a Quaker following of McCarthyism were discovered...

...Surely something.—B.R.] Yet who concerns himself with it...

...Moreover, George Sokolsky, Roy Cohn, Walter Winchell and Rabbi Schultz are McCarthy's Jewish brain-trusters...

...There were only masses, and the masses have now been converted into classes...

...Could one logically account for the real, if limited, success of demagogues, the oppressive atmosphere they helped create, and the consequent erosion of our liberties...

...These classes have been thrown up by the boom which has taken previously harmless people and propelled them into positions of some importance where, for all their pecuniary well-being, they suffer from a sense of economic stress and acute intellectual deprivation...

...but by now most of them are openly annoyed...

...But as John Dewey once remarked, the data are not given...

...Besides, they feel somewhat straitened on fixed incomes...

...The word, "radical," still retained some of its purity even after "democratic," "liberal," "revolutionary" and "socialist" had all been debased...

...Do you...

...but now that they have been collected into a book,* edited by Daniel Bell, they do not seem quite so impressive...

...this is the true voice of many "new liberals...

...But is a program for the disestablishment of democratic government radical...

...There are a number of contributors: Bell himself, Richard Hofstadter, David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, Peter Viereck, Seymour Martin Lipset and Talcott Parsons...

...The question is no longer "Why McCarthyism...

...Their argument has been presented at length and in many contexts...

...Which sounds reasonable, even incisive...

...After Samuel Stouffer's recent study revealed the all-but universal apathy of Americans, one might have expected a long sigh of relief from these two observers who have worried for years about our overpoliticization...

...They seldom fail to supply the right neologism for a fresh idea...

...their character structure...

...Now it too is contaminated...

...Very well...

...Or is it simply reactionary, if not counter-revolutionary...

...the administration of a moderate Republican could act as a damper on the extreme right...

...So far has social science moved from the particularistic fallacy, stressing one dominant or decisive factor, to multiple causation, stating all possible factors and giving them approximately equal weight...

...Specifically, the reader is indebted to Riesman and Glazer, who have already provided so many new and useful terms, for yet another, namely, the discontented classes, or alternatively, the ex-masses...

...Wall Street, West Point, the universities and the churches must all be tapped, the better to "manage" public opinion while governing in harmonious accord on what their spokesmen regard as the commonweal...

...but, "How on earth could there be anything else...

...Or are all these the same...

...Edited by Daniel Bell...

...What our writers never trouble to do is to explain why certain members of the "discontented classes" are more vulnerable to demagogic manipulation than others...

...But the one inessential condition was singled out by Bell: Eisenhower's election...

...The analysis would appear to be comprehensive since it encompasses all American families...

...For under "American conditions," he points out, it is impossible to lead the people against business...

...As a result they tend to express shabby-genteel resentment in one obnoxious way or another, but usually through organizaciones like the D.A.R...

...Within their unlimited "pluralistic" view, Bell and his contributors are also endlessly inventive...

...Bell sums up the pro-Eisenhower Lippmann-Alsop position of 1952 and adds his approval...

...In some ways the situation was worse last year...

...We should create (some of his colleagues would say re-create) "social strata where traditional political responsibility is ingrained...

...It is his considered judgment that America desperately needs an elite...

...emergence of the Discontented Classes (Riesman and Glazer) and the rise of the Radical Right (Lipset) . We end by wondering how it is possible for one country to contain such a vast conglomeration of reactionaries...

...Are there significant religious patterns in the appeals of McCarthy ism...

...This makes them uneasy, impatient and ultrapatriotic...

...Then the Democrats took over Congress, and then McCarthy suffered his collapse...

...A question less charged with emotion and moral judgment is the following: what can be done with a dichotomy like masses and classes...

...They generally admit that there was a troglodyte in the land who symbolized a major threat to the Bill of Rights...

...For a while it seemed as if there were no more challenging problem in our domestic life than McCarthyism...

...Riesman and Glazer are similarly inclusive...

...It includes the Texas millionaires and men like Howard Hughes who "can do business operating a plane, yacht or hotel room...

...For all this a plausible reason can always be found: insecurity may be attributed and indeed located in almost any group...

...When we know so much we know scarcely anything...

...Whatever the casual connections may be, we do have a mess on our hands...

...He and his collaborators have been overpowered by a mood that makes it natural for them in 1955 to embrace the old bully-boy Theodore Roosevelt and to vilify the muckrakers...

...events, he feels, have proved the soundness of their case...

...Hence, the old and the young are susceptible...

...That mood is plainly deducible from The New American Right, and therein lies its major interest...

...Taken in sum, these essays imply that the New Whatever-It-Is has virtually unlimited sources and resources...

...Broadly, I think, a political elite in the two main aspects of 'politicians' whose specialities consist in the management of public opinion and of 'administrators' in both civil and military services, must be greatly strengthened...

...If you follow this path long enough, it leads straight back to almost everyone in the American population...

...An active search to secure and interpret facts has been underway for a year or so among an influential and distinguished group of writers who might be designated—since they themselves have so great a passion for new labels—as "the new liberals...

...Unfortunately, Bell does not speak for himself alone...

...Furthermore, Parsons believes that this ruling class must have a heavy business representation...

...But what does this make Talcott Parsons...

...have not had a chance to do their usual exhaustive analysis of it...

...As it is, his radical change would merely compound several of the sorriest features he has found in a bad situation...

...The feast is a rich one...

...It can hardly be claimed that the more sophisticated American intellectuals responded to these problems with overwhelming alacrity...

...At least there seem to be several classes, when they are not definitely identified as one heterogeneous class...

...Hofstadter immediately offers a second insight...

...Were they previously amorphous ciphers, inchoate, anonymous...

...Actually, Riesman and Glazer do not have too firm a grip on their slippery new concept...

...McCarthy was living high on the hog, higher than ever, throughout the first two years of Eisenhower's administration...

...Lipset explains the phrase, radical right, which when first encountered looks and sounds a bit like "chaste whore," as follows: "This group is characterized as radical because it desires to make far reaching changes in American institutions and because it seeks to eliminate from American political life those persons and institutions which threaten either its values or its economic interests...

...As it stands, we have a thesis which asserts that from the discontented classes are recruited those who belong to the radical right, and the radical right is a segment of society identical with those who participate in the pseudo-conservative revolt because they are part of the discontented classes...

...Only a static system would preclude the kind of movement in any direction that presumably has such a deleterious effect on political life...

...For Parsons, however, it belongs in a rather large driver's seat, shared with a cadre of subsidiary generals, professors and clergymen...

...As a group they looked everywhere for explanations, and found them—everywhere...

...Now, however, a remarkable turn-about has oc curred so that the formerly inarticulate apathetics are vociferous and thereby susceptible to demagogic manipulation while the once voluble liberals have nearly been silenced...

...Consider one example: the historian Richard Hofstadter suggests that old-family Americans are peculiarly susceptible to pseudo-conservatism because many of them are losing their old claims to status...

...Yet of the same class or classes, they say: Conspicuous underconsumption has replaced conspicuous consumption as the visible sign of status, with the result that men who have made enough money to indulge the gaudy dreams of their underprivileged youth learn all too fast that they must not be flamboyant...

...It was better in those days, with mass acquiescence to intelligent guidance from above...

...Somehow, the contemplation of my dis tance from this issue does not stir in me the deep guilt feelings it prob ably ought to...

...How did the disease begin...

...Well, Puritanism still exerts a powerful influence on America, and it is pin-pointed as a major source of contemporary intolerance...

...I content myself with just one more, from the editor's pen: One ultimately comes to admire the "practical politics" of a Theodore Roosevelt and his scorn for the intransigents, like Godkind and Villard, who, refusing to yield to expediency, could never put through their reforms...

...So why should we distinguish between Joe McCarthy and Norman Thomas...

...There were many other important circumstances that affected McCarthy's fate...

...or that there will soon be none, is turned on its head by the counter-iconoclasts (if I too may coin a term) who maintain that there never was one...

...In addition to the old American families there are the new American families...

...Thus for instance, they see discontent germinating in two age groups, the old and the young...

...But the more significant, and more difficult to understand and grapple with, is a discontent which arises from the mental discomforts that come with belonging to a class rather than a mass—discomforts founded less on economic than on intellectual uncertainty...

...To Riesman and Glazer it has long been evident that apathy among the uneducated masses is highly desirable...

...Any one of these, unaided by the others, can tell you more than you need to know about what many people have hitherto found rather mystifying...

...But among youth too, many individuals have been made ill at ease by an affluence which descended upon them so suddenly that it did not allow time for necessary changes in...

...Did persons who have since ascended in the social scale never belong to a class...

...It is no longer necessary for them to go about calming one another...

...The new turn in affairs is so recent that Bell, et al...

...We begin by sharing the authors' interest in a strange phenomenon, variously designated as the Pseudo-Conservative Revolt (Hofstadter) , the • The New American Right...

...Lump them all together, and you have greatly simplified both the taxonomic and the ethical problem...

...To be sure, the man and the ism were shorthand for a cluster of unpleasant—not to say symptomatic—developments...