Notebook: Journey To The End Of Right
Howe, Irving
Now that our distinguished liberal intellectuals have finished proclaiming "the end of ideology," it begins to seem that we are entering an intensely ideological period in American...
...But do they really know what conservatism is...
...THE IMPORTANT POINT IS that out here the right-wing groups have seized the political initiative...
...that it needs to be examined, in one manifestation, as a new version of conservative ideology, and, in another, as an outbreak of a primitive semi-fascism...
...it is they who fill the columns of the letters to the editor...
...Abolishing the income tax may not be of the twentieth century, but where is it written that people living in a century need necessarily be of it...
...And the local district attorneys seem more concerned with banning Henry Miller's novels—the fools really think that reading Tropic of Cancer could arouse someone sexually!— than in investigating and prosecuting the leaders of these private armies...
...In the thirties the son of a rich man still knew something about poverty, and that too was a way of experiencing it...
...At a large private university a Congressman belonging to the John Birch Society attracted an enormous crowd, and not, I fear, because the students regarded him as a crank or a menace but because they took him as a serious spokesmen for serious views...
...Functioning with discipline and elan, they pressure school boards and town governments...
...it is they who conduct campaigns to vindicate the unspeakable General Walker...
...And some of those I have spoken to seem to feel that anyone who fails in our society simply deserves to, and that taking into account the lot of such depressed groups as the Negroes or Puerto Ricans is mere sentimentalism...
...For what if in America there is indeed emerging the kind of society that can dispense with the wisdom of literature and the lessons of history...
...A few weeks ago I visited for dinner an eating house run by girl students, and inevitably the talk turned to politics, especially to the assurance and aggressiveness of the conservative minority...
...it is they who steadily, and with some effect, keep pressuring local school boards...
...But in the East McCarthyism was based primarily on plebeian and lower-middle-class sectors of the population—in Boston, for example, on the numerous Irish Catholic poor...
...Such things don't get into the newspapers very often, but they do affect the daily course of American life...
...But in some respects they are quite different from the fascist shirt-groups of the thirties, for if then the membership was likely to consist of urban flotsam and small-town jetsam, now the turn pens drive Buicks and feel they have something worth defending...
...A little while back I talked to a professor of history who serves as an advisor to a large publishing firm...
...and they cultivate a style of politeness which, even when it has a touch of condescension toward liberals (meaning anyone left of Goldwater), still involves a tacit acceptance of the norms of civilized discussion...
...A good number of respondents to a questionnaire in The San Francisco Chronicle report they would not hesitate to shoot neighbors who might invade their shelters...
...I say "protect" but they do not hesitate to say "shoot...
...And so diseased is the moral atmosphere that the "problem" of what to do if someone invades your fallout shelter (one local county has, in utter madness, issued directives on taking care of pets after the attack) is discussed seriously...
...Total freedom, she seemed to feel, was her birthright as an American...
...And while there are, as DISSENT readers surely realize, any number of questions, including some pretty recondite ones, I am prepared to argue, the income tax...
...It draws, no doubt, on some of the same emotions, and attracts some of the same people, that McCarthy did...
...I also find myself liking a little the feeling of these students that they speak as men of principle, doomed to be a minority for a long time, but unwilling to go along with the expediency and eclecticism of the liberal establishment...
...Nowadays we have perfected in this country such an extraordinary skill at brushing every unpleasantness beneath the social rug that many students simply don't believe in the reality of the poor...
...It is amusing and more than a bit disconcerting to discover, in talking to these boys and girls, how ill-prepared one is to cope with them...
...They organize cells...
...In bits and pieces...
...And one feels a trifle bewildered at having to think about the kinds of questions they raise...
...To see this right-wing upsurge as a recurrence of McCarthyism would be something of a mistake...
...But these people do need a program of sorts, because they realize that politically they have a long way to go and that survival will require more than explosions of feeling and fright...
...Well, I shall have to do some home work...
...McCarthy, I think, had no sense of the political future: what mattered to him was the immediate sensation, the feeling that sufficient unto each day was the smear thereof...
...They have a theory of human nature and a theory of society, or at least shards and fragments of theory...
...The crackpot side is somewhat frightening...
...So far as one can tell, however, the Birch Society and its various competitive allies in California seem to attract a segment of the well-to-do, apparently those suburbanites and nouveaux riches who are genuinely frightened that Communism—or is it the income tax?—will take away the privileges they have recently acquired and barely learned to enjoy...
...in which some effort is apparently made toward serious study of Communism...
...You can easily imagine the economic stake in keeping the concession to, say, an American history textbook in Texas, and for the publishers this is no easy problem...
...How much experience have you had lately in arguing against a proposal to abolish the income tax...
...In a word, they are, unexpectedly and late in the day, confirmed ideologists...
...It is they who hold the large rallies, choked with revivalist emotion...
...One of them, declaring herself a follower of Ayn Rand, told me with utter seriousness that she believed that through an exertion of intelligence and will she could make anything she wished of her life...
...NATIONALLY, I suppose, the far right has no immediate prospect of becoming a serious power...
...There is a kind of rationalized hardness of spirit among these conservative students that I find very hard to understand, let alone cope with...
...Yet it is noteworthy that even among the Birchers, to say nothing of the more respectable conservatives, there is some effort at developing a coherent political program...
...How large or significant groups like the Minute Men are, no one seems to know...
...They seem really to care about politics and society, in their own (but sometimes calloused) way...
...McCarthyism made no pretense to a program: it was a sheer outbreak, a curious mixture of spontaneous and calculated sentiment, of paranoia and ressentiment...
...OTHER QUALITIES among them are far less attractive...
...they are well-informed, in the manner of the propagandist...
...These students, I must confess, are often quite likable...
...These students come with figures, no doubt pre-packaged, to prove the economic feasibility of doing away with income taxes, quite as young Communists used to come with figures to prove the ineluctable progress of Russian industrialization...
...FROM AN INTELLECTUAL point Of View, the right-wing organizations are far less interesting than those conservative students one encounters who look down their patrician noses at the Birch Society...
...Local newspapers are full of stories about the Minute Men, a secret private "army" supplied with light and medium arms that has been formed to protect the nation against invaders and, perhaps more to the point, residents of rural counties against urban refugees who may be expected to flee the cities after atom bombs are dropped...
...And they affect it largely because these days the right-wing groups are just about the only ones that have some fighting spirit and sense of purpose...
...But in many localities the Birch people do serious damage...
...He described the problem of publishers in states like Texas where a well-organized campaign by the right-wing organizations has established a virtual censorship over high school textbooks...
...Ah, these red-blooded Americans...
...Now that our distinguished liberal intellectuals have finished proclaiming "the end of ideology," it begins to seem that we are entering an intensely ideological period in American history...
...Reflecting a little wryly on the lives I have known, I replied that two things seemed to run counter to her expectations: literature and history...
...After living in California only a few months, one discovers that the upsurge on the political right is a more serious matter than anyone in New York or Boston is likely to suppose...
...Many of the conservative students raise issues of a more serious kind, and in their concern for the preservation of personal initiative in a bureaucratic society there is something an intelligent radical ought to accept...
...The right-wing groups have their share of that too, and continue McCarthy's tradition of attacking not so much the Communists as the conspiracy of almost everyone else to hand over the country to the Communists...
...They do not feel themselves oppressed— their economic status could hardly allow them to suppose any such thing...
...When conservatives like Senator Taft advanced an essentially 19th-century political outlook, it was usually on the assumption that this outlook would satisfy the requirements of both our democratic tradition and a modern quasi-welfare society...
...Taft still spoke in terms of a common welfare, a responsibility for all citizens...
...and that on the American scene today, at least in this part of the country, it constitutes a force of some energy...
...They offer tags from Russell Kirk or, more intelligently, Clinton Rossiter...
...That is why one witnesses the quite astonishing spectacle of "study groups"—shades of the Marxist past...
...They feed their members propagandistic material, quite as the Communists used to, so that when one meets some of their student members one feels that they are both the best informed and most ignorant people on the campus...
...they admire Senator Goldwater as a man who can give their sentiments rational expression...
...Now, it is noteworthy, that some of the conservative students, though not all, have developed an elitist position so extreme that it leads to a frank contempt for "the masses...
...Whatever else, one can count on this country to hold the line to the bitter end, at least in public, against the "menace" of homosexuality...
...but they do feel themselves harassed, the last of the upright and independent...
...they are quick to invoke the name of Edmund Burke...
...And how ironic it is, I might add in passing, that so far only the primitive right has managed to solve the problem of getting people out of their ranch homes and into political activity...
...Too many other people are celebrating the "end of ideology...
...For what the Birch people are trying to do is to build a movement...
...She was taken aback by my remark, but later, while going home and feeling pleased with the incisive ness of my rejoinder, I realized that what I had told her might not be quite so devastating...
...One of the Minute Men commanders has finally been arrested, but the charge against him was not that he had organized a private guerrilla band, it was that he had failed to register with the police as a sexual pervert...
Vol. 9 • January 1962 • No. 1
