Status and the Right
ROCHE, JOHN P.
WRITERS and WRITING Status and the Right The New American Right. Ed. by Daniel Bell. Criterion. 239 pp. $4.00. Reviewed by John P. Roche Associate professor of political science, Haverford...
...I have one major reservation about The New American Right...
...But when times are good, as they have been in the United States for the past decade and a half, status considerations move to the fore...
...Parrington...
...During depression periods, food and shelter and the needs of existence tend to exorcise status worries...
...The thesis that alienation, social as well as economic, leads to extremist acts has been around for some time: Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto both emphasized the need for a "circulation of the elite" to forestall social discontent...
...While Viereck has the brilliant apercus of the poet and occasionally presents a striking formulation, he is too much the paradox-monger for my taste, and often seems to have become the captive of his own rhetoric...
...Nathan Glazer and S. M. Lipset's "The Polls on Communism and Conformity...
...With one voice, the authors assert: Kill a man's father, even steal his patrimony, but leave his ego alone --or run the risk of engendering extremist political activity...
...Best of the lot, in my opinion, is S. M. Lipset's "The Sources of the Radical Right...
...Also excellent are Richard Hofstadter's "The Pseudo-Conservatives," David Riesman and Nathan Glazer's "The Intellectuals and the Discontented Class...
...The central thesis of the authors (Richard Hofstadter, David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, Peter Viereck, Talcott Parsons, S. M. Lipset and Daniel Bell) is that the key to understanding the "radical Right"--the McCarthyite constituency--must be sought in "status politics" rather than in the traditional techniques of analysis...
...Peter Viereck's essay, "The Revolt Against the Elite...
...It is interesting to note, as Bell points out in his introduction, that all these essays but one appeared in print at roughly the same time...
...Talcott Parson's "Social Strains in America...
...a superb combination of solid research, keen insight, and good writing...
...Roth groups--the Texas new-millionaires and the coupon-clipping, card-carrying Daughters of the American Revolution--welcome political extremism as possible salvation from symbolic alienation, and it is right-wing extremism that has an appeal since the dominant American "political formula" is today "liberal," and "liberals" dominate the "political class...
...Ironically, prosperity seems to encourage status conflicts...
...Dewey et al...
...In this collection of perceptive essays--edited by a New Leader alumnus and dedicated to Executive Editor S. M. Levitas--acorollary is offered to Machiavelli's wisdom...
...Henri de Man based his revision of Marxism in The Psychology of Socialism on the social psychological, rather than economic...
...frustrations of the working class...
...The Marxist pundits...
...The "radical Right," the authors agree, can best be explained in terms of the demands of alienated strata in American society for their "rightful" place in the sun...
...while rewarding, seems to me somewhat unrelated to the main emphasis of the volume...
...The essays that make up this book are of a very high order...
...The house-gods of liberal social science Beard...
...Interpretations of American Politics...
...Reviewed by John P. Roche Associate professor of political science, Haverford College Nicolo Machiavelli, the putative father of political sociology, observed somewhere in The Prince that the sound ruler should refrain from taking the property of his subjects because "men forget more quickly the death of their father than the loss of their patrimony...
...In short, scholars discovered that reality had escaped from the confines of their favorite models and were forced to seek new theoretical formulations...
...It is certainly correct to assert that the methodology employed in this book has been neglected by American scholars, to their impoverishment, but the tools of analysis have existed, awaiting only competent employers...
...however, does not seem to me up to the level of its companions...
...On the other hand, the inflation which customarily runs with good times drives the fixed-income rentiers to the wall (or at least from two Cadillacs to one), and to arms to defend their caste privileges...
...Nevertheless, right extremists can also be found in some numbers among the smaller contingent of Americans who are caught in a status-spin, the declassed and those fighting to avoid losing their symbolic prerogatives...
...The primary source of recruits today is the upwardly mobile segment of the population, prosperity's children who possess everything but the intangible symbols of prestige...
...The editor and authors claim, if I understand them correctly, to be breaking a new trail in political analysis...
...even after dialectical convolutions of the first order, could only emerge muttering "Wall Street" or "frontrunners of fascism...
...On one hand, a new crop of Horatio Algers hammers on the portcullis of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company or the Antiquarian and Numismatic Society demanding admission to the Brahmin cast...
...But editor Bell should feel proud of the prose-level attained in his volume--seldom has a study of this sort been compiled which could not serve as a potent sleeping potion...
...and Daniel Bell's introductory comments...
...Bell suggests that the reason for this unplanned convergence of both subject-matter and methodology was the inadequacy of existing frameworks of analysis to explain the sudden upsurge of "ultra conservatism" (in Clinton Rossiter's phrase) which struck American polities like a blockbuster circa 1950...
...And, to take but one further instance, Alexis de Tocqueville in The Old Regime and the French Revolution pointed out that the French bourgeois of the old regime was far more aggravated by his status isolation than by economic privation or political despotism...
...It is true that there has been no extended examination of the "radical Right" from the viewpoint of "status displacement" --and here the book docs make an invaluable contribution--but it is not true to suggest or imply that the methodology employed by the authors is new...
...Lipset alone makes obeisance to his methodological ancestors, citing Michels's brilliant analysis of the political implications of status frustration in the case of German small businessmen...
...supplied no category into which to dump these frenetic crusaders against the liberalism that fed them...
Vol. 38 • December 1955 • No. 50
