'Menace from the Right'

...Finally, we should take our bearings from American history, and not from German history...

...Hardly a week passes, it seems, without the mailman delivering a monograph or a package of documents portraying in ominous tones the resurgence of the radical right...

...If Walker were a political man, he would have settled for two punchy paragraphs vividly expressing his dismay with the Commander-inChief...

...Typical question from Bircher in audience: "Will you comment on the fact that Janie Davis of 347 Woods St., Suisun, California, read a UNESCO pamphlet on nationalism and then spit on the American flag...

...It was difficult to get Eisenhower in the sights: it was obvious that, whatever his ex officio role, Ike really did believe in the withering away of the State—though not for the reasons adduced by Robert Welch...

...Ten years ago, in The New Leader and elsewhere, I suggested that in this identical sense McCarthyism was a spook...

...And it is precisely this fate which American political institutions tend to prepare for the extremist...

...Psychologically, the extremist must attack, attack, and then attack again the road to power for such a man is unceasing assault...

...Put bluntly, much of the liberal frenzy about the resurgent right seems to rest on the submerged premise that the United States in the 1960s resembles Weimar Germany in the Great Depression...

...But this does not mean that they will admit him to the club...

...confronted by intelligent and vigorous oppostion, what appears to be a solid phalanx degenerates into paranoidal atoms which scuttle into hiding babbling of Jews, flourides and UNESCO...

...There is no point in wasting time in private combat...

...Some local Yahoo has been trying to get me to debate the immorality of the income tax before his Freedom Fighters local...

...he may be reluctantly led to the conclusion that political manners have improved over the past century and a half...

...And if on one scale he made Joseph P. Kennedy look like an editor of the Catholic Worker, on another he was totally incapable of action...

...Walker's farewell address to Congress identified him as the pure ideologist, the man who lives in a world where words have an autonomous force in history...

...Because they are alienated from contemporary American life, right-wing extremists have no real self-confidence...

...I actually attended a cocktail party a few years back where the main topic was, "Will Eisenhower be the American Hindenburg...

...The United States has always been a rough country with a turbulent political tradition at the local level...

...What Walker and others have failed to appreciate was tersely put by a former Republican Senatorial magnate: "We don't draw any line between conservatives and reactionaries," he said, "but we sure as hell discriminate between the sane and the insane...

...And this is no heroic pose...

...My diagnosis then is that for at least the next six years, and hopefully for the next 20, we will have to pay the price of power and put up with a savage right-wing assault...

...It is a sad, sickening business, but nobody is going to take care of them for us...

...But they have no institutional base of operations...

...When you know that they have the dice loaded, that they have poisoned the wells, that they are everywhere, it is hard to have the stomach for a sustained fight...

...In October 1954, for example, I noted in Current History that politically McCarthyism had no future...

...Nothing could be farther from the truth...

...This is, I suppose, what disturbs me about many of my liberal friends and is probably just another formulation of the complaint of the activist...

...Now, at long last, they have a clear sighting on their target: a President who believes in Government...

...But there are risks in the perpetual attack—it becomes increasingly extreme, shrill, and, finally, boring...

...I added: "Where does the Senator go from here...

...The best liberal strategy comes from the folk-wisdom of County Mayo: "Stand firm boys—and when a head comes over the wall, hit it...

...The most important thing for us to do is cut out the paranoia, stop looking over our shoulders at Nazi Germany every time a sick nut pushes an anti-Semitic tract, stop feeling sorry for ourselves for living in a time when—despite our obvious virtue and dedication to Truth —people say nasty things about us...

...Walker, however, is off to the political wars (he has put his name in the Texas Democratic primary for Governor), probably under the illusion that the Democratic politicians who were so nice to him in Washington will stand up and be counted for a trueblue conservative...

...The crowd ominously referred him to a recent local resolution proclaiming "that if anyone called the people a mob, he should be tarred and feathered...

...has a political vehicle for this right-wing extremism, that the Yahoos have a party which presents the American people with a meaningful alternative to the status quo...

...Yet the most he could achieve was the status of a nasty, vicious nuisance...

...What this analogy assumes, without demonstrating, is that the U.S...

...those who denounce the Birchers today are surely in no worse shape than Albert Gallatin was in 1794 when he told his neighbors to pay the whiskey excise and stop behaving "like a mob...

...they don't even control one state government, though as several corporations can verify this is not necessarily an impossible attainment...

...These boys aren't so tough...

...They may even, on occasion, become picadors, stimulating the Yahoo bull against the handsome, self-confident Toreador, secure in the knowledge that no bull has ever replaced a vanquished bullfighter...

...If they really feel that freedom is in jeopardy, they may strike back by subscribing to the Nation...

...Its epigoni have an almost unbelievable capacity for generating tumult and hate on an ad hoc basis, but they have developed no institutional roots and do not, in my view, constitute a serious threat to our free society...

...Now Walker has proved useful to Senator Strom Thurmond (D.— S. C.) and others who are willing to use any stick to beat a dog— in this case Senator William Fulbright (D.—Ark...

...But inert or militant, the fact of the matter is that for the last 25 years of his life my father had no political home...

...The Yahoos are seemingly ferocious, and to take one on does involve a pilgrimage to a Kafkaesque frame of discourse where 2 + 2 = 22, Alger Hiss + UNESCO = the Berlin Wall, and Katanga = the Ulster of 1961, the Hungary of 1961, or the Spitzbergen of 1961...

...Never have the right-wing stalwarts been as far from power and influence in the United States as they are today...

...Similarly, the liberal journals are studded with articles on the new threat to liberalism...

...Let us leave self-pity to the right-wingers and devote ourselves to giving them sufficient justification for its exercise...

...There is no reason then for the liberals to hit the panic button...

...And most important, the American electorate has probably never been more stable and less susceptible to extremist appeals...

...Furthermore, the politicians of the conservative coalition, while they will not link their destinies with right-wing extremists, are delighted to take box seats at the bullfight...

...There is no Yahoo party, and their chances of taking over the existing political machinery except on a sporadic local basis are virtually nonexistent...

...there are a lot of things that scare me to death—nuclear war, automobile accidents, lung cancer, to mention but three—but I have only a limited time to devote to fright...

...I spent an exasperating evening recently disposing of the thesis that UNESCO has corrupted American education, and that UNICEF Christmas cards are part of the Communist plot to take Christ out of Christmas and thus destroy the religious foundations of American civilization...

...He is in for a shock...

...No one in his senses prefers debating with a Bircher to an evening at home, but we have to make a commitment to slug it out whenever there is a public audience involved...

...I have resisted by offering an alternate topic: "Resolved, the Kansas-Nebraska Act is a national disaster...

...It is considered bad form either to be a "nut," that is, to act as though you believed your own press releases, or—as Adlai Stevenson discovered—to deprecate the political act...

...Indeed, at close range a Yahoo crusade is a quite pathetic congeries of the insecure...

...Nor do today's bitter, driven militants have any place to go...

...Thus, in our continuing struggle against these twisted prophets we should never underestimate their talent for trouble-making and for hurting the innocent, but at the same time we should keep our perspective and act like men...

...In fact, I would argue that we should take every opportunity to drag them out into the open and have it out...

...With the exception of William F. Buckley Jr...

...Perhaps because I grew up in the bosom of the radical right (my family ran the full course from Father Coughlin through America First to Joseph R. McCarthy), I have never been able to take these frustrated nihilists seriously as a political force...

...For a set of wholly non-political reasons, I hold the memory of my father in warm affection, but politically he was a compulsive loser...

...They simply have nothing to offer...

...After what we have done to the Yahoos in the United States over the past 30 years, can we really expect them to love us...

...The extremists will swarm here today, there tomorrow (but always in Los Angeles, the American Munich), and the unsophisticated observer may get the impression that there is a powerful movement surging toward native fascism...

...Right-wing extremism, in other words, is an ideology without an institutional base...

...Unless a demagogue can seize commanding positions of state power in the early stages of his campaign, he is likely to end his days in the political wilderness, a rejected prophet...

...If one reads the denunciations of President Adams by the Jeffersonian press (before he suppressed most of it), or the Federalist analysis of Jeffersonian democracy ("A great body of domestik traitors," the Gazette of the United States wrote on June 9, 1798), or the Republican Platform of 1876 ("We charge the Democratic party with being the same in character and spirit as when it sympathized with treason...

...The last thing one should ever do with Yahoos is display fear or the slightest willingness to compromise—this will bring down the whole pack howling for blood...

...The death of Senator Styles Bridges removed the last Yahoo magnate from the upper house—a decade ago we had a good half-dozen...

...I was "whitewashing McCarthy" said one critic, and a junior Marxman in Dissent managed to convince himself that I was objectively anti-civil rights...

...are treated by politicians and voters as part of the staging...

...It was inevitable that the election of a liberal Democrat to the Presidency would unleash the full force of right-wing extremism, but what we must not overlook is the clear fact that the Yahoos have been there all the time...

...They can sponsor raids on school boards, crucify a few hapless teachers here and there, get sortie hick town to ban UNICEF collection boxes on Halloween, and occasionally even tear hell out of a state legislature or the U.S...

...he built no party and left no inheritance, even in his native state...

...My attitude toward McCarthy in his day was the same as my current view of the Birchers and their kind: one of contempt rather than fear...

...and his cadre, who are really in a different class, they are not very effective in ideological warfare, and they much prefer to operate from the shadows...

...I therefore have a scale of priorities on which the "menace from the right" ranks 23rd—between fear of being eaten by piranha and fear of college presidents...

...they are not political men and they have no conception of how one conducts a rationally irrational campaign...

...While it is, of course, useful to reveal the activities and the party line of the right-wingers, it is silly to get hysterical about their machinations and give them a lot of free publicity...

...he was, as Richard Rovere suggested in Senator Joe McCarthy, a nihilist with only destructive capabilities...

...Although one must be very cautious in reading lessons from history, the fate of past extremists seems to offer some insight on this matter...

...So for me, at any rate, his opinions were absolved by his inertia...

...I know from long experience that nothing can prevent people who do not read articles from writing stupid critiques, but as a perennial optimist let me say right now that I am in no sense arguing for inertia in dealing with the Birchers—or that McCarthy was a nice man...

...Instead, he took up a good half-page of the New York Times with a manifesto worthy of a 33rd degree Trotskyite...

...We simply lose our perspective...

...While among ourselves we may suspect that ADA (known in right-wing circles as the politburo of the Liberal Machine) could not fight its way out of a wet paper sack, we take the John Birch Society on its own assessment as a tightly knit, single-purposed conspiratorial cadre...

...Because a number of liberal intellectuals live in the same universe as General Walker—one in which words substitute for realities—there is generalized angst about coping with the radical right...

...They are distressed about right-wing extremism, exaggerate the power and the efficiency of the right-wingers, and then await cosmic intervention to avert "fascism...

...In this connection, the political future of General Edwin Walker is instructive...

...They are wanderers in a hostile land who go into battle with a brooding suspicion that history itself is conspiring against Truth...

...The extreme right's chosen weapons are the scurrilous letter (I have a collection that would make a First Sergeant blush), the nasty anonymous phone call, the sordid little tract...

...One might think from all this that we have in the United States a powerful right-wing junta, mobilized and waiting for the signal to crush the helpless Kennedy Administration and substitute the National Review for the Congressional Record...

...However, he usually fails to consider the other side of the coin: the extent to which the "menace from the right" is in effective political terms an equally mythical bogy, a vapor of the perfervid liberal imagination...

...Senate...

...In no sense did he pose an organizational threat to the American political system...

...Anyone who has spent any time in liberal pressure groups knows the extent of our organizational weakness, recognizes the degree to which the liberal monolith is a creation of right-wing fantasies...

...their very nihilism militates against successful organization...

...To state this proposition is to reveal its absurdity...

...We have a tough, liberal President who has made it clear both in his Los Angeles speech and in a recent press conference that he will take no nonsense from the right...

...In his Senate committee chairmanship McCarthy had an ideal position for conducting guerrilla warfare and campaigns of attrition...

...For saying this I was accused of all sorts of odd heresies...

...It is usually hit and run...

...This is not intended to be cute or delphic: One of the most interesting aspects of American campaigns is the degree to which irrational elements—demagoguery, charismatic displays, etc...