From Taft to Reagan

...the New Right is part of a delayed response to the latest Leftward drift of liberalism—and so on, with no end in sight...

...The desire was to reaffirm the ideal of an older America under attack by the succubus of "New Deal Socialism...

...But before we dispatch the Evangelicals and the Right-to-Lifers to cloud cuckoo land, we ought to remember that it was not the people on the Right who adored Jim Jones...

...Yet in terms of Miles' own earlier insights, the New Right is the latest round in the continuing cycle of reform and reaction set off by the New Deal's defeat of old-style Republicanism: McCarthy-ism was the perverted revenge of free-market individualism on "creeping socialism...

...Liberals dusted off Richard Hofstadter's celebrated 1963 essay on "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," updated its arguments, and went on to assert that like its predecessor, the New Right is essentially the product of disturbed minds...

...As Taft's ally, John Bricker, put it, "Joe [McCarthy], you're a dirty SOB, but there are times when you've got to have an SOB around and this is one of them...

...Less principled than the Taftites but as anti-New Deal and far more willing to intervene abroad, its leaders were first William F. Knowland of California and later Barry Gold-water of Arizona...

...The appeal of such technology was that it seemed to allow for a small standing army, while keeping the United States sufficiently independent militarily to avoid entangling alliances...

...19.95 Reviewed by Fred Siegel Assistant professor of communications, Queens College, CUNY All too prone to dismiss the political Right in toto, liberals and Leftists have paid scant attention to the diversities within the enemy's ranks...

...They were again in Gethsemane...

...Their chief opponents, the corn belt conservatives, were the representatives of a provincial elite whose sentiments and ideology were deeply rooted in the traditions of small town America...

...This brief summary of the first two-thirds of Miles' book can hardly do justice to a work whose richness is its many perceptive observations and shrewd insights...

...Joe McCarthy became the agent of their revenge...

...Miles depicts a once-proud Grand Old Party that had ruled for most of the previous 70 years, becoming suddenly traumatized by the collective loss of place and prestige...

...Miles dubs this group, led by Robert Taft, the Old Nationalists...

...The Eastern Establishment, and its 1940 Presidential candidate, Wendell Wilkie, were internationalist in foreign policy and willing to make a pragmatic accommodation with the New Deal at home...

...Until the late '30s the Republicans were frozen in shock, very much like the victims of a natural disaster watching their most familiar surroundings slide away...

...Miles argues convincingly that the spirit of revenge powered the Old Nationalists, and increasingly the party at large...

...The upheaval in China was an enormous shock to Republicans as varied as Taft, General Mac Arthur and Henry Luce, men deeply tied to the Orient by family and personal histories no less than ideology...

...The Old Nationalists believed America's destiny lay in the Far East and China, rather than the decadence of Europe...

...They harangued the country about the Democratic treachery that led to American intervention on the side of Soviet Russia but denied support for our "democratic" allies in China...

...Forget for a moment that he was a corrupt war lord, and that Truman made a good and courageous decision...

...The resort to the "paranoid style" argument is an intellectual snare allowing us to dehumanize our enemies and freeing us from the obligation of serious political analysis...

...They saw Chiang Kai-shek's collapse as the foreign policy equivalent of the New Deal...

...Because Miles has produced far and away the best account of the old Republican Right to date, it is a shame that the last third of The Odyssey of the American Right wanders off into a desultory discussion of Nixon and the sunbelt...

...The great virtue of Michael Miles' Odyssey of the American Right is that he refuses to psychologize the people he is studying...

...The sources of the Republican Right's foreign policy reached far back as well...

...Mao's victory unleashed the pent up frustration of the previous 15 years...

...the new mood of the '60s wreaked havoc on the victors of the '50s...

...And fear of that hydra-headed monster, the Tri-Lateral Commission, is every bit as widespread among respectable radicals as it is among free-enterprise cranks...

...The "loss" of China brought the Republicans to the barricades...

...An example: Miles shows how the Republican passion for airplanes and missiles did not simply derive from a bloodthirsty temperament...

...Still, no sooner was the New Right recognized than it was denounced as mere lunacy...

...When Roosevelt began to slip and the GOP started its recovery, it split into three factions...

...Isolationist in foreign policy, unalterably opposed to the New Deal, their belief in the individualist ethic of 19th-century Protestant America held fast throughout the Depression...

...Traditionalists viewed the cosmopolitan forces of immigrant radicalism and Federal reform as a threat to their provincial prerogatives...

...The problem here is not only that Miles has little to say about an already tired topic, it is that the rise of the New Right goes largely unnoticed...

...The third faction, based in the rapidly growing West, Miles calls the New Nationalists...

...Belief in the time-honored virtues of personal autonomy, hard work and voluntary community is what connects Robert Taft to Ronald Reagan...

...Thus they were surprised to find recently that an incarnation of their old bete noire is alive and prospering...

...They pointed to the Truman Doctrine's promise to fight Communism anywhere it reared its ugly head and asked how, given that promise, Truman and Dean Acheson could back away from this country's old and revered friend, Chiang...

...After their shafts helped bring down Richard Nixon, they tended to naively assume that conservatism had fallen with him...

...Joe McCarthy temporarily harnessed the furies to become the piston rod of Republican revival...

...From the point of view of those who felt they represented the "real" America, the abandonment of China was the final humiliation...

...Or as one New Nationalist put it, "I'm afraid that the Roosevelt revolution will make me a stranger in my own home...

...Miles uses the stencil of foreign policy to trace the lineaments of these sentiments as they were buffeted initially by our entry into World War II, then by Yalta and the Europe-first policy of the Truman Administration, and finally and most severely by the Chinese Revolution...

...His book is a richly complex examination of the political and ideological origins of modern conservatism, beginning with the Republican Party's fall from grace during the Great Depression...

...They often saw the British and not the Russian Empire as the chief danger to America...

...When Oliver Wendell Holmes explained that" It has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies but to be one," he was describing the Old Nationalists' preoccupation with the "American way of life...