In 1963 in an essay on the John Birch
Society in the Daniel Bell edited collection The Radical Right: The New American
Right Expanded and Updated (Garden City, NY: Anchor Doubleday, 1963), a
revision and expansion of 1955s The New American Right (New York: Criterion),
Alan Westin prophesies that this recent radical right group would be contained by
business leaders, conservatives, and moderate and liberal figures in Republican Party. It is now 60 years later
and the extreme right has not been contained like a domestic Soviet Union by business leaders, conservatives, or the Republican Party. Rather, the radical right
has become, with the election of Donald Trump to the American presidency, at least in part, the mainstream of the post-1960s Republican Party.
So how did we get from there to here? I had avoided long reading The Radical Right given its post-1960s reputation. In
the mid-and late 1960s The Radical Right fell into
ideological disfavour in certain quarters within the social sciences and the humanities communities. Conflict theorists and social and
cultural constructionists like myself found its championing
of centrist democratic liberalism and its occasional stereotyping and
caricaturing of the radical right (the Monkey Trial effect) as far too ideological raising
questions about the validity of the analysis of the essays in this
edited collection. Many obsessed with the working class and its supposed apocalyptic role in world history found its portrayal of populists as authoritarian and racist fascists and its linking of populists and the contemporary paranoid right problematic. Given the current political crisis in the US I
decided, however, that it was time to take a look at the essays in The Radical Right.
I actually began reading The Radical Right in
October of this year because I was interested in the answer to the question of how and why the radical or extremist right had been mainstreamed in American political culture. When I got to Westin’s essay on the John Birch Society, however, I discovered
that pages 214 to 226 were missing in the print-on-demand copy of the book that I
purchased from Amazon. Thanks to a used bookstore from whom I purchased a
paperback copy of the book, however, I have been able to finally finish this edited collection and it gave me a lot to think about. The essays in the The Radical Right, most
of them by some of the best and brightest centrist stars in the end of ideology
firmament of the era such as Daniel Bell, Richard Hofstadter, Daniel Riesman,
Nathan Glazer, and Talcott Parsons, offer a largely
unified perspective. Most of the essays argue that in the wake of World War II the economic interest
politics that had dominated the US since industrialisation was replaced by
status politics. For many of The Radical Rights's essayists, economic, political, and cultural forces, and the
Cold War, in particular, created psychic status anxiety in many Americans and the resulting status anxiety about the Cold War and socio-economic positions in post World War II gave rise to movements like the
anti-Communist crusade of the late 1940s and 1950s and the John Birch Society,
which was also anti-Communist, and, importantly, a shill for free market capitalism and the notion that big American governments were tyrannical take awayers of "liberty".
The essays in The Radical Right, and particularly the most systematic essay in the collection Seymour Matin Lipset's 1955 article on the extremist right, argue, for the most part, that the anxieties released by changes afoot in
post-World War II America, particularly economic and political changes, were not primarilly directed outward against the Soviet Union but were largely
directed inward against supposed traitorous fifth columnists within the United States. Characterised by manicheanism and a conspiracy theory mania, the radical
right found enemies everywhere within the US, fifth columnists and
"traitors", who were, they raged, undermining the
American way of life (read: The White Anglo Saxon Protestant way of life and the White way of life), be
these "traitors" Republicans like Ike, who some Birchers saw as doing
the communist will of his Soviet masters, or liberals, by which they meant New
Deal and particularly East Coast and elite educated progressives, or members of the Communist Party in the US.
If a lot of this sounds frighteningly familiar,
it should. This radical manichean, conspiracy theory, apocalyptic, raging, fear
mongering, ahistorical, scapegoating, and hysteric right is still with us today and how.
What is different, as I noted earlier, is that in the wake of the so-called
Reagan Revolution, the Republican Party, which was once a regional Northern
political party with an ideology centred around free soil and free labour, has
been Dixiefornicated. The Republican Party, in other words, has, thanks to a number of factors including the rise of the Sunbelt, the tendency of many and particularly many Whites who move to the Sunbelt to conform to Sunbelt conservatism, neoliberalism with its small government polemics and its taxes as tyrannical mantras, the increased acceptance of the belief that progressive liberals are dangerous fifth columnists akin to "commies" before them, the revolt against the federal government control of large pockets of land in the American West, the movement of White evangelicals from the Dixiecrat Party to the Republican Party and their re-emergence into American politcal culture, and the kindler and gentler discourse the radical right used and uses, a rhetoric that wasn't overtly racist and anti-Semitic, morphed into
the Dixiecrats and, as a result, the radical right has gone mainstream.
The Radical Right was an interesting read
particularly in the context of the takeover of one of the US’s major political
parties by the contemporary radical right between the 1960s and Trump. It raises a lot of interesting questions and issues worth pondering given the mainstreaming of the radical right. In particular I found Westin’s essay on the early
history of the Birchers fascinating, Hyman's comparative analysis of the US and Britain interesting, Lipset's 1955 essay well argued, and Peter Vierick’s two essays on a
conservatism that is flexible to the dynamics of history, interesting and
intriguing. There were some things I disagreed with in the book. I don't think there has been a decline in White supremacist and anti-Semitic sentiments in the US. Rather I suspect that these have been submerged into a kindler and gentler discourse which those in the know could easily and readily decode. I appreciated The Radical Right's emphasis on social factors (class fractions, new business interests, education, region, political party) and social psychological factors (the authoritarian personality and the social construction of fear and anxiety) but would argue that these have been unfortunately emphasised at the expense of cultural explanations (many of the essays do touch on religion and, if too briefly, on ideology) for the rise of the extreme right in the US. I did not find the books occasional emphasis on a national character grounded in a national psychology particularly compelling. Still I highly recommend this collection particularly to anyone interested in American politics and the American political and ideological right.
