In 1955 the sociologist Daniel Bell edited a volume of essays under the title The New American Right. The essays addressed, from various standpoints and with the tools of various disciplines, the phenomenon of McCarthyism and related expressions of far-right-wing politics. A new edition, with supplemental essays by many of the same authors, appeared in 1963 as The Radical Right.
Reading these essays requires some effort by the contemporary reader to recapture, or imagine anew, the political and cultural atmosphere in the United States of the early 1950s. But the effort pays its great dividend in yielding the shock of the familiar: McCarthyism, minus the leader who in the decades since his heyday has receded into a figure of sinister absurdity, was not so very different from its direct descendant, the so-called Tea Party movement.
As several of the authors point out, McCarthyism, despite its insistent droning of the shibboleth “Communist,” was hardly at all about anticommunism. No actual Soviet spy or mole was ever uncovered by the agitated senator from Wisconsin, nor did he even try very hard to do so. The movement that collected itself behind his erratic leadership was motivated by quite other aims and stimuli. It was not even primarily a political movement, but rather an emotional upheaval amongst a body of persons who felt, for any of many different reasons, alienated from traditional leadership, from cultural developments, and often from their own pasts.
It is precisely because such movements are regressively emotional that, in the words of another of the book’s essays, by David Riesman and Nathan Glazer, “the pseudo-conservative right has so small a program and so belligerent a stance.”
One favorite target of McCarthyist rage, as of right-wing railing today, was what was then thought of as the intellectual class, which today has been absorbed into a broader grouping that is routinely and with inherited ignorance derided as the “elites.” Here is one of Professor Bell’s authors, the conservative Peter Viereck, on the proper and necessary role of intellectuals in American representative democracy:
[W]ho on earth, if not the intellectuals, will resist the periodic stampedes to entrust American culture to the manipulators of gadgets? This resistance to stampedes ought to express not the conformism of “non-conformism,” flaunted to pose as a devil of a fellow, but the sensitivity of a deeper and finer grain, an ear conforming not to bandwagon-tunes but to the finer, older, deeper rhythms of American culture.
A few years ago, liberal intellectuals were reproaching me for refusing to bait Big Business — and today (in several cases) for refusing to equate it with Santa Claus. Why do either? Business-baiting was and is a cheap bohemian flourish, a wearing of one’s soulfulness on one’s sleeve, and no substitute for seriously analyzing the real problem: namely, the compulsion of modern technics (whether under capitalist bigness or a socialist bigness) to put know-how before know-why.
When the alternative is the neo-Populist barn-burners from Wisconsin and Texas, naturally I ardently prefer Big Business, especially a noblesse-obligated and New Dealized Big Business. For its vanity (desire to seem sophisticated) makes a point of allowing a lot more elbowroom to the free mind. But what a choice! All America’s great creative spirits of the past, like Melville (who spoke of “the impieties of Progress”) and conservative Henry Adams, would turn in their graves, as indignantly as would liberal Abraham Lincoln, at even the hint that no noble third alternative remained for a nation boasting of itself as the freest on earth.
Photo credit: Joseph McCarthy; National Archives, Washington, D.C.