Two vivid sets of images epitomize the dramatic course of the
American right in the last quarter of the twentieth century. The
main image is of a triumphant President Ronald Reagan, reasonably
viewed as the most effec-tive president of recent decades. A second
set of images comes from the bombing of a government building in
Oklahoma City by Timothy McVeigh, a man linked to shadowy parts of
the contemporary ultraright. The roots of Reaganism are
conservative, intellectual, and political movements of the 1950s
and 1960s, including currents that in those years were considered
marginal and ex-tremist. The roots of the ultraright of the 1990s
have intersecting though by no means identical sources.
Serious evaluation of the American right should begin with The
Radical Right. It describes the main positions and composition of
distinctive forces on the right in the first half of the 1950s and
the next decade. It recognizes the right's vehement opposition to
domestic and international Communism, its sharp rejec-tion of the
New Deal, and its difficulty in distinguishing between the two.
Bell's controversial point of departure is to regard the basic
position of what he terms the radical right as excessive in its
estimation of the Communist threat and unrealistic in its rejection
of New Deal reforms. From this starting point, Bell and his authors
evaluate the ways the right went beyond programs and the
self-descriptions of its leaders and organizers.
The Radical Right explains McCarthyism and its successors in
terms of conflicts over social status and the shape of American
culture. Daniel Bell focuses on the social dislo-cation of
significant groups in the post-New Deal decades. Many members of
these groups perceived themselves as dispossessed and victimized by
recent changes, even if it was not possible to regard them as
having undergone any great suffering.
David Plotke's major new introduction discusses the book's
argument, McCarthyism and American politics, the changing shape of
the American right from 1965-2000, mili-tias, and new issues in
American politics. This edition also includes an afterword by
Daniel Bell responding to Plotke's interpretation and revisiting
his own perspectives.
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