The Politics of Unreason

A number of left-wing writers have argued that despite the core of the Republican party being heavily older, whiter and pissed-off, the passing to a new generation may not equal moderation. Reading THE POLITICS OF UNREASON: Right-Wing Extremism in America, 1790-1970 by Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab I can see why.

I first read the book years ago, and tried to find it when working on Screen Enemies of the American Way but failed, possibly because I didn’t remember the title or the authors. Then I happened to stumble on it a while back and finally got to rereading it.

The authors’ focus isn’t so much on extreme views as anti-democratic extremism—the willingness to dispense with votes, procedural safeguards, legal mandates, to get a particular agenda passed (usually because it’s the Will of the People). This, as they point out, is something that turns up on both the left and the right, but they argue right-wing “preservatist” extremism (fueled by people afraid of losing money, power or status) has been a stronger force than left-wing extremism (where the goal is forcing the redistribution of money, power or status).

While the book came out in the seventies, the portrayal of a right wing terrified of losing ground to the Other (at various points Catholics, Jews, blacks and immigrants in general—though some of those groups would adopt the same stance once they’d made it in America) sounds depressingly familiar. Even the running right-wing focus on the Illuminati (a deadly threat in the eyes of the Anti-Masonic Party, the Know Nothing Party and the John Birch Society) is still around (Pat Robertson invoked them as the Big Bad in his early nineties book The New World Order along with the International Jewish Bankers).

Lipset and Raab argue that while different threats form in different times (Catholics, Jews, Commies, blacks), it’s simply a manifestation of the same underlying causes. Senator McCarthy, for instance, wasn’t attacking Soviet Communism as much as a supposedly Commie-riddled Washington establishment; George Wallace, likewise, was scathing in his attacks on “elites” and “pointy-headed bureaucrats” (the book’s focus on Wallace’s 1968 presidential campaign may date it a little). Likewise the most powerful conspiracy theories involve some vague, shadowy group coupled with individuals believers now have license to hate—Catholics as agents of the Vatican, Jews as agents of the Elders of Zion, Japanese-Americans as agents of imperial Japan (they don’t actually get into that, possibly because it was a more general paranoia than specifically right wing).

If a little dry and academic in some of its details, overall I found this fascinating to reread.