THE RADICAL RIGHT

These essays, an enlargement and extension of 1955's The New American Right, are by and large the best examination of the emergence of rightist extremism that we have; tough-minded, integral, important, they pinpoint the cold war complex of fears and frustrations vis a vis the Soviet Union, the resultant conversion of issues into ideologies and the proliferation of way-out movements, for example, McCarthyism and the Birchers. The contributors, mostly Harvard and Columbia bright lights (professors Bell, Riesman, Parsons, Hofstadter, Lipset, Viereck), are all, of course, no-nonsense scholars; true, a few betray an over-subtle approach or a self-congratulatory tone, but they know the score and serve it stingingly and with style. The socio-psychological dissections include the New Deal as monster-spawner, Korea and the ""cookie "" conspiracy, All-American status-anxiety, political appeals to intolerance and irrationalism (guilt by association), pseudo-conservatism (not reverence of the past a paranoid preoccupation with the future), the carnival charges of Robert Welch brothers Dulles and the brothers Eisenhower as ""traitors"") and, over all, the vigilante he-who-is-not -with-me response. This is the logical extension of Janson and The Far Right (McGraw-Hill- p. 42) with a closer analysis of certain aspects of this movement only touched upon (or simply reported) by the two journalists. Top-flight.