SUNDAY, JUNE 12 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A
BY THEO ZENOUThe year was 1954, and the
Cold War was in full swing. Sen.
Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.) was
seeing Soviet spies in every cor-
ner of the government. And a
young sociologist at Columbia
University, Daniel Bell, convened
a seminar to come to grips with
the menace of McCarthyism.
Bell enlisted an academic
dream team that included histo-
rian Richard Hofstadter and so-
ciologist Seymour Martin Lipset.
A year later, the group of seven
intellectuals published their
findings as an essay collection,
edited by Bell. “The New Ameri-
can Right” argued that McCar-
thy’s conspiratorial anti-commu-
nism was here to stay.
By then, the Senate had cen-
sured McCarthy, and McCarthy-
ism had collapsed. The book
looked dead on arrival.
But nearly 70 years later, as a
congressional committee investi-
gates the far-right attack on the
U.S. government on Jan. 6, 2021,
the forgotten text has never
looked more prescient.
The authors wrote that far-
right activists who wrapped
themselves in the American flag
actually posed a grave threat to
the country’s core principles. In
the name of protecting U.S. de-
mocracy, they warned, the radi-
cal right would employ the lan-
guage and methods of authori-
tarianism.
If “The New American Right”
seemed obsolete when it was first
published, that changed quickly.
By the early ’60s, it was obvious
McCarthy had spawned a move-
ment with real staying power
made up of anti-communist or-
ganizations.
Take the John Birch Society,
which in 1962 counted about
60,000 members and an estimat-
ed 9.5 million sympathizers. Its
founder, a candy tycoon named
Robert Welch, thought “traitors
inside the U.S. government
would betray the country’s sover-
eignty to the United Nations for a
collectivist New World Order,
managed by a ‘one-world social-
ist government.’”
Or take the lesser-known Lib-
erty Lobby, founded by an
avowed admirer of Nazi Ger-
many. This white-supremacist
group prophesied an apocalyptic
struggle “between the white and
the colored world, of which Rus-
sia is the Lord.”
Bell’s team of academics re-
vised “The New American Right”
and rereleased it in 1963 as “The
Radical Right.” It would become
a must-read for students of mod-
ern American history.
The intellectuals held that the
radical right not only loathed
communism but also liberal de-
mocracy and the basic tenets of
the U.S. Constitution. As Bell
noted wryly, its partisans stood
ready “to jettison constitutional
processes and to suspend liber-
ties, to condone Communist
methods in the fighting of Com-
munism.” They blasted free elec-
tions and the peaceful transfer of
power, lamented the independ-
ence of the judiciary and op-
posed civil rights.
If the Soviets wanted to desta-
bilize the republic, they could
hardly have found keener agents
than the radical right.
Hofstadter called these activ-
ists “pseudo-conservatives” (a
term borrowed from philosopher
Theodor W. Adorno). They posed
as conservatives but in truth
were authoritarians with a nihil-
istic urge to watch the world
burn. “Followers of a movement
like the John Birch Society,”
Hofstadter wrote in one of the
book’s essays, “are in our world
but not exactly of it.” They lived
amid what their successors
would come to call “alternative
facts.”
Adherents of the movement
preached imminent doomsday.
In 1963, following the ratifica-
tion of a nuclear treaty with the
Soviet Union, the Liberty Lobby
declared that “the United States
has, at best, only a few more
years.” In a speech denouncing
the radical right, Sen. Thomas
Kuchel (R-Calif.) labeled themreal political power. Barry Gold-
water, the Republican firebrand
who ran for the presidency in
1964, was crushed in a landslide,
and subsequent Republican
presidents did not embrace pse-
udo-conservatism.
When the radical right first
gained strength, it fell to a Demo-
cratic president to formulate a
counterattack — just as Presi-
dent Biden and his allies in
Congress are now attempting. In
1961, John F. Kennedy deplored
those who “call for a ‘man on
horseback’ because they do not
trust the people.” His brother,
Attorney General Robert F. Ken-
nedy, deemed the John Birch
Society “a tremendous danger”
and excoriated “those, who, in
the name of fighting commu-
nism, sow the seeds of suspicion
... against the foundations of our
government — Congress, the Su-
preme Court, and even the presi-
dency itself.”
To stave off the threat, the
Kennedys had the IRS audit
extremist groups and the Federal
Communications Commission
regulate right-wing radio. But
these efforts failed to make a
dent in the groups’ appeal.
Pseudo-conservatism only lost
relevance in the mid-1960s, after
conservatives such as Ronald
Reagan disavowed the John
Birch Society. Today’s Republi-
cans have yet to follow suit with
Trump, QAnon and the Jan. 6
attack. In February, the Republi-
can National Committee de-
clared the insurrection “legiti-
mate political discourse.”
The House committee investi-
gating the Jan. 6 attack began a
series of highly anticipated hear-
ings Thursday. The committee,
composed of seven Democrats
and two Republicans, has so far
stood united in its pledge to
uncover the truth about what
Biden has called “the worst at-
tack on our democracy since the
Civil War.”
But the ideology behind the
attack is nothing new. Bell’s team
of academics was already sound-
ing the alarm 67 years ago.RETROPOLIS
A 1955 book on right-wing extremists predicted Jan. 6
Nearly 70 years after ‘The New American Right’ published, the t ext has never looked more prescient
“fright peddlers.” It became the
’60s equivalent of Hillary Clin-
ton’s “deplorables,” a term of
derision worn as a badge of
honor by the derided.
Bell argued that pseudo-c-
onservatives were driven by a
fear of modernity. The United
States was starting to shift to a
knowledge economy dominated
by a “technical and professional
intelligentsia.” This rattled pse-
udo-conservatives, who felt, in
Bell’s words, the “disquiet of the
dispossessed.”
This sounds more than a little
like the forces that helped elect
Donald Trump, spark the QAnon
extremist ideology and launch
the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
The radical right of the 1960s,
by contrast, never found its
Trump — a leader who could
unite the movement and give itASSOCIATED PRESSASSOCIATED PRESS
TOP: Roughly 12,000 supporters of Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy
(R-Wis.) attend a rally at Madison Square Garden in New York on
Nov. 29, 1954. ABOVE: McCarthy refers to a document at a news
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