260
DAVID RIES..,.AN
Wingers who are satisfied to shout "better Red than dead" or "we want
more bombs.") For example, I have encountered students who have
the great forensic ability to cite Communist abuses and treacheries-–
students who, on graduation
if
not before, can take part in the many
seminars, schools, and other more or less intellectual apparatuses of
today's anti-Communist movements. While Father Coughlin and his
followers gathered in small groups or cells to listen to his broadcasts and
receive instructions, his sermons made no real attempt at intellectual
analysis, any more than McCarthy's speeches and hearings did. The
speed of change is perhaps reflected in the astonishment of a number
of priests and other religious, teaching at Catholic colleges, who are
beleaguered by student admirers of the John Birch Society or of Barry
Goldwater- neither John Birch or Goldwater being, as one Jesuit Priest
wryly put it, one of the boys as Joe McCarthy was.*
I am not clear in my own mind as to the weight in these various
fragmentary movements of the ideological component. Among the sit–
in and disarmament groups, there is often a rejection of ideology and
complexity and a preference for a single issue simply seen- though there
is often also a more scholarly and searching attempt to cope with issues,
particularly in the field of disarmament and foreign policy. On the
Radical Right, as already indicated, there is a stronger attempt than
heretofore to support attitudes with ideology or at least with slogans
and superficial information; there is more fanaticism and less fooling
around. As people become aware of their national defenselessness in the
nuclear age, the militant may feel the need of ideas even while they fear
them. The general educational and intellectual upgrading of our popu–
lation as a whole also forces Right Wing groups to pay more attention
to ideas or the semi-balance of ideas.
Any effort to explain in social psychological terms a political or
cultural movement runs the risk of making it appear too rational, too
much a response to external circumstance. I now think that in our
earlier essay the very effort to understand the mentality of the Radical
Right placed too much emphasis on the ties between the New Dealers
*
I don't intend here to imply that Goldwater and the John Birch Society
are alike; indeed, at a recent meeting Goldwater was picketed by a Radical
Right organization carrying signs saying, "We want war . . . Red Russia must
not survive." Goldwater's sometimes humorous and genial tone lacks that blend
of exigent Protestant fundamentalism and witch-doctor academese ("each and
every" Harvard graduate; "known Comsymp") that attracts to the John Birch
Society or other anti-political groups some of the uneasy new rich whose
achievements have outrun their anticipations.
