~I
THE NATIONAL STYLE
527
III
The distinctive theme of the radical Right is not only that
Communism is a more threatening force today than at any other
time in the past forty years, but that the threat is as great
domestically
as it is externally.
If
one points out, in astonishment, that the American
Communist Party is splintered badly, its membership at the lowest
point since the mid-1920s, its influence in the trade unions nil, and
that not one American intellectual figure of any consequence today
is a Communist, the rightist replies do not confront these assertions
at all. They range from the question of how, if this is so, it happened
that the United States "lost" China, Czechoslovakia, and Cuba to the
Communists, to General Walker's charge that the highest officials of
the Democratic Party are members of the "communist conspiracy,"
or Robert Welch's claim that former President Eisenhower was a
"tool" of the Communists and that his brother Milton is an avowed
one. Defeat can be possible in America only
if
sinister men are at
the helm. Typical of this line is the question constantly reiterated
by Reverend Billy Hargis: "How can you explain the mistakes
of our leaders for the last thirty years if there aren't Communists
giving them advice?"
In fact, so great is the preoccupation with the alleged domestic
threat that only rarely in the press of the radical Right is there any
mention of Russia's military prowess, its scientific equipment, or its
ability to propel intercontinental ballistic missiles. When such facts
are raised, it is often asserted either that such strength is a sham or
that whatever knowledge Russia has was "stolen" from the United
States. (This claim is made, for example, by Medford Evans, now an
adviser to General Walker, in his book
The Secret War for the
A-Bomb)
Chicago, Regnery Press, 1953.) For a considerable period
of time the magazines of the radical Right refused to acknowledge
that the Russians had sent a sputnik to the moon, or that they had
sent a man into space, and, like the
Daily Worker
unmasking a
capitalist conspiracy, they gleefully pounced on inconsistencies in news
stories to assert that we were all being hoodwinked by a hoax (as
were, presumably, the United States tracking stations).
The existence of an extreme
internal
threat is crucial to the
