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DANIEL BEll
ideological, if not the psychological, posture of the radical Right.
For if they admitted that such a threat is dubious, then the debate
would have to shift to ground about which they have little com–
prehension, or they would have to admit-as Eisenhower did- that
the area of maneuverability in foreign policy is highly limited.
If
the
threat was conceded to be largely external, then one would have
to support an expanded federal budget, large military expenditures,
foreign aid to allies. And they would have to confront the intractable
fact that American might alone is insufficient to defeat the Russians–
or that victory for anyone would be possible once war began !-and
that the United States has to take into account the forces working
for independence in the former colonial world.
The unwillingness of the radical Right to recognize Russian
military strength as a prime factor in the balance of terror, and the
compulsive preoccupation with a presumed internal threat, can
perhaps be clarified by a little-understood psychological mechanism–
the need to create "fear-justifying" threats in order to explain fright
that is provoked by other reasons. A child who is afraid of the dark
may tell his parents that the creaking noises he hears in the house
indicate that there are burglars downstairs. It does not reassure the
child if he is told that there is no burglar, or that the noises are
harmless, for he needs the story to justify the fear he already feels.
In fact, it upsets the child to be so "reassured." (The simplest answer
is to tell the child that
if
there are burglars downstairs, his father is
strong enough to handle them or that the police are close by.) An
Indian study by Prasad a few years ago on rumors following an
earthquake found that people in the areas adjacent to the earth–
quake, who had heard about the quake but had no direct experience
of it, persisted in believing and spreading rumors that a
new
earth–
quake was coming. The function of such stories was to justify,
psychologically, the
initial
apprehensions which had ambiguous basis
in experience.
s
In a similar sense the radical Right, having a diffused
sense of fear, needs to find some story or explanation to explain or
3. For a technical elaboration of this psychological mechanism, see
A Theory of
Cognitive Dissonance,
Leon Festinger. Row, Peterson, Chicago, 1957.
