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THE NATIONAL STYLE
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justify that fear. One can deny the external reality, and build up the
internal threat, through such psychological mechanisms.
One sees among the radical Right, particularly among sections
of its upper middle class following who have never seen a Com–
munist, the most extraordinary apprehensions about the extent of
current Communist infiltration in government.
If
asked to explain
these attitudes one is constantly reminded of Alger Hiss and Harry
Dexter White. Yet whatever the reality of past Communist infiltra–
tion in the government-and its actual influence has been highly
distorted-none of this is any proof about the current status of
Dean Rusk or W. W. Rostow, or any of the present foreign policy
advisers of the Kennedy administration. Yet the
internal
threat is
the one that is largely harped upon, along with the suspicions of the
"soft" attitudes of the current administration.
It is largely among the extremist fringes of the radical Right
that such paranoid views are peddled. But most of the radical Right,
uneasily aware of the difficulty of maintaining the position that the
Communist Party alone constitutes the internal threat, has shifted
the argument to a different and more nebulous ground-the identifi–
cation of communism with liberalism. "I equate growth of the welfare
state," says Dan Smoot (a former F.B.1. agent, whose program,
The Dan Smoot Report,
is heard on thirty-two television and fifty–
two radio stations), "with socialism and socialism with communism."
Thus it is argued that the Administration is unwilling (for ideological
reasons) or incapable (for intellectual reasons) of "getting tough"
with Communism. And in this fashion, the foreign policy issue is
tied in with a vast array of right-wing domestic issues, centering
around the income tax and the welfare state.
But in so shifting the argument, the nature of the debate becomes
clearer. What the right wing is fighting in the shadow of Communism
is, essentially, "modernity"-that complex of attitudes which might
be defined as the belief in rational assessment, rather than established
custom, for the control of social change-and what it seeks to defend
is its fading dominance, once exercised through the institutions of
small-town America, over the control of social change. But it is
precisely these established ways that a modernist America has been
forced to call into question.
