530
DANIEL BELL
IV
Within the American consensus a meaningful polarity has always
been part of the search for self-definition and self-identity: Jefferson
versus Hamilton, Republicanism versus Federalism, Agrarianism versus
Capitalism, the frontier West versus the industrial East. However
significant such polarities may have been in the past, there seems
to be little meaningful polarity today. There is no coherent conservative
force
4
-someone like Walter Lippman, whose
The Public Philosophy
represents a genuine conservative voice, rejects the Right as it rejects
him-and the Radical right is outside the political pale, insofar as
it refuses to accept the American consensus. Nor does a viable Left
exist in the United States today. The pacifist and socialist elements
have been unable to make the peace issue salient. The radicals
have been unable to develop a comprehensive critique of the social
disparities in American life-the urban mess, the patch-work educa–
tional system, the lack of amenities in our culture. Among the liberals,
only the exhaustion of the "received ideas," such as they were, of
the New Deal remains. It is a token of the emptiness of contemporary
intellectual debate that from the viewpoint of the radical Right, the
Americans for Democratic Action constitutes the "extreme left" of
the American political spectrum, and that
Lite,
in order to set up a
fictitious balance, counterposes the tiny Council of Correspondence,
a loosely organized peace group inspired by Erich Fromm and David
Riesman, as the "extreme left," to the "extreme right" of the John
Birch Society.
The "politics of conflict" in any country inevitably has an
emotional dimension, but in the United States, which has lacked an
historically defined
doctrinal
basis for emotional divisions, the politics
of conflict-when economic interest-group issues are muted-takes
on a psychological dimension. In this psychological polarity, the
Right has often been splenetic, while the mood of the Left has
4. The National Review, which proclaims itself conservative, is a strange mash
of Thomistic natural law (Buckley), Manchester economic liberalism (Hazlitt
and Buckley), Burkean traditionalism (Meyer and Buckley) , Platonic
virtu
(Bozell and Buckley), Haushofer gee-politics (Burnham and Buckley), and
single-tax, agrarian, libertarian individualism (Choderov and Buckley). A
heady brew indeed.
