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DANIEL BELL
or respectable support. The McCarthyite movement of the early
1950s, despite the rampaging antics of its eponymous leader, never
dared go, at least rhetorically, outside the traditional framework in
trying to establish loyalty and security tests. The Birchers, and the
small but insidious group of "Minutemen," as the epitome of the
radical Right, are willing to tear apart the fabric of American society
in order to instate their goals; and they did receive a temporary aura
of legitimacy on the Right.
Barbarous acts are rarely committed out of the blue.
(As
Freud
says, first one commits oneself in words, and then in deeds.) Step by
step, a society becomes accustomed to accept, with less and less moral
outrage and with greater and greater indifference to legitimacy, the
successive blows. What was uniquely disturbing about the emergence
of the radical Right of the 1960s is the support it was able to find
among traditional small-town leaders who have become conditioned
by an indiscriminate anti-Communism equating any form of liberalism
with Communism to judge as respectable a movement which, if
successful, would only end the liberties they profess to cherish.
