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RADICAL RIGHT
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have appointed himself his ideologue. Described in its subtitle as "An
Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism," his latest book ex–
pounds with corrosive clarity the right-wing case against that astonish–
ing liberal turn-about which Mr. Eisenhower executed 'in the last week
of his first term. By leaving the Hungarian revolt to perish unaided
while helping Nasser to defeat Britain he destroyed the last remnants
of Acheson's Containment, and Dulles' Liberation policies. During
the decade that followed-in which Eisenhower and two successive
Presidents have very cautiously developed a policy of coexistence abroad
and racial equality at home-reaction has been boiling up below the
surface. The traditional suspicion of intellectuals, the suppressed racism,
the renewed fears of a left-wing "conspiracy" at home and abroad,
the taxpayer's resentment of welfare economics and foreign aid, the
craving for big-stick policies to teach the foreigner a lesson-all these
confused and ill-expressed prejudices of an affluent society have been
exploited by Mr. Goldwater, and articulated by Mr. Burnham into a
, coherent statement of right-wing radicalism.
When I first read
The Managerial Revolution,
I welcomed it as
the first piece of American political vulgarization comparable with the
work of John Strachey. As Communists, both men undertook the super–
human task of not merely translating Marx into English but of re–
thinking Marxism in Anglo-Saxon terms. When they broke with their
Communist masters, they turned their peculiar powers of polemical
analysis and political dialectic against the totalitarian enemy, and
demonstrated that an anti-Communist ideology can be vulgarized in
just the same way as a Communist ideology.
As long as Stalin kept the world hopelessly divided into two
blocks, forcing us into the postures of cold war and the policies of
containment, anti-Communist ideology enjoyed an immense vogue not
only on the Right but among liberals and socialists as well. But since
Mr. Eisenhower's turn-about, the thaw induced by the combination of
Khrushchev's revisionism, the nuclear deadlock and the Sino-Russian
dispute has been changing the climate of opinion in Washington and
London. Over here, the conservative political leaders, who are never
unduly worried by charges of intellectual inconsistency, have com–
pletely put aside the postures of the anti-Communist crusade, and
proceeded in Africa to accept decolonization at the cost of breaking
their pledged word to the white settlers. In its attitude to Communism
and colonialism, the whole British political establishment has trans–
planted itself to a position well left of center, and adopted policies
which they themselves would have condemned as fellow-traveling ap-