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DANIEL BELL
though in practice there was always the uneasy balance between reck–
less rhetoric and cautious moves
to
detentes.
This moralism became translated into domestic politics primarily
during the McCarthy era. The frustrations of the Korean War, the
inability to take a long historical view of social change, made it easy
to
translate these frustrations of power and omnipotence into a search
for the "bad guys" (i.e. the domestic communists and liberals) who
had "betrayed" us and weakened the resolve to "fight to the finish."
This moralism, with its simplistic view of world politics and its
fear of modernity, is part of the world view of that social stratum that
I have called the "Dispossessed." The Dispossessed are those who have
lost not wealth, or even immediate political power and status, but a
comfortable sense of historical position in the world. They represent
a wide social band: the small-town realtor and banker who once knew
(and in the locale still knows) the levers of power, but finds the
complications of the world scene bewildering and buffeting; the retired
army officers and combat-trained soldiers who resent the newer modes
of strategy and economic (i.e. cost-effectiveness techniques) planning ;
the corporation executive who finds that while he may have money
and power within an organization, he is uncomfortable with the rise of
a new intelligentsia. While the "base" is one of social class, the phe–
nomenon is much more wide-spread; it embraces a whole spectrum of
the country who have grown up, and accepted, this moralistic view of
the world. In the modem political sense, Barry Goldwater's definition
of an extremist is the secular version of the old religious "enthusiast."
The irony and paradox is that both elements, of moralism and
dispossession, should be combined in the person of an
auslander,
Barry
Goldwater. Yet it has been a repeatable social phenomenon that the
outsider takes on more exaggeratedly, and caricatures, the social mask
of an old, established class. (This is most evident in the South where
Wallace and Faubus, coming from the poor white heap, should be the
most ferocious in defense of established privilege.) It is in this sense,
too, that the play-acting of Barry Goldwater has the elements of intel–
lectual farce and sinister politics. It is the angry cry of a social stratum
with its back to the world.