tuencies of the declining central cities and the “redundant industry belt” of the Midwest may find their paths converging with elements of the corporatist right. (But they will try to distinguish their views from the right by emphasizing the need both to help minorities through urban reconstruction and to gain the cooperation of the unions.) Meanwhile, Ronald Reagan’s present commitment to supply-side economics also could be described as more “radical” than “conservative.” In ordinary political discourse, a conservative means someone who wants to maintain existing institutional relationships that might be under threat. But in 1980 and 1981, such zealots of the supply-side cause as Jude Wan- niski liked to call themselves "The Wild Men,” well aware that they were advocating something explosive. My guess is that the failure of the radical supply-side doctrine is clearing the way for a different sort of radicalism: a move toward a species of European corporate statism in the United States. The prospects of the further radicalization of the Middle-American electorate are also considerable. In the spring of 1980, when the extent of the swing to the right was still only faintly discernible, three primary elections took place that hardly anyone bothered to consider together: Harold Covington, leader of the U.S. Nazi Party, got over 40 percent of the vote in the North Carolina Republican primary for nomination for state attorney general. Thomas Metzger, head of the state Ku Klux Klan, won the Democratic nomination for Congress in the Forty-third Congressional District of California. Gerald Carlson, a former Nazi Party member who left to organize the National Christian Democratic Union, won the Republican congressional primary in the Fifteenth District of Michigan. By calling attention to these men, I mean to be provocative. Well aware of the dangers of comparing American political developments to those in Europe, I would still suggest four rough parallels between the United States of the late 1970s and early 1980s and Weimar Germany in the late Twenties. The first is the impact of inflation and the resulting frustration of the middle classes; the second is the trauma of a nation’s first defeat in war — World War I for Germany, Vietnam for the United States; the third is the antipathy of the German Volk and much of Middle America to the ensuing postwar “liberation” of moral, cultural, and sexual standards; and fourth is the pervasive erosion of popular faith in the fairness, responsiveness, and effectiveness of government and other political institutions. Within a nation, such frustrations accumulate only slowly — and rarely. Obviously, the traditionally Germanic forms of reaction would have no place here; yet it seems quite reasonable to suggest that a kindred sense of debility could, and indeed already has, expressed itself in indigenous forms of radicalism. During the late 1960s, one of the biggest mistakes made by most political scientists, journalists, and sociologists was to assume that the dominant alienation, radicalism, and populism in American politics were encompassed and defined by the left. So misled, these commentators dwelt on antiwar demonstrators, on the activists inspired by Ralph Nader, on marijuana lobbyists, and other predominantly middle-class left-liberal groups. Accordingly, they played down the much more important demographic implications of people who applauded Spiro Agnew, liked Merle Haggard’s “Okie From Muskogee,” or spent time listening to fundamentalist preachers, often on television. The fact that many of those who analyzed and helped to form opinion came from backgrounds similar to those of the left-wing elites probably helped to obscure statistical reality. But the numbers were always there — in the Wallace vote of 1968 and 1972, in the dramatic growth of fundamentalist church membership, in the proliferation of radio stations featuring country-and-western music. And the converging issues affected not so much the elite but the majority: middle-class fear of inflation, racial and ethnic hostility, frustrated nationalism, and religious fundamentalism all bespoke a radical potential tilted toward the right. In 1972, analysts could deceive Middle-class fear of inflation, racial and ethnic hostility, frustrated nationalism, and religious fundamentalism all bespoke a radical potential tilted toward the right. themselves into thinking that South Dakota’s George McGovern, a presumed “Prairie Populist,” came from the tradition of Andrew Jackson and William Jennings Bryan, eventhough 40 percent of the delegates at the Democratic National Convention that nominated him had at least a master's degree. By 1976, though, any hopes for a left-leaning populism with radical goals collapsed with the failure of the voters to respond to the presidential campaign of former Oklahoma senator Fred Harris, who attracted no more than a few middle-class housewives and college students. The interest in Harris among blue-collar workers was negligible, largely because the historic constituencies of American populism were not looking left. As C. Vann Woodward admitted in 1981: “When the [liberal] neopopulists went to the people to offer leadership, they found the whites lined up behind George Wallace, and the blacks, in time, behind the hostile nationalists.” FOURTH-ORJULY FIREWORKS By Walt Curtis If you can make love against the black sky like Fourth-of-July fireworks — first there's a ssssssssstt wobbling upward, an (soothing) aaahhh gasp of pleasure as the orangish bluish white fingers curl and expand with a poof reach out touching and embracing. Then there's a BOOM if the making love is good which you feel in your belly forever, like a bomb blast. When you look at fireworks, remember this delicate tracery — which lasts only for seconds — etches itself in eternity. The orgasmic acts of you and your lover go sssst, aah, poof, BOOM if you're lucky. Body and soul thrill in dazzling freedom, thunderous wonder, as the night sky flowers in gorgeous, falling, fiery bursts which darken — shimmering and metallic — a spark at a time, just as our love fades neuron by neuron startlingly satisfied. We are recorded in the heavens by such humanly manufactured displays. Love competes with the stars. Reprinted from Mississippi Mud The confusion of the liberals was understandable. All during this time, “Middle Americans,” from restive farmers to anxious insurance clerks, were unhappy about the shape and direction of our society and politics. Little in our past suggested that such frustration would fine expression in traditional conservatism. Movements of alienated groups had usually been populist and radical, though sometimes the radicalism veered to the right (as with the nativ- ism of the 1850s, the Ku Klux Klan sentiment of the 1920s, or McCarthyism of the 1950s). The notion of popular frustration breeding conservatism seemed hardly credible. Only a small number of commentators saw that once again populism would turn to the right and this time might become the most important such wave in American history. It now seems beyond dispute that inflation, cultural and moral revolution, the first American wartime defeat and consequent frustrated nationalism — later compounded by humiliation over the hostages in Iran — produced a reaction toward the right in the late 1970s. And as that happened, many old radical constituencies were swept up in the same reaction. Skeptics have only to look at the old electoral statistics and to see how the Lower East Side and Brooklyn Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods, where Reagan did so well in 1980, were Socialist and American Labor Party strongholds of the 1920s or 1940s. The rural Southern fundamentalist counties on which Reagan improved 20 and 30 points on the vote for Gerald Ford were strongholds of William Jennings Bryan in 1896, and then of Huey Long, “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman, and George Wallace. The Wheat Belt, including many counties where Reagan scored 30 to 40 points better than Ford, is the core of Farm Belt radical tradition. And who remembers that the rural Oklahoma counties that followed the Moral Majority in 1980 had the highest percentage of votes for Socialist presidential candidates just before World War II? The arch-Catholic counties of the northern Farm Belt, also strongly for Reagan in 1980, heavily supported Congressman William “Liberty Bell” Lemke, Father Coughlin’s splinterparty candidate for President in 1936. Ronald Reagan may not have done well in the middle-class radical precincts of Manhattan, Cambridge, Aspen, and San Francisco, but he did extraordinarily well for a Republican in regions with genuinely radical populist traditions. If one wants to understand the radical nature of the Reagan coalition and the “conservative” politics of the early 1980s, several theories and analogies strike me as useful. The first is Seymour Martin Lipset’s notion of “Center extremism”: the idea that under certain circumstances, when traditional politics breaks down, voters from the center move toward radical beliefs that do not fit conventional ideas of “right” or “left.” Lipset argues that in practice, “center extremism” — the radicalization of the electoral middle — has been closely linked to various degrees of fascism, Caesarism, or authoritarianism. A second theory, closely related, is Donald Warren’s notion of “Middle American Radicals,” who make up, in Warren’s view, 25 to 30 percent of the American electorate — men and women whose anger is directed at rich and poor alike. Also worth mentioning is the European view that “revolutionary conservatism” is reappearing in the late twentieth century, a phenomenon akin to the emergence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in France, Germany and Italy of activists and intellectuals who attacked the institutions of secular liberalism and called for the reassertion of religion, ethnicity, and nationalism. Of course, European precedents will not apply neatly to Wichita, Levittown, or South Boston. The essential point made by Lipset and Warren is that a powerful movement can flow from a radicalized “middle” of the body politic. And as that kind of movement gathers force in an atmosphere of economic and cultural frustration, it usually rallies around programs and policies bearing little resemblance to those of either traditional elite conservatism or proletarian leftism. The politics of the radicalized “middle” tends to respond to cultural and moral traditionalism, nationalist pride and grandeur, and a promise of national and personal economic security. Its slogans tend to be along the lines of “Work, Family, Neighborhood,” and the like. Middleclass voters also like the trains to run on time and the streets to be safe. During the past fifteen years, the political revolt of the lower-middle and middle classes was paramount in two elections, 1972 and 1980, and confused in two others, 1968 and 1976. But if one looks at all four elections together, several patterns emerge rather clearly. Democratic Party loyalties held up relatively well among the left-wing quarter of the electorate: the intelligentsia, the minorities, and the working-class electorates of stagnating industrial areas. Generally speaking, Republican strength maintained itself in well- to-do suburbia, old conservative Northern rural areas, and among busi18 Clinton St. Quarterly
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