“In the late 1950s and early 1960s conservatives were widely dismissed
as “kooks” and “crackpots” with no hope of winning political power. In
1950 the literary critic Lionel Trilling spoke for a generation of
scholars and journalists when he wrote that “in the United States at
this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole
intellectual tradition…. It is the plain fact [that] there are no
conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation” but only
“irritable mental gestures which seem to resemble ideas.” The
historian Richard Hofstadter echoed Trilling’s assessment, arguing
that the right was not a serious, long-term political movement but
rather a transitory phenomenon led by irrational, paranoid people who
were angry at the changes taking place in America.”
— Matthew Dallek, “The Conservative 1960s” – book review,
Atlantic Monthly, Dec. 1995.
If only they’d been right, huh?
What can we learn from this? That we have gone from being a people who abhorred the reactionary paranoia of Iron Curtain autocracy to a people who embrace it, feed and pet it, and set it at the gates of our hearts and homeland, like a purblind mastiff in the hall. So long as that beast lays apost, we’re trapped by the fear we have bred.
Metaphor 