A 1955 book on right-wing extremists predicted the Jan. 6 attack

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

The year was 1954, and the Cold War was in full swing. Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.) was seeing Soviet spies in every corner of the government. And a young sociologist at Columbia University, Daniel Bell, convened a seminar to come to grips with the menace of McCarthyism.

Bell enlisted an academic dream team that included historian Richard Hofstadter and sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset. A year later, the group of seven intellectuals published their findings as an essay collection, edited by Bell. “The New American Right” argued that McCarthy’s conspiratorial anti-communism was here to stay.

-snip-

Bell’s team of academics revised “The New American Right” and rereleased it in 1963 as “The Radical Right.” It would become a must-read for students of modern American history.

The intellectuals held that the radical right not only loathed communism but also liberal democracy and the basic tenets of the U.S. Constitution. As Bell noted wryly, its partisans stood ready “to jettison constitutional processes and to suspend liberties, to condone Communist methods in the fighting of Communism.” They blasted free elections and the peaceful transfer of power, lamented the independence of the judiciary and opposed civil rights.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/06/11/radical-right-extremism-bell-hofstadter/

[regnaD kciN]

1. Daniel Bell was quite prescient in his other works as well.

[keep_left]

2. Another good book from the same era, more or less, is...

...The True Believer by Eric Hoffer. It was a favorite of President Eisenhower's. The book covers a lot of the same themes as The Radical Right, but from perhaps a more universal perspective (not as focused on American society).

Escape From Freedom by Erich Fromm is often considered a companion book to Hoffer's as well.

[bucolic_frolic]

3. Hofstadter I recognize

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Hofstadter

His most widely read works are Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860–1915 (1944); The American Political Tradition (1948); The Age of Reform (1955); Anti-intellectualism in American Life (1963), and the essays collected in The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964).

____________

I think he was more slightly left of center than the super liberal reputation he has acquired.

[Martin68]

4. Thank you for sharing this. Puts things in a whole new perspective.

Perhaps Orwell was the first to see what was going on...

[peppertree]

5. Today's GOPee is a marriage of John Birch and Jim Crow

You might say, the only gay marriage they have no problem with.

[Kid Berwyn]

6. Don't forget the NAZIs.

A Fresh Look
by Carla Binion

Nazis and the Republican Party

Investigative reporter Christopher Simpson says in BLOWBACK that after World War II, Nazi émigrés were given CIA subsidies to build a far-right-wing power base in the U.S. These Nazis assumed prominent positions in the Republican Party's "ethnic outreach committees." Simpson documents the fact that these Nazis did not come to America as individuals but as part of organized groups with fascist political agendas.

snip

Simpson shows how the State Department and the CIA put high-ranking Nazis on the intelligence payroll "for their expertise in propaganda and psychological warfare," among other purposes. The most important Nazi employed by the U.S. was Reinhard Gehlen, Hitler's most senior eastern front military intelligence officer. After Germany's defeat became certain, Gehlen offered the U.S. certain concessions in exchange for his own protection. Gehlen promoted hyped up cold war propaganda on behalf of the political right in this country, and helped shape U.S. perceptions of the cold war.

Journalist Russ Bellant (OLD NAZIS, THE NEW RIGHT, AND THE REPUBLICAN PARTY) shows that
Laszlo Pasztor, a convicted Nazi war collaborator, built the Republican émigré network. Pasztor, who served as adviser to Republican Paul Weyrich, belonged to the Hungarian Arrow Cross, a group that helped liquidate Hungary's Jews. Pasztor was founding chairman of the Republican Heritage Groups Council.

Two months before the November 1988 presidential election, a small newspaper, Washington Jewish Week, disclosed that a coalition for the Bush campaign included a number of outspoken Nazis and anti-Semites. The article prompted six leaders of Bush's coalition to resign. According to Russ Bellant, Nazi collaborators involved in the Republican Party included:

1.Radi Slavoff, GOP Heritage Council's executive director, and head of "Bulgarians for Bush." Slavoff was a member of a Bulgarian fascist group, and he put together an event in Washington honoring Holocaust denier, Austin App.
2.Florian Galdau, director of GOP outreach efforts among Romanians, and head of "Romanians for Bush." Galdau was once an Iron Guard recruiter, and he defended convicted Nazi war criminal Valerian Trifa.
3.Nicholas Nazarenko, leader of a Cossack GOP ethnic unit. Nazarenko was an ex-Waffen SS officer.
4.Method Balco, GOP activist. Balco organized yearly memorials for a Nazi puppet regime.
5.Walter Melianovich, head of the GOP's Byelorussian unit. Melianovich worked closely with many Nazi groups.
6.Bohdan Fedorak, leader of "Ukrainians for Bush." Fedorak headed a Nazi group involved in anti-Jewish wartime pogroms.

more

http://www.bartcop.com/nazigop.htm

[Buckeyeblue]

7. At a certain point the tactics started to meld with the beliefs

And Republicans became full blown fascists. It was always there. Southern property owners used fascists tactics to get poor, non-property owners to do their bidding in the Civil War.

Certain humans are just ripe for the fascist picking. They aren't that intelligent and are very eager to blame their deficiencies on others.

And the internet reaches people like never before.