Books in Brief: The Odyssey of the American Right

The Odyssey of the American Right, by Michael W. Miles (Oxford, 371 pp., $19.95). It remains the liberals’ tactic to pre-empt political debate by defining the terms under discussion to suit themselves. Hence “progressive” forces seeking solutions are always arrayed versus “reactionaries” who, by inference, must be regressive. Once one has crawled through this terminological briarpatch of prickly pejoratives such as “selfish parochialism” and “narrowmindedness,” it becomes painfully obvious who represents the forces of light counterpoised against those mean-spirited descendants of the Puritans who desire the darkness of repression. Though Michael W. Miles is less hysterical than those who hear the echoes of jackboots within today’s conservative resurgence, he cannot resist repeating the canards which have become articles of faith for so many of his fellow “progressives.” Let’s see, MacArthur was a demagogue, McCarthy a lout, and Goldwater’s winning the Republican nomination in 1964 a garish aberration. Add the Republican frustration at being out-maneuvered for the past fifty years, mix in the conservative penchant for irresponsible nationalistic impulses, and one comes to appreciate what an unstable bunch the American Right must be. And yet the conservatives’ “intellectual inferiority complex” has been eased somewhat by this Buckley chap who “. . . took the fight into the camp of the enemy. He matched arrogance with arrogance, pomposity with pomposity, convolution with convolution. His was the style to emulate among right-wing intellectuals.” A vintage left-handed, and Left-handed, compliment.