ABSTRACT
Much of our understanding of the nature of “right-wing extremism” in the contemporary United States has its roots in the 1950s, in the attempt to account for the apparent “lapse” in the American political system represented by the rise of McCarthyism. Faced with the events of a “turbulent mid-century America” a number of scholars proposed a “new framework” to explain the rise of such discontent in a prosperous society. Collected together in The New American Right in 1955, they included the work of Daniel Bell, Talcott Parsons, Peter Viereck, and Herbert Hyman, but the driving forces behind this new framework were Richard Hofstadter’s essay “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt” and Seymour Martin Lipset’s “The Sources of the Radical Right,” both of which employed concepts of status anxiety and status politics. In 1963 a revised edition of the book, under the new title The Radical Right, was published. The authors of the original essays were given the opportunity to reassess their theses in response to the emergence of a new right-wing group, the John Birch Society In most respects the original framework was deemed sturdy enough to remain in place. What we might call an “orthodox approach” to the study of right-wing extremism in the United States was beginning to emerge. It was completed in 1964 with the publication of another Hofstadter essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.”1
