ABSTRACT
Staughton Lynd, writing from the frontiers of the American New Left, has recently drawn attention to the excessive optimism of radical ‘theorists of corporate liberalism’ who ‘made the implicit assumption that capitalism in the United States would not turn to overt authoritarianism’. The political events of recent years have exposed the misguided thinking behind such an assumption: and the consequences of this miscalculation on the Left, he argues, may be disastrous. Lynd compares the prevalent view on the New Left, that ‘the main enemy (is) not the reactionary right, but the liberal center’, with the notoriously short-sighted tactical positions of the German Communist Party in the 1930s [Lynd 1969, pp. 77–2]. The comparison is certainly not wholly persuasive, but Lynd is on solid ground when he points to the erosion of liberal political values in America over the past decade, and to the emergence of an increasingly explicit authoritarianism. These latter trends are traced below in the writings of American political scientists, which give one indication of changes in official ideology. The argument is that the previously unquestioned political ideal of ‘democracy’ is in the process of being replaced by another ideal, that of ‘order’.
