
          Politics of Nativism.
          Reviewed by Kilbourne, LarryLarry Kilbourne
          Vol. 11, No. 5, 1989, pp. 20-21
          
          The Party of Fear: From Nativist
Movements to New Right in American History by David H. Bennett
(University of North Carolina Press, 1988. 509 pp. $29.95.)
          Right wing extremist groups are scarcely a neglected
subject. Persistent survival from one era to another, violence,
paradoxical relationship to a country which they profess to love while
repudiating its values of equality and tolerance, these
characteristics have won and will continue to win them the attention
of critics and historians. Most interpretations have followed Richard
Hofstader, Daniel Bell, and Seymour Martin Lipset. For these authors,
the racist, religious, and anti-alien hate groups endure because they
appeal to the displaced and marginalized, to those whose social
positions and cultural norms have been threatened by too rapid
change. As consolation to the. orphans of change, abandoned in a
social landscape grown suddenly unfamiliar, right wing movements
offered rituals and ceremonies which restored the feeling of community
that modernization had eroded.
          On the whole, William Bennett, professor of history at Rutgers
University, accepts their thesis. From the several themes of right
wing rhetoric, however, he isolates one--nativism, the irrational fear
and hatred of foreign peoples and foreign ideas--as the primary
attribute of the traditional right. For Bennett "Americanism,"--as
defined by the dominant Anglo-Protestant culture--is the binding
thread. Newcomers, with unfamiliar religions and customs, became
convenient scapegoats for resentments that could not be safely
expressed otherwise. In the colonial and early national periods,
Catholics from France, Germany, and Ireland served this
function. Later, nativist animosity focused on eastern European
immigrants, and the virus of anarchist and socialist ideas they were
presumed to carry.
          Much of this is familiar. Bennett's originality lies in his
contention that with the assimilation of the ethnic groups that
arrived in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries nativism
gradually lost its force, and that the new right which has emerged in
the last two decades is largely free of this preoccupation. In
Bennett's treatment, Father Coughlin, the radio priest of the 1930s,
emerges as a pivotal figure who, by directing his attacks at foreign
ideas rather than at groups and by adding the WASP 

establishment to
the right's customary list of villains, was able to make nativist
themes appealing to Catholics who were themselves of immigrant German
and Irish stock.
          Can Bennett's contention, that recent developments on the right
show a decline of nativist bias, be accepted? I would question whether
the psychological dynamics underlying nativism have died out, or
merely been deflected. Rather than vanishing, the anger that once
drove religious and ethic hatred has merely been refocused, so it
appears to this reviewer, on subcultures and lifestyles perceived as
alien. The poor, the homeless, homosexuals, and AIDS patients have
become the objects of a hatred once directed at immigrants. Moreover,
when viewed in larger perspective that includes other competing
hatreds, nativism seems a less pervasive, less central preoccupation
than racism. For throughout American history, blacks more than any
other group have played the roles of the "disturbing alien," the
vaguely threatening "outsider," to mainstream white society.
          Yet even traditional nativism may still possess more vitality,
albeit latent, than Bennett imagines. The retreat of nativism during
the last few decades was linked to the decline of immigration and the
acculturation of the descendants of the immigrants who had arrived
around the turn of the century. But the nation is now once again
receiving large numbers of immigrants--this time from below the Rio
Grande and the Caribbean, from southeast Asia and Korea, from Africa
once more--and the middle years of the century may be a trough between
the crests of two waves. If so, the weakening of nativist sentiment
may prove equally transient. Thus far new Americans from the Pacific
rim have met with relatively little hostility, certainly far less than
their turn of the century counterparts. On the contrary, their success
in adapting has been praised in the news media and compared to the
supposedly poorer performance of older minority groups. All this could
change: nativism thrives on hard times, and might return with added
overtones of racism should the economy drop.
          The ecumenicalism of the religious right, which Bennett points to,
doesn't, I think, go very deep. The alliance of Southern Protestant
fundamentalists and conservative Northern Catholics--to which
President Reagan owed much of his support--is a marriage of
convenience that might dissolve under other circumstances. An
off-the-cuff remark of Jerry Falwell's cited by Bennett, about the
unlikeliness of Mother Theresa going to heaven without first
undergoing the born-again conversion experience, bears witness to the
contradictions within this coalition. Why should someone who feels
called upon to reshape society according to the literal word of God be
less incensed by doctrinal heresy (the Virgin Birth, Papal
Infallibility, Transubstantiation) than by secular apostasy
(Darwinism, abortion, religiously neutral schools)? Indeed, given that
many Vietnamese and most Hispanics are Catholic, the conditions may
exist once again for coalescence of religious and ethnic
hatreds. Intolerance is implicit in the logic of the religious
right.
          
            LARRY KILBOURNE graduated from Brandeis University and is
now a U.S. Air Force historian living in Ohio.
          
        