TWO CENTURIES OF FEAR

Because of the emergence of extreme right-wing politics in recent years, the publication of David Bennett's The Party of Fear is timely. Covering "right-wing political extremism" from nineteenth-century nativism to the New Right, Bennett calls his work a study of the movements the organizations and leaders-which sought "to defend America and its values from the un-American people, un-American ideologies, and destructive tendencies seen as menacing it" (p. 12). Together, these movements constituted "a party of fear," which viewed America as threatened by "powerful, sinister, and conspiratorial adversaries" (p. 13). Thus, there is a pattern of continuity to Bennett's story. Each group believed passionately that the "American Way of Life" was in danger. Spurred by an ideal vision of the meaning of America-often located in an Edenic past-these stern "moralists of the Right" sought to protect their idealized version of America "by purging the corrupting elements that menaced its values and perverted its institutions" (p. 3). Each antialien group responded to social, economic, and, at times, international forces that produced stresses and strains in American society. These tensions were exacerbated by the tradition of American individualism and the geographic mobility of Americans. If the nineteenth-century nativists and their twentieth-century antialien successors were defenders of the "American Way of Life," they also suffered from the tensions it produced. A mobile, individualistic society suffered from rootlessness, from a lack of "moral authority." Nineteenth-century America not only celebrated individualism; it sought "community and authority" within an individualistic society lacking the traditional structures of authority: "in true Americanism there could be unity and community for those who needed some sanctuary in times of trouble" (p. 11). The antialiens were "both protectors and fugitives" (p. 12). In developing their own "subcultures" of true Americanism, they sought to protect the real Americans against the "evil out-