Riesman Sees Emergence Of Outspoken Right Wing

Rapid social upheaval has turned American conservatism from a non-vocal philosophy concerned primarily with local issues into a full-scale national movement, according to Harvard sociology professor David Riesman '31.

In an article entitled "America Moves to the Right," which appeared in yesterday's New York Times Magazine, Riesman wrote, "It is only under certain conditions, such as an unsatisfactory war, that... local pockets of right-wing and defensive conservatism coalesce into any kind of national movement."

Riesman, who this year is a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford said that "the United States through most of its history has been a profoundly conservative country." The conservative majority is usually apathetic in national politics, he wrote, but when "presented... with definitions of American life sharply at odds with their own," conservatives undertake "symbolic crusades to extirpate the strange and the stranger and to set the country back on the right track."

The blue-collar working class and the lower-middle white-collar class, Riesman explained, feel threatened by the blacks or Puerto Ricans moving into their neighborhoods and puzzled by the upper-class and upper-middle-class "anti-Puritan snobs" who seem "to tolerate if not to sponsor the radicals."

Nixon's "probable victory," he wrote, "is likely to sweep into office many Congressmen and some Senators far to his own right... The greater the margin of Humphrey's defeat, the more the right will feel it has won."

But Riesman concluded that, despite the present rise of the right, "America is a more open society than it ever has been" and that "more Americans are confused than are dogmatic and fanatical."

"If we can somehow make peace in Vietnam and survive the present era," he wrote, "we may discover that America's development toward further openness has been only temporarily halted."