about a "devitalization of the governing power" and a general "decline of the West."

McCarthyism confirmed liberals in their fear of mass movements and "direct democracy," and they turned to Adorno's concept of pseudo-conservatism in order to uncover the social and psychological roots of its "profound if largely unconscious hatred of our society and its ways," in the words of Richard Hofstadter. With a few exceptions, they ignored the international tensions exploited by McCarthy. Most of them refused to admit that Truman's containment policy and his domestic loyalty program had helped to generate the anticommunist hysteria now directed against Truman himself and his principal advisers. Instead they traced McCarthy's "pseudo-conservatism" to the populist tradition in American politics. "This outburst of direct democracy," wrote Peter Viereck in The New American Right (1955), a collection of essays on McCarthyism edited by Daniel Bell, "comes straight from the leftist rhetoric of the old Populists and Progressives, a rhetoric forever urging the People to take back 'their' government from the conspiring Powers That Be." According to Leslie Fiedler, the populist "distrust of authority, institutions, and expert knowledge" had found a new champion in McCarthy. Seymour Martin Lipset argued that McCarthy played on the "key symbols" that appealed to populists and compaigned "against the same groups midwest Populism always opposed, the Eastern conservative financial aristocracy."

This interpretation of McCarthyism as a revival of populism drew heavily on Adorno's concept of status politics. McCarthy's obsession with domestic subversion, according to Hofstadter, revealed a "dense and massive irrationality" that distinguished pseudo-conservatism from "practical conservatism." Like Adorno, Hofstadter saw every departure from orthodox liberalism as an expression of a "paranoid" style. Having come to recognize a "wide range of behavior for which the economic interpretation of politics seems to be inadequate," he found status anxiety in everything that could not be accounted for by an economic interpretation. ^* This approach, though ostensibly designed to replace economic

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*	"My generation," Hofstadter wrote in 1962, "was raised in the conviction that the basic motive power in political behavior is the economic interest of groups." Having

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