Hans F. Sennholz, “Extremism Left and Right” (1964)

This 1964 American Opinion essay is a magazine political polemic by Hans F. Sennholz, written as the Goldwater movement was being attacked as a “radical right.” Its scope is the immediate 1964 election, but its larger object is conceptual: to redefine extremism as allegiance to collectivism, not as distance from the reigning liberal consensus. Sennholz argues that liberal denunciations of the right are strategic acts of division and deflection, meant to smear opponents rather than answer their case.

The Extreme Right is diametrically opposed to the philosophical essence of contemporary "Liberalism": collectivism. It is unalterably opposed to the principle of government control over the people in their social and economic endeavors.

The essay’s first move is to claim the name of extremism for a politics of restoration. The “Extreme Right,” in Sennholz’s usage, is not fascistic or irrational but Jeffersonian: it seeks private property, individual liberty, and limits on government. It appears radical because the political center has, in his view, moved leftward. Yet he also distinguishes this conservatism from the movement’s opportunistic fringes—racists, nationalists, and disappointed liberals—who may oppose the current regime while sharing its collectivist premise.

By nature and constitution these political fringes are collectivists who are forced into opposition because the brand of collectivism in power differs somewhat from their own.

The middle sections turn from electoral rhetoric to intellectual genealogy. Sennholz presents Walt Rostow, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and McGeorge Bundy as representative “Liberal” radicals in positions of power. Rostow’s theory of stages of economic growth is treated as a disguised version of Marxian historical materialism: both, Sennholz says, make technology the determining force of social evolution and thereby efface human judgment, saving, enterprise, and institutional freedom.

The materialism of Marx and Rostow denies man's freedom of choice. Instead it makes everything a superstructure of man's material basis, especially of his state of technology.

Schlesinger is attacked as a theorist of class conflict whose anti-communism does not prevent him from adopting Marxian categories. Sennholz reads his contempt for businessmen and celebration of redistribution as evidence that liberal democracy, in practice, imports the language of exploitation and class struggle into American politics.

According to the doctrine of class conflict, the preservation of capitalism benefits exclusively the small minority of parasitic exploiters who are feasting on the sweat and blood of impoverished workingmen.

Bundy’s “national purpose” supplies the essay’s sharpest warning about technocratic authority. For Sennholz, the call for a president to crystallize national purpose is not statesmanship but authoritarian collectivism, replacing plural individual ends with a single imposed objective.

The very concept of "national purpose" is taken from the armory of radical collectivism. It requires every American to pursue a common goal that gives meaning and direction to his existence. National purpose is the national objective for which anything exists or is done.

The closing section invokes Hayek’s account of totalitarian mass politics and asks who really serves Caesar: conservatives defending inherited liberties, or liberals marching under Marxian, Leninist, and Khrushchevian assumptions. The relevance of the essay lies in its fusion of Goldwater-era conservatism with an economic-philosophical critique of planning, welfare statism, and technocratic liberalism. Its core conceptual move is to shift the political axis from left versus right to liberty versus collectivism.

Against these drum beats of radical collectivism the voices of opposition aim to uphold the values of Western civilization.