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Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort, by Chip Berlet and Matthew N. Lyons. New York: Guilford Press, 2000. 498 pp. $42.00 cloth. ISBN: 1-57230-568-1. $21.95 paper. ISBN: 1-57320-562-2.
What is in a name? What many people still call right-wing extremism or radicalism, Chip Berlet and Matthew N. Lyons study as rightwing populist movements. The name change is significant, because the authors reject what they call centrist/extremism theory. This theory posits a sharp dichotomy between a political mainstream that is rational, orderly, and just and a political fringe that is irrational, violent, and just plain evil.
Berlet and Lyons, by contrast, argue that there is no simple dichotomy of mainstream and radical right-wing politics in America, that there are direct links between the political center and fringe, and that those who participate in right-wing movements are neither socially marginal nor psychologically disturbed. Undoubtedly many sociologists who study the Right would agree. Still, the term, right-wing extremism maintains its currency, because it is a handy political label for fighting the Right and because it is hard to come up with an alternative characterization.
That...