THE THIRD WAVE
This craving for a masterful, macho leader is voiced today by even the most well-meaning of people as their familiar world crumbles, as their environment grows more unpredictable and their hunger for order, structure, and predictability increases. Thus we hear, as Ortega y Gasset put it during the 1930’s when Hitler was on the march, “a formidable cry, rising like the howling of innumerable dogs to the stars, asking for someone or something to take command.”
In the United States, the President is violently condemned for “lack of leadership.” In Britain, Margaret Thatcher is elected because she offers at least the illusion of being “the Iron Lady.” Even hi the Communist industrial nations, where leadership is anything but timid, the pressure for still “stronger leadership” is intensifying. In the U.S.S.R., a novel appears that baldly glorifies Stalin’s ability to draw the “necessary political conclusions.” The publication of Victory by Alexander Chakovsky is seen as part of a “restalinization” drive. Little pictures of Stalin sprout on windshields, in homes, hotels, and kiosks. “Stalin on the windshield today,” writes Victor Nekipelov, author of Institute of Fools, “is an upsurge from below … a protest, however paradoxical, against the present disintegration and lack of leadership.”
As a dangerous decade opens, today’s demand for “leadership” strikes at a moment when long-forgotten dark forces are stirring anew in our midst. The New York Times reports that in France, “after more than three decades hi hibernation, small but influential right-wing groups are again seeking the* intellectual limelight, expounding theories on race, biology and political elitism discredited by the defeat of Fascism in World War II.”
Prating of Aryan racial supremacy, and violently anti-American, they control a major journalistic outlet in Le Figaro’s weekly. They argue that the races are born unequal and should be kept that way by social policy. They lace their arguments with references to E. O. Wilson and Arthur Jensen to lend supposedly scientific color to their virulently antidemocratic biases.
Across the globe in Japan, my wife and I not long ago spent 45 minutes in a massive traffic pile-up watching a procession of trucks crawl by, bearing uniformed and helmeted
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