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Boundaries between the New Left and the traditionalist and libertarian factions of the conventional Right are today often obscured by newly emerging issues. This study attempts to clarify some of the new meanings applied to Left and Right, based on comparative survey data from thirdparty activists of the Los Angeles Peace and Freedom County Council and major party activists of the Los Angeles Democrat and Republican County Central Committees, and on participant observation and content analysis of statements presented by representative spokesmen of the New Left and conventional Right. Three basic points of growing convergence between the two political camps are: (a) a joint attack on the increasingly centralized and bureaucratized structure of authority in government and society; (b) a growing existential theme of personal worth, human dignity, and social justice; and (c) the offering of localized and personalized solutions.

Marx's formulation of the alienation problematic is grounded in a strategic set of underlying assumptions concerning the human condition. On the one hand, people are seen as the creators of their material and mental world through their labour activity. They are endowed with natural human qualities, creative powers and historically existing potentialities that are essential to human growth. People are, in essence, free, creative, productive beings of praxis in conscious control of their activities and the world they have created. But the material and mental products of human labour (e.g. commodities, ideas, social institutions) assume an autonomous life of their own. They come to rule over people as dehumanizing objects and powers, as alien and hostile forces operating independently above and against the common will of their own creators. People no longer experience themselves as active human agents in conscious control of their life circumstances. Their own productive activities, human creations, social relationships and nature at large remain alien and beyond their grasp. The realization of natural human capacities and potentialities for a genuinely human life in an alienating world of domination and oppression is consequently thwarted, repressed or denied. Alienation is construed as a universal social phenomenon that pervades all spheres of human life in the existing world.

The accent on status‐anxiety factors which shape ideologies and political directions has emerged as a popular, but relatively speculative and untested, theme in contemporary political analysis. This article traces the evolution of the “status politics” theme, from its essayist interpretations of American right‐wing radicalism to comparative applications in other Western industrialized societies. The task is to make more organized sense of this theme and to submit several derivative statements to a systematic empirical test. The results are based on a secondary analysis of Lausanne survey data and the preliminary findings of a recent nation‐wide survey of the Swiss general electorate. The Lausanne results indicate that emotive dissatisfaction with personal status failures and felt aspiration—achievement discrepancies, especially among occupational skidders and immobile respondents, are among the more influential status‐anxiety factors associated with classical conservative ideology. The national survey results point to other related status insecurities and dissatisfactions which distinguish ultraconservative National Action and Republican party supporters from other party supporters in the Swiss general electorate. These results lend some comparative weight to the status politics explanation.

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