A comprehensive analysis of the stability properties of the appropriate kinetically generalized form of MHD ballooning modes together with the usual trapped-particle drift modes is presented. The calculations are fully electromagnetic and include the complete dynamics associated with compressional ion acoustic waves. Trapped-particle effects along with all forms of collisionless dissipation are taken into account without approximations. The influence of collisions is estimated with a model Krook operator. Results from the application of this analysis to realistic tokamak operating conditions indicate that unstable short-wavelength modes with significant growth rates can extend from ..beta.. = 0 to value above the upper ideal-MHD-critical-beta associated with the so-called second stability regime. Since the strength of the relevant modes appears to vary gradually with ..beta.., these results support a soft beta limit picture involving a continuous (rather than abrupt or hard) modification of anomalous transport already present in low-..beta..-tokamaks. However, at higher beta the increasing dominance of the electromagnetic component of the perturbations indicated by these calculations could also imply significantly different transport scaling properties.