Radical right (United States)

The study of the radical right began in the 1950s as social scientists attempted to explain McCarthyism, which was seen as a lapse from the American political tradition. A framework for description was developed primarily in Richard Hofstadter's "The pseudo-conservative revolt" and Seymour Martin Lipset's "The sources of the radical right". These essays, along with others by Daniel Bell, Talcott Parsons, Peter Viereck and Herbert Hyman, were included in The New American Right (1955). In 1963, following the rise of the John Birch Society, the authors were asked to re-examine their earlier essays and the revised essays were published in the book The Radical Right. Lipset, along with Earl Raab, traced the history of the radical right in The politics of unreason (1970).[15]

The central arguments of The Radical Right provoked criticism. Some on the Right thought that McCarthyism could be explained as a rational reaction to communism. Others thought McCarthyism should be explained as part of the Republican Party's political strategy. Critics on the Left denied that McCarthyism could be interpreted as a mass movement and rejected the comparison with 19th-century populism. Others saw status politics, dispossession and other explanations as too vague.[16]

Two different approaches were taken by these social scientists. The American historian Richard Hofstadter wrote an analysis in his influential 1964 essay The Paranoid Style in American Politics. Hofstadter sought to identify the characteristics of the groups. Hofstadter defined politically paranoid individuals as feeling persecuted, fearing conspiracy, and acting over-aggressive yet socialized. Hofstadter and other scholars in the 1950s argued that the major left-wing movement of the 1890s, the Populists, showed what Hofstadter said was "paranoid delusions of conspiracy by the Money Power".[17]

Historians have also applied the paranoid category to other political movements, such as the conservative Constitutional Union Party of 1860.[18] Hofstadter's approach was later applied to the rise of new right-wing groups, including the Christian right and the Patriot movement.[15]

The political success of Donald Trump has prompted American historian Rick Perlstein to argue that historians have underestimated the influence and power on the modern American political right of populist, nativist, authoritarian, and conspiracy-minded right-wing movements, such as the Black Legion, Charles Coughlin, the Christian Front, and "birther" speculation;[19] and have overestimated the more libertarian influence of William F. Buckley's limited government, free trade, free market intellectual conservatism, and the neoconservative pro-immigration and optimistic outlook of Ronald Reagan.[19]

The American Patriots who spearheaded the American Revolution in the 1770s were motivated primarily by an ideology that historians call Republicanism.[40] It stressed the dangers of aristocracy, as represented by the British government, corruption, and the need for every citizen to display civic virtue. When public affairs took a bad turn, Republicans were inclined to identify a conspiracy of evil forces as the cause.[41]

Against this background of fear of conspiracies against American liberties the first Radical Right-style responses came in the 1790s.[42] Some Federalists warned of an organized conspiracy involving Thomas Jefferson and his followers, and recent arrivals from Europe, alleging that they were agents of the French revolutionary agenda of violent radicalism, social equalitarianism and anti-Christian infidelity.[43] The Federalists in 1798 acted by passing the Alien and Sedition Acts, designed to protect the country against both foreign and domestic radicals. Fear of immigration led to a riot in New York City in 1806 between nativists and Irishmen, which led to increased calls by Federalists to nativism.[42][44]

In America, public outrage against privilege and aristocracy in the United States was expressed in the Northeast by advocates of anti-Masonry, the belief that Freemasonry comprised powerful evil secret elites which rejected republican values and were blocking the movement toward egalitarianism and reform. The anti-Masons, with a strong evangelical base, organized into a political party, the Anti-Masonic Party that pledged to rid Masons from public office. It was most active in 1828–1836. The Freemason movement was badly damaged and never fully recovered; the Anti-Mason movement merged into the coalition that became the new Whig Party. The anti-Masonry movement was not "radical"; it fully participated in democracy, and was animated by the belief that the Masons were the ones subverting democracy in America.[45][46] While earlier accounts of the antimasons portrayed their supporters as mainly poor people, more recent scholarship has shown that they were largely middle-class.[47]

The arrival of large numbers of Irish Catholic immigrants in the 1830s and 1840s led to a reaction among Americans, who were alarmed by the levels of crime and welfare dependency among the new arrivals, and the use of violence to control the polls on election day. Nativists began to revere symbols of Americanism: the Puritans, the Minute Men, the Founding Fathers and people who they considered true Christians. The immigrants were seen as pawns in a conspiracy to undermine America. Nativists in New York formed the American Republican Party. It merged into the Know Nothings in the 1850s. The main support for the Know Nothings was urban and working class. The party split over slavery and the northern wing merged into the Republican Party in the late 1850s.[48][49]

Starting in the 1870s and continuing through the late 19th century, numerous white supremacist paramilitary groups operated in the South, with the goal of organizing against and intimidating supporters of the Republican Party. Examples of such groups included the Red Shirts and the White League.

In the Midwestern United States in 1887, the American Protective Association (APA) was formed by Irish Protestants who wanted to fight against the power of the Catholic Church in politics. It was a secret organization whose members campaigned for Protestant candidates in local elections and it opposed the hiring of Catholics for government jobs. Claiming to have secret documents which it obtained from nuns and priests who had escaped from the Catholic Church, it accused the Pope of absolving Catholics from loyalty to the United States and it also accused the Pope of asking Catholics to kill heretics. It also claimed that the Catholic Church ordered Catholics to emigrate to major U.S. cities where they could assume control and it also claimed that the civil service was dominated by Catholics who remitted part of their pay to Rome. The movement was rejected by mainstream Republicans and it faded away in the mid-1890s.[50][51]

An offshoot of the APA, the Protestant Protective Association (PPA) was set up in the Canadian province of Ontario in 1891. It drew support from Orangemen in the 1890s, before it went into decline. Its leaders opposed Catholic influence and supported the Imperial Federation.[52] A PPA was also set up in Australia.[53]

The lily-white movement was an all-white faction of the Republican Party in the Southern United States which opposed civil rights and African-American involvement in the party, and it was active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The Second Ku Klux Klan, which was formed in 1915, combined anti-Catholicism, antisemitism, white supremacy, Protestant fundamentalism and moralism with right-wing extremism. Its main source of support came from the urban south, the midwest and the Pacific Coast.[54] While the Klan initially drew most of its members and supporters from the upper middle class, its bigotry and its violence alienated these members and it came to be dominated by less educated and poorer members as a result.[55] The Klan claimed that there was a secret Catholic army within the United States which was loyal to the Pope, it also claimed that one million Knights of Columbus were arming themselves, and it also claimed that Irish-American policemen would shoot Protestants as punishment for heresy. They also claimed that the Catholics were planning to take over Washington and put the Vatican in power, and they also claimed that all presidential assassinations had been carried out by Catholics. The prominent Klan leader, D. C. Stephenson claimed that international Jewish bankers were behind the First World War and he also claimed that they were plotting to destroy economic opportunities for Christians. Other Klansmen claimed that the Russian Revolution and Communism were both controlled by Jews. The Klan frequently reprinted parts of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and New York City was condemned as an evil city which was controlled by Jews and Catholics. However, the objects of the Klan's fears tended to vary by locale and they included Catholics, Jews, African Americans, Wobblies, Orientals, labor unions and liquor. The Klan was also anti-elitist and it also attacked "the intellectuals", seeing itself as the egalitarian defender of the common man.[56]

British subjects who became naturalized Americans were encouraged to join the "Riders of the Red Robe" and the Klan was successful in establishing branches in several Canadian provinces, but it disappeared after 1930.[57]

During the Great Depression there was a large number of small nativist groups, whose ideologies and bases of support were similar to those of earlier nativist groups. However, movements such as Huey Long's Share Our Wealth and Father Coughlin's National Union for Social Justice emerged, which differed from other right-wing groups by attacking big business, calling for economic reform and rejecting nativism. However, Coughlin's group later developed a racist ideology.[58]

The Black Legion, which had a peak membership of 40,000 was formed by former Klansmen and operated in Indiana, Ohio and Michigan. Unlike the Klan, its members dressed in black and its organizational hierarchy was based on the organizational hierarchy of the military, not on the organizational hierarchy of fraternal organizations. Its members swore an oath to keep "the secrets of the order to support God, the United States Constitution, and the Black Legion in its holy war against Catholics, Jews, Communists, Negroes, and aliens". The organization went into decline after more than fifty members were convicted of various crimes in support of the organization. The typical member was from a small farm in the South, lacked a high school graduation diploma, was married with children and worked in unskilled labor.[59]

Gerald B. Winrod, a fundamentalist Christian minister who founded the Defenders of the Christian Faith revived the Illuminati conspiracy theory that was originally introduced into the United States in 1798. He claimed that the French and Russian Revolutions were both directed by the Illuminati and he also claimed that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was an accurate expose of a Jewish conspiracy. He believed that the Jews, the Catholics, the communists and the bankers were all working together and plotting to destroy American Protestantism. Although Winrod's appeal was mainly limited to rural, poor, uneducated fundamentalist Christians, his magazine The Defender reached a peak circulation of 100,000 in the late 1930s.[60]

William Dudley Pelley's Silver Shirts movement was overtly modelled on European fascism and introduced a populist statist plan for economic organization. The United States would be reorganized as a corporation, with individuals paid according to their contributions, although African Americans, aboriginals and aliens would be treated as wards of the state and therefore hold a lower status. The organization blamed the Jews for the depression, communism, and the spread of immorality, but it openly accepted Catholics as members. Its membership was largely uneducated, poor and elderly, with a high proportion of neurotics, and it also had a large female membership. Its main base of support was in small communities in the Midwest and on the West Coast, and it had almost no presence in the Southern States.[61]

Charles Coughlin (Father Coughlin) was a Catholic priest who had begun broadcasting on religious matters in 1926. However, when his program went national in 1930, he began to comment on political issues, promoting a strongly anti-Communist stance, while being highly critical of American capitalists. He urged the government to protect workers, denounced Prohibition and held the "international bankers" responsible for the depression. By 1932 he had millions of regular listeners. The following year he set up the "National Union for Social Justice". Although an early supporter of the U. S. president, Franklin Roosevelt, he broke with him in 1935 when Roosevelt proposed that the United States join the World Court. Coughlin then denounced the New Deal, which he claimed had accomplished little but instead had strengthened the position of the bankers. His organization became increasingly supportive of European fascism.[62]

In 1936 Coughlin began to endorse candidates for political office and supported the presidential campaign of William Lemke, who campaigned on the Union Party ticket. Lemke was also supported by Gerald L. K. Smith, head of the Share Our Wealth movement and Dr. Francis Townsend, head of the Townsend Old Age movement. At the time Coughlin claimed that his organization had 5 million members, while Smith claimed that his organization had 3 million members. In the election however Lemke received fewer than 900,000 votes.[63]

Following this setback, Coughlin became more overtly fascist, attacking trade unionists and politicians for being pro-Communist, calling for a corporate state and setting up "Social Justice Councils", which excluded non-Christians from their membership. His magazine, Social Justice, named Benito Mussolini as man of the year in 1938 and defended Hitler's "persecution" of Jews, whom he linked with Communism. Major radio stations then refused to air his broadcasts and the Post Office banned Social Justice from the mails in 1942. Threatened by a sedition trial against Father Coughlin, the Catholic Church ordered him to cease his political activities and Coughlin retired from political life.[64]

Huey Long, who had been elected governor of Louisiana in 1928 and was a U.S. senator from 1932 until his death in 1935, built a national organization, Share Our Wealth, which had a populist appeal.[65] He combined both left and right-wing elements.[66] As governor, he removed the poll tax and directed state spending to the improvement of schools and rural roads. He attacked "the corporations and urbanites, the 'better elements' and the professional politicians." At the time of his death, his organization had, according to its files, over 27,000 clubs with a total membership of almost 8 million.[67] Long never introduced minimum wage or child labor laws, unemployment insurance or old age pensions, although other states did so at the time. He actively courted support from big business, and reduced taxes on corporations. He differed from other right-wingers by making no appeal to conspiracy theories, nativism, or morality. He worked closely with Catholics and Jews and never appealed to race issues. However, he chose Gerald L. K. Smith, who was associated with the fascist Silver Shirts to organize his Share our Wealth movement. But the movement died out following Long's death.[68]

Although the United States emerged from the Second World War as the world's most powerful country economically and militarily, communism had also been strengthened. Communism had spread in Eastern Europe and southeast Asia, and there were numerous Communist insurgencies.[69] At the same time, Communist espionage had been found in the U.S. Responding to the fears the new enemy presented, Joe McCarthy, a Republican U.S. senator from Wisconsin, claimed in 1950 that there were 205 Communist spies in the State Department.[70] The main target of McCarthyism however was ideological nonconformism, and individuals were targeted for their beliefs. Black lists were established in many industries restricting the employment of suspected nonconformists, and libraries were pressured to remove books and periodicals that were considered suspect. McCarthy investigated Voice of America and although no communists were found, 30 employees were fired as a result.[71] The strongest support for McCarthyism came from some of the German and Irish Catholics, who had been isolationist in both world wars, had an anti-British bias, and opposed socialism on ostensibly religious grounds. Catholic support was far from uniform, and many Catholics were actively opposed to McCarthy and his methods.[72] Much of the hostility was directed against the Eastern elites.[73] Following the GOP landslide in 1952, McCarthy continued his investigations into the new Republican administration until the Republican party turned against him.[74]

The John Birch Society, which was created in 1958, combined economic liberalism with anti-communism. The founder, Robert Welch, Jr., believed that the greatest enemy of man was government, and the more extensive the government, the greater the enemy. To him, government was inherently corrupt and a threat to peace. He advocated private institutions, local government and rigid individualism.[75]

Welch wondered why U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower had helped destroy Joe McCarthy, made peace with the communists in Korea, refused to support anti-communist movements abroad and had extended the welfare state. His conclusion was that Eisenhower was either a communist or a dupe of the communists and that the United States government was already 60% to 80% under communist control. Welch saw the communist conspiracy as controlled by the Illuminati, which he thought had directed the French and Russian Revolutions and was behind the current civil rights movement. They were also responsible for welfare programs, central banking, progressive income taxation and the direct election of U.S. senators. Welch identified William Morgan, William Wirt and Joe McCarthy as people who had been killed for their attempts to expose the Illuminati. Morgan's murder presumably by Masons had led to the earlier Anti-Masonic movement, Wirt had denounced the New Deal and McCarthy had claimed to have discovered a Communist conspiracy.[76]

The 1968 presidential campaign of George Wallace created a new party called the American Independent Party (AIP) which in later years came under the control of Radical Right elements. In 1969, the party had split into two groups, the anti-communist American Party under the leadership of T. Coleman Andrews and another group under the AIP founder Bill Shearer. Both groups opposed federal intervention into schools, favored police suppression of domestic disorder and victory in the Vietnam War. The two groups united under the American Party banner in order to support the 1972 presidential campaign of George Wallace, but after he withdrew they nominated U.S. Representative John G. Schmitz.[77]

Although small militias had existed throughout the latter half of the 20th century, the groups became more popular during the early 1990s, after a series of standoffs between armed citizens and federal government agents, such as the 1992 Ruby Ridge siege and 1993 Waco Siege. These groups expressed concern for what they perceived as government tyranny within the United States and generally held libertarian and constitutionalist political views, with a strong focus on the Second Amendment gun rights and tax protest. They also embraced many of the same conspiracy theories as predecessor groups on the radical right, particularly the New World Order theory. Currently active examples of such groups are the 3 Percenters and the Oath Keepers. A minority of militia groups, such as Posse Comitatus and the Aryan Nations, were white nationalists and saw militia and patriot movements as a form of white resistance against what they perceived to be a liberal and multiculturalist government. In the 21st century, militia and patriot organizations were notably involved in the 2014 Bundy standoff, the 2016 Occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, and in the 2021 United States Capitol attack.

Paul Gottfried first coined the term paleoconservatism in the 1980s. These conservatives stressed (post-Cold War) non-interventionist foreign policy, strict immigration law, anti-consumerism and traditional values and opposed the neoconservatives, who had more liberal views on these issues. The paleoconservatives used the surge in right-wing populism during the early 1990s to propel the presidential campaigns of Pat Buchanan in 1992, 1996 and 2000. They diminished in number after the September 11 attacks, where they found themselves at odds with the vast majority of American conservatives on how to respond to the threat of terrorism.

In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks in 2001, the Counter-jihad movement, supported by groups such as Stop Islamization of America and individuals such as Frank Gaffney and Pamela Geller, began to gain traction among the American right. They were widely dubbed "islamophobic" for their vocal condemnation of the Islamic religion and their belief that there was a significant threat posed by Muslims living in America. They believed the United States was under threat from "Islamic supremacism", accusing the Council on American-Islamic Relations and even prominent conservatives like Suhail A. Khan and Grover Norquist of supporting Islamist groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood.

Jim Gilchrist, a conservative Republican, founded the Minuteman Project in April 2005. The Minutemen, inspired by the earlier Patriot movement and the original revolutionary Minutemen, advocated greater restrictions on illegal immigration and engaged in volunteer activities in the Southwestern United States against those perceived to be illegal immigrants. The group drew much criticism from those who held more liberal views on the immigration issues, with President George W. Bush condemning them as "vigilantes". The Minuteman Project was similar to the earlier Ranch Rescue organization, which performed much the same role.

The alt-right emerged during the 2016 U.S. presidential election cycle in support of the Donald Trump presidential campaign.[78] It draws influences from paleoconservatism, paleolibertarianism, White nationalism, the manosphere, the Dark Enlightenment, identitarianism, and the neoreactionary movement, and it differs from previous radical right-wing movements due to its heavy internet presence on sites such as 4chan.[78]

Groypers, sometimes called the Groyper Army, are a group of White nationalist and far-right activists, who are notable for their attempts to introduce far-right politics into mainstream conservatism in the United States. The group is led by far-right political commentator Nick Fuentes.