(notes / draft) Who were the early conservatives? Former fascists and Nazi sympathizers in the US.
1930s opposition to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal
3 main right-wing factions then:
- libertarians — right-wing economics faction led by Milton Friedman, Ludwig von Mises, & Friedrich Hayek
- traditionalists — William F. Buckley, National Review (1955), Barry Goldwater
- anti-communists and Nazi sympathizers — John Birch Society, Robert Welch, Fred Koch, William Randolph Hearst, Henry Ford, Father Charles Coughlin, Charles Lindbergh, McCarthyites
After the Allies won World War II, a number of the early Hitler sympathizers “hid out” in anti-communist circles, allowing them to cloak their underlying fascism inside of the American Cold War project and give it a semi-presentable face in conservatism.
In the 1970s, 2 more conservative groups emerged for a total of 5 main sects:
4. neoconservatives — Ronald Reagan
5. the religious right — the Moral Majority, Jerry Falwell Sr. & Jr., Jimmy Swaggart, Jim & Tammy Fae Baker, Pat Robertson, Jesse Helms, Paul Weyrich, Paul Regnery, William Rusher, prosperity gospel
- Evangelicals
- fundamentalism
- relationship between fundamentalist thinking and authoritarianism
- rejection of science and empiricism
- rejection of the liberal political order
- limitations of received wisdom
- Christian nationalism
- Biblical law
- End Times
Conservatives became fascists again in 2016
The ascension of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States gave permission to all the closet fascists practicing ketman as conservatives to come right on out and let their freak bigotry flags fly.
All the little white power sleeper cells and now networked anti-government militia groups were let off the chain and invited to take a swing at our national sovereignty and see if they could steal the American government for him. Thanks to the strength and integrity of numerous civil servants and others they did not succeed — however, the festering mass of fascism isn’t going anywhere much just yet.
Other topics
will be fleshing out further:
- neoliberals & theocons — Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, George W. Bush, and others who led us into forever wars in the Middle East
- MAGA
- white supremacists & Lost Cause religion
- right-wing anti-government violence
- domestic violent extremism
- paramilitary groups: the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters
- conservative ideology as a form of totalism
Comments are closed.