The radical right is a fervent anti-government strain of Libertarian ultraconservative, emerging out of the anti-New Deal ideology of the 1930s. From McCarthyism to the John Birch Society, from fiscal conservatives to Christian nationalists, the radical right contains some of the most extreme ideologies in the right wing.
Conservative ideology has gotten more and more extreme over the past few decades — as well as being mainstreamed within the Republican Party. Formerly moderate Republicans are referred to as “RINOs” (Republican In Name Only) and are being pushed out of the party, whether by primary defeat or ostracism by the right-wing base.
Only those who pass the utmost purity tests are allowed to remain amid, and especially atop of, the right-wing political establishment in recent years. They persist in holding some truly debunked, thoroughly delusional “explanations” for phenomena in the real world.
Radical Right myths and beliefs:
- Government assistance makes people weak and lazy.
- Unemployed people don’t want to work.
- FDR and the Democrats destroyed our system of free enterprise.
- Wealthy people are job creators and we must do more to preserve their wealth.
- Cutting taxes creates jobs — aka Trickle Down Economics
- Hierarchy and the maintenance of a de facto caste system — despite the nation’s founding ideals of Equality
- Strict Father Morality — adherence to rigidly traditional gender roles and the absolute power of authority
- Originalism — the idea that we cannot fundamentally make new laws; that all we can do is peer into the past and try to imagine the original intent of the Founders when writing the Constitution
- Independent State Legislature Theory — so-called “states’ rights” by another name, taken to a more extreme twist in which only the state legislature — unchecked by executive power or judicial review — can have any say in the state’s election procedures
- nullification
- anti-federalism
- New World Order old conspiracy theory & the Illuminati
- anti-UN
- Communist spies in the government
- Communists in Hollywood
- Fear of creeping socialism
- Anti-social security
- “Second Amendment remedies” and other thinly-veiled calls to political violence
- Coming to “take our country back”
- right-to-work laws — to break unions
- anti-abortion
- anti-LGBT
- anti-feminism
- anti-liberal
- anti-immigrant
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