John S. Huntington - Far-Right Vanguard: The Radical Roots of Modern Conservatism

POLITICS AND CULTURE IN MODERN AMERICA

Series Editors: Keisha N. Blain, Margot Canaday, Matthew Lassiter, Stephen Pitti, Thomas J. Sugrue

Volumes in the series narrate and analyze political and social change in the broadest dimensions from 1865 to the present, including ideas about the ways people have sought and wielded power in the public sphere and the language and institutions of politics at all levelslocal, national, and transnational. The series is motivated by a desire to reverse the fragmentation of modern U.S. history and to encourage synthetic perspectives on social movements and the state, on gender, race, and labor, and on intellectual history and popular culture.

John S. Huntington

Copyright 2021 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Huntington, John S., author.

Title: Far-right vanguard : the radical roots of modern conservatism / John S. Huntington.

Other titles: Politics and culture in modern America.

Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2021] | Series: Politics and culture in modern America | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021005734 | ISBN 9780812253474 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: ConservatismUnited StatesHistory20th century. | Right and left (Political science)United StatesHistory20th century. | RadicalismUnited StatesHistory20th century. | Right-wing extremistsUnited StatesHistory20th century. | United StatesPolitics and government19451989. | United StatesPolitics and government19011953.

Classification: LCC JC573.2.U6 H86 2021 | DDC 320.520973dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021005734

For Kristen

In early 1967, Louisiana publisher and far-right activist Kent Courtney put out a call to arms. We cannot dismantle Socialism, or destroy the criminal conspiracy of Communism unless we change the policy of the U.S. government, Courtney told his roughly 25,000 readers. His four-page newsletter detailed the apocalyptic dangers facing America, namely the pro-Communist and pro-Socialist programs advocated by the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations. Courtney encouraged his fellow conservatives to organize, to join state-level third parties and fight the communist leviathan restricting Americas freedoms. The government had become the enemy, Courtney intoned, and neither major party was halting the trend toward communist slavery. The only path forward was a right-wing counterrevolution. Courtney concluded his manifesto with a plea for donations and an ominous warning: Although education is a preliminary necessity, unless we translate this anti-Communist education into political action, we will end up being the best educated anti-Communists in a Communist concentration camp.

A little over fifty years later, on August 27, 2020, President Donald Trump broke precedent by hosting the Republican National Convention on the White Houses spacious South Lawn. Trump shelved his trademark stream-of-conscious surrealism during his keynote address for a staid, teleprompter-guided cadence. Nevertheless, conspiratorial rhetoric rained down from the dais. This election will decide whether we SAVE the American Dream, or whether we allow a socialist agenda to DEMOLISH our cherished destiny, Trump warned the roughly 1,500 assembled supporters and the 23 million viewers watching from home. Trump meandered through a cornucopia of right-wing talking pointstax cuts, economic deregulation, abortion restrictions, patriotic nationalismbut his fever-pitch fearmongering often took center stage. If the left gains power, they will demolish the suburbs, confiscate your guns, and appoint justices who will wipe away your Second Amendment and other constitutional freedoms, Trump declared. [Joe] Biden is a Trojan horse for socialism. According to Trump, any political opposition, including the Democratic Party and its supporters, were un-American subversives.

On the surface, Courtney and Trump had little in common. Courtney was an ultraconservative activist hoping to drum up support for a third-party crusade, a man whose movement was barely respectable, let alone formidable. Conversely, Trump was an incumbent president accepting his partys nomination to run for a second term, quite literally the most powerful politician in the nation. And yet deep ideological roots connected the two men. The conspiracy theories, nativism, white supremacist rhetoric, and radical libertarianism promoted by mid-twentieth century ultraconservatives had metastasized slowly over the course of sixty years until they consumed the Republican Party. During the buildup to the 2020 election, Trump was far from the only conservative voice spreading conspiracies about socialist tyranny, wanton violence, and the erosion of America. If Biden is elected, theres a good chance you will be dead within the year, wrote cartoonist turned right-wing commentator Scott Adams, before adding an even more apocalyptic declaration: Republicans will be hunted. The deluded, conspiratorial language that once marked the far right like a scarlet letter had seeped into the conservative mainstream.

Numerous conservative commentators, out of a concern for respectability, tried to create distance between conservatism and Trump. These erstwhile Republicans formed a loose never-Trump coalition and condemned him as a populist, a big-spending nationalist, a creature of illiberalism and authoritarianism. But this gate-keeping rendered a narrow, misleading definition of modern conservatism. Trumps brand of politics, however off-putting to some of his conservative detractors, represented the apotheosis of conservatisms far-right wing. His conspiratorial mudslinging, casual racism, and authoritarian impulses would have been welcome at a John Birch Society gathering or a Citizens Council meeting. He was less President Ronald Reagan and more Alabama governor George Wallace, less National Review editor William F. Buckley Jr. and more Birch Society founder Robert H. W. Welch Jr. Ultraconservatives spent years out of the limelight, derided as a bunch of irrational kooks, but they nevertheless served as a centrifugal force within the conservative movement. They were looking for a savior, and they found one in Donald Trump. While it is impossible to forecast the direction of conservatism or Trumps Republican Party, one thing remains certain: the far right laid the foundation for the vitriolic politics that pulse throughout twenty-first-century America.