In United States politics, the radical right is a political preference that leans towards extreme conservatism, anti-socialism, and other right-wing beliefs in hierarchical structure. The term was first used by social scientists in the 1950s regarding small groups such as the John Birch Society in the United States and since then it has been applied to similar groups worldwide.
The term "radical" was applied to the groups because they sought to make fundamental (hence "radical") changes within institutions and remove from political life persons and institutions that threatened their values or economic interests. They were called "right-wing" primarily because of their opposition to socialism, communism, Marxism, anarchism, progressivism and liberalism and their ultraconservative or reactionary tendencies which limited new access to power and status.
Terminology
There
is disagreement over how right-wing movements should be described, and
no consensus exists regarding what the proper terminology should be,
although the terminology developed in the 1950s, using the words
"radical" or "extremist" is the most commonly used one. Other scholars
simply prefer to call them "The Right" or "conservatives", which is what
they call themselves. The terminology is used to describe a broad range
of movements. The term "radical right" was coined by Seymour Martin Lipset and included in a book titled The New American Right, which was published in 1955. The contributors to that book identified a conservative "responsible Right" as represented by the Republican administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower and a radical right that wished to change political and social life.
Further to the right of the radical right, they identified an
"ultraright". Most ultraright groups operate outside political life,
call for drastic change and in extreme cases they use violence against
the state. These groups were seen as having developed from the radical
right, both by adopting an ideology and containing members drawn from
them. In The Radical Right
a contrast is made between the main section of the radical right that
developed in the 1950s and was able to obtain influence during the
Reagan administration and the related ultraright that had turned to violent acts including the Oklahoma bombing.
Ultraright groups, as The Radical Right definition states, are normally called "far-right", although they may also be called "radical right".
According to Clive Webb, "Radical right is commonly, but not
completely, used to describe anticommunist organizations such as the
Christian Crusade and the John Birch Society... [T]he term far right... is the label most broadly used by scholars... to describe militant white supremacists."
Theoretical perspectives
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).
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.
Paranoid style politics
Two different approaches were taken by these social scientists. 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".
Historians have also applied the paranoid category to other political movements, such as the conservative Constitutional Union Party of 1860. Hofstadter's approach was later applied to the rise of new right-wing groups, including the Christian right and the Patriot movement.
Trump victory
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, collectivist authoritarian, and conspiracy-minded right-wing movements such as the Black Legion, Fr. Charles Coughlin, the Christian Front, and "birther" speculation; and overestimated the more libertarian influence of William F. Buckley's limited government, free trade, free market intellectual conservatism or the pro-immigration and optimistic outlook of Ronald Reagan.
Social structure
Sociologists
Lipset and Raab were focused on who joined these movements and how they
evolved. They saw the development of radical right-wing groups as
occurring in three stages. In the first stage certain groups came under
strain because of a loss or threatened loss of power and/or status. In
the second stage they theorize about what has led to this threat. In the
third stage they identify people and groups whom they consider to be
responsible. A successful radical right-wing group would be able to
combine the anxieties of both elites and masses. European immigration
for example threatened the elites because immigrants brought socialism
and radicalism, while for the masses the threat came from their
Catholicism. The main elements are low democratic restraint, having
more of a stake in the past than the present and laissez-faire
economics. The emphasis is on preserving social rather than economic
status. The main population attracted are lower-educated, lower-income
and lower-occupational strata. They were seen as having a lower
commitment to democracy, instead having loyalty to groups, institutions
and systems.
However, some scholars reject Lipset and Raab's analysis. James
Aho, for example, says that the way individuals join right-wing groups
is no different from how they join other types of groups. They are
influenced by recruiters and join because they believe the goals
promoted by the group are of value to them and find personal value in
belonging to the group. Several scholars, including Sara Diamond and Chip Berlet,
reject the theory that membership in the radical right is driven by
emotionality and irrationality and see them as similar to other
political movements. John George and Laird Wilcox
see the psychological claims in Lipset and Raab's approach as
"dehumanizing" of members of the radical right. They claim that the
same description of members of the radical right is also true of many
people within the political mainstream.
Hofstader found a common thread in the radical right, from fear
of the Illuminati in the late 18th century, to anti-Catholic and
anti-Masonic movements in the 19th to McCarthyism and the John Birch
Society in the 20th. They were conspiracist,
Manichean, absolutist and paranoid. They saw history as a conspiracy by
a demonic force that was on the verge of total control, requiring their
urgent efforts to stop it. Therefore, they rejected pluralistic
politics, with its compromise and consensus-building. Hofstadter thought
that these characteristics were always present in a large minority of
the population. Frequent waves of status displacement would continually
bring it to the surface.
D. J. Mulloy however noted that the term "extremist" is often
applied to groups outside the political mainstream and the term is
dropped once these groups obtain respectability, using the Palestinian Liberation Organization
as an example. The mainstream frequently ignores the commonality
between itself and so-called extremist organizations. Also, the radical
right appeals to views that are held by the mainstream: antielitism,
individualism and egalitarianism. Their views on religion, race,
Americanism and guns are held by a significant proportion of other white
Americans.
Conspiracism
Throughout
history, conspiracism has been a major feature of the Radical Right and
subject to numerous books and articles, the most famous of which is Richard Hofstadter's 1964 essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics".
Imaginary threats have variously been identified as originating from
Catholics, non-whites, women, homosexuals, secular humanists, Mormons,
Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, American Communists, Freemasons,
bankers and the U.S. government. Alexander Zaitchik, writing for the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), credited cable news hosts, including Glenn Beck and Lou Dobbs, the John Birch Society and WorldNetDaily with popularizing conspiracy theories. In the Fall 2010 issue of the SPLC's Intelligence Report, he identified the following as the top 10 conspiracy theories of the Radical Right:
- Chemtrails
- Martial Law
- Federal Emergency Management Agency Concentration Camps
- Foreign troops on US soil
- Door-to-door gun confiscations
- 9/11 as government plan
- Population control
- High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP)
- Federal Reserve
- North American Union
Common to most of these theories is an overarching belief in the existence of New World Order intent on instituting a one-world, communist government.
Climate change being viewed as a hoax is also sometimes associated with the radical right.
Right-wing populism
From the 1990s onward, parties that have been described as radical
right became established in the legislatures of various democracies
including Canada, Australia, Norway, France, Israel, Russia, Romania and Chile, and had entered coalition governments in Switzerland, Finland, Austria, the Netherlands, and Italy. However, there is little consensus about the reasons for this. Some of these parties had historic roots, such as the National Alliance, formed as the Italian Social Movement in 1946, the French National Front, founded in 1972, and the Freedom Party of Austria, an existing party that moved sharply right after 1986. Typically new right-wing parties, such as the French Poujadists, the U.S. Reform Party and the Dutch Pim Fortuyn List enjoyed short-lived prominence.
The main support for these parties comes from both the self-employed
and skilled and unskilled labor, with support coming predominantly from
males.
However, scholars are divided on whether these parties are
radical right, since they differ from the groups described in earlier
studies of the radical right. They are more often described as populist.
Studies of the radical right in the United States and right-wing
populism in Europe have tended to be conducted independently, with very
few comparisons made. European analyses have tended to use comparisons
with fascism, while studies of the American radical right have stressed
American exceptionalism. The U.S. studies have paid attention to the
consequences of slavery, the profusion of religious denominations and a
history of immigration, and saw fascism as uniquely European.
Although the term "radical right" was American in origin, the
term has been consciously adopted by some European social scientists.
Conversely the term "right-wing extremism", which is European in origin,
has been adopted by some American social scientists. Since the European
right-wing groups in existence immediately following the war had roots
in fascism they were normally called "neo-fascist". However, as new
right-wing groups emerged with no connection to historical fascism, the
use of the term "right-wing extremism" came to be more widely used.
Jeffrey Kaplan and Leonard Weinberg argued that the radical right
in the U.S. and right-wing populism in Europe were the same phenomenon
that existed throughout the Western world. They identified the core
attributes as contained in extremism, behaviour and beliefs. As
extremists, they see no moral ambiguity and demonize the enemy,
sometimes connecting them to conspiracy theories such as the New World Order.
Most politicians are seen as traitors or cowards. Given this worldview,
there is a tendency to use methods outside democratic norms, although
this is not always the case. The main core belief is inequality, which
often takes the form of opposition to immigration or racism. They do not
see this new Right as having any connection with the historic Right,
which had been concerned with protecting the status quo.[29]
They also see the cooperation of the American and European forms, and
their mutual influence on each other, as evidence of their existence as a
single phenomenon.
Daniel Bell
argues that the ideology of the radical right is "its readiness to
jettison constitutional processes and to suspend liberties, to condone
Communist methods in the fighting of Communism". Historian Richard Hofstader
agrees that communist-style methods are often emulated: "The John Birch
Society emulates Communist cells and quasi-secret operation through
'front' groups, and preaches a ruthless prosecution of the ideological
war along lines very similar to those it finds in the Communist enemy".
He also quotes Barry Goldwater: "I would suggest that we analyze and copy the strategy of the enemy; theirs has worked and ours has not".
History
Conspiracy fears
The American patriots who spearheaded the American Revolution in the 1770s were motivated primarily by an ideology that historians call Republicanism.
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.
Against this background of fear of conspiracies against American
liberties the first Radical Right-style responses came in the 1790s. 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. 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.
The Anti-Masonic Party
In America, public outrage against privilege and aristocracy in the
United States was expressed in the Northeast by anti-Masonry, a belief
that Freemasonry
comprised powerful evil secret elites who 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.
While earlier accounts of the antimasons portrayed their supporters as
mainly poor people, more recent scholarship has shown that they were
largely middle-class.
Nativism
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, Minute Men,
Founding Fathers and what they considered to be true Christians. The
immigrants were seen as part of 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.
White paramilitary organizations in the Southern United States
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.
American Protective Association
The American Protective Association
(APA) formed in the Middle West in 1887 by Irish Protestants to fight
the power of the Catholic Church in politics. It was a secret
organization whose members campaigned for Protestant candidates in local
elections and opposed hiring Catholics for government jobs. Claiming to
have secret documents obtained from nuns and priests who had escaped
from the Catholic Church, it claimed that the Pope had absolved
Catholics from loyalty to the United States and asked them to kill
heretics. It claimed that the Catholic Church ordered Catholics to
emigrate to major U.S. cities where they could assume control and
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 faded away in the mid-1890s.
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 going into decline. Its leaders opposed Catholic influence and supported the Imperial Federation. A PPA was also set up in Australia.
Lily-white movement
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 was active in the late
19th and early 20th centuries.
The Second Ku Klux Klan
The Second Ku Klux Klan, which was formed in 1915, combined Protestant fundamentalism and moralism with right-wing extremism. Its major support came from the urban south, the midwest and the Pacific Coast. While the Klan initially drew upper middle class support, its bigotry and violence alienated these members and it came to be dominated by less educated and poorer members. The Klan claimed that there was a secret Catholic army within the United States loyal to the Pope, that one million Knights of Columbus were arming themselves, and that Irish-American policemen would shoot Protestants as heretics. They claimed that the Catholics were planning to take Washington
and put the Vatican in power, and 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 planned to destroy economic opportunities for Christians. Other Klansmen claimed that the Russian Revolution and Communism were 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 controlled by Jews and Catholics. The
objects of Klan fear however tended to vary by locale and included Catholics, Jews, African Americans, Wobblies, Orientals, labour unions and liquor.
The Klan were also anti-elitist and attacked "the intellectuals",
seeing themselves as egalitarian defenders of the common man.
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, although they
disappeared after 1930.
The Great Depression
During the Great Depression
there were a large number of small nativist groups, whose ideologies
and bases of support were similar to those of earlier nativist groups.
However, proto-fascist 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.
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 military, not on 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.
Gerald B. Winrod,
a fundamentalist Christian minister who founded the Defenders of the
Christian Faith revived the Illuminati conspiracy theory that have
originally been introduced into the United States in 1798. He claimed
that both the French and Russian Revolutions were directed by a them and saw the Protocols of the Elders of Zion
as an accurate expose of a Jewish conspiracy. He saw the Jews, the
Catholics, the communists and the bankers as working together 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. He combined both left and right-wing elements. 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.
According to Lipset and Raab, Long was considered to be right-wing
because of his authoritarian style, building a large National Guard and
police force, intimidating opponents and the press, and bringing the
electoral process and prosecution service under his direct control. 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.
Dixiecrats
In 1948, the Dixiecrats, a breakaway segregationist faction of the Democratic Party, contested the 1948 presidential election with then-Governor of South Carolina Strom Thurmond as their candidate, winning 4 states.
McCarthyism
Although the United States emerged from the Second World War as the
world's strongest country both economically and militarily, communism
had also been strengthened. Communism had spread in Eastern Europe and
southeast Asia, and there were numerous Communist insurgencies. 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.
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.
The strongest support for McCarthyism came from German and Irish
Catholics who had been isolationist in both world wars and had an
anti-British bias and opposed socialism on religious grounds. Much of the hostility was directed against the Eastern elites.
Following the GOP landslide in 1952, McCarthy continued his
investigations into the new Republican administration until the
Republican party turned against him.
John Birch Society
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.
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.
American Independent Party
The 1967 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 Schmitz.
In Louisiana, Ned Touchstone, a Wallace supporter, edited a conservative newsletter, The Councilor, through which means he attacked liberals in both major parties. The Councilor was the publication of the White Citizens' Council. In 1967, Touchstone ran unsuccessfully as a Democrat against Louisiana Education Superintendent Bill Dodd, who carried the support of party moderates, liberals, and African Americans.
Constitutional militia and patriot movements
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. More recently, militia and patriot
organizations were involved in the 2014 Bundy standoff and the 2016 Occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.
Paleoconservatism
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. The Constitution Party and the Reform Party of the United States of America had much support from the paleoconservatives.
Counterjihad
After the September 11 attacks in 2001, the Counterjihad 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 faith 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 radical Islamists such as the Muslim Brotherhood.
Minuteman Project
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.
Alt-right
The alt-right emerged during the 2016 election cycle in support of the Donald Trump presidential campaign. It draws influence from paleoconservatism, paleolibertarianism, white nationalism, the manosphere, Identitarianism and the neoreactionary movement, and differs from previous radical right movements due to its heavy internet presence on sites such as 4chan.
