Musings on the Origins of the American Radical Right...

Though America's radical right likes to think that it has its origins in conservatism that supposed genealogy is simply false. The contemporary American right is not conservative. Conservatism had its origins in the Enlightenment and to modernity. It was a reaction against the liberalism of the Enlightenment. Conservatives set themselves in opposition to bourgeois middle brow culture and society and proletariat low brow culture and society including bourgeois mass capitalism. Real, historically speaking, conservatives were thus opposed to mass capitalism, opposed to middle class or bourgeois political culture, and opposed to middle class mass middle brow or working class low brow culture and the mass individualism or mass narcissism (I, me, mine) of both. They favoured instead a kind of liturgical Christian or manor house like community run by the best and brightest, not surprisingly themselves, that was hierarchicalised on the basis of different degrees of culturedness and civilisedness.

The American modern and postmodern populist right, on the other hand, has its roots in three cultural streams, one before the European revolutionary eras and two others unleashed by the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and mass capitalism. The first stream that fed into the American right wing was the ethnocentric (nativism), conspiracy theory, paranoiac, and inquisitorial culture of theocratic and popular Christianity. One can also, of course, find this stream in the American South's Jim Crow Dixiecrats and the John Birch Society, two of the fathers and mothers of the contemporary American right. The second stream was the populist revolutionary movement that gave virtual free reign to revolutionaries chopping off the heads of aristocrats, putting them on pikes, and making them them eat hay. The third stream that fed into the American right was laissez-faire liberalism, one of the strands of liberalism that arose in the Enlightenment and afterwards. Paradoxically, this laissez-faire capitalist stream merged with right wing mass populism to produce a populist movement that advocated for oligarchic rights. All of these streams were inherently manichean, inherently intolerant (our way or, at best, the highway), inherently rageoholic, and inherently intellectually anti-intellectual. All of these cultural phenomena seem to have an elective affinity for each other and seem to be the glue that holds the intolerant, raging, and manichean American radical right together.

The terms "conservative" and "conservatism" have, of course, a history just like everything else. With the triumph of liberalism and modernity "conservative" was eventually coopted by laissez-faire liberals as a term for themselves, a term which also served to binarily mark them off from social or reformist liberals often in patented foucauldian fashion. The term and the social movement has now, in turn, been coopted by the looney radical right which consists of paranoids, the deluded, intolerant politically and ideologically correct theocrats, secular and religious, and adolescent rageoholics.

It is, of course, these characteristics--paranoia, delusion, political and ideological correctness, and the rageoholism of White men--which distinguish classic Conservatives from modern and postmodern right wingers. However, there are other characteristics that distinguish classic Conservatives from modern and postmodern right wingers as well. Right wingers typically can't engage in empirical discussion. Right wingers typically behave like male seventh graders during recess in conversation. Right wingers typically delude themselves that they are omniscient and that their cult totem is the messiah or a messiah. Right wingers typically have no sense of real history. Right wingers typically live in a simplistic manichean world with Dudley Doright and Boris and Natasha Badonov heroes and villians. Gee, they sound a lot like Dixiecrats and revved up WWE fans don't they? Anyway, right wingers typically tick all of these boxes, Classic conservatives do not tick any save perhaps one.

Further Reading:
Daniel Bell (ed.) The Radical Right
Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics
Joseph Lowndes, From the New Deal to the New Right: Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism