Conservatism and the Far Right

3 Credits · Level: Graduate

“I thought I understood the American Right. Trump proved me wrong,” historian Rick Perlstein, one of the leading chroniclers of American conservatism, wrote in the New York Times shortly after the 2016 presidential election. Perlstein alluded to the fact that the established story of modern conservatism – what most historians and the broader public thought they knew and understood about the Right – could hardly have led to our present and Trump’s rise. Historians have begun to rethink the history of the Right. And at the center of that re-conceptualization stands the relationship between mainstream conservatism and the Far Right. According to the established story, in which rightwing extremism had been ostracized from modern conservatism since the 1950s, Trumpism had to be an aberration – a departure from the venerable tradition of principled conservatism. But since 2016, a counter-narrative has become a lot more popular: This was what modern conservatism, at its core, had always been – a political project animated by white grievance, in which rightwing extremism had played a key role at all times. In this course, we will examine the history of the Right since the middle decades of the twentieth century up until today and focus on the relationship between modern conservatism and rightwing extremism. We will discuss conservatism in the American political tradition; modern conservatism as a political project and the role of the Republican Party; the conservative and reactionary intellectual sphere; conservative grassroots activism and rightwing media; and the extremist milieu and culture, including militant white nationalist groups. We will also explore the Right’s transnational connections, its sympathy for and flirtations with foreign autocratic regimes like Franco Spain, Apartheid South Africa, and Victor Orbán’s Hungary today. Ultimately, our goal is to situate Trumpism in the longer-term context of the Right’s history and reflect on the promise and pitfalls of revising the history of conservatism in the age of Trump.