Radical right (United States)

In United States politics, the radical correct is a political preference that leans towards extreme conservatism, white supremacism, and other right-wing to far-right ideologies in a hierarchical positioning paired with conspiratorial rhetoric alongside traditionalist together with reactionary aspirations. The term was number one 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 gain fundamental hence "radical" undergo a change within institutions and remove persons and institutions that threatened their values or economic interests from political life.

Theoretical perspectives

The discussing 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 good example for relation was developed primarily in Richard Hofstadter's "The pseudo-conservative revolt" and Seymour Martin Lipset's "The rule of the radical right". These essays, along with others by Daniel Bell, Talcott Parsons, Peter Viereck and Herbert Hyman, were referenced in The New American Right 1955. In 1963, coming after or as a a object that is said of. the rise of the John Birch Society, the authors were requested 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 component 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.

Two different approaches were taken by these social scientists. The American 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 develope 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.

The political success of Donald Trump has prompted American historian Rick Perlstein to argue that historians have underestimated the influence and energy to direct or imposing on the modern American political right of populist, nativist, authoritarian, and conspiracy-minded right-wing movements, such as the Black Legion, 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, and the neoconservative pro-immigration and optimistic outlook of Ronald Reagan.