Radical Politics: The Far Right

Redefining the Right Wing.

During the 1950s, with the emergence of the United States as a global power and as the leader of the West in the Cold War, the right wing in American politics had to reinvent itself. Though the right wing maintained its opposition to federal involvement in domestic issues that made it anti-New Deal during the 1930s and 1940s, it abandoned its isolationist position in foreign policy which was incompatible with their militant anticommunism. The far-right elements that had tended to xenophobia and nativism before World War II muted these aspects of their message after the war, when they discovered that their militant anticommunism appealed to many of the same religious and ethnic groups who had been the targets of their hate in the 1930s, notably Irish and East European Catholics. The new, militantly anticommunist right wing considered American foreign policy, including the doctrine of containment, to be too...

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