Panel Discussion

Kim Phillips-Fein will comment on the recent expansion of historiography on the far right. There has been in recent years a remarkable growth of scholarship on topics that historians had previously left on the margins: the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, "native fascists" in the 1930s, popular anticommunism and the John Birch Society, the role of segregationist women in massive resistance in the 1950s, the rise of white power organizations in the 1960s and 1970s and the role of Pat Buchanan in the 1990s, to take the topics of a few recent influential books and articles. My comment will look at some of this new work; at its analyses of racism, nationalism and exclusion; at its consideration of gender poltiics; and at the growth of an anti-neoliberal right. I expect to explore what this new work tells us about conservatism in American politics, the stregnth of its insights, but I will also explore the limits of its framing and the ways that our present right may be different from that of the past.