Panel Discussion

I'm tempted to title my remarks "The Howl of Minerva"—not just that understanding tends to come retrospectively, but that, when it does come, there exists a tendency to reinterpret much, if not all, of what came before. This has been the case with historians and the "far right" during and after Donald Trump's presidential campaigns and one term in office. I think "far right" remains a useful term, because the distinction between that and a more "mainstream" right allows us to better track the shifts among conservative elites since 2015—the new publications, think tanks, fundraising campaigns, etc that followed his rise. This is not a critique of the excellent work that's been done on, say, the importance of the John Birch society, white nationalist groups, and other radical groups in recent years. It is to say, based on my own experience as a young conservative, that attentiveness to the dynamic interplay between the "far right" and more supposedly mainstream conservative elites remains an important dimension of understanding the right, and that maintaining some sense of distinction between them, however porous that ends up in practice, allows us to do that.