If there is one thing that the events of recent years have made clear, it is that we need to rethink our existing narratives of the place of far-right politics in United States history. This panel brings together people who have participated in, studied, and interpreted right-wing aspects of American politics for both academic and public audiences to ask some broad questions about the nation’s political spectrum. How do we define “far right” and is there a more useful terminology we could use to depict the political movements and ideas traditionally classified under that heading? What is the relationship between the “far right” and mainstream conservatism? And what is the most effective way to convey the history of the antidemocratic far right to the public?

In part this panel is inspired by relatively recent political events. Many historians, along with observers in the Democratic and Republican parties, failed to see the lasting impact of white nationalist, anti-government, and illiberal currents because these were considered part of an unfortunate but largely spent political tendency. This may have been because we insufficiently understood the history of the far right. Five and half years ago, labor historian Jefferson Cowie published an article called “How Labor Scholars Missed the Trump Revolt.” Political historians now need to ask the same question.

This panel is also a thirtieth-anniversary revisiting of Alan Brinkley's classic "The Problem of American Conservatism," which inspired an entire generation of historians to write more about conservatism and to take it more seriously as an ideology. Previously, too many histories dismissed conservatives as figures of a long gone past, not as part of a very alive political tradition that was reproducing itself all along. It seems as if we have a similar historiographic problem with the far right. It may be that by not interrogating fully enough how much "conservatism" and "the far right" historically overlapped, historians ended up replicating the sort of narratives that conservatives themselves used to distance themselves from antidemocratic and reactionary movements.