Reimagining The Far Right

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• Reimagining The Far Right
• Alex McPhee-Browne (bio)

Leo P. Ribuffo’s The Old Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right from the Great Depression to the Cold War. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983. xix + 274 pp. Notes and Index.

All historical work is, at least implicitly, revisionist. All historical work seeks to alter our perception of a set of individuals, ideas, or events. But some work is Revisionist with a capital R, capable of profoundly, if often subtly, shifting the existing terms of debate, opening a new perspective that comes to seem like common sense. The late Leo Ribuffo’s first book, The Old Christian Right (1983), was one of those works, a tour de force that made us see the past of the Great Depression and the early Cold War in a new and unsettling light.

With far-right movements flourishing across the globe, a return to and reconsideration of Ribuffo’s work can provide us with a deeper understanding of the roots, significance, and impact of the far right in twentieth- and twenty-first-century America. The Old Christian Right was published when the American far right was largely, though not wholly, in abeyance, and Ribuffo’s account of the far right of the 1930s and 1940s provided a definitive analysis of the political fortunes of the movement in those pivotal decades. Ribuffo wrote with a skeptical eye and a roving curiosity. What made his work so fresh—and so prescient—was its utter refusal to carry on a tradition of analysis inherited from the postwar era. Although the subjects of his book, as he noted, were not heroes—indeed, they were “villains” (p. xi)—he refused to treat them with anything but the utmost scrupulous, probing, and critical respect, the kind of respect due any subject of historical inquiry, however repugnant their views or even their actions.

In practice, this principle, Ribuffo believed, had been ignored by the previous generation’s literature on the far right. Scholars such as Seymour Martin Lipset and Richard Hofstadter had tended to pathologize the far right, attributing its rancor and extreme beliefs to a mix of “status anxiety,” fundamentalist Christianity, psychopathology, and the deracinating force of industrial capitalism. [End Page 295] These “pluralist”—or “consensus”—scholars, Ribuffo argued, seldom provided a comprehensive explanation of the ideology held by members of the right or left “extremes,” even as a prelude to subsequent analysis. Their beliefs, instead, were treated by pluralists as tokens of personal neuroses or status deprivation; they were caricatured rather than examined as “complex human beings” (p. xi).

The concept of “extremism,” originally used to make sense of the fractious politics of the 1930s, dominated post-World War II scholarship on the far right. This was due, in part, Ribuffo noted, to three factors: an increasing reliance on social science to counter organized bigotry, a reassessment by centrist academics of former progressive and Popular Front beliefs, and the emergence of senator Joseph R. McCarthy. The result was a scholarship that substituted for class analysis a vague—and often dubious—focus on social status and “authoritarian” personalities (p. 238). Disregarding primary research, for the most part, the pluralist scholars expressed the themes of the 1930s crusade against native fascism in a social science vernacular, warning of the power and appeal of the far right and the nation’s susceptibility to its influence. This was the basis, Ribuffo wrote, “for a sweeping interpretation of American life now so commonplace that it barely needs review” (p. 239).

Positing a far left and a far right at odds with a “pragmatic” center, pluralist scholars argued that “extremists,” rather than pursuing tangible economic benefits, sought psychological and emotional relief from status anxiety (p. 240). Yet pluralist scholars’ reductive polemics against “pseudo-conservatives,” Ribuffo argued, concealed rather than clarified the nature of the far right (p. 239). Members of the far right of the 1930s, he insisted, were not paranoiacs, psychologically outside the realm of normal pluralist politics, as Hofstadter had suggested, but integrated members of American political life. Indeed, members of the far right were in many ways more complex psychologically and ideologically than their liberal foes. This argument, elaborated at length by Ribuffo, is...