The Metaphor of the Fringe in the Historiography of the American Right

Not since the late 1950s and early 1960s have Americans heard as much about a right-wing fringe as they have in the six years since the election of Donald Trump. Just to name a few examples in what turned out to be a parade of horrors: in 2017, white supremacist groups attacked peaceful advocates of racial equality in Charlottesville, North Carolina, killing one. An anti-Semitic extremist killed 11 people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018. In 2019, a xenophobic white-supremacist targeted Latinos, murdering 23 people in El Paso, Texas. And a coalition of right-wing extremists coordinated and participated in the attack on the U.S. Capitol to overturn the election of President-elect Joseph Biden in 2021. Many journalists have asked “what happened to America’s political center of gravity?”1 The “menace,” they report, finally “has entered the mainstream,” as “the GOP fringe has taken over American politics.”2 If journalists and commentators expressed surprise at the power of the so-called far-right fringe, historians John Huntington and Edward Miller do not. Huntington’s Far-Right Vanguard: The Radical Roots of Modern Conservatism and Edward Miller’s A Conspiratorial Life: Robert Welch, the John Birch Society, and the Revolution of American Conservatism have located new sources—people, organizations and events long neglected or taken for granted—and their different histories converge on a compelling argument: the growing power of the American right in the late 20th century derived not from the influence of the so-called respectable right and mainstream Republican Party, but from the far right, or ultraright. The ultraright’s activists led the growth of the right in every way: they fueled the communications used to educate a wider grassroots right and a national political leadership; they peopled movement