Conservatism, the Right Wing, and the Far Right: A Guide to Archives. Archie Henderson

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СКАЧАТЬ href="#ulink_f651f7b7-b33f-54c6-a519-8499acc06230">23 Other divisive issues include disputes with science (evolution, human equality, vaccination, and climate change) as well as child labor.

It is beyond the scope of this introduction to offer working definitions of the terms embodied in the title of the guide. It is, in fact, likely that, for each of the terms "conservatism," "right wing," and "extreme right," there are as many definitions as there are for the term "terrorism," for which more than 100 have been catalogued.24 It has been stated that "There is little uniformity in how scholars characterize the right in modern Western societies."25 Michael Whine describes the definitional problem as "a continuing problem for researchers of the far right."26 Especially today in the United States, when "the mainstream Republican Party has become ideologically extreme," the distinctions between mainstream conservatism and extremism are blurred beyond recognition.27 For purposes of this guide, however, the right may be characterized broadly as any political ideology or expression generally considered to be to the right of center as to any particular issue or range of issues. It is broad enough to encompass everything from the American nativist movement of the 1830s and 1840s to the Tea Party movement of recent years; from Russian right-wing periodicals of the 1870s to their counterparts in the 1990s and early 2000s; from the Old Right to the New Right; and from traditional conservatism to the extreme anti-Semitic right. As such, the field is practically inexhaustible. No single archive, no matter how large and impressive, covers all aspects of the right; but considered together, the archives give a wonderfully comprehensive view of the major themes and concerns of the right. The cumulative index to this volume gives an idea of the full range of materials held by archival collections. Neither is an attempt is made to define "archive" other than through the recognition, as reflected in the numbered entries, that archives include collections of materials in all media, including digital-only and born-digital materials.

Uniting many (though by no means all) figures of the right is a viewpoint, expressed in words or actions, that stands in opposition to proposed, established, or evolving changes in social behavior, attitudes, or institutions. Whatever differences they may otherwise have, conservatives and right-wing extremists stand opposed to something. As Ivan Zoltan Denes writes, "While modern liberalism posited a relatively independent and specific value system, conservatism was primarily negative in nature: it did not so much assert as deny."28 As evidence of this, the present guide records no fewer than a thousand different examples of oppositional viewpoints, which are listed in the index under "anti-," followed by the object of opprobrium. Not all of these examples characterize the right (anti-Fascism being one of many counter-examples); but the vast majority of them do. Among the better-known examples are anti-abortion, anti-Communism, anti-desegregation, and anti-United Nations. In 1962, Walter D. Wagoner attributed this insistent negativism to a desire for an idyllic past:

One of the curses of this strife is that it is many fights: not only against communism, but how to fight communism, what means are justifiable in the anti-communist crusade, and, indeed, serious debate whether anti-communism is the main motivation of these Red Raiders. The American Right Wing makes it more than clear that there are many issues hidden behind the smokescreen of anti-communism. Billy James Hargis, Dr. Fred Schwarz, Carl McIntire, General Walker, Admiral Crommelin, John Kasper, Robert (John Birch) Welch, Edgar Bundy, William Buckley, and the other leaders of these anti-democratic reactionaries can be likened to a destroyer flotilla, fortunately without a single attack pattern, which in its offensive against the communist fleet lays down a smoke screen of slogans, war cries, and invective. Behind this smoke screen are landing craft of all sizes and shapes: no income tax, no United Nations, no NAACP, no foreign aid, no National Council of Churches, no National Education Association, no Harvard, no NATO, no Fifth Amendment, no Justice Warren, no Unions, no Social Security, etc., etc. This is why this movement is literally reactionary. It is almost one hundred per cent negative, desiring to return to some pre-McKinley state of bliss.29

In 1975, Kirkpatrick Sale described the rise of George Wallace as an example of a "broad adversarianism, a being-against. Wallace has no real policies, plans, or platforms, and no one expects them of him; it is sufficient that he is agin and gathers unto him others who are agin, agin the blacks, the intellectuals, the bureaucrats, the students, the journalists, the liberals, the outsiders, the Communists, the changers, above all, agin the Yankee establishment."30 Matthew Continetti sees a line from Wallace to Donald Trump, whose "antagonism toward the Eastern establishment is obvious."31

       Many of the threats as perceived by the American right go to the heart of their understanding of what America is, or was, or should be. Rising to prominence in various times and places are the perceived threats to de-Americanize (or foreignize, colonize, invade, alienize, or Balkanize) America (immigration), to Catholicize America (Catholic immigration), to Judaize America (predominance of Jews in the Roosevelt administration), to feminize America (women's suffrage, gay rights), to federalize and bureaucratize America (New Deal), to sovietize (or communize or enslave) America (Communism, socialism), to internationalize America (pluralism, multiculturalism, modernism, world government, World Court, United Nations), to mass medicate or mass narcotize America (brainwashing, drugs, fluoridation of water, mental health treatment), to poison America (fluoridation, adulteration or irradiation of food, vaccination), to mongrelize America (desegregation), and to secularize or de-Christianize America (the school prayer issue). Many of the collections described in this guide embody these dramatized conflicts.

It should not be assumed that a listing for a collection implies that the collection is principally devoted to right-wing materials. In many cases, the description lists only those items from a collection which are most relevant to the subject of this guide. Many individuals and organizations, for example, have carried on correspondence with public figures of both the left and right; for such collections, only the "rightist" material, or material commenting on the right, is summarized. Perhaps surprisingly, the papers and records of many leftist, socialist, and feminist persons and organizations are also included and are often among the most useful. It may be true, as Tanya Zanish-Belcher and Kären M. Mason write, that "women's archives [i.e., archival repositories] today may have a feminist bias and may fail to document groups that do not share these values or who actively oppose these values, such as right-wing organizations or right-to-life groups."32 As an institutional policy, many repositories may indeed choose not to collect representative material from both sides of an issue; in any event, feminist groups, and leftist organizations in general, have often collected material of, or about, their counterparts at the other end of the political spectrum. As John Earl Haynes writes, "Creating background files on one's opponents is a normal action by any institution or movement engaged in an ideological and organizational struggle."33 This activity of documenting the groups which oppose them has served the political or other interests of the organizations which have collected the material. For example, Planned Parenthood has studied cassette tapes featuring an anti-abortion group; by studying the arguments of the opposition, Planned Parenthood felt that it could better respond in the media.34 In the UK, left-leaning groups surveyed anti-immigrationists for the purposes of information-gathering.35 As a result of this common collecting practice by groups on the left, a number of leftist collections are included in the present guide. This tactic is not exclusive to the left, as those on the right have done the same thing. For example, "[a] small portion of the [Paul O. Peters] collection is devoted to left-wing materials gathered by Peters so that he might better understand his opposition."СКАЧАТЬ