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Researching the Right for Progressive Changemakers
 

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A Topical Definition

Selected Right Wing Topical Issues and Approved State Function

What is it that makes the right the right? The diversity within the right can be confusing, yet there is a back beat to these many melodies of the right-the issue of equality. Sara Diamond has offered the most concise definition that covers the widest variety of right-wing tendencies: "To be right-wing means to support the state in its capacity as enforcer of order and to oppose the state as distributor of wealth and power downward and more equitably in society. Throughout the history of U.S. right-wing movements, we...see this recurring pattern as one organization after another worked to bolster capitalism, militarism, and moral traditionalism."7

Using Diamond's definition and viewing the right in terms of its political and social mobilization around certain core themes, Diamond in Roads to Dominion divided the US right between WWII and the end of the Cold War into four broad movements: the anticommunist right, the racist right, the Christian right, and the neoconservatives. Each of these sectors had adherents that ranged from moderate to militant, pursued various methodological strategies and tactics, and stressed different themes in an infinite matrix of individualized combinations. What a particular right-wing social or political movement views as the legitimate enforcement functions of the state depends on its key topical demands.

Chart Two

Sector Opposes State Should Defend
Economic
Economic regulations Unrestricted Capitalism
Taxation Wealth
Land use regulations Property rights
Internationalism National business interests
Free Trade Trade Restrictions
Social
Collectivism Individualism
Mass democracy Elitist oligarchy
Dissent and rebellion Law and order
Racial diversity Racial purity
Cultural
Unorthodox behavior Traditional morality
Multiculturalism Monoculturalism
Religious diversity Core religious tenets
Feminism & Gay Rights Heterosexual patriarchy

Chart Three

(Note that in any sector actual participants may range from peaceful to violent)
More willing and able to use democratic methods:
"Moderates"
Fiscal conservatism
Economic libertarianism
Neoconservatism
Business nationalism
Corporatist internationalism
Militarism & unilateralism
Christian orthodoxy & fundamentalism
Social orthodoxy & traditionalism
Patriot constitutionalists & regressive populism
Reactionary anti-modernism
Paleoconservatism
Theocratic Christian nationalism
White racial nationalism
Far Right
Revolutionary activism
White supremacist genocidalism
Fascism
Neonazism
"Extremists"
More willing and able to use authoritarian methods

Diamond's definition and topical analysis of the right is an important additional to our analytical tool box, but other dimensions need to be examined at the same time, especially the methods deemed appropriate by a particular movement to achieve its goals, (ranging from democratic civil discourse to armed revolution) which itself is often, but not always, related to the degree of zealousness of belief.

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7 Sara Diamond, Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States. (New York: Guilford, 1995), p. 9.
 

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