A Glossary of the Right-Wing Sectors in U.S. Foreign Policy

Tom Barry, Interhemispheric Resource Center

[Militant] Anticommunists: Until the collapse of the Soviet bloc, militant anticommunism served to unify right-wing sectors around a foreign policy that stressed military budget increases, rationalized U.S. support for dictatorial regimes, and supported armed intervention. Unlike cold war liberals, who also identified themselves as anticommunists, the militant anticommunists of the right believed that the battle against communism needed to be fought at home as well as abroad, and they advocated aggressive rollback strategies rather than merely containment and deterrence. Militant anticommunism no longer functions as the backbone of the right’s approach to international affairs, although anticommunist convictions still shape the foreign policy agendas of many right-wing ideologues regarding U.S. relations with China, Cuba, and North Korea. This political agenda of crushing all forms of communist governance has created fissures within the right, dividing the proponents of free trade from those who resist establishing normal business relations with countries ruled by Communist parties.Christian Right: Before the 1970s, the U.S. evangelical movement was a subculture that kept its distance from electoral politics. With a new focus on social conservatism, Republican Party strategists together with neoconservatives and right-wing ideologues encouraged the politicization of the evangelical sectors as part of the New Right fusionism that ushered Ronald Reagan into the presidency in 1981. In foreign policies issues, the Christian Right has made common cause with neoconservatives in focusing U.S. human rights policy on the suppression of religious freedom--particularly in the case of minority Christian and Jewish populations--by Islamic and communist nations. Christian Zionists, who believe that the maintenance of a Jewish state is a precondition for the Second Coming, have led the Christian Right in advocating support for unwavering U.S. support for Israel.

Conservative Internationalists: Neoconservatives often use this label to describe themselves. It distinguishes them from the paleoconservatives, from the realpolitik approach of many traditional mainstream Republicans, and from the liberal internationalism that is found mainly among Democrats. Its distinguishing features include an aggressive antimultilateralism, a righteous absolutism that assumes U.S. moral and cultural supremacy, and a belief that U.S. military supremacy is essential to maintaining a Pax Americana structure of international peace and national security. Conservative internationalists not only believe that Pax Americana makes the world “safe for democracy” in the liberal internationalist tradition but that the U.S. can restructure undemocratic regimes and regions through U.S. government and private sector intervention.

Conservative Mainstream: Today’s conservative mainstream encompasses all sectors of the right who believe that it is possible to operate within the electoral arena, including all the sectors in this glossary. The mainstream includes think tanks and front groups as well as major constituency organizations like the Christian Coalition. The conservative mainstream may call for radical changes in domestic and foreign policies, but it does not embrace the methods of domestic right-wing vigilante groups, although most sectors of the right have supported U.S. assistance to foreign right-wing vigilante groups. In its modern configuration, American conservatism does not imply resisting social change or rejecting the role of government in furthering social change. Rather, most sectors of the conservative mainstream support radical policy reforms to eliminate what they regard as liberal laws and programs and to replace them with ones that reflect their own social, moral, economic, and foreign agendas.

Libertarians: Right-wing libertarians have long been part of the conservative mainstream in their embrace of free market solutions and processes and in their opposition to government intervention in social and economic matters. Both conservative libertarians and progressive civil libertarians resist government infringement on individual civil liberties. Libertarians join in opposing U.S. interventionism and foreign aid with paleoconservatives because of their concern that a foreign policy not closely honed to furthering U.S. national interests dangerously expands the power of the federal government.

National Security Militarists: Closely connected to what President Eisenhower termed the “military-industrial complex,” national security militarists are among the chief proponents of major increases in the military budget and a foreign policy based on U.S. military supremacy as the ultimate guarantor of international peace and national security. Closely allied with the most militant anticommunist sectors of the right, the militarists have in recent years rallied around a grand strategy of U.S. global supremacy built on the foundation of unchallenged military power in order to maintain “the American peace” well into the 21st Century.

Neoconservatives: Neoconservatives constitute an intellectual current that emerged from the cold war liberalism of the Democratic Party. Unlike other elements of the conservative mainstream, neoconservatives generally share historical and social roots in liberal and leftist politics. Disillusioned first with socialism and communism and later with new Democrats (like George McGovern) who came to dominate the Democratic Party in the 1970s, neoconservatives played a key role in boosting the New Right into political dominance in the 1980s. For the most part, neoconservatives--who are disproportionately Jewish (although a number of influential Catholic theologians and political activists have also long been associated with the movement)--are not politicians but rather political analysts, activist ideologues, and scholars who have played a central role in forging the agendas of numerous right-wing think tanks, front groups, and foundations. Neoconservatives profoundly believe both in America’s moral superiority and in the necessity of a strategic alliance with Israel--convictions that facilitate coalitions with the Christian Right. Unlike either core traditionalists of American conservatism or those with isolationist tendencies, neoconservatives are committed internationalists who believe that the United States has both a moral obligation and national security interests in using military supremacy to maintain a Pax Americana free of totalitarian and rogue regimes. Reminiscent of their role in the 1970s, the neoconservatives were instrumental in the late 1990s in helping to fuse diverse elements of the right into a unified force based on a new agenda of U.S. supremacy.

New Right: In the 1970s this populist manifestation of American conservatism represented a revival of the coalition of libertarians, traditionalists, and anticommunists that gave Barry Goldwater the Republican nomination in 1964. Unlike its precursor, however, the New Right fusionist movement included a politicized evangelical sector (the Christian Right), Democrats disaffected with the liberal platform of the new Democratic Party, and the strong intellectual influence, particularly in foreign policy issues, of the neoconservatives.

Old Guard Right: The Old Right is a philosophical sector that focuses on its own writing and publications rather than on political mobilization. Its adherents see themselves as an enlightened “remnant” standing against the forces of liberalization and modernism. The Old Guard Right posits a natural order established by God that the best intentions of humankind cannot change. This natural order includes a constant tension between good and evil, a social hierarchy, and a political and economic aristocracy. It disdains big government, whether in the hands of Democrats or Republicans, and believes that civility and compassion rather than egalitarianism should shape society. Its American roots are found among Southern Agrarians and Taft Republicans, and its niche abuts both paleoconservatives and right-wing libertarians in current political spectrum.

Paleoconservatives: In opposition to neoconservative internationalism, paleoconservatives reject foreign intervention not directly related to protecting U.S. national interests. In contrast to both neoconservatives and liberal inernationalists, paleconservatives follow the right-wing tradition of defining the Western Hemisphere and the Pacific as the U.S. domain and regard with suspicion entanglements in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. Their roots can be traced back to the America First Committee, which opposed U.S. involvement in World War II. After the end of the cold war, the paleoconservatives were one of the few political sectors that criticized the new military interventionism, including both the Gulf War and the humanitarian interventions of the 1990s. On economic issues such as free trade, the paleocons are nationalists and protectionists, while on most domestic issues their posture is one of reactionary populism infused with elements of racism and nativism. Paleoconservatives accuse neoconservatives of usurping and distorting conservatism in America.

Social Conservatives: This sector, mostly focused on domestic issues, arose from the traditionalist backbone of the U.S. conservative movement. Unlike libertarians, social conservatives hold that government has the God-given mandate to enforce a moral order shaped by Judeo-Christian values. Although not all social conservatives are part of the Christian Right, most support the notion of a “culture war” to protect what they regard to be traditional American values from erosion due to secularism, feminism, and cultural relativism. As part of their own backlash against liberalism and the counterculture, many Jewish neoconservatives have championed social conservative political agendas and joined the culture wars against secular humanism and Islamic fundamentalism. The international perspective of social conservatives has historically been filtered through the prism of anticommunism, but in the 1990s, neoconservative authors and activists like Samuel Huntington and William Bennett were instrumental in internationalizing the paranoia that fueled the domestic culture wars of the right by positing that Judeo-Christian values and civilization were threatened around the world.

[Sources: Amy E. Ansell, ed. Unraveling the Right: The New Conservatism in American Thought and Politics (Westview Press, 1998); Chip Berlet and Matthew Lyons, Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort (Guilford Press, 2000); Sara Diamond, Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States (Guilford Press, 1995). Also highly recommended are two glossaries compiled by Political Research Associates that focus on right-wing populism and the Christian Right: Chart of Sectors and Glossary.]