Old Right (United States)

Old Right (United States)

The Old Right is a branch of American conservatism that was most active in the early 20th Century and opposed both New Deal domestic programs of the 1930s and U.S. entry into World War I and World War II.

Many members of this faction were associated with the Republicans of the interwar years led by Robert Taft and Herbert Hoover. Some were Democrats. They were called the "Old Right" to distinguish them from their New Right successors, such as Barry Goldwater, who came to prominence in the 1950s and 1960s and favored an interventionist foreign policy to battle international communism. Many members of the Old Right favored laissez faire classical liberalism; some were business-oriented conservatives; others were ex-radicals who moved sharply to the right, like the novelist John Dos Passos; still others, like the Southern Agrarians, were traditionalists who dreamed of restoring a premodern communal society. The Old Rights devotion to anti-imperialism where at odds with the the spreading of progressive culture and global democracy, the top-down transformation of local heritage, social and institutional engineering of the political Left and even some from the modern Right-wing.

The Old Right per se has faded as an organized movement, but many similar ideas are found amongst paleoconservatives and paleolibertarians.