Old Right (United States) - Views

Views

The Old Right emerged in opposition to the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Hoff says, "moderate Republicans and leftover Republican Progressives like Hoover composed the bulk of the Old Right by 1940, with a sprinkling of former members of the Farmer-Labor party, Non-Partisan League, and even a few midwestern prairie Socialist."

By 1937 they formed a Conservative coalition that controlled Congress until 1964. They were consistently non-interventionist and opposed entering WWII, a position exemplified by the America First Committee. Later, most opposed U.S. entry into NATO and intervention in the Korean War. "In addition to being staunch opponents of war and militarism, the Old Right of the postwar period had a rugged and near-libertarian honesty in domestic affairs as well."

This anti–New Deal movement was a coalition of multiple groups:

  • intellectual individualists and libertarians, including H. L. Mencken, Albert Jay Nock, Rose Wilder Lane, Garet Garrett, Raymond Moley, and Walter Lippmann;
  • laissez-faire liberals, especially the heirs of the Bourbon Democrats like Albert Ritchie of Maryland and Senator James A. Reed of Missouri;
  • pro-business or anti-union Republicans, such as Robert Taft;
  • conservative Democrats from the South, such as Josiah Bailey and Harry F. Byrd;
  • pro-business Democrats such as Al Smith and the founders of the American Liberty League
  • powerful newspaper and magazine publishers, such as William Randolph Hearst of the Hearst chain and Colonel Robert R. McCormick of the Chicago Tribune.
  • reformed radicals who had supported FDR in 1932, such as William Randolph Hearst and Father Charles Coughlin


Robert Nisbet in his book Conservatism: Dream and Reality noted the traditional hostility of the right to interventionism and to increases in military expenditure:

“Of all the misascriptions of the word ‘conservative’ during the last four years, the most amusing, in an historical light, is surely the application of ‘conservative’ to the last-named. For in America throughout the twentieth century, and including four substantial wars abroad, conservatives had been steadfastly the voices of non-inflationary military budgets, and of an emphasis on trade in the world instead of American nationalism. In the two World Wars, in Korea, and in Viet Nam, the leaders of American entry into war were such renowned liberal-progressives as Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy. In all four episodes conservatives, both in the national government and in the rank and file, were largely hostile to intervention; were isolationists indeed..


Jeff Riggenbach argues that some members of the Old Right were actually classical liberals and "were accepted members of the 'Left' before 1933. Yet, without changing any of their fundamental views, all of them, over the next decade, came to be thought of as exemplars of the political 'Right.'"

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