“The Far Right in US History”
Special issue of the Journal of Right-Wing Studies
Call for Proposals

It has now been almost a decade since the beginning of the so-called “fascism debate,” the long-running controversy over the question of whether this label adequately describes former president Donald Trump and his followers. While this dispute shows no signs of ending anytime soon, we can already make two general observations about its evolution. The first is that the evidence in favor of an affirmative response has accumulated over time, with the attempted coup on January 6, 2021, marking a decisive inflection point for many who had hitherto remained skeptical. The longer Trump has been active in national politics, the more scholars and the general public alike have proven receptive to the idea that there may in fact be fascist potentialities within both his movement and his candidacy, even if he himself does not meet all the classic criteria of a fascist leader. However, it is also clear that the debate has yet to produce a real consensus. Many continue to reject the label altogether, either because they prefer a different one such as “right-wing populism,” or because they argue that “fascism,” a term still heavily associated in the public mind with the regimes of Hitler and Mussolini, fails to capture what is new, different, or distinctly American about the MAGA movement.

This discussion has proven so inconclusive that some have called for it to be put to rest. In his edited collection Did It Happen Here? (2024), Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins argued for instance that historians are poorly equipped to grasp the specificities of the present, while Bruce Kuklick in his Fascism Comes to America (2022) claimed that the label had been applied so indiscriminately over the past century as to be unsalvageable for scholarly use.

Yet this debate has proven extremely useful in at least one respect: it has prodded scholars who study the United States to take a more serious look at the role played by actors located to the right of the mainstream conservative movement—in other words, the far right. Substantial work on the topic has been published in recent years by scholars such as Kathleen Belew, Anna Duensing, Bradley Hart, John Huntington, Alex McPhee-Browne, Kim Phillips-Fein, and David Walsh, to cite only a few. Collectively, they urge us to reconsider the importance of a tradition that had long been dismissed as nothing more than an inconsequential collection of fringe figures. This special issue of the Journal of Right-Wing Studies aims not only to encourage the emergence of this new and exciting scholarship, but also to step back and reflect on how it changes the conventional narrative of US history. In so doing, it takes Steinmetz-Jenkins’s suggestion to heart and calls for proposals that focus less on our current moment than on the past, which needs to be understood on its own terms. We therefore encourage proposals that explore far-right activity in the United States in all its contested and diverse expressions.

We invite proposals on the following list of topics (without any temporal restriction), though suggestions dealing with different themes are also welcome:

• The place of the far right in popular culture, including but not restricted to skinheads, zines, white power music, and video games
• Far-right media outlets, either on their own or in relationship with mainstream media or new media technologies
• The changing definition of what counts as “extreme” or “radical,” as opposed to “mainstream” or “respectable,” in both public and academic circles
• The influence of far-right groups and politicians in local, state, and national politics
• The far-right view of the place of the United States in the world and the US far right’s relationship with like-minded groups overseas
• The internal divisions within the far right as to strategy, ideology, religion, ethnicity, race, and gender, among other matters
• The relationship of far-right intellectuals with political and cultural activism
• The role of memory in the far-right worldview, and in particular the place of the Old South and the Confederacy
• The changing place of antisemitism, racism, and conspiracy theories in the repertoire of the far right
• The relationship of the far right with the mainstream conservative movement, and with the Republican and Democratic parties
• The shifting role of far-right terrorism, vigilantism, and militias, and how this violence relates to political parties, law enforcement, and the state.
• The far right’s sources of funding, its relationship with business and labor forces, and the political economy of far-right politics more broadly
• The relationship between faith and the far right, including “Christian nationalism,” evangelical Protestantism, Catholic social teaching, and non-Christian religions
• “Culture war” politics and other drivers of polarization and radicalization
• The role of courts, laws, and the legal profession in legitimizing or mainstreaming far-right ideologies
• The function of gender and sexuality on the far right, including not just masculinist performance or a defense of traditional gender roles but also less conventional right-wing actors

Interested authors are invited to send a 500-word abstract and CV by November 1, 2024, to jrwsspecialissue@gmail.com.
The authors of the proposals that are selected will then have until March 3, 2025, to submit full drafts.