When one refers to the Right, or right wing, in the cuts across currents associated with Jeffersonian United States, one begins with a tradition which and Jacksonian democracy.

One must initially note that confusions between conservatives and reactionaries muddy the waters. A conservative tradition, resting on aspects of Puritanism, a more sober view of human nature and behavior, the elitism of the Federalists and, in part, the Whigs, and, importantly the Southern traditionalism associated with John C. Calhoun, must be distinguished from reactionary and characteristically xenophobic movements and moments, ranging from the Alien and Sedition Acts of the 1790s to the anti-Catholic Know-Nothings to the antiReconstruction Ku Klux Klan.

In the twentieth century, the Right stood against the emergence of the welfare state most identified with the New Deal and against the secular trends towards moral relativism, which have engendered what many call “the culture wars.” As such, the Right, in the 1930s through the Liberty League and neo-fascist voices like Father Charles Coughlin, and in the early Cold-War years in the form of McCarthyism, was, for the most part, a reactive force, able to scare and sometimes slow, but never able to halt the tides of modernization and modernity During the 1950s, the contemporary Right began to take form under the leadership of William F. Buckley, Jr. and his National Review, which produced a “fusion” of Cold War anti-communism, economic free-market laissez-faire and cultural traditionalism. When liberalism faltered during the 1960s, battered by failures in Vietnam, racial and generational tensions and the beginnings of economic stagnation, the Right responded with impressive success. The Goldwater campaign of 1964, despite its defeat, formed the cadre and organizational base for the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s. George Wallace pointed the way with his “law-and-order” attacks on liberals, black militants, hippies, student activists and feminists. Richard Nixon modified Wallace’s appeal to his Southern strategy of 1968 and proceeded to mobilize successfully his “Silent Majority” hardhats in the name of patriotism, traditional moral values and racial backlash.

The Right flourished because the challenges posed by the 1960s and early 1970s were so profound and, therefore, frightening (e.g. racial, gender and sexual-choice equalities, a more permissive approach to sexuality language, dress, environmental constraints and challenges to “my country right or wrong”). During the 1970s, the Right was augmented by the rise of a religious Right under the leadership initially of Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority and by the emergence of the neo-conservatives, mostly ex-liberals chastened by what they saw as the excesses of the 1960s. With the deepening economic stagflation of the late 1970s, combined with foreign-policy crises, such as hostages in Iran and Soviets in Afghanistan, the Right marched into power under the sunny Ronald Reagan.

The end of the Cold War has fragmented the Right, as has the relative success of Bill Clinton’s New Democratic strategy of co-opting conservative issues like crime and welfare. The Right, since the high point of the 1994 Gingrich congressional victory has suffered from the mistrust between economic conservatives, mostly focused on probusiness, anti-tax policies, and its cultural conservatives, intent on rolling back what they perceive as secular humanism and cultural relativism.