Iberian Vistas: Franco,Salazar,and American Conservatives

Abstract

The article takes both a historical and a present-oriented look at the influence of the twentieth-century authoritarian Iberian regimes—including their leaders, Franco and Salazar—on the American conservative movement. It explores the political and religious motivations and major narratives driving Hispanophilia and Lusophilia, and their main advocates. Furthermore, and with a comparative approach, the text analyzes the past and current arguments—in magazines, books, and social media—favoring both regimes, especially in the light of the revival within American conservatism of Catholic Integralism and the defense of alternative representative systems, such as corporatism, that could usher in a new postliberal political regime. The article further explores the potential impact—and inherent limitations—of such strategies and projects, and shows that the revival of interest in figures such as Franco and Salazar is significant not only in terms of a reinvigorated criticism of the political and moral philosophy of liberalism but also regarding the search for new political forms and regimes.

Introduction

It is “complete madness, a crazy idea,” said Francis Fukuyama in an interview with a Portuguese newspaper, “but currently several North American conservative intellectuals have highly praised your former president Salazar—and dictator—as a model for the United States” (Diário de Notícias, 2022). “Make no mistake,” Fukuyama further admonished in an article for The Unpopulist (2023), “[t]his is not your grandfather’s conservatism,” critiquing the rise of a New Right that praises “Spain’s Francisco Franco or Portugal’s António Salazar who were happy to see democracy abolished in their countries.”

Fukuyama’s words are part and parcel of a wider frame: the ongoing fears from advocates of an open liberal society about the worldwide decline of liberal democracies and the parallel rise of an illiberal wave. Illiberalism itself is an elastic concept that evades a clear-cut and fixed definition, and is characterized by a number of scholars as featuring strong executives and weakened legislatures and judiciaries, and existing in a continuum, “from democracy to non-democracy, describing a move from the former to the latter” (Laruelle, 2022: 303). Against the perceived threat of an elite-driven liberal authoritarianism—and its promotion of policies deemed destructive to the common good—illiberal democracies have risen and put at the center of politics the idea of “unrestrained popular sovereignty” and of the supremacy of the majority and its common interests over minorities and individuals (Smilova, 2022: 193).

With this broader context in mind, this article is more narrowly focused on a particular, US-based challenge to the liberal order that, for political or religious reasons, has embraced some of the experiments, leadership styles, and legacies of the twentieth-century authoritarian regimes of the Iberian Peninsula. The primary focus of the article is on two periods where the conservative interest in Franco and Salazar surged: in the 1950s and 1960s, amid the Cold War and Decolonization, and in the years since 2010 when there was renewed discussion of the merits of authoritarian and illiberal visions. Literature in books, newspapers and magazines, as well as websites, blogs, and podcasts that provide insights into these views provide the basis for the analysis. The article maps out the views expressed by the American conservative movement in magazines like National Review or Triumph on the Franco and Salazar regimes during the Cold War and Decolonization. It then analyzes the continuity of these views over time to their current reappraisal and acclaim from some sectors of the US Right. This modern-day reappraisal and acclaim for the Franco and Salazar regimes has reemerged in the context of a backlash against the perceived excesses of progressivism and liberalism.

This present-day embrace of both Franco and Salazar is a sign of a broader phenomenon of the resurgence of a more combative Right—whether more secular or more religious—that is uninterested in accommodating a hostile liberalism but fully committed to a cultural war against it, while craving a systematic change of the political system that may lead to a postliberal order. The revival particularly since the 2010s of Catholic Integralism—and its founding premise that temporal power should be subordinated to spiritual power—is a manifestation of this new illiberal/postliberal wave, driven by the idea that “liberalism can no longer lay exclusive claim to justifying political authority” (Pappin, 2022: 55). This neo-Integralism (as it is also called) is also one of the sources of fondness for past regimes such as those of Salazar and Franco and their commitment to God, Fatherland, and Authority. This also suggests a revival of older varieties of conservatism, especially “paleoconservatism,” as a significant force in the US political landscape.

The American Conservative Movement

When discussing the American conservative movement, we are not referencing conservatism as a general sensibility or groups that have historically supported the Republican Party. It is a specific political movement that emerged in the US after World War II, seeking to challenge the New Deal liberalism that was then dominant in the country (Nash, 1976). Its birth was marked by the publication of important books, such as The Conservative Mind by Russell Kirk, and the founding of the magazine National Review by William F. Buckley, Jr. in 1955. This movement brought together multiple ideological tendencies that had little in common with each other beyond opposition to contemporary liberalism. Early conservatives included free-market advocates who wanted a return to pre-New Deal economic norms, as well as cultural traditionalists who sought to halt and reverse cultural innovations they considered deleterious.

These disparate factions were not immediately united, but through the work of theorists such as Frank Meyer (1962), a new variety of conservatism (later called “fusionism”) sought to combine concern for individual liberty and individual virtue into a single, semi-coherent political program. Conservatism has since evolved, welcoming new factions and emphasizing different issues depending on the political circumstances, but this understanding of conservatism has since been widely embraced by the US center-right in subsequent decades.

One common denominator among early conservatives was a preoccupation with the Cold War, which they viewed in apocalyptic terms. America’s struggle with the Soviet Union was not like earlier foreign policy concerns. According to conservative thinkers like James Burnham (1947) and Whitaker Chambers (1952), the fate of all civilization was at stake, and many current indicators suggested the US was losing the conflict. Although conservatives at that time expressed their support for limited government as a principle, most were adamant that defeating the Soviet Union must be the movement’s overriding concern. Buckley (1952), for instance, stated that totalitarian measures would perhaps be needed to secure victory.

This variety of conservatism eventually came to dominate the Republican Party, especially after the conservative Senator Barry Goldwater won the Republican presidential nomination in 1964. Goldwater subsequently lost the presidential election in a landslide, but his primary victory cemented conservatism as a key player in American politics. Sixteen years after Goldwater’s defeat, Ronald Reagan won the presidency on a platform very similar to Goldwater’s. The mainstream American conservative movement has faced many challengers from the political right (Hawley, 2016), but its ideological agenda remains dominant within the Republican Party and right-wing media.

Catholicism in the Early Conservative Movement

Today’s conservatives who praise Franco and Salazar are, in some ways, following an old American conservative tradition. Fascination with mid-twentieth-century Spain was a common denominator among many of the most important conservative intellectuals and journalists from that era. However, whereas many of today’s contemporary rightists are eager to praise, or at least respect, the authoritarian regimes in Spain and Portugal for their politics, earlier generations of conservatives were drawn to those countries for religious and cultural reasons, as well.

Among the most influential post-war American conservatives, Roman Catholics were massively overrepresented, compared to their share of the population, and even more so when compared to the typical supporter of the Republican Party (Allitt, 1994 [1993]; Hawley, 2022). Although white evangelical Protestants would be the most important demographic for the rise of conservatism as a political force, Catholics took a leading role in shaping the ideological orientation of post-war American conservatism. Most notably, William F. Buckley, Jr., who is reasonably considered a pivotal founder of the movement (Nash, 1976), took his Catholic identity very seriously and wrote on the subject extensively throughout his life (Buckley, 1998). In the early years of National Review, Buckley counted vanishingly few evangelical Protestants among his professional collaborators (Harp, 2019).

Other leading conservatives from that era were either raised Catholic or converted to Catholicism as adults. The scholar Willmoore Kendall (one of Buckley’s professors at Yale) was a Catholic convert (Owen, 2021), as was Russell Kirk. Buckley’s brother-in-law and fellow editor at National Review, L. Brent Bozell, also converted to Catholicism, and would eventually make religion his entire focus—Bozell later rejected American conservatism entirely, especially the fusionist variety, becoming an advocate of Catholic theocracy (Kelly, 2014). Frank Meyer, also a National Review editor, became a Catholic at the very end of his life. The same was true for political theorist and fervent anti-communist James Burnham—who was also a National Review editor (Kelly, 2002).

The disproportionately Catholic influence on the early conservative movement had several consequences. Importantly, it meant that post-war conservatives would exhibit none of the anti-Catholic bigotry that had characterized earlier American right-wing movements. Buckley (1992) also sought to rid conservatism of antisemitism. These new conservatives thus sought to be more ecumenical, welcoming Jewish Americans into intellectual positions on the American right, and they took it for granted that Catholics would play a leading role (Chelini-Pont, 2018).

Because they were so disproportionately Catholic, however, the “cultural traditionalism” that these conservatives promoted was distinct from trends in the evangelical revival that was occurring in the US at that same time. In some cases, conservative intellectuals openly rejected American Protestantism, believing that majority Catholic countries were morally, religiously, and culturally superior to the US. This was especially true for Bozell (2004: 32), who criticized the United States, noting that “Everyone recognizes that American today is not a Christian country.” This may partly explain why so many post-war American conservatives expressed fascination with Spain.

Beyond being a staunch Catholic, Buckley also had strong cultural connections to Spain and Spanish culture. Buckley’s father had important oil interests in Mexico, and Spanish was actually the first language William F. Buckley, Jr. acquired. For the rest of his life, Buckley maintained a love for Spanish language and culture. Other leading figures at National Review lived for a time in Franco’s Spain, including Kendall and Bozell. They and other conservatives expressed their admiration for Spanish culture, which they found more pious, authentic, and conservative than the US. As conservative scholar Richard Weaver (1931: 2) put it, Spain is “a land of sunshine, color, and romance.”

Franco: View From the Right

From its early days, the American conservative movement was consistently supportive of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, who led Nationalist forces during the Spanish Civil War and served as the country’s dictator from 1939 until his death in 1975. During the civil war, Franco was supported by fascist governments in Italy and Germany. He maintained formal Spanish neutrality in World War II, but he did allow Germany to recruit Spanish volunteers for its war effort. Although American conservatives did not deny that Franco was a dictator that collaborated with fascist governments, he was viewed as a heroic figure by conservatives because of his victory over far-left forces during the civil war. From their perspective, Franco was responsible for keeping Spain from becoming a new outpost of communism in Western Europe.

In the context of the Cold War, American conservative fascination with Franco’s regime makes more sense. In the post-war conservative imagination, Franco was a Christian statesman who had defeated the forces of international communism in his country, a leader who would be a valuable ally in the conflict for the foreseeable future. This, in their view, was far more important than the fact he was a dictator. Many conservative American Catholics viewed Franco as “the George Washington of Spain and interpreted his war by analogy with the American War of Independence” (Allitt, 1994 [1993]: 25).

Among leading figures at National Review, we find many instances of conservatives expressing admiration for Franco. In 1957, Buckley stated,

General Franco is an authentic national hero. It is generally conceded that he above others had the combination of talents, perseverance, and the sense of righteousness of his cause, that were required to wrest Spain out of the hands of visionaries, ideologues, Marxists and nihilists that were imposing on her, in the thirties, a regime so grotesque as to do violence to the Spanish soul, to deny, even, Spain’s historical identity (Buckley, 1957: 389).

According to one editorial from the magazine’s early years, “The government of Francisco Franco is unattractive to us for many reasons. But Franco is a part, and an integral part, of Western Civilization” (Buckley, 1957: 221). These sentiments would be expressed many times in the magazine in the forthcoming years. Most American conservatives recognized that Franco was a dictator, and, aside from a few exceptions like Bozell, they did not want to see his form of government imported to the US. They nonetheless appreciated him as a heroic anti-communist and bulwark of Catholic tradition (Clements, 2022).

From the conservative perspective, the fact that liberals would not support an ally like Franco during the Cold War showed that they were more interested in defeating the right in all its forms than in halting Soviet aggression. The leftists who were so eager to denounce Franco, conservatives noted, turned a blind eye to communist and anti-colonial atrocities across the globe. Liberals discussing Franco and the Spanish Civil War further demonstrate their hypocrisy by downplaying violence committed by the left throughout the conflict. According to James Burnham (1964: 212), “Left-wing trade unionists and Marxian politicians massacred by Franco strike a liberal’s attention more forcibly than nuns, priests and tradition-minded peasants massacred by Franco’s opponents.”

The fact that Franco was a dictator was also not necessarily problematic for conservatives. Conservatives of that era, most notably Russell Kirk, were not committed to democracy promotion in other countries. This traditionalist view held that different peoples require different forms of government (Kirk, 1993), and it may have been the case that the most appropriate form of government for Spain was a right-wing dictatorship.

Conservative writer Jeffrey Hart’s article on Spain was one of the most controversial articles ever published at National Review. Many conservatives such as Buckley had argued that, even though Franco had done some terrible things over the course of his career, he must nonetheless be recognized as an important statesman who was doing what he could to defend Catholic Spain from the forces of international communism. They further argued his crimes must be put in context, noting the war crimes committed by Franco’s opponents during the civil war. In a 1973 article in National Review, however, Hart went a step further and argued that Franco’s most significant war crimes never happened. In “The Great Guernica Fraud,” Hart argued that the infamous bombing of Guernica, with assistance from Nazi Germany, never actually took place—a position most historians of the Spanish Civil War unequivocally reject. To the credit of National Review editors, in a subsequent issue they gave space to historians who had misgivings with Hart’s argument, but in doing so they nonetheless inaccurately implied that there was still a debate among historians as to whether the bombing of Guernica was a real historical event.

Franco received unsurprisingly laudatory obituaries from conservatives following his death in 1975. James Burnham (1975: 1288) declared that “Francisco Franco was our century’s most successful ruler.” Another obituary in National Review, technically published before Franco’s death, and written by Buckley’s (1974: 1283) brother, stated Franco was

a Spaniard out of the heroic annals of the nation, a giant. He will be truly mourned by Spain because with all his heart and might and soul, he loved his country, and in the vast context of Spanish history, did well by it.

Conservatives continued to express admiration for Franco in the years after his death. In 1981, William F.Buckley (1981) defended Franco’s record:

Say what you like about Franco, the Spanish people—those of them who were willing to let their political appetites hibernate—did well. They prospered economically—all classes of Spaniards. And the peace was longer under Franco than at any time in Spanish history.

Eventually, however, as Spain transitioned into a secular liberal democracy, conservative interest in Spain and its previous dictator began to dissipate. In 1987, conservative scholar Allan Bloom (1987: 159) suggested Franco was interesting primarily because “Throne and Altar” conservatism “breathed its last only with Francisco Franco in 1975.” In other words, Franco was already an anachronism at the time of his death. In the 1990s and early 2000s, we can find little evidence of further conservative interest in Franco and no suggestions from significant figures that Americans should consider importing his model of governance to the US.

Declining interest in Franco corresponded to a significant evolution in US conservatism. Although they had been on a collision course for some time, the 1980s experienced a considerable internal battle between the “neoconservatives,” who were taking leading roles in the movement, and the “paleoconservatives,” who opposed their ideological agenda (Continetti, 2022). In particular, the neoconservatives sought to make the movement more expressly egalitarian, shedding, among other things, the opposition to civil rights legislation that had been common among an older generation of conservatives (Friedman, 2005). Neoconservatives were also known for their relative idealism when it came to foreign policy.

Paleoconservatives, for their part, rejected this approach, insisting that neoconservatives conceded too much to the political left—and may even be properly classified as left-wing themselves (Drolet and Williams, 2020; Hawley, 2016; Scotchie, 2002). Paleoconservatism was marked by its nativism, isolationism, radical cultural traditionalism, and continued skepticism toward pivotal civil rights legislation. Former Nixon and Reagan staffer Patrick J. Buchanan, who unsuccessfully sought the Republican presidential nomination twice in the 1990s, was paleoconservatism’s most famous proponent (Hemmer, 2022). Buchanan, incidentally, was also a great admirer of Franco in his youth (Getlin, 1992). Paleoconservatives unquestionably lost their fight with the neoconservatives over the future of the conservative movement and, by extension, the Republican Party. Paleoconservative writers like Sam Francis were marginalized, largely because of their history of racist statements (Hawley, 2016). By the time George W. Bush became president of the US, paleoconservatives were little more than a footnote in the movement’s history.

Over the last decade, and especially since Donald Trump launched his political career, new varieties of right-wing thought, sharing many traits with paleoconservatism, have seemingly become ascendant in the US. During this time, some on the right, such as conservative writer Rod Dreher (2019), have argued mainstream conservatism—the fusionist philosophy that combined support for free markets, cultural traditionalism, and a hawkish foreign policy into a coherent ideology—had become outdated. “Zombie Reaganism” had controlled the Republican Party for too long, and it was time for American rightists to put that philosophy to pasture, replacing it with a more muscular right-wing ideology.

Although the original paleoconservatives played little role in Donald Trump’s movement, and none in his administration—by that time, most leading paleoconservatives were elderly (Patrick Buchanan, Paul Gottfried) or deceased (Sam Francis, Mel Bradford)—new right-wing currents in American life, inspired by Trump, could reasonably be described as heirs to the paleoconservatives (Drolet and Williams, 2020). It is likely not coincidental that this revival of an older, more reactionary variety of conservatism has coincided with a new conservative interest in figures like Franco.

Some of the rightward shift we see among conservatives can be credited to technological changes. New means of communication have changed the nature of the American right. Publications like National Review once had extraordinary influence over mainstream conservatism, and being banned from a relatively small number of conservative print publications would ruin the career of a right-wing writer in the latter decades of the twentieth century. As recently as the 1990s, when a publication like National Review signaled that it was moving in a more progressive direction on an issue, such as race, it had a meaningful impact on conservative discourse nationwide (Hawley, 2016). That is arguably no longer the case. Thanks to the Internet, individuals can set up a quality website in just a few hours, and if they find an audience, they can build a career without support from mainstream publications. National Review, it should be noted, is not a contemporary conservative publication that has recently expressed admiration for Franco.

The right-wing writer and activist Charles Haywood is one person who has taken advantage of this new communication environment and is growing in prominence. He made an extraordinary fortune in business, and he is now building his own independent political movement (Waller, 2022). On his website, Haywood includes multiple reviews of Franco and Salazar biographies. In his most recent essay on Franco, he wrote, “Naturally, therefore, my own impression of Franco was generally favorable. But after reading up on him, my impression of him has changed. Now it is positively glowing” (Haywood, 2019).

The current debate about Franco among conservatives was largely kicked off by Josh Abbotoy (2023), who asked the provocative question in the conservative magazine, First Things, “Is a Protestant Franco inevitable?” In that piece, Abbotoy insisted that he did not desire that outcome, only that it is the likely end result of contemporary trends:

Is there any point to the dissident right’s speculations about Red Caesar, Protestant Franco, and Baptist Pinochet? Is it all just puerile escapism? No. It is basic realism that any thinking man should countenance. If the current trajectory holds, it is certainly possible that conditions will deteriorate until something like a Protestant Franco becomes inevitable. If that happens, the utopian grading rubric for our politics will vanish. When civil strife starts, you give up the more noble aims of politics and rush to the person who is least likely to kill your friends and family. Is this prospect still remote? Hopefully. But it is possible, and over a long enough time horizon, it is certain.

Other conservatives have also expressed an apparently new appreciation for Spain’s former dictator. Michael Knowles of The Daily Wire said of Franco: “Given the circumstances that he was in; you’ve got the communists threatening to take over the entire country and they’re killing priests and raping nuns, Franco was pretty good” (Media Matters Staff, 2023). Writing at The Imaginative Conservative, Joseph Pearce (2023) wrote,

In truth, the history of Europe and the world might have been very different if the Christians had not won the war in Spain. If Spain had remained a communist country, it would have been a crucially strategic Soviet outpost in the heart of Western Europe. The iron curtain which fell across central Europe would also have fallen across the Pyrenees. It is possible, therefore, that the Christians of Spain had saved Europe from the infidel in the Civil War as they had saved Europe from the Islamic infidel eight hundred years earlier.

We should be careful not to overstate contemporary conservative admiration for Franco. Many conservatives remain convinced that Franco does not represent a workable model. Even the conservative magazine First Things, which has recently been amenable to right-wing populist appeals, published an article noting why Franco does not deserve admiration from conservatives. In that article, Peter Hitchens (2019) argued that

When we consider men such as Francisco Franco, and are tempted (as even I have been) to make excuses for them because they seem to be on our side in one thing, we make a serious mistake. Do not, if you can possibly avoid it, take that path. It leads into a long and dark valley.

The conservative and classical liberal webzine Law and Liberty more recently published Richard Reinsch’s (2023) argument that the right would be making a terrible mistake following Franco’s example. According to Reinsch,

Those who might be enticed by such an argument ought to recognize the absurdity of the very concept of a “Protestant Franco,” the tyranny and failure of the historical Franco regime, and the self-radicalized derangement that so many illiberal religious thinkers find themselves experiencing.

We should therefore not exaggerate contemporary conservatives’ admiration for Franco. As noted, many continue to insist that he is a problematic historical figure and not worthy of emulation. It is nonetheless notable that this is now even a debate.

Salazar: View From the Right

According to the historian Joshua Tait, Europe has always been a sort of “repository of pre-liberal or post-liberal ideas and practices” for some American conservative intellectuals. Tait particularly noted in an interview with Illiberalism.org (2022) that Portugal’s Salazar has “experienced something of a revival in conservative circles.” The conservative admiration, at times effusive, for Salazar’s regime (the Estado Novo, or New State, that lasted from 1933 to 1974)—and often to the leader himself (who ruled for 36 continuous years as prime minister, until 1968) and his personality and character traits—has its own periodization and track record. From the outset, this admiration was not exclusive to conservatives, let alone Republicans. Salazar left an indelible mark, for example, on lifelong Democrat, Dean Acheson, whom he met in Lisbon in 1952. Acheson, then-US Secretary of State, described Salazar as a “remarkable man, the nearest approach in our time to Plato’s philosopher-king.” Acheson (1962: 112–113) recounted about their meeting that “I left knowing that I had never spent a more revealing hour, and had met a man unique in his time, the possessor of a rare mind and even rarer charm.”

Glowing accounts of Salazar from moderates and liberals notwithstanding, it was the early American conservative movement that particularly welcomed Salazar, his regime, and his policies. As noted above, the intellectual vanguard of the American conservative movement that began in the 1950s was mainly Catholic—often cloistered around National Review. This certainly played a role in a positive view among mid-century American conservatives of Salazar’s New State; although not a clerical regime, it did promote a climate of general cooperation between the State and the Roman Catholic Church—formalized with the signing of a concordat—and affirmed a shared vision of society, heralding a reorientation of Portugal “toward the traditional direction of its destiny” in the words of Salazar, after the anticlerical wave of the first Portuguese Republic (de Carvalho, 2016; Pinto and Rezola, 2007).

In 1956, National Review published “Be resolved to fight,” an article by the Portuguese strongman in which he vowed to fight for Western civilization and Christian values (Salazar, 1956). Salazar’s Portugal was generally viewed as a well-governed country and in 1958 Buckley wrote in the magazine that “we do not despise Salazar for using force to keep his highly benevolent regime in power.” A year later, in a debate at Hunter College about liberalism, Buckley (1958, 2000: 28) would note that “there are many more allusions, on college campuses, to the fact that Salazar governs Portugal undemocratically than to the fact that he governs it well.” It should be said, however, that in the pages of National Review Salazar’s regime was praised, for the most part, for civilizational reasons—in response to the process of African decolonization, for example—and for ideological—read, anti-communist—reasons in response to the ideological conflict of the Cold War.

The support given by American Catholic conservatives to Portuguese colonial possessions in Africa was part of a broader defense of European colonial powers, and this support for European colonialism was framed more widely as a defense of Western civilization coupled with the premise that the consequence of decolonization would be an irredeemable civilizational retreat (Curtis, 2019). The political theorist James Burnham wrote at length about what was at stake with the end of European rule in Africa. Burnham wrote in 1961 about the situation in Colonial Angola that

The Portuguese have been in Angola for four hundred years. Before them, there was nothing, historically speaking: no nation, no civilization, nothing but scattered, warring, exceedingly primitive tribes. Ought Angola be “liberated”? But what is the “Angola” that can or could be liberated? As a nation, a society, a community, Angola exists only through Portugal. Take Portugal away, and a social chaos is left (Burnham, 1967: 225).

With a similar mindset, while traveling in Mozambique, Buckley berated then-US Ambassador to the United Nations Adlai Stevenson for his “inconceivable” belief that “Mozambique natives would be better off without the Portuguese than with them,” recognizing “the economic, social, and political progress that has recently been made under the Portuguese in the African provinces . . . [and] their determination to stay there and to help the natives and themselves” (Buckley, 1962). This view was often complemented during the Cold War by scathing criticism of the US policy toward decolonization viewed as harmful to Western interests. Portugal, as a faithful ally, “has never played coy about her firm anti-Soviet, anti-communist conviction,” Burnham wrote. Thus, its departure from “Black Africa” would only precipitate the communist victory by “driv[ing] out the Westerners and create a social chaos which their apparatus can take over” (Burnham, 1967: 224, 226).

Other prominent voices against decolonization featured in National Review, hailing the Portuguese presence in Africa as a benign and positive colonialism, originated from Europe. World travelers such as its European correspondent, the Austrian Monarchist and Catholic Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, and the Hungarian-born and traditionalist Catholic Thomas Molnar published reports on Africa in the magazine. They also mirrored the opinion, expressed by Burnham and Buckley, that the Portuguese achieved greater “racial integration” in their colonies than had other European powers and boasted, in Buckley’s (1962) words, “the upward mobility of the native in a society with the least rigid color line in Africa.” Kuehnelt-Leddihn, in line with his anti-democratic predilections, saw in this development a lesson: it was not a coincidence, he wrote just one year before the start (in 1961) of the Portuguese Colonial War, that “the only part of Africa devoid of racial tensions lies in the area controlled by a power which does not believe in formal democracy” (quoted in Allitt, 1994 [1993]). Molnar, for his part, extolled the civilizing force of Western colonialism, which manifested “a moral vigor, [and] an undivided loyalty to a cause which may appear annoying to the superficial observer, but which reveals the fibers of which great nations and great enterprises are woven.” Molnar (1966: 154) further added, “In the western world, as far as I can see, there are only three such nations possessing this stuff: the Americans, the Portuguese, and the South Africans.”

In the post-Decolonization and post-Cold War eras, circulation of positive views of Salazar and his regime have largely been confined for some time to Traditionalist Catholic sectors. For example, The Remnant (2017), America’s oldest Traditionalist Catholic newspaper, featured Salazar in its “Catholic Heroes” series as a “Catholic Statesman, vilified by Christophobic revisionists,” and both noted that the leader of the New State “wanted simply to restore the Catholic Social Order,” and affirmed that “Our Lady of Fátima guided Salazar’s administration.” Meanwhile, Garry Potter (2022) (founding editor of Triumph) proclaimed Salazar in the online journal Catholicism.org to be “the greatest Catholic statesman of the 20th century.”

Particularly, since the end of the 2010s, the renewed interest about Salazar in some right-wing circles has been energized by both the publication of a biography of the Portuguese autocratic leader and the rise of a more assertive, anti-liberal Catholicism in the form of Integralism. The Scottish political scientist Tom Gallagher’s biography Salazar: The Dictator Who Refused to Die, published in 2020, sparked the rise on the right of a series of book reviews, articles, and discussions about the merits of Salazar. The reception by American right-wing writers of this volume benefited from the wider context of increased criticism of liberalism and the search for alternatives—many of the pro-Salazar pieces, accordingly, came from sectors critical of mainstream conservatism. As stated by Charles Haywood (2021)—a strong critic of liberal democracy and for whom “nothing notable or worthwhile has happened in Portugal since Salazar died in 1970”—in a podcast, “For post-liberals in particular, Salazar is necessarily interesting, since he is one of the few twentieth-century examples of a long-lived Right regime that successfully opposed the corrosion of Enlightenment liberalism.”

“Waiting for Salazar,” a 2021 review of Gallagher’s book in The American Conservative by the liberal modernity critic, medievalist, and Catholic writer Michael Warren Davis, was a sort of opening salvo. Davis first praised Salazar’s “patriotic humility,” an d his legacy because, “when he left after three decades, Portugal was a respected first-world power.” He then went on to write that “if we Americans lack the self-discipline necessary for self-government, if liberalism is off the table, the only alternative to a tyrant like Lenin or Hitler may be a man like Salazar: a paternalistic traditionalist, a philosopher king” (Davis, 2021a). Davis (2021b) subsequently published that year The Reactionary Mind, in which he not only listed Salazar among the role models for present-day anti-liberal reactionaries, but also portrayed him as a “Portuguese strongman who extolled ‘the intrinsic value of religious truth to the individual and society’ and lamented that ‘politics killed administration’.” The merits to Salazar’s Portugal of his anti-liberal corporatist order—in which social and political representation revolves around groups with common interests rather than around individual parties or interests—is discussed in Helen Andrews’s book review published by First Things. Andrews (2021) favorably compares this corporatist order to the present-day cliquey and oligarchic tendencies of liberal democracies:

American society is more and more managed “pre-politically” by various elites—bureaucrats, tech companies, NGOs. The difference is that our corporative actors answer to no higher authority. The Portuguese had Salazar single-handedly mediating among society’s various interests. They also had a shared idea of the common good and a Catholic moral vocabulary to which competing parties could appeal. Without these external constraints, rule by elites is not corporatism but oligarchy.

Favorable images of the “benevolent autocrat” and of the virtuous strongman, and about the Salazarist model as an alternative to liberal democracy, are complemented by open admiration for the unabashed use of executive power in Salazar’s Portugal. This is explicit in Christopher Roach’s The Salazar Option, published in American Greatness—a magazine critical of the conservative establishment and its “elite insularity.” Roach establishes the following parallel between Salazar’s times and the present time, and concludes the following: In the face of revolutionary leftism (as in the period that preceded Salazar’s regime), the solution is to use State power at the service of a counterrevolution. Roach (2021) then proceeds to enumerate the New State’s lessons for the American Right: the need to implement a “systemic change,” to take off the “kid gloves” when dealing with hostile and revolutionary elements, and to dismiss any “Benedict option” of retreating from the cultural and political fight but instead to become willing to use power in order to survive and win.

The New State’s institutional model, based on corporatism as a statist-organic alternative to liberal democracy (Pinto, 2023 [2021]), has also found a fertile reception in a resurgent Integralist movement—particularly, its defense, as set forth by the Integralist theorist Edmund Waldstein (2018), of the principle that political authority exists to protect not individual rights but the common good of human life, viewed in terms of worshipping God and promoting the true religion—Roman Catholicism. Integralism reflects a more combative Catholicism. As a reflection of that more combative Catholicism, a major idea of Adrian Vermeule—a dominant voice of this movement who draws on Carl Schmitt’s friend–enemy distinction to describe the relationship between liberalism and the Church—is to take over the apparatus of the State and destroy liberalism from within. In Vermeule’s (2018b) words, such a takeover would be

a matter of finding a strategic position from which to sear the liberal faith with hot irons, to defeat and capture the hearts and minds of liberal agents, to take over the institutions of the old order that liberalism has itself prepared and to turn them to the promotion of human dignity and the common good.

The current political and cultural context, as characterized by another Integralist, Gladden Pappin, who runs the online magazine Postliberal Order with Vermeule and others, is of out-of-control free-market capitalism and globalism. It should be seen as no wonder that the time has come, according to Pappin (2020b), for “the Right to become more corporatist in its approach to directing business activity in the national interest, and more Integralist in its view of the link between government and the common good.” Pappin (2020a) defends a corporate alternative in political representation and education in “Corporatism for the Twenty-First Century” as a way of dealing with an increasingly divided and fragmented society. He advocates a “state-led program to establish the corporate bodies of society and bring them to negotiations” as a way of reaching the common good (Pappin, 2020a). In this transition to a postliberal society, as becomes clear too in the writings of Vermeule, the administrative state, rather than electoral politics, is a crucial element—hence, as he proclaimed in a manifesto on the Integralist website The Josias, it is necessary to focus on “executive-type bureaucracies rather than on parliamentary-democratic institutions per se.” Vermeule (2018a) gives the example of Salazar’s Portugal as a country where bureaucracy has flourished in a illiberal regime.

The newfound interest and appraisal for Salazar and his regime sparked controversy and criticism from other sectors of the Right. Ironically, Buckley’s National Review published some of the most scathing criticism. Cameron Hilditch (2021a, 2021b), a northern Irish William F. Buckley Fellow at the National Review Institute, wrote about the immorality of “airbrushing the brutality” of Salazar’s regime while conceding that he put in place a “innovative model of corporatist government” that was worth of “serious thought” even if flawed. Social media became the epicenter of much of this debate, and former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum (2021) contributed by saying, “It’s weird to read US right-wingers praise for the Salazar regime embracing the image of Portugal’s ‘quiet idyll of Catholic orderliness’ while ignoring the ‘disastrous’ colonial wars.” Disapproval has also come from Integralist sectors—as a misguided admiration for a regime that did not let “the Kingdom break in, lest it lose its grip on power,” that gave primacy to the modern state and to the market, and that represented a “prime example of the veneer of Catholic Social Teaching without the reality of solidarity and subsidiarity” (Domencic, 2021).

Major Lessons and Concluding Remarks

Whether for political or religious reasons, or for both, the revival of interest in Franco’s and Salazar’s personas and regimes is part of an ongoing rethinking of US right-wing politics. This emergent New Right is certainly at odds with traditional conservatism and its declared commitment to individualism and limited government—also, in more secular or more religious terms, it constitutes an anti-liberal revolt and culminates in the yearning for a postliberal order whose configuration, however, is still vague, nascent, or not clearly defined. Within this New Right spectrum, neo-Integralism has been one of the sectors more dynamically invested in this redefinition of the political order (Waller, 2021). It is invested to such an extent that the neo-Integralist project is not without reason called “radical” and bent on a “counterrevolution” (Field, 2024; Vallier, 2023).

In the eyes of this anti-liberal movement, the liberal order has failed. What are the major lessons that these writers and intellectuals have taken from the older regimes of Franco and Salazar? One lesson concerns the issue of political authority and, more specifically, to the primacy given to the executive power. Rejecting the perceived liberal separation between politics and ultimate ends (the ideal society), these critics of liberalism espouse a political and moral vision of society, the common good, that is steeped in traditionalist Catholic principles, and in which the powerful leader must promote the harmony between temporal and spiritual power. Proponents of this vision therefore emphasize the creation of an ordered society rooted on spiritual and moral guidelines, rather than on liberty, as is the case in liberalism and traditional conservatism (Deneen, 2023). This factor is a driving force for a positive view not only of illiberal regimes of the past but also for the newer illiberal democracies of the present and their perceived virtuous Christian social policies.

Of course, the application of the common good requires an appropriate political system—a new institutional arrangement more appropriate than parliamentary democracy. Hence, some of these anti-liberal critics breathe new life into corporatism, which was a staple of the Iberian regimes. In the face of a decadent liberal-democratic system, polarized and hyper-partisan, and based on competition between lobbies for various private interests, such critics continue to search for a new state-led system of interest representation between different groups and based on cooperation and consensus—this is part of a discussion about the need for a new stakeholder politics, in which all groups participate, and take advantage, as they form common political, social, and economic goals. Here too, in this institutional model, the emphasis is not on freedom but on the superior good of harmony (Gregg, 2021).

In conclusion, today’s conservatives expressing admiration for Franco, Salazar, and other twentieth-century right-wing autocrats are following an established precedent. Although not all Cold War-era conservatives were uncritical admirers of these figures, overall, conservative discussions of them were generally positive. When they did acknowledge the more unsavory aspects of these regimes, they made sure to note that liberal sympathy for communist regimes was even more hypocritical. With the Cold War over, however, conservative enthusiasm for Franco and Salazar seems less defensible, and it is notable that in the final decades of the twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first century, conservatives mostly declined to praise these dictators. Conservatives could once defend these right-wing leaders on the grounds that communism was even worse. Now that communism is no longer on the political table in Western countries, this argument may be less persuasive, even if this “New Right” views liberalism as a destructive an ideology—with its decadent, atomized society.

Those religious conservatives who, today, would look to undemocratic right-wing European leaders for inspiration should also remember that conservatives have tried that path before. Although not the norm, some conservative Catholics in the US attempted to shift the conservative movement, and the broader culture, toward a variety of Catholic theocracy. This was Brent Bozell’s major project after his break with the mainstream right. His efforts were completely ineffectual, and his new magazine, Triumph, shut down in 1976 (Kelly, 2014). The efforts of those contemporary conservatives who would like to shift America away from liberalism and toward an illiberal religious conservatism are even more quixotic. In fact, within the wider conservative camp, many see these attempts as a sign of elitism and detachment from reality—the sin of intellectuals giving too much power to ideas (Greer, 2021). The US is a much less religious country than it was in the 1970s, and the constituency for that variety of politics continues to shrink (Hawley, 2017; Jones, 2016). The notion that the US could be set on the path toward an authoritarian and specifically Catholic government is less believable than ever, and conservatives choosing that path are likely ensuring their own marginalization in the future.

Despite the limited prospects for Christian nationalism (especially a narrowly Catholic variety) gaining ground as a successful US political movement in the near future, the apparent revival of interest in figures such as Franco and Salazar is potentially significant. This interest corresponds with other trends on the US right, such as new criticisms of civil rights legislation, which are now coming even from mainstream conservatives such as Christopher Caldwell (2020). New discussions of European right-wing leaders are another indication that debates about the nature of US conservatism formerly settled have been re-opened, and there is new ideological space for intellectual descendants of paleoconservatism and other more radical right-wing movements to grow.