The MAGA New Right

Iberian Vistas: Franco, Salazar, and American Conservatives

Properties1
tags

7 min read

Iberian Vistas: Franco, Salazar, and American Conservatives

José Pedro Zúquete (Portuguese political scientist) and George Hawley (American political scientist; Right-Wing Critics of American Conservatism, 2016; The Moderate Majority, 2024), Politics, Religion & Ideology (Sage), 2025; the academic synthesis tracing the line from postwar *NR*-circle Catholic admiration of Francisco Franco and António Salazar to the contemporary postliberal / integralist revival of those same regimes as institutional models.

Why It Matters Here

Iberian Vistas is the wiki’s primary source for a previously untraced through-line in the synthesis: the postwar conservative movement’s Iberian-authoritarian Catholic admiration as the direct ancestor of contemporary Vermeule / Pappin / Deneen anti-liberal political-form thinking. Pre–Iberian Vistas, the wiki traced postliberalism through Bozell-1962 and Catholic intellectual currents but did not have the concrete authoritarian regime models the postwar Catholics were holding up. With Iberian Vistas, we can name them: Franco’s Spain and Salazar’s Estado Novo are the regime types postwar Catholic conservatives admired and modern postliberals are reviving.

The paper also adds a substantial node-set to the wiki’s thinker map: Willmoore Kendall, James Burnham, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Thomas Molnar (the 1950s–60s admirers); Charles Haywood, Josh Abbotoy, Edmund Waldstein, Christopher Roach, Helen Andrews, Joseph Pearce, Michael Knowles (the 2010s–20s revivalists).

Core Argument

Two periods of American-conservative interest in Iberian authoritarianism:

Period 1 — 1950s–60s (Cold War + Decolonization)

  • Demographic note. Roman Catholics were “massively overrepresented” among postwar conservative intellectuals. Buckley, Kendall (Yale convert; Buckley’s mentor), Bozell (convert), Russell Kirk (convert), Frank Meyer (convert at end of life), James Burnham (convert at end of life). This is the wiki’s strongest prior under-emphasis: the postwar movement’s Catholic center of gravity.
  • Personal Iberian connections. Buckley’s father had Mexican oil interests; Spanish was Buckley’s first language. Kendall and Bozell lived in Franco’s Spain.
  • Franco as Christian-anti-communist hero. Buckley (1957): “General Franco is an authentic national hero… [who] wrest[ed] Spain out of the hands of visionaries, ideologues, Marxists and nihilists.” James Burnham (1975 obituary): “the most successful ruler” of the twentieth century. Allitt: many American Catholics viewed Franco as “the George Washington of Spain.”
  • Salazar. Dean Acheson (1962, Democratic Sec of State) called him “the nearest approach in our time to Plato’s philosopher-king.” 1956 NR published Salazar’s “Be resolved to fight.” Buckley (1958): “we do not despise Salazar for using force to keep his highly benevolent regime in power.”
  • Decolonization. Burnham, Buckley, Kuehnelt-Leddihn, and Molnar published serial NR defenses of Portuguese colonialism in Angola and Mozambique. Kuehnelt-Leddihn (a year before the Colonial War began): “the only part of Africa devoid of racial tensions lies in the area controlled by a power which does not believe in formal democracy.”
  • Jeffrey Hart’s Guernica denial (1973 NR) — argued the Guernica bombing never happened. Editors gave space to historians to push back but framed it as a real debate.
  • The Bozell exception. Bozell wanted to import Franco’s model. Triumph magazine (1966–1976) was the venue. He was the only American conservative who openly advocated Catholic theocracy. He lost the argument; Triumph folded.

Decline (1980s–2000s)

Iberian admiration faded as Spain liberalized post-Franco, the Cold War ended, and neoconservatism displaced paleoconservatism inside the movement. Allan Bloom (1987): Throne-and-Altar conservatism “breathed its last only with Francisco Franco in 1975.”

Period 2 — 2010s–present (postliberal revival)

  • Charles Haywood (independent Hard-Right blogger, post-business-fortune): “my impression of [Franco] is positively glowing.” On Salazar: “nothing notable or worthwhile has happened in Portugal since Salazar died” — and key for the wiki: “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.”
  • Josh Abbotoy, “Is a Protestant Franco inevitable?” (First Things, 2023): “If the current trajectory holds, it is certainly possible that conditions will deteriorate until something like a Protestant Franco becomes inevitable.”
  • Christopher Roach, “The Salazar Option” (American Greatness, 2021): “use of State power at the service of a counterrevolution”; take off the “kid gloves”; reject the Benedict Option.
  • Helen Andrews (First Things, 2021, on Tom Gallagher’s Salazar biography): “The difference is that our corporative actors answer to no higher authority. The Portuguese had Salazar single-handedly mediating among society’s various interests… Without these external constraints, rule by elites is not corporatism but oligarchy.”
  • Michael Warren Davis (The American Conservative, 2021): “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.”
  • Adrian Vermeule. Cites Salazar’s Portugal as a country where “bureaucracy has flourished in an illiberal regime”; advocates focus on “executive-type bureaucracies rather than on parliamentary-democratic institutions per se.” Direct connection: Salazar’s Estado Novo is Vermeule’s working analogue for a Schedule-F-and-administrative-state-captured United States.
  • Gladden Pappin. “Corporatism for the Twenty-First Century” (2020): defends a corporate alternative in political representation and education; advocates “a state-led program to establish the corporate bodies of society.” The corporatist organizational form Pappin advocates is Estado Novo corporatism, ported.
  • Counter-voices. Peter Hitchens (First Things 2019), Richard Reinsch (Law and Liberty 2023), Cameron Hilditch (NR 2021): the Franco/Salazar admiration is “self-radicalized derangement” and “long and dark valley.” David Frum and integralist purists (Pater Edmund Waldstein on tactical grounds; Domencic) also pushed back.
  • Michael Knowles (Daily Wire): “Franco was pretty good.” Joseph Pearce (Imaginative Conservative, 2023): “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.”

Major Lessons (Zúquete & Hawley’s Synthesis)

  1. Executive-power primacy. Both regimes give the wiki a name for the political form Vermeule and Pappin advocate — concentrated executive authority pursuing substantive moral ends, with parliamentary democracy demoted.
  2. Corporatism as the institutional alternative. The Estado Novo’s corporatist representation (interests organized by sector, mediated by the state) is the model behind Pappin’s contemporary advocacy.
  3. Why the revival is structurally limited. The US is far less religious than the Catholic Iberia of 1950–70. A Catholic-theocratic transformation is “less believable than ever” (Hawley, 2017; Jones, 2016 demographics). Bozell’s effort failed in 1976; the post-Bozell version is “even more quixotic.”
  4. But the intellectual significance is real. “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.” The very fact that Salazar and Franco are debated in First Things and American Greatness is the indicator.
  5. The framing connects to Field’s *Furious Minds*. Zúquete & Hawley cite Field (2024) on the integralist project as “radical” and bent on “counterrevolution.” The two analyses are convergent.

Methodological Note for the Wiki

Zúquete & Hawley are not writing a polemic — Hawley in particular is known for empirical-electoral work (The Moderate Majority, 2024, argues the Republican base is less radicalized than commentary suggests). Their conclusion that the Iberian-authoritarian revival is “potentially significant” but “limited” is an important brake on the wiki’s catastrophist impulse: the new Hard-Right corporatism is real as an intellectual project but the constituency for actual Catholic theocracy is shrinking, not growing. The wiki should be careful not to inflate the Iberian thread beyond what the demographic data supports.

Cross-References

Graph View

Backlinks