The MAGA New Right

António Salazar

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António de Oliveira Salazar (1889–1970)

Portuguese economist; Coimbra finance minister 1928, prime minister 1932–1968; founder and leader of the Estado Novo (New State) corporatist authoritarian regime (1933–1974); Dean Acheson called him “the nearest approach in our time to Plato’s philosopher-king”; the wiki’s principal corporatist-authoritarian reference for Pappin / Vermeule-style contemporary postliberal political-form thinking.

Why He Matters Here

Where Franco is the wiki’s “Throne and Altar” figure, Salazar is the corporatist administrative state figure. The two regimes were both Catholic, both authoritarian, both anti-communist, and both admired by the same postwar *NR* circle — but their structures differed in ways that map onto contemporary New Right divides:

  • Franco = military strongman + Catholic concordat + anti-communist crusader → admired by the Throne-and-Altar Catholic right (Buckley, Bozell)
  • Salazar = Catholic technocratic professor + corporatist representation + administrative-state primacy + tactical neutralism → admired today by the administrative-state-capture postliberal right (Vermeule, Pappin)

Salazar’s relevance to the contemporary wiki is the corporatism thread. Pappin’s “Corporatism for the Twenty-First Century” (2020) and Helen Andrews’s 2021 First Things essay are explicit about porting Estado Novo corporatism into a 21st-century U.S. setting.

Brief Biography

  • Born Vimieiro, Portugal, 1889. Trained for the Catholic priesthood (took minor orders); diverted to economics at Coimbra.
  • 1928: appointed Finance Minister with extraordinary powers after the 1926 military coup. Balanced the budget within a year — the basis for his subsequent reputation as a technocratic miracle-worker.
  • 1932: appointed Prime Minister. 1933 constitution established the Estado Novo — corporatist, authoritarian, Catholic-aligned, single-party (União Nacional).
  • WWII: maintained Portuguese neutrality but tilted toward the Allies on bases (Azores). Allowed Allied use of Lajes Field 1943.
  • Post-WWII: Portugal admitted to UN (1955), founding NATO member (1949), joined EFTA (1960). The regime survived democratization elsewhere in Western Europe by tying itself to the Cold War Atlantic alliance.
  • 1961: outbreak of the Portuguese Colonial War (Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau). The colonial wars consumed ~40% of state spending by the late 1960s.
  • 1968: incapacitated by stroke. Marcelo Caetano took over but Salazar was not informed and continued to believe he ruled until his 1970 death.
  • 1974: the regime fell to the Carnation Revolution.

Estado Novo — Structural Features Relevant to the Wiki

  1. Corporatist representation. The Câmara Corporativa organized representation by sector (employer/employee guilds, professions, religious bodies) rather than territorial constituencies. Theoretically subordinated electoral politics to functional representation; in practice consolidated single-party rule but provided the form contemporary postliberals are reviving.
  2. Catholic Concordat (1940). Did not establish Catholicism but gave it privileged status. Less integralist than Franco’s Spain; more “social-Catholic” than “altar-and-throne.”
  3. Bureaucratic continuity. Salazar’s administrative state was technocratic and durable. Adrian Vermeule: “Salazar’s Portugal as a country where bureaucracy has flourished in an illiberal regime.”
  4. PIDE secret police. The regime’s organ of suppression. The wiki notes this for completeness; contemporary postliberal admiration carefully does not engage with the PIDE record.

The American Conservative Reception

Period 1 (1950s–60s)

Per Iberian Vistas:

  • Dean Acheson (1962) — Truman’s Secretary of State, lifelong Democrat, met Salazar in Lisbon 1952: “the nearest approach in our time to Plato’s philosopher-king… 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.” Acheson’s encomium is the wiki’s load-bearing fact that moderate-establishment Cold War America also took Salazar seriously — not just the NR right.
  • Buckley (1958, NR). “We do not despise Salazar for using force to keep his highly benevolent regime in power.”
  • Buckley (1958, Hunter College debate). “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.”
  • Salazar in NR (1956). “Be resolved to fight” — Salazar in his own voice in NR.
  • James Burnham, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Thomas Molnar. Serial defenses of Portuguese colonialism in Angola and Mozambique. The wiki reads this as NR-circle anti-decolonization — civilization-defense rhetoric materially structured as defense of European imperialism in Africa.
  • Catholicism.org / Triumph. Bozell’s Triumph magazine (1966–76) supplied the most ardent American-Catholic Salazar admiration.

Period 2 (2010s–present)

  • Tom Gallagher’s Salazar: The Dictator Who Refused to Die (2020). Sympathetic biography by a Scottish political scientist; the trigger for the contemporary American revival.
  • Michael Warren Davis (The American Conservative, 2021, “Waiting for Salazar”): “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.”
  • Helen Andrews (First Things, 2021): “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.”
  • Christopher Roach, “The Salazar Option” (American Greatness, 2021): in the face of revolutionary leftism, “use of State power at the service of a counterrevolution”; reject the Dreher “Benedict option.”
  • Adrian Vermeule. Cites Salazar’s Portugal as exemplary of bureaucracy flourishing in an illiberal regime. Foundational for Common Good Constitutionalism’s administrative-state focus.
  • Gladden Pappin. “Corporatism for the Twenty-First Century” (2020): defends “a state-led program to establish the corporate bodies of society and bring them to negotiations.” This is Estado Novo corporatism in 21st-century vocabulary.
  • Charles Haywood. “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.”

Structural Place in the Wiki

Salazar’s Estado Novo is the regime-type referent for the contemporary postliberal political-form imagination — particularly Pappin’s corporatism and Vermeule’s administrative-state primacy. The wiki’s structural reading: where critics of the postliberal current ask “what does the postliberal regime look like?”, Estado Novo Portugal is the most direct historical analogue — a Catholic, corporatist, technocratic, authoritarian, anti-communist administrative state. (See Iberian Vistas for the academic version.)

The same caveat applies as to Franco: the constituency for a Catholic corporatist transformation is shrinking. The intellectual revival is real; the political viability is limited (Hawley 2024). Salazar belongs in the wiki as a diagnostic indicator of postliberal intellectual ambition.

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