The MAGA New Right

Francisco Franco

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Francisco Franco (1892–1975)

Spanish military officer; Caudillo (head of state) of Spain from 1939 until his death in 1975 after winning the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) at the head of Nationalist forces with German and Italian fascist support; the wiki’s principal “Throne and Altar” authoritarian reference figure for the postwar American conservative movement and its 2010s–20s revivalist heirs.

Why He Matters Here

Franco does not appear in the wiki’s anchor texts (Field 2025 briefly; Deneen 2018 not at all; Deneen 2023 obliquely) — he is the node the wiki had been triangulating around without naming. With Iberian Vistas (Zúquete & Hawley 2025) the wiki now has the source material to anchor him.

Three layers of relevance:

  1. The 1950s–60s *NR* lineage. William F. Buckley Jr., James Burnham, Frank Meyer (late), Willmoore Kendall, L. Brent Bozell Jr., Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Thomas Molnar all defended Franco in print as a Catholic anti-communist hero. Buckley’s first language was Spanish; Kendall and Bozell lived in Franco’s Spain.
  2. The 2010s–20s revival. Charles Haywood, Josh Abbotoy, Joseph Pearce, Michael Knowles, Christopher Roach, and (more elliptically) Adrian Vermeule and Gladden Pappin have re-opened the question of Franco as model. Abbotoy’s “Is a Protestant Franco inevitable?” (First Things, 2023) is the touchstone essay.
  3. The structural form. “Throne and Altar” — concentrated executive authority pursuing substantive moral ends in alliance with the Catholic Church — is the political-form the contemporary postliberal / integralist current is reaching for. Franco’s 1939–1975 Spain is the longest-running real-world instantiation. (Allan Bloom, 1987: “Throne and Altar conservatism breathed its last only with Francisco Franco in 1975.”)

Brief Biography

  • Born El Ferrol, Galicia, 1892, into an old military family.
  • Africanista officer in the Rif War (Morocco, 1909–1927); youngest brigadier general in Europe at 33.
  • 1936: leader of the Nationalist coup that triggered the Spanish Civil War. Used German and Italian air support (notably the Condor Legion bombing of Guernica, April 1937) to win the war by April 1939.
  • 1939–1975: dictatorial head of state. Maintained nominal neutrality in WWII but allowed Spanish volunteers (Blue Division) to serve with the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front.
  • Post-WWII: integrated Spain into the Western Cold War order via the 1953 Pact of Madrid (US bases on Spanish soil) and 1955 UN admission.
  • 1975: died in office. Designated King Juan Carlos his successor; Juan Carlos initiated transition to constitutional monarchy and eventual democracy.

The American Conservative Reception

Period 1 (1950s–60s)

Per Iberian Vistas:

  • Buckley (1957, NR): “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.”
  • Burnham (1975 obituary, NR): “Francisco Franco was our century’s most successful ruler.”
  • F. Reid Buckley (1974 NR pre-obituary): “a Spaniard out of the heroic annals of the nation, a giant.”
  • Buckley (1981): “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. And the peace was longer under Franco than at any time in Spanish history.”
  • Allitt: “Many conservative American Catholics viewed Franco as ‘the George Washington of Spain.’”
  • Jeffrey Hart’s 1973 NR “Great Guernica Fraud.” Argued the bombing of Guernica was a hoax. NR gave space to historians to push back but treated the question as open. The episode is the wiki’s instance of postwar conservative NR-circle outright Franco apologetics shading into historical revisionism.

The mode of admiration was: anti-communism (decisive in the Cold War context), Catholic civilization (defining for the disproportionately Catholic NR circle), tactical authoritarianism (acceptable as foreign policy — “different peoples require different forms of government,” per Russell Kirk).

Decline (1980s–2000s)

Spain’s transition to democracy plus the Cold War’s end made the Franco apologetic increasingly difficult to sustain. NR-circle interest in Franco effectively ceased by ~1990. Bloom’s 1987 valediction (“breathed its last with Franco”) is the wiki’s marker.

Period 2 (2010s–present)

The revival comes from explicitly anti-fusionist sectors:

  • Charles Haywood (independent Hard-Right blogger): “my impression of [Franco] is positively glowing.” Haywood is the wiki’s clearest example of the new elite-grassroots Hard-Right Hispanophilia.
  • Josh Abbotoy, “Is a Protestant Franco inevitable?” (First Things, 2023): not advocating but framing as inevitable. The piece broke the postwar taboo on positive Franco discourse in mainstream conservative venues.
  • Michael Knowles (Daily Wire): “given the circumstances… 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.”

Counter-voices in the same period: Peter Hitchens (First Things 2019); Richard Reinsch (Law and Liberty 2023); Cameron Hilditch (NR 2021); David Frum.

Structural Place in the Wiki

Franco is the regime-form referent for what Vermeule-style postliberalism is, structurally, reaching for: Catholic concordat, executive primacy, demoted parliamentary politics, suppressed left-wing challenge, “ordered liberty” with substance. The wiki does not claim contemporary postliberals advocate Franco’s specific means (mass executions, torture, censorship). It does claim that the political form — concentrated Catholic-aligned executive authority — is what gives the contemporary current its silhouette. See Iberian Vistas for the academic version of this claim.

The relevant warning, also from Iberian Vistas (and from Hawley’s broader empirical-electoral work in The Moderate Majority, 2024): the constituency for Catholic-authoritarian transformation is shrinking, not growing. The intellectual revival is real; the political viability is limited. The wiki should read the Franco revival as a diagnostic indicator of the New Right’s institutional ambition rather than as a predictive indicator of the political future.

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