From Draft NOtices, October-December 2024
— Isidro Ortiz, PhD
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The election of Richard Nixon in 1968 marked the twilight of liberalism and the ascendancy of conservatism, according to some historians. In the wake of Nixon’s rise to power, the American Right mobilized and caused significant changes to social, economic and political life. Two recent works explore how the Right became such an influential force and are worth our reading.
In her new book, Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern American, historian Lauren Lassabe Shepherd draws extensively on interviews and archival sources to chronicle the emergence and growth of organized resistance to the campus-based New Left and Black Power movements of the late 1960s. She illuminates how conservative student activists were funded by wealthy donors and received intellectual guidance from sophisticated prominent conservatives. Under such sponsorship and direction, conservative student activists such as Karl Rove, Bill Barr, Jeff Sessions and Pat Buchanan crafted a robust response to progressivism on college campuses and became conservative icons.
The third chapter of Shepherd’s book, titled “If you Want to Live Like an American, Act Like One,” will be of particular interest to those involved in countering military recruitment. Here Shepherd examines conservative student reactions to the anti-war movement in 1967 and 1968. As expected, the campus Right supported military recruitment on campus, developed new tactics and increasingly articulated the authoritarian credo that persists in American politics today. Ultimately, however, conservatives “did not win the campus wars of the 1960s, and they failed in almost every way to meaningfully pull faculty or students to the right during their time on campus. Yet their counter-activism has by design thrown sand into the gears of the machines that drive the academy’s democratic missions, then and now.”
In Defectors: The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What it Means for America, journalist Paola Ramos complements Shepherd’s historical work by focusing on a distinctive segment of Latino voters who voted for Donald Trump and other conservative candidates in recent elections and are aligned with Trumpism. Their presence and behavior have been described as “the rightward shift” among Latino voters, a group that has historically been consistently and overwhelmingly aligned with the Democratic party. As a whole, Latinos constitute the nation’s largest minority, 36.2 million of whom are eligible to vote in the forthcoming presidential election. Thus, signs of an alleged rightward shift among a segment of the Latino electorate have engendered much discussion and controversy over its potential political implications.
Ramos takes us beyond the controversy by bringing us face to face with those whose behavior has proven puzzling because, among other things, the candidates they have supported, such as Donald Trump, seemingly are inimical to their interests. Through interviews with a Congressional candidate, January 6th insurrectionists and other “defectors,” she interrogates them about their motivations for voting for Trump.
One chapter of her book, titled “General Tario and the Insurrectionists,” will be of interest to those concerned with militarism. In this chapter, she reveals the impact of militarism over time and across national boundaries. From her interview with Enrique Tarrio, the chair of the Proud Boys, the reader will learn that the self-anointed “general” Tarrio took inspiration from General Augusto Pinochet, the dictator who ruled Chile with an iron fist after seizing power in a military coup in 1973. Tarrio romanticized Pinochet and orchestrated the January 6 th insurrection on the basis of his belief that the United States needed a military style-strongman in the mold of General Pinochet.
Looking forward, Ramos underlines the significance of Latinos to Democrats, Trumpism and white supremacy. She observes that Democrats cannot afford to ignore this small but growing radicalized segment of the Latino vote. In a recent Pew Center poll, a majority of Latino registered voters (57 percent) said that they would vote for Vice President Kamala Harris while 39 percent would vote for Donald Trump. “Demographics are not destiny unless we put in the work,” Ramos concludes. “That work starts by being willing to see the warning signs around us which are telling us not that Latinos are ‘shifting to the right’ but rather, that we are not monolithic; that we are flawed human beings with complicated, painful histories.”
This article is from Draft NOtices, the newsletter of the Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft (http://www.comdsd.org/).
