Right-wing politics

political alignment favoring traditional politics

Right-wing politics is the range of political ideologies that view certain social orders and hierarchies as inevitable, natural, normal, or desirable, typically supporting this position based on natural law, economics, authority, property or tradition. Hierarchy and inequality may be seen as natural results of traditional social differences or competition in market economies.

Quotes

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For all of American history, there has been a reactionary far-right movement in America, often animated by fundamentalist religion, obsessed with the populist fever dream that the real America is being undermined by shadowy outsiders within. It is the "paranoid style of American politics," as Richard Hofstadter observed in the McCarthy Era. And it has never gone away. ~ Jay Michaelson
  • To survive, let alone flourish, liberal democracy needs the right’s support. It needs, that is, conservatives who accept liberal and democratic ground rules. Yet conservatism began life as an enemy of liberalism and never fully abandoned its reservations about democracy. Conservatism endured in modern politics by cooperating with liberalism and soon learned how to prevail in democracy. Liberal democracy of the kind that thrived in Western Europe and the United States after 1945 grew from that historic compromise by the right. When, as now, the right hesitates or denies its support, liberal democracy’s health is at risk. With the left in retreat, both intellectually and in party terms, the right commands politics at present. But which right is that? Is it the broadly liberal conservatism that underpinned liberal democracy’s post-1945 successes or an illiberal hard right claiming to speak for “the people”?
  • Look, I don’t see the world as something divided between right and left. And I don’t at all care who’s on the right or left or in the center. Even though we use them, even though I use them myself, these expressions have lost all meaning. I’m not interested in one label or the other—I’m only interested in solving certain problems, in getting where I want to go. I have certain objectives.
    • Indira Gandhi, quoted by Oriana Fallaci. (2011). Interview with Indira Gandhi, in : Interviews with history and conversations with power. New York: Rizzoli.
  • Rightist ideas are only truly magnetic if they are absolutely pure; Leftist ideas, on account of their materialistic and heretic essence, never demand perfection. Mediocrity is the death of every Rightist movement, but it is the very air in which Leftism thrives. A totalitarian leader who betrays practically every point of his party program hardly shakes the faith of his fanatical followers, but mediocre monarchs, Popes, and prelates have destroyed the old order.
  • Conservative or rightist extremist movements have arisen at different periods in modern history, ranging from the Horthyites in Hungary, the Christian Social Party of Dollfuss in Austria, Der Stahlhelm and other nationalists in pre-Hitler Germany, and Salazar in Portugal, to the pre-1966 Gaullist movements and the monarchists in contemporary France and Italy. The right extremists are conservative, not revolutionary. They seek to change political institutions in order to preserve or restore cultural and economic ones, while extremists of the centre and left seek to use political means for cultural and social revolution. The ideal of the right extremist is not a totalitarian ruler, but a monarch, or a traditionalist who acts like one. Many such movements in Spain, Austria, Hungary, Germany, and Italy have been explicitly monarchist. The supporters of these movements differ from those of the centrists, tending to be wealthier, and more religious, which is more important in terms of a potential for mass support.
    • Seymour Martin Lipset, "Social Stratification and 'Right-Wing Extremism,'" in British Journal of Sociology (1959:10), pp. 346–382
  • If I tell the world that a right-wing, fascist way of doing things doesn't work, no one will listen to me. So I'm going to make a perfect fascist world: everyone is beautiful, everything is shiny, everything has big guns and fancy ships, but it's only good for killing fucking bugs!
  • Listen, there are some significant bloody issues on the right wing that we have to fix, because if we don't you're going to alienate the living crap out of women.

See also

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