Journal of Right-Wing Studies

In the wake of the October 1929 stock market crash, conservatives formed an array of organizations and publications that aimed to resist the nation’s steady embrace of New Deal liberalism. Crucial to their opposition was a group of “nationalist conservatives” whose most prominent member was the operative and propagandist Merwin K. Hart. Hart’s worldview, which embraced nativism, antisemitism, anti-interventionism, and economic libertarianism, was shared by a range of figures on the right whose contributions to the emergence of the postwar conservative movement have not been studied. Hart’s organization, the New York State Economic Council (later renamed the National Economic Council), played a critical function in propagating conservative ideas throughout the years of liberal political hegemony. Scholarship on conservatism has generally cast the early opponents of the New Deal as principled libertarians, unsullied by bigotry and nativism; this article challenges that picture, arguing that the nationalist conservatives were critical in shaping the ideology of the postwar right.

To conceal their activities, far-right networks manipulate similarity heuristics that suggest their constituent organizations are discrete and coherent. When an organization crafts a public image indicating that only those who wear the same uniforms and march in the same marches are part of an organization, it implies that those who do not, are not. This use of cognitive shortcuts assists far-right organizations in crafting their organizational boundaries to obscure internal divisions of labor. That these disguised internal divisions of labor exist is strong evidence to support a renewed focus on the intra-organizational dynamics of far-right organizations—a focus that pivots from a discursive to a materialist understanding of the far right. I use the case of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), one of the world’s largest far-right organizations, to argue that similarity heuristics disguise far-right connectivity. Paying granular attention to the organizational boundary-making practices of the RSS demonstrates that the true organizational focus of the RSS is its managerial manifestation, rather than its cadre division, which is just one organization the managerial RSS manages. This key finding suggests that scholars must focus on the mechanics of the managerial RSS over the aesthetic phenomenon of the cadre RSS. Such a focus inevitably leads to a network-centric approach to the Indian far right that better captures the mechanics of its mobilization.