Mission
Established in February 2009, the mission of the Center is to encourage and nurture scholarship on right-wing movements in the United States, Europe, Asia, and Latin America. The Center is especially interested in supporting research that examines the diversity of right-wing movements, and the significance they give to social and religious issues, nationalism and race, and economic doctrines, as well as their strategic and tactical orientations. The Center promotes research, offers mini-grants, fellowships, and training opportunities to Berkeley students, publishes findings, and brings together leading scholars through conferences, colloquia, and other public events in order to engage in a comparative and interdisciplinary dialogue on right-wing ideology, politics, and organizational forms and their likely directions in the 21st century.
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2013 Spring Colloquia
- Tuesday, March 19, 4:00-5:30pm
"In the Name of Motherland: Nationalist Debates and Literary Responses to the Right in Pre-WWI France"
Vesna Rodic, Lecturer, French Department, UC Berkeley
with
Lawrence Rosenthal, Executive Director of CRWS, UC Berkeley
as respondent
In the years leading up to WWI, France was shaken by powerful debates on nationalism that involved French literature. The main actors in those debates were members of the right-wing political movement Action Française, whose leader Charles Maurras embraced monarchist, counter-revolutionary ideas and moved toward integral nationalism. The widespread appeal of the Action Française was challenged by members of the Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF), a literary journal founded by André Gide. This paper examines the Action Française’s conceptions of nation and the French literary canon through its polemics with the NRF in order to uncover the influence of political debates on the shaping of French literary criticism from 1909 to 1914. We conclude that the selective views of tradition adopted by the right reveal a moment of crisis, one that brought out tensions between literary criticism and political attitudes and that was further challenged by the experience of war.
Wildavsky Conference Room, ISSI, 2538 Channing Way
- Wednesday, April 10, 4:00-5:30pm
"Border Granny Wants You!": Grandmothers Policing Nation at the U.S.-Mexico Border"
Jennifer Johnson, Associate Professor of Sociology, Kenyon College, and Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies Visiting Scholar
with
Paola Bacchetta, Associate Professor of Gender and Women's Studies, UC Berkeley
as respondent
This paper examines the politicization and lived experience of grandmotherhood within the ranks of militant anti-immigration activists in the contemporary U.S. Grounded in qualitative research on the Minuteman border policing movement, it documents how nativists collectively deploy grandmotherhood to boost the movement’s membership, sharpen its political critique, and ensure a constant source of behind-the-scene care workers. The theoretical import of this case lies in its potential to extend scholarship on women’s incorporation into nationalist projects in two inter-related directions: 1) from an emphasis on “motherhood” as the basis for mobilizing women in defense of nation toward a consideration of how the work of “grandmotherhood” may be used for this purpose, and; 2) from a focus on control of women’s sexuality and reproductive capacity toward an exploration of their roles as strategic actors in ideological battles against multiculturalism.
Wildavsky Conference Room, ISSI, 2538 Channing Way, Berkeley
- Monday, April 15, 12:00-1:30pm
"Neo-Nationalism in Western Europe"
Maureen A. Eger, Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Sociology, Umea University, Sweden
The increasing popularity of radical right parties in Western Europe has received widespread attention. And, while there is now a rather large literature on parties with explicitly anti-immigrant platforms, there is surprisingly little consensus—and more importantly evidence—about the underlying ideology of this party family or the ideological positions of its supporters. Particularly lacking is cross-national research that maps party positions along both economic and cultural axes over time. Using Manifesto Project Data (1970-2010), we analyze the platforms of the parties the literature has identified as radical right and show that they have qualitatively changed between 1970 and 2010. Current parties differ fundamentally from their predecessors in that nationalist claims are paramount. We verify our findings through a content analysis of party websites in 2012 and then utilize the European Social Survey (2002-2010) to confirm that voters’ attitudes are consistent with contemporary parties’ platforms. Our results point to a coherent political ideology, which may be partially responsible for these parties’ recent electoral successes. Based on our combined analyses, we conclude that contemporary anti-immigrant parties actually constitute a new, distinct party family, which we term neo-nationalist.
Duster Conference Room, ISSI, 2420 Bowditch Street, Berkeley
Steep: The Precipitous Rise of the Tea Party
Steep: The Precipitous Rise of the Tea Party (University of California Press, August 2012), edited by Lawrence Rosenthal and Christine Trost is now available from UC Press.
Description:
In the Spring of 2009, the Tea Party emerged onto the American political scene. In the wake of Obama's election, as commentators proclaimed the "death of conservatism," Tax Day rallies and Tea Party showdowns at congressional town hall meetings marked a new and unexpected chapter in American conservatism. Accessible to students and general readers,Steep: The Precipitous Rise of the Tea Party brings together leading scholars and experts on the American Right to examine a political movement that electrified American society. Topics addressed by the volume's contributors include the Tea Party's roots in earlier mass movements of the Right and in distinctive forms of American populism and conservatism, the significance of class, race and gender to the rise and successes of the Tea Party, the effect of the Tea Party on the Republican Party, the relationship between the Tea Party and the Religious Right, and the contradiction between the grass-roots nature of the Tea Party and the established political financing behind it. Throughout the volume, authors provide detailed and often surprising accounts of the movement's development at local and national levels. In an Epilogue, the Editors address the relationship between the Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street movement.
To order a copy and/or read more about the book click here.
Bibliography of Academic Theses and Dissertations on the American Right
CRWS is pleased to make available Ernie's Lazar's extensive bibliography of academic theses and PhD dissertations on the American Right. Mr. Lazar has spent three decades collecting archival material on the right wing and is committed to making his work available to a wide audience of researchers. The bibliography is organized thematically and some of its citations go back more than 50 years. To our knowledge, this is the most exhaustive directory of its kind available on line or elsewhere.
Read more about the Bibliography here.
CRWS People for the American Way Collection of Conservative Political Ephemera and Broadcasting, 1980-2004, Now Available
In June of 2010, People for the American Way (PFAW) donated its vast and unique collection of political ephemera and video broadcasting on the American Right to CRWS.
The paper archive has been processed and is now permanently housed at UC Berkeley's prestigious Bancroft Library, one of the largest and most heavily used libraries of manuscripts, rare books, and unique materials in the United States, which is open to students and scholars from around the world. Comprised of approximately 1,220 organizations, 300 individual files, and 80 rare right-wing magazines and newspapers, the Collection charts the flourishing movements of American conservatism from the 1980s to the early twenty-first century. The materials in the collection, which include organizations' and individuals' pamphlets, direct mailings, publications, speeches, conference programs, internal financial records, membership lists, fundraising strategies, voter guides, manuals, and biographies document the ideological orientations, policy positions, talking points, and organizational structures and strategies of hundreds of right-wing organizations, individuals, and publications. A large portion of the collection focuses specifically on documents associated with the "religious right." Of particular interest (due to scope) are materials pertaining to the American Family Association, Christian Coalition, Coalition for Better TV, Concerned Women for America, Family Research Council, the Moral Majority, and the Pat Robertson Papers. Additionally, there are comprehensive collections of the following publications: Charisma & Christian Life, Chalcedon Report,Chronicle, Focus on the Family and New American. Issues covered in the Collection include political strategy and tactics, taxation, race, guns, the judiciary, marriage, homosexuality, foreign policy, the military, and the role of religion in American politics. It is our hope that political scientists, sociologists, historians, legal scholars, policy makers, and other scholars will use the collection to illuminate our historical and social understanding of the American Right.
The video archive contains over 2,000 DVDs with content transfered from PFAW's videotape collection of network and cable braodcasting, widely documenting year-to-year developments among major figures and organizations of the right. Televangelist broadcasts occupy a good portion of the archive, including such television programs as Pat Robertson's 700 Club, The Old Time Gospel Hour, and Falwell Live, among others. In many instances the archive directory indicates the guests or issues covered on a particular show. The archive also includes speeches by important figures on the right (e.g. Ronald Reagan, Pat Buchanan); coverage of important Congressional proceedings (e.g. the Bork nomination); coverage of important conservative events (e.g., The Conservative Political Action Convention); and one-off productions on particular subjects by right-wing groups (e.g., Falwell's film on the Clintons, Circle of Power). The video archive is housed at the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues at the University of California at Berkeley, which is also the home of CCSRWM. Scholars who are interested in obtaining access to the video archive may contact CRWS Program Director and ISSI Associate Director, Dr. Christine Trost (ctrost AT berkeley.edu).
To read more about the materials in the Collection and how to access them, click here.
CRWS (formerly named CCSRWM) Featured in The Berkeleyan
"Right-wing studies? At Berkeley? Neither left nor right, the 2-year-old Center for the Comparative Study of Right-Wing Movements is leading the effort to fill a scholarship gap with roots in the Cold War." Read the full article here.