The far right in the United States has a secret weapon called Francisco Franco. Their mission would be to restore order through military means in a country that they describe as being in a situation of anarchy and in which they see signs of civil war. Exactly how Spain was, they argue, in the 1930s.
The North American extreme right is a magma in which there are ultra-conservative Catholics, white supremacists and nationalists amalgamated in the conviction that Donald Trump will return in 2024. If possible, to stay as long as possible.
The source of the current enthusiasm for Franco is an article written in June by Josh Abbotoy in the religious publication First Things titled “Is a Protestant Franco Inevitable?” Despite the identification of the original with National Catholicism, Abbotoy’s leader would have to be Protestant to adapt him to the US tradition, and in later comments he states that he is preferably an Anabaptist.
Abbotoy is director of American Reformer, a Catholic thought website, and manager of New Founding, a fund for companies that follow the “American ideal.”
The Spanish dictator has historically had followers in the most reactionary American right. The best known of them was the journalist William F. Buckley, founder of the National Review.
But the man who has acted as a bridge with the new generations is Stanley Payne, a Hispanic scholar who did his doctoral thesis on the Falange. In recent years, Payne has slipped towards the revisionist positions of Pío Moa, a Grapo terrorist who passed into historical dissemination (academics describe his books as pamphlets). Moa has written that Franco had no choice but to take up arms against the insurgent left in a country that was already on the verge of communism.
Payne also writes in First Things, sympathizes with Vox and makes an apocalyptic description of today’s Spain. To revisit the character: Franco rose up against a democratically elected government in a civil war that claimed half a million dead. A conservative count estimates that 50,000 opponents were executed during his 37 years in power.