The extreme right of the United States has a secret weapon called Francisco Franco. Their mission would be to restore order by military means in a country they describe as in a situation of anarchy and where they see signs of civil war. Exactly how, according to his argument, Spain was in the 1930s.
The American far right is a melting pot of Catholic ultra-conservatives, white supremacists and nationalists amalgamated in the belief that Donald Trump will return to the White House in 2024. If possible, to stay there as long as possible possible
The origin of the current enthusiasm for Franco is an article written in June by Josh Abbotoy in the religious publication First Things entitled “Is a Protestant Franco inevitable?”. Despite the identification of the original with National Catholicism, Abbotoy’s caudillo would have to be Protestant to adapt it to the tradition of the United States, and in later comments he states that he is preferably Anabaptist.
Abbotoy is director of American Reformer, a website of Catholic thought and manager of New Founding, a fund for companies that follow the “American ideal”.
The Spanish military has historically had followers within the more reactionary American right. The best known, the journalist William F. Buckley, founder of the National Review. But the man who has built a bridge with the new generations is Stanley Payne, a Hispanic scholar who did his doctoral thesis on Falange. In recent years, Payne has leaned towards the revisionist positions of Pío Moa, a Grapo terrorist who has 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 insurgency of the left in a country about to fall into the hands of communism.
Payne also writes in First Things, sympathizes with Vox and gives an apocalyptic description of Spain today. To resituate the character, it is necessary to explain that Franco rose up against a democratically elected government in a civil war that claimed half a million lives. A conservative count estimates 50,000 opponents executed during the 37 years he remained in power
