Center for Right-Wing Studies

From 1981-2005 creationist legal strategy underwent a transformation that belied several foundational conservative attitudes towards postmodernism and epistemological relativism. The upshot of a series of developments in the philosophy and historiography of science, as well as in the United States Supreme Court’s Establishment Clause jurisprudence, this shift constituted a radical break with wide-spread conservative resistance in post-World War Two America to any philosophy that held truth to be somehow sociological or culturally “constructed.” The historical—intellectual and cultural—context within which this change in legal strategy took place is the subject of this thesis. So too, of course, are the conservatives that affected it.

In many ways this is an intellectual history. Ideas here, however, are treated as historical phenomena, not tidy abstractions. My goal in this thesis is to historicize, rather than provide a history, of conservative ideology and identity in modern America. Much, recently, has been written about conservatism in America during the latter-half of the twentieth century. But for reasons I explore in this thesis not enough attention has been paid to its ideational and ideological dynamism. By tracking several ways in which conservatives were less than successful politically, less than coherent ideologically, and, ultimately, less “conservative” than they have previously been portrayed, this thesis attempts a history of an ideology in motion, and an identity in flux, in a fractured post-World War Two American intellectual and cultural environment.

In a moment of rising nationalism, examining the particular glue that mobilizes people becomes important. In the US, many have rightfully pointed out that White nationalism is on the rise, a movement that seeks to create an all-White nation-state. But, not all far-right organizations in the U.S. are ideologically White nationalist or overtly racist. The Patriot Prayer and Proud Boys, two far-right organizations which have gained prominence in the post “Unite the Right Rally” period, boast multiracial membership and often repurpose antiracist language against their opponents. Patriot Prayer and Proud Boys lead demonstrations against the Left, Antifa, “social justice” advocates and the #Metoo movement, and have gained a following particularly in the Pacific Northwest and California. Through examining the history of far-right multiracial organizing, particularly in the 1990s anti-government militia movements, this paper seeks to contextualize this contemporary trend within a historical context, exploring its specific attributes, and why it is happening today.

The social, economic, and political situations of Kurdistan and other areas in which Kurds live have changed drastically during the last decades. The Kurds are now almost totally autonomous in Northern Iraq, building state institutions in Rojava (Syrian Kurdistan) and democratic autonomy in Northwest Kurdistan (eastern Anatolia). Politically, until the 1990s, Kurds were dominated and contentious players; today they are key players in the Near East. This paper considers Kurdish interactions with regional powers - Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria - and ‘disputed boundaries’, and the role of self-determination, autonomy and federalism in solving the Kurdish Question. Within the current context marked by political upheaval of the Kurds in some areas of Kurdistan and the continued repression of Kurds in other areas, I examine the potential for federal solutions to solve the Kurdish Question by giving Kurds regional autonomy within the state boundaries of Turkey.