(Mirror. Mirror. This extract takes 5¾–7⅔ minutes to read.)

From its early days, the American conservative movement was consistently supportive of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, who led Nationalist forces during the Spanish Civil War and served as the country’s dictator from 1939 until his death in 1975. During the civil war, Franco was supported by fascist governments in Italy and Germany. He maintained formal Spanish neutrality in World War II, but he did allow Germany to recruit Spanish volunteers for its war effort.

Although American conservatives did not deny that Franco was a dictator that collaborated with fascist governments, he was viewed as a heroic figure by conservatives because of his victory over far-left forces during the civil war. From their perspective, Franco was responsible for keeping Spain from becoming a new outpost of communism in Western Europe.

In the context of the Cold War, American conservative fascination with Franco’s régime makes more sense. In the post-war conservative imagination, Franco was a Christian statesman who had defeated the forces of international communism in his country, a leader who would be a valuable ally in the conflict for the foreseeable future. This, in their view, was far more important than the fact he was a dictator. Many conservative American Catholics viewed Franco as “the George Washington of Spain and interpreted his war by analogy with the American War of Independence” (Allitt, 1994 [1993]: 25).

Among leading figures at National Review, we find many instances of conservatives expressing admiration for Franco. In 1957, Buckley stated,

General Franco is an authentic national hero. It is generally conceded that he above others had the combination of talents, perseverance, and the sense of righteousness of his cause, that were required to wrest Spain out of the hands of visionaries, ideologues, Marxists and nihilists that were imposing on her, in the thirties, a regime so grotesque as to do violence to the Spanish soul, to deny, even, Spain’s historical identity (Buckley, 1957: 389).

According to one editorial from the magazine’s early years, “The government of Francisco Franco is unattractive to us for many reasons. But Franco is a part, and an integral part, of Western Civilization” (Buckley, 1957: 221). These sentiments would be expressed many times in the magazine in the forthcoming years. Most American conservatives recognized that Franco was a dictator, and, aside from a few exceptions like Bozell, they did not want to see his form of government imported to the U.S. They nonetheless appreciated him as a heroic anti-communist and bulwark of Catholic tradition (Clements, 2022).

[…]

The right-wing writer and activist Charles Haywood is one person who has taken advantage of this new communication environment and is growing in prominence. He made an extraordinary fortune in business, and he is now building his own independent political movement (Waller, 2022).

On his website, Haywood includes multiple reviews of Franco and Salazar biographies. In his most recent essay on Franco, he wrote, “Naturally, therefore, my own impression of Franco was generally favorable. But after reading up on him, my impression of him has changed. Now it is positively glowing” (Haywood, 2019).

[…]

Other conservatives have also expressed an apparently new appreciation for Spain’s former dictator. Michael Knowles of The Daily Wire said of Franco: “Given the circumstances that he was in; you’ve got the communists threatening to take over the entire country and they’re killing priests and raping nuns, Franco was pretty good” (Media Matters Staff, 2023). Writing at The Imaginative Conservative, Joseph Pearce (2023) wrote,

In truth, the history of Europe and the world might have been very different if the Christians had not won the war in Spain. If Spain had remained a communist country, it would have been a crucially strategic Soviet outpost in the heart of Western Europe. The iron curtain which fell across central Europe would also have fallen across the Pyrenees. It is possible, therefore, that the Christians of Spain had saved Europe from the infidel in the Civil War as they had saved Europe from the Islamic infidel eight hundred years earlier.

[…]

According to the historian Joshua Tait, Europe has always been a sort of “repository of pre-liberal or post-liberal ideas and practices” for some American conservative intellectuals. Tait particularly noted in an interview with Illiberalism.org (2022) that Portugal’s Salazar has “experienced something of a revival in conservative circles.” The conservative admiration, at times effusive, for Salazar’s régime (the Estado Novo, or New State, that lasted from 1933 to 1974)—and often to the leader himself (who ruled for 36 continuous years as prime minister, until 1968) and his personality and character traits—has its own periodization and track record.

From the outset, this admiration was not exclusive to conservatives, let alone Republicans. Salazar left an indelible mark, for example, on lifelong Democrat, Dean Acheson, whom he met in Lisbon in 1952. Acheson, then-U.S. Secretary of State, described Salazar as a “remarkable man, the nearest approach in our time to Plato’s philosopher-king.” Acheson (1962: 112–113) recounted about their meeting that “I left knowing that I had never spent a more revealing hour, and had met a man unique in his time, the possessor of a rare mind and even rarer charm.”

Glowing accounts of Salazar from moderates and liberals notwithstanding, it was the early American conservative movement that particularly welcomed Salazar, his régime, and his policies. As noted above, the intellectual vanguard of the American conservative movement that began in the 1950s was mainly Catholic—often cloistered around National Review. This certainly played a rôle in a positive view among mid-century American conservatives of Salazar’s New State; although not a clerical régime, it did promote a climate of general cooperation between the State and the Roman Catholic Church—formalized with the signing of a concordat—and affirmed a shared vision of society, heralding a reorientation of Portugal “toward the traditional direction of its destiny” in the words of Salazar, after the anticlerical wave of the first Portuguese Republic (de Carvalho, 2016; Pinto and Rezola, 2007).

In 1956, National Review published “Be resolved to fight,” an article by the Portuguese strongman in which he vowed to fight for Western civilization and Christian values (Salazar, 1956). Salazar’s Portugal was generally viewed as a well-governed country and in 1958 Buckley wrote in the magazine that “we do not despise Salazar for using force to keep his highly benevolent regime in power.”

A year later, in a debate at Hunter College about liberalism, Buckley (1958, 2000: 28) would note that “there are many more allusions, on college campuses, to the fact that Salazar governs Portugal undemocratically than to the fact that he governs it well.” It should be said, however, that in the pages of National Review Salazar’s régime was praised, for the most part, for civilizational reasons—in response to the process of African decolonization, for example—and for ideological—read, anti-communist—reasons in response to the ideological conflict of the Cold War.

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The Scottish political scientist Tom Gallagher’s biography Salazar: The Dictator Who Refused to Die, published in 2020, sparked the rise on the right of a series of book reviews, articles, and discussions about the merits of Salazar. The reception by American right-wing writers of this volume benefited from the wider context of increased criticism of liberalism and the search for alternatives—many of the pro-Salazar pieces, accordingly, came from sectors critical of mainstream conservatism.

As stated by Charles Haywood (2021)—a strong critic of liberal democracy and for whom “nothing notable or worthwhile has happened in Portugal since Salazar died in 1970”—in a podcast, “For post-liberals in particular, Salazar is necessarily interesting, since he is one of the few twentieth-century examples of a long-lived Right regime that successfully opposed the corrosion of Enlightenment liberalism.”

“Waiting for Salazar,” a 2021 review of Gallagher’s book in The American Conservative by the liberal modernity critic, medievalist, and Catholic writer Michael Warren Davis, was a sort of opening salvo. Davis first praised Salazar’s “patriotic humility,” and his legacy because, “when he left after three decades, Portugal was a respected first-world power.” He then went on to write that “if we Americans lack the self-discipline necessary for self-government, if liberalism is off the table, the only alternative to a tyrant like Lenin or Hitler may be a man like Salazar: a paternalistic traditionalist, a philosopher king” (Davis, 2021a).

Davis (2021b) subsequently published that year The Reactionary Mind, in which he not only listed Salazar among the rôle models for present-day anti-liberal reactionaries, but also portrayed him as a “Portuguese strongman who extolled ‘the intrinsic value of religious truth to the individual and society’ and lamented that ‘politics killed administration’.”