ABSTRACT
This chapter chronicles some of the main US far right groups of the past 150 years. Before the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, the radical right was mostly associated with Europe in US media. For most Americans, far right politics was something on the margins of US politics with, at best, some troublesome history during the era of the struggle for civil rights in the South in the 1960s. Nativism has been a powerful electoral force in the US at least since the mid-19th century. After the defeat of Nazi Germany the US would still be home to myriad Nazi and neo-Nazi groups, thanks to its broad interpretation of freedom of speech. Radical right sentiments played a noticeable role in the anti-communist movement of the 1950s and 1960s, and particularly in prominent organizations like the John Birch Society (JBS), but the movement itself cannot be categorized as radical right.
