"Right-wing populists in the US also emerged in the Weimar era of the 1920s, involving Christian evangelicals such as Billy Sunday, as well as the Ku Klux Klan. They expressed anti-establishment religious revivalism and racist calls for restoring the traditional order and honor of the South. In the 1930s, the American Liberty League formed a Tea Party ancestor that opposed the entire New Deal as unconstitutional statism.
>From the 1960s to the 1980s, the United States underwent even greater division >between a counterculture tied to a Left that saw the Vietnam War as emblematic >of a flawed militaristic empire against a "silent majority" - a term coined by >President Nixon to suggest a majoritarian right-wing America backed by the GOP >establishment - committed to American glory, free market capitalism, >traditional families, the virtues of hard work, and for some, white rights and >Christian values. By the late 1970s, the Silent Majority morphed - with aid from the Republican corporate establishment - into the populist "New Right." The New Right groups embraced unrestrained capitalism as "Christian," something which evangelical movements had seldom previously done. The American corporate elite found this version of populism - which they helped shape - palatable, especially when, like the German establishment during Weimar, it confronted a threat from the Left. The 1970s New Right was a new generation of Christian fundamentalist populists emphasizing traditional values and free markets. In 1980, the New Right helped elect President Ronald Reagan and helped consolidate the Republican establishment's hold on power, based on the odd marriage of big corporations and Southern right-wing populism." Read more: http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/12477-historys-magic-mirror-americas-economic-crisis-and-the-weimar-republic-of-pre-nazi-germany
