Journal of Right-Wing Studies

Carol Mason,
University of Kentucky

UC Berkeley’s Center for Right-Wing Studies on November 3, 2025, hosted a tour de force discussion of “The Path Towards Authoritarianism” by the Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor of Law and dean at the UC Berkeley School of Law. Dean Erwin Chemerinsky led his online audience of more than a hundred people and a roomful of listeners through a list of unprecedented activities by the Trump administration that signal its goal of dismantling the United States of America as a democracy. At one point in his remarks Chemerinsky referred to an editorial from The New York Times, published within days of his talk, that likewise alerts the public to particular and unprecedented actions and decisions that signpost the nation’s way to authoritarianism. Among these are stifling dissent and free speech, ignoring the rule of law, creating a cult of personality, and deploying military troops domestically.

I found it striking that these two major institutions, one on the east coast and one on the west—The New York Times and the University of California—nearly simultaneously broadcast these discussions that spell out with bald clarity how close we are to becoming an authoritarian state. As a scholar who has studied since the 1990s various campaigns, discourses, and factions of the right, I agree with these assessments. But I also know that there is danger in overemphasizing the unprecedentedness of all this. We don’t want to overly convey to the public that Trumpism has ushered in these antidemocratic efforts, leaving people with the impression that the impetus for tearing down democracy is only about ten years old. This is why scholarship on right-wing movements is essential, and why Chelsea Ebin’s new book is essential reading.

The Radical Mind: The Origins of Right-Wing Catholic and Protestant Coalition Building (University Press of Kansas, 2024) is Ebin’s contribution to ensuring that a robustly historical understanding of these antidemocratic forces prevails. She provides in-depth intellectual biographies of important people who built the conceptual infrastructures of US political thought and organizing that aim toward authoritarianism. Three chapters constituting the meat of the book showcase the evolution of thought and influence of Paul Weyrich, Connaught Marshner, and Jerry Falwell—three “political entrepreneurs” (xiv) who shaped the New Right in a way that allowed Catholic and Protestant conservative organizing to find its synergy.

To analyze Weyrich’s Catholicism and conservatism, Ebin delves into primary materials from various sources, including his own trove of papers at the Library of Congress. She emphasizes “the influence of Catholic theology on Weyrich and his collaborators” (xv) and its importance to how the Christian Right articulated its aims. This new scholarly emphasis on Weyrich’s radical Catholicism reveals his involvement in shaping discussions not only about the Catholic Traditionalist Movement, but also about reproductive issues and the separation of church and state. The result is to lay bare Weyrich’s and his contemporaries’ rarely articulated intention to, in his words unearthed by Ebin, “overturn the present power structure in this country” (76).

To analyze women’s place in this overturning, Ebin focuses largely on another Catholic: Connaught (Connie) Marshner. Once described as a “conservative gadfly” by the Washington Times,[1] Marshner worked with other female strategists of the New Right (such as Onalee McGraw, Phyllis Schlafly, and Alice Moore) and their more well-known male counterparts (Richard Viguerie, Howard Phillips, John Terry Dolan, and William Marshner, her husband). These relationships defined “the new traditional woman” (78), a clear precursor to today’s tradwives and Moms for Liberty. Marshner and her colleagues helped deliver “the first incarnation of New Right institutions, for example, Analysis and Research Associates (ARA) and Heritage Foundation” (91), which now have so much sway over the current administration.

Ebin’s chapter on televangelist Jerry Falwell—“the most visible face of fundamentalism in the 1970s” (105)—provides historical context for the changes that Protestantism underwent in the twentieth century that allowed for his rise. But Ebin avoids the easy interpretation of his ascendance, explaining for example that Falwell’s entrée into politics wasn’t so much abortion as it was a persecution complex instigated by SEC investigation into his fundraising for the 1972 construction of Liberty University. Ebin thereby tweaks the conventional history of Falwell’s politicalization to show how he and fellow fundamentalists embraced “engaging and transforming the secular political and cultural establishment,” which was tantamount to an “assault” on him and “the family” (132, 134).

These intertwined themes of transformation and of persecution at the hands of the secular government—an ethos of victimhood—occupy the opening and closing chapters that bookend the middle analyses of Weyrich, Marshner, and Falwell. Transformation, not entrenchment, is the intent of these conservatives. According to The Radical Mind, it is wrongheaded to assume that these people’s motivation was reactionary. Ebin spends a good amount of ink explaining why Weyrich, Marshner, Falwell, and their influential colleagues and institutions do not constitute a backlash. She devotes a lot of the introduction and another whole chapter to defining and dismissing the backlash framework as an improper and ineffectual way to look at these political coalitions and discourses. Her message to resist framing right-wing politics as a backlash seems especially directed to fellow political scientists. As a discipline, political science perhaps has been slow to recognize what other scholars and journalists (I’m thinking specifically of early “resistance researchers” such as Sara Diamond, Jean Hardisty, and Chip Berlet) have long understood as the generative, productive, forward-thinking, and revolutionary ambitions of right-wing populists and Christian nationalists. For those of us who already avoid the backlash framework to describe Trumpism and the political movements that led to it, Ebin helpfully provides evidence of where and how that assumption of backlash prevents more robust analysis of current antidemocratic events.

One of the most insightful discussions Ebin provides is explaining how “coopting the liberal discourse of rights-based claims from historically marginalized communities” allowed the New Right and the Christian Right to pass as classically liberal movements that sought “entrance to liberal democratic institutions” (163). Counter to some historians who have championed the rise of conservative causes as progressives earning a place at the mainstream table, Ebin convincingly argues that their use of liberal language is a ruse. The intentions to “refashion” those democratic institutions and “make the American polity anew” (163) are laid bare quotation after quotation, page after page, and chapter after chapter. To address this tricky aspect of conservatism as it emerged in the twentieth century, Ebin promotes the concept of “prefiguration” to explain how a movement supposedly bent on preserving established social hierarchies was actually forging new illiberal paths. Cultural conservatism envisions not a return to the past that the invocation of “traditional” feigns but, instead, “a complete disavowal of the ideological commitment to liberal individual rights” (167). Ebin thus moves us helpfully past the endpoint of most analyses of the right’s coopting of liberal language, which is to cry hypocrisy. With Ebin’s concept of prefiguration, The Radical Mind names the temporal paradox of calling forth a new political reality while calling backward to a faux past. The prefigurative call to Make America Great Again is an echo of the radical minds of Weyrich, Marshner, Falwell, and their contemporaries who appeared to seek restoration of tradition but were truly aiming for a new order. An authoritarian one.

The Radical Mind helps readers see more clearly those antidemocratic events and the general pathway to authoritarianism that Dean Chemerinsky was warning us about. But The Radical Mind attends more to issues of gender, which was noticeably absent in both the dean’s discussion and the New York Times editorial. Ebin not only devotes a chapter to the “new traditional woman.” She also weaves what are woefully still regarded as “women’s issues” into her analysis, ensuring that abortion, the Equal Rights Amendment, and so-called concerned mothers touting parents’ rights are seen as part and parcel of the coalition between Catholic and Protestant political strategists—not some sideshow.

Ebin’s research methodology is intricate and encyclopedic, but her narrative argumentation is smooth and cool. Her writing is patient and inviting, not confrontational. For these reasons, The Radical Mind is perfect for the classroom, where students deserve accessibility in their reading material. Moreover, The Radical Mind is indispensable for scholars and teachers who are compelled to explain how far the current pathways to authoritarianism are extended into the past, and who the pathbreakers were.