Why is the US far right finding its savior in Spanish dictator Francisco Franco?
Some US far-right figures have made renewed attempts to rehabilitate the 20th century Spanish dictator Gen Francisco Franco in recent months, praising him as an avatar of religious authoritarianism, and praising his actions during and after the Spanish civil war as a model for confronting the left in the US.
But historians say that this Franco fandom is based on partial or revisionist accounts of the 1936-1939 civil war and Franco’s ensuing 37-year dictatorship and continues a long-term hostility to democracy on the American right.
It also comes as fears of authoritarianism and Christian nationalism in the US are on the rise with Donald Trump almost certain to win the Republican party nomination amid fears he would misuse his powers in any second term to erode or dismantle American democracy.
Franco, a general in the Spanish army, led a nationalist revolt against Spain’s democratic second Republic in 1936, and won by 1939 with the support of fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Some 500,000 Spaniards died as a result of the war, with 150,000 of Franco’s opponents being executed during or after the conflict and half a million held in concentration camps by 1940.
Nevertheless, in October, Josh Abbotoy asked in an article at religiousconservative outlet First Things: “Is a Protestant Franco inevitable?” The article was a development from a May post on X, formerly Twitter, in which Abbotoy had more affirmatively claimed that “Basically, America is going to need a Protestant Franco”.
Abbotoy is a former Claremont Institute Lincoln Fellow, and executive director of American Reformer, a far-right Christian website. The article did draw some criticism from others on the right: James M Patterson wrote that “There is nothing in 1930s Spain that can instruct Americans about their Constitutional order.”
But elsewhere and especially on the now extremist-friendly X, formerly known as Twitter, the article was celebrated in far-right circles that had already adopted the dictator as their own.
Established Franco fans included influential far-right accounts – the Maga personality and conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich has been posting in praise of Franco to his 1.1 million followers since 2022.
In the wake of Abbotoy’s article, would-be “warlord” and former soap manufacturer Charles Haywood took the opportunity to promote his own 2019 essay praising Franco as a model for contemporary conservatives: “The right person at the right time can both defeat the Left and offer the future … [H]e will offer human flourishing, rather than human destruction and depravity, the gifts of the Left.”
Abbotoy’s associate, Nate Fischer – one of whose companies the Guardian revealed to be an ammunition supplier to government agencies – asked if critics of Franco would “have the judgment and fortitude to do what was needed to stop the communists?”.
Consistently, these far-right voices make a direct comparison between Spain in the 1930s and the US today – claiming that both feature a totalitarian, violent left that is prepared to overturn elections – and look forward to an authoritarian leader who will resolve the crisis.
But many say the comparison makes no sense.
Sebastiaan Faber is a professor of Hispanic studies at Oberlin College and chair of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archive, which preserves the legacy of American volunteers who fought on the Republican side against Franco in the Spanish civil war, which ran from 1936 to 1939.
In a telephone conversation, he explained that these and other recent examples of rightwing reflections on Franco simply reheat a false “Francoist narrative, which is that with the arrival of the republic, Spain went down the road to self-destruction”.
He also said that there was no basis for comparing the US today with
Republican Spain. “When the civil war broke out, Spanish democracy was less than five years old,” he said.
Others agree.
“There has been a lot of political tumult recently in the United States,” said Mark Bray, a historian of Spain and antifascism at Rutgers University in a separate conversation “but the US now and Spain then are at opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of government stability, not to mention political culture. We have political violence but not on the scale of what Spain experienced: political violence was much more palatable to the left and the right in the 30s.”
Others have pointed out that this flurry is just the latest chapter in the American right’s efforts to rehabilitate Franco, which began before the Spanish civil war was over.
David Austin Walsh is a postdoctoral associate at the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism, wrote a piece last May in part responding to Abbotoy’s initial tweet in which he observed that “admiration for the generalissimo is not new on the US right”.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Walsh said, William F Buckley, the influential conservative journalist and founder of National Review, “was more or less openly pro-Franco”.
The current spike in rightwing interest in Franco, however, may also result from the influence of a historian who is an active participant in efforts to rehabilitate Franco, and quoted as an authority by others doing the same.
Stanley Payne, a revisionist historian of Spanish fascism at the University of Wisconsin Madison until his retirement in 2004, has penned a string of recent articles in rightwing outlets like First Things which invite readers to compare the US with Spain in the 1930s. He has reiterated a line that Franco’s hand was forced by leftist violence and promoted the work of other revisionist historians like Pío Moa, who many professional historians dismiss as a “pseudo-historian”.
The critics of this flurry of neo-Francoism say that the real target of this revisionism is domestic attitudes to US democracy.
For Bray, they offer the same “rightwing arguments against ‘pure democracy’ that have existed for hundreds of years: if you give people too much power and autonomy, it’s going to be chaos and lawlessness, and a strongman will need to step in and limit or suppress it entirely”.
For Faber, parts of the the American right are captured by “the dream of order, where social order is more important than democracy, and democracy is a threat to social order”.
When the civil war broke out, Spanish democracy was less than five years old
Sebastiaan Faber