The entire contemporary Right Wing was originally progressive (and vice versa).
In the 1690's the eastern seaboard was burning witches. One hundred years later it was conducting the first "red scare" in American history, with people like Rev. Timothy Dwight (President of Yale) and Rev. Jedidiah Morse (Samul F.B.'s father) seeing Illuminati, Freemasons, and "French atheists" under every bed. The ancestors of today's conservatives were derided as atheistic Jacobins who would confiscate and burn all Bibles if their man Jefferson was ever elected. A generation later the Whigs made similar accusations against the Jacksonians.
In the 1890's the eastern seaboard was quaking in its boots over the "Jacobin" William Jennings Bryan, whose creationism threatened the Social Darwinism that was used to justify their beliefs. They even had a bunch of alienists (and psychiatrists, psychologists, and therapists were known at the time) to declare Bryan "insane." Sound familiar?
Then during the New Deal something happened. The Eastern Seaboard discovered in New Deal statism a more useful argument for centralization and elitism than the old Hamiltonian conservatism had been. Suddenly the children of the old "robber barons" of the Gilded Age were Secretly Behind Communism. And the old Reds of the 1920s were now the "Old Right."
As a Hamiltonian myself, drawing these lines gives me no joy. But it's time to admit that the most radical sector of American society is its old aristocracy. They have shifted the Left from supporting industrial workers to upper class causes like environmentalism and homosexuality (which the Old Left called "bourgeois decadence"), the repudiation of Old Left populism (initiative and referendum, recall), and the constant vilification the working class and celebration scabs (ie, "people of color," "immigrants," "refugees," "indigenous pipples").
In my former life as a chrstian, I was very attracted to the Theocratic anarchism of the J-- Witnesses precisely because the old establishment was so radical it was easy to believe they were in cahoots with "Lucifer" from the beginning.
A minor historical quibble...no one was ever burned at the stake in America, The “witches” were hanged.