Thank you! And noted.
The whole business of describing the political spectrum as running from "individualism" on the right to "collectivism" on the left strikes me as false and counterproductive. As I pointed out earlier, patriotism is itself "collectivistic" (this observation is actually not mine, but of a national socialist former John Bircher attacking the individualism of the American right). But this is far from the only example of conservative "collectivism."
Roman Catholic social teaching, as based on Pope Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum, opposed to Marxist class struggle the idea of a society as a body in which each member has its own particular function. A war among classes is thus no different than a war between organs of a single body. This philosophy is traditionally referred to as "corporatism" or "corporativism," but one can hardly call it individualist. Is the notion of all members of society as organs of a single body working together not collectivist?
One of the most egregious examples of dishonesty about the individualist/collectivist issue was perpetrated by none other than Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society, in that organization's Blue Book. A whole chapter is devoted to the philosophy of Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West. Welch interprets Spengler as suggesting that civilizations are indeed organic entities, like the bodies of individual human beings--they are born, grow old, and eventually die by succumbing to the "cancer" of "collectivism." There are two problems with this: 1)as I understand it, Spengler actually said that eventually civilizations die from individualism (the exact opposite of Welch's interpretation), and 2)the notion that countries/societies/civilizations are organic bodies made up of individual "cells" (ie, the people who make them up) is itself collectivist! The American Right does indeed to be very confused on this issue, but no more so than those on the Left who think state socialism is the ultimate form of individualist rebellion.
Before closing, I'd like to return to the issue of Francoism. Many American conservatives, while condemning Mussolini's Italian Fascism as "identical to Communism" will nevertheless defend Franco, whose official ideology was national syndicalism (syndicalism being a form of radical socialism). In fact, the full official name of the only legal political party under Franco was Falange Espanola Tradicionalista y de las Juntas de la Ofensive Nacional Sindicalista (which translates literally and clumsily as "Traditionalist Spanish Phalanx and of the Juntas of the National Syndicalist Offensive"). Again, I note that few conservatives make the claim that Franco's Spain was essentially the same as a Communist state. Shoot, Trujillo's Dominican Republic could perhaps be defined as socialist because Trujillo and his family owned everything (there was also a cult of personality in which each home was "encouraged" to display Trujillo's portrait), but many conservatives who loudly denounce Nazism and Fascism as being on the left regard Trujillo as a valiant anti-Communist ally. (At least the Birchers did.)