Defunct Newspapers Journals TV channels Websites Other Congressional caucuses Economics Gun rights Identity politics Nativist Religion Watchdog groups Youth/student groups Miscellaneous Other Melvin Eustace Bradford (May 8, 1934 – March 3, 1993) was an American conservative author, political commentator and professor of literature at the University of Dallas.

In his preface to The Reactionary Imperative, he wrote "Reaction is a necessary term in the intellectual context we inhabit in the twentieth century because merely to conserve is sometimes to perpetuate what is outrageous."

"The original understanding of the Constitution, Bradford maintained, conformed much more closely to the Southern position than to Lincoln's acts of usurpation.

"[2] The selection met with intense objections from neoconservative figures, centering partly on Bradford's criticisms of President Abraham Lincoln.

[2] "Bradford rejected Lincoln because he saw him as a revolutionary, intent on replacing the American Republic established by the Constitution with a centralized and leveling despotism.

[8] Author Keith Preston later described the successful effort to cancel Bradford's nomination as symbolic of the cosmopolitan neoconservatives descended from liberalism establishing hegemony over the Republican Party and American conservatism, displacing more traditionalist and regionalist thinkers with ideological roots in the Old Right.

Gerhart Niemeyer, Russell Kirk, Jeffrey Hart, William Buckley, M. Stanton Evans, Andrew Lytle, Harry Jaffa ("Bradford's principal intellectual antagonist"),[2] and "dozens of others" were also named as supporters.