American historians were late to cover postwar conservativism seriously. Richard Hofstadter’s influential characterization in 1964 of the “paranoid style” of the extreme right may have encouraged other scholars to pathologize conservatism or dismiss the postwar movement as a form of social psychosis (although Hofstadter himself clarified that he wasn’t using the term “paranoid” in a clinical sense). It wasn’t until Alan Brinkley’s 1994 essay, “The Problem of American Conservatism,” that the movement became the subject of intensive historical scrutiny. Since then, a bounty of well-researched articles and monographs have been published, including analyses of both elite thought and grassroots organizing.
Still, with a few exceptions, the story told by this scholarship struggles to account for the sudden emergence and popularity of Donald Trump. David Austin Walsh’s new book, Taking America Back, complicates the history of American conservatism in order to better understand the rise of a populist demagogue who unapologetically dines with antisemites and white supremacists.
Although journalists often regard Trump’s rise as a “hostile takeover” of the Republican Party, Walsh contends that “American conservatism and the far right enjoyed a long and deeply intertwined relationship across the twentieth century.” Further, Walsh argues that “the notion that the far right cannot be a faction of the responsible and respectable conservative establishment remains a deeply pernicious myth.” Despite conventional conservatives’ occasional efforts to publicly distance themselves from those they privately dismissed as kooks, they were in fact allied with extremists in a heterogenous “popular front.” Not all these extremists were bona fide fascists, of course, but the label hits home because, Walsh maintains, it “was not groundless.”
Walsh’s exploration of the Right begins in the 1930s with the story of a lesser-known critic of the New Deal, Merwin K. Hart (1881–1962). Hart’s New York State Economic Council sought to rally business leaders against FDR’s policies, and he played a pivotal, though not always prominent, role in assorted postwar conservative organizations. Hart often expressed antisemitic views, which he shared with his political ally Charles Lindbergh; he lauded Francisco Franco’s regime in America, Look at Spain (1939); and he embraced a form of anti-democratic mass politics favored by fascists. Predictably, Hart opposed U.S. entry into the war in 1939, but because of his antisemitism, the America First Committee’s John T. Flynn kept him at arm’s length initially. After the war, Hart and his fringe collaborators failed to prevent the United States from recognizing the establishment of Israel, and the postwar groups they created (such as American Action, Inc.) did not become strong grassroots organizations. Still, the inroads Hart did make show that the Far Right was a key element in the larger right-wing popular front.
Another “nexus figure” on the postwar right was Joe McCarthy. Conventional accounts of the Second Red Scare often omit the Wisconsin senator’s extensive ties to extreme elements, but Walsh shows that from the beginning of his senate career, McCarthy sympathized with the Far Right. During a Senate sub-committee investigation of Waffen-SS officer Joachim Pieper’s conviction for his involvement in the execution of eighty-four U.S. POWs in the Malmedy massacre of 1944, McCarthy cast the SS troopers as victims of mishandled prosecutions and brutal treatment by the U.S. Army. McCarthy’s paranoid hatred of the American Left was not a “political novelty” when it emerged in mature form during the early 1950s; it was of a piece with his fascist sympathies.
Walsh’s account of a festive dinner in February 1953 to honor McCarthy aide J.B. Matthews at the Waldorf-Astoria provides a revealing portrait of the varied composition of this right-wing popular front. Guests included Hart, Flynn (McCarthy’s soon-to-be chief counsel during the Army-McCarthy hearings), the notorious Roy Cohn, Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, Ayn Rand, William F. Buckley Jr., and Buckley’s brother-in-law Brent Bozell. The event also featured written greetings from Vice President Richard Nixon and anti-communist actor John Wayne. Respectable conservatives clearly rubbed elbows with those operating on the fringes.
The second half of the book is titled “The Purge That Wasn’t.” It examines several cases where Buckley and other would-be gatekeepers sought to distance the conservative movement from extremists. These publicized breaks concealed ongoing ties with extremists and other measures designed to maintain a hard-right following. For example, when the American Mercury embraced a brazen antisemitism in 1952 under its new publisher, Russell Maguire, Buckley was slow to exclude its writers from his new movement organ, the National Review. Only after news distributors refused to handle the American Mercury did Buckley take the modest step of removing those who appeared on its masthead from his magazine’s own masthead.
Probably the best known “purge” was Buckley’s attack on the John Birch Society leadership in the October 1965 pages of the National Review. His critique focused mainly on the bizarre conspiracism of founder Robert Welch. But even then, Buckley strove not to alienate the society’s rank and file; his criticism was narrowly focused on a couple of leaders while he took care to affirm the anticommunist concerns of average members. Bircher support had been important to the conservative alliance that won Barry Goldwater the Republican nomination in 1964. As Walsh puts it, “the genesis of the ‘purge’ lay less in high-minded principles and more in pragmatic calculation of the limits of a Birch-dominated political coalition.”
The rise of a blue-collar, populist conservatism during segregationist George Wallace’s independent presidential campaign in 1968 confirmed that Buckley and the National Review did not control the larger movement. Despite Buckley’s pretentions, he wasn’t, as Walsh makes clear, conservatism’s “pope." The National Review dismissed Wallace as a fake conservative because of his acceptance of certain New Deal programs, and it ridiculed his following as a mix of rural rubes and misguided elderly people. But mainstream conservative elites recognized the significance of Wallace’s impressive showing, a campaign that “appeared to offer new opportunities for right-wing organizing.”
The final “purges” involve Buckley falling out with Joseph Sobran and Pat Buchanan in the 1990s, in yet another battle over who “owned conservatism.” As Buckley stepped down as National Review editor in October 1990, the old antisemitic right appeared to be staging a modest comeback with paleoconservatives like Buchanan challenging the interventionist foreign policy of George H. W. Bush. Buckley tried gallantly to hold the assorted factions of the Right together, but it was a losing struggle.
Walsh describes a complex intermingling of Holocaust deniers, white supremacists, and extreme libertarians who challenged established movement leaders. Among the most peculiar (though influential) figures was Murray Rothbard, libertarian economist and co-founder of the Cato Institute. Despite his own Jewish roots, Rothbard used crude antisemitic slurs in private correspondence, became one of Buchanan’s key supporters during his 1992 presidential campaign, and was even drawn to ex-Klansman David Duke’s 1991 Louisiana gubernatorial race. Rothbard might have deserved further attention, given his continued popularity with both secular and religious libertarians today. Like other figures Walsh examines, Rothbard sought to exculpate Germany for responsibility for World War II. He also represents a good example of the influence of the Austrian school of economics on the Far Right. Notably, in calls for libertarians to exploit populist movements on the Right and the Left, Rothbard evidenced a pragmatic authoritarian streak. In the early 1990s, he even stressed the need for a “charismatic leader who has the ability to short-circuit the media elites, and to reach and rouse the masses directly.”
In the book’s epilogue, Walsh addresses the leader that eventually did emerge. Far from an aberration, Donald Trump and the MAGA movement are a natural upshot of the “intertwined relationship between the conservative movement and the fascistic far right.” It was no accident that one of the organizers of the infamous Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally in 2017 (Richard Spencer) had earlier been an editor at Pat Buchanan’s American Conservative magazine. The evolution of mainstream conservative attitudes regarding Trump followed a familiar pattern. As in the past, organs like the National Review at first came out strongly against Trump. But upon his election in 2016, many of its writers recalibrated to defend his administration or, at least, “pivoted…to an anti-anti-Trump stance.” Taking America Back confirms that this sort of pragmatic accommodation with the Far Right has deep historical roots.
Eccentric characters abound in Walsh’s book, though some, like Rothbard, merit fuller treatment. Walsh might have included Sun Oil magnate J. Howard Pew, who contributed to the Birchers and also played a critical role linking evangelical Christians with the partisan Right. (This part of the story was aptly told in Darren Dochuk’s brilliant Anointed with Oil.)
The book is engagingly written and well researched (including extensive use of several manuscript collections), and greatly enriches the now flourishing historiography of the modern American Right. Walsh is at his best in connecting the disparate dots and tracing the tangled personal connections that held together these allies. What emerges is a fuller and more complicated portrait of American conservatism that sheds considerable light on its recent Trumpian turn.
Taking America Back
The Conservative Movement and the Far Right
David Austin Walsh
Yale University Press, $35, 320 pp.
