July 30, 2024
Brandan P. Buck
Taking America Back: The Conservative Movement and the Far Right, by David Austin Walsh, Yale University Press, 303 pages, $35.
Since 2016, trained historians and writers of popular histories have sought to explain the rise of populism by looking to the distant past for its origins. Such works seek to reconceptualize our understanding of American conservatism and its relationship to the so-called far right. Usually, they aim to blur or erase the distinction between the two.
Entering this crowded field is David Austin Walsh's Taking America Back: The Conservative Movement. Walsh argues that the American right was not comprised of a distinct conservative movement with a radical fringe. Instead, the movement existed as a "popular front" between these two factions that persisted throughout the 20th century. This argument purports to provide greater historical clarity about movements and figures that have attracted relatively little attention from scholars. Yet Walsh's analytical leaps, lack of historical empathy, arguments from association, and often contradictory accounting of the American right saddle his book with tensions.
Taking America Back is comprised of eight chapters divided into two parts. Part One is centered on the origins of the conservative movement and its position within the so-called “popular front,” which included other rightwing organizations that cohered around opposition to the New Deal and, later, to American entry into World War II. To make his case, Walsh centers the ideologies and activities of liminal figures who skirted the categories of respectable politics. Walsh’s throughline in Part I is the career of an underexamined anti-New Dealer Merwin K. Hart who tinged his opposition to programs of FDR with antisemitism and general distain for democracy.
In Part Two, which spans from 1953 until 1991, Walsh strives to make his main historiographical contributions. These four chapters cover the origins and political life of the modern conservative movement as most readers would recognize it today. In the latter half of the book, Walsh is explicitly writing against an established historiography that holds that by the mid-1960s, the conservative movement, quarterbacked by William F. Buckley, successfully purged far-right actors such as the antisemitic editors of The American Mercury magazine and conspiratorially-minded actors like the John Birch Society from mainstream conservative circles. Walsh asserts that the second half of the 20th century did not witness significant internal changes within the conservative movement. Instead, Walsh argues that throughout the latter half of the 20th century, the conservative movement maintained its links to far-right groups and philosophies that lay far outside the bounds of the Overton Window.
Narratively, Walsh's work is often enlightening and illuminates the role of the far-right within conservative politics and the tensions that relationship created both internally and between the right and its liberal and progressive opponents. Walsh's material on the American Jewish right is especially intriguing considering the prevalence of antisemitism within the far-right and, to a lesser extent, conservative circles. Walsh shows how antisemitic actors on the right, citing the example of Hart, were often willing to work with “good Jews” who displayed their anticommunist credentials and who “accepted the tenets of the ‘great Christian Republic.’” He concludes that the “Jewish right and the antisemitic far right were partners – albeit tense partners – in the right-wing popular front.”
Walsh's material on the John Birch Society is, at times, similarly nuanced as he examines the role of religious and racial minorities in an organization that also hosted individuals who had explicitly racist views. He notes that during the early years of the John Birch Society, its raison d'etre was anticommunism, not resisting the Civil Rights Movement. As such, Walsh notes that prominent black anticommunists, many of them former Communists, such as Leonard Patterson, Julia Brown, and George Schuyler found a home with the society. Such high points within the book offer interesting areas of relief on a movement often accused of ideological dogmatism and adherence to identity politics centered on white Protestantism.
Analytically, however, Taking America Back fails in its stated goal of showing the coherence and continuity between the American conservative movement and the far-right. Walsh foregrounds the importance of radical actors, which affords them a place of prominence over other, more mainstream segments of the right. Throughout his work, the history and motivations of radical and, specifically, antisemitic actors are well-flushed out and informative.
However, as to the broader conservative movement, Walsh gives the reader little background on their motivations. While many histories of New Deal opposition center on more mainstream organizations, such as the National Association of Manufacturers, Walsh pays little attention to them. Walsh's centering of the fringe gives the impression that the right (writ large) drew its opposition to FDR's massive changes to the American political economy from an especially dark place.
Walsh's case ultimately rests on arguments of ideological adjacency. His employment of this methodology is ironic as it is a political mirror of the antagonists in his study. Throughout the book, Walsh (correctly) notes that the forces of the right, be they conservative or far-right, saw the ideological or political proximity of organized labor, the bureaucratic state, or the civil rights movement to the forces of the far-left as evidence of their "alienness" and therefore illegitimacy. Walsh neglects to test the validity or historize these sentiments outside its more noxious antisemitic flavor. New Deal opponent's charges of "alienness" also stemmed from Midwestern sectional politics, amplified by Anglophobia and middle-class resentment. Walsh does not explore these motivations.
To boost his argument, Walsh frequently reads against the grain of his sources, sees dog whistles that mask darker motives, or argues that mainstream conservatives were adjacent to those who held them. In Chapter 1, for example, Walsh argues that many anti-New Deal groups, like the explicitly antisemitic and Boston-based Sentinels, cast the New Deal as an "alien" import of the "Jewish Brigade" or referred to it as the "Jew Deal." He then notes that other anti-New Deal groups did not openly peddle antisemitic conspiracism but did refer to FDR's suite of economic policies as "alien." He argues that such language was either coded antisemitic discourse or constituted a "porous" rhetorical boundary. But vaguely similar rhetoric does not prove similar motives or demonstrate that the criticisms were unjustified. Walsh ignores other motivating factors for conservative opposition to the New Deal, such as earnest support for laissez-faire economics or recent memories of mass labor unrest, domestic terrorism, and the domestic impacts of World War I—a generation-defining tragedy that is absent from the analysis.
The absence of historical context skews Walsh's arguments in other chapters. Throughout much of the book, but particularly in Chapter 2, Walsh argues that conservatives and the far-right shared a sense of victimization through smear campaigns and politicized investigation. Suggesting that this victimization was illusory, Walsh doubts the importance of the "Brown Scare," a domestic panic over fascism first argued for by Leo P. Ribuffo in his seminal work, The Old Christian Right. Some conservative noninterventionists did harbor antisemitic views, as Walsh rightly notes. Yet the main charge leveled by the interventionists upon their noninterventionist opponents was that the latter were in league with Nazi Germany, a hostile foreign power. This charge was false despite being advanced by various interventionist groups, political figures, media outlets, and even President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Nor was the scare merely a public relations fight, which could be defended as free speech in action. Instead, the interventionist camp, buoyed by unlawful spying and surveillance on the part of the FBI and British intelligence, violated the very democratic norms they claimed to protect.
Walsh's downplaying of the smear campaign is a case of being factual but not truthful. Respected scholarship such as Insidious Foes by Francis MacDonnell argued that the scare was overblown and that the forces of domestic fascism never constituted a threat to the republic. Furthermore, historian Douglas Charles argues in his J. Edgar Hoover and the Anti-interventionists that the FBI's role in the scare artificially shrank the Overton Window on the most critical question that faces any body politic, the issue of war and peace.
Walsh's coverage of the debate over American participation in World War II indicates a critical failing of the book: a lack of empathy. Even if one grants that Walsh's subjects were not victims to the extent that they claimed, they were undoubtedly targets of an often-illegal campaign that fed their sense of victimhood. Furthermore, postwar revelations about the British government's role in promoting American intervention broke in the early 1960s via a memoir titled Room 3603 written by retired British intelligence officer H. Montgomery Hyde. These disclosures coincided with the beginnings of another heated political battle, a Second Brown scare, the combination of which incensed the postwar right and deepened their penchant for conspiracism and hatred toward their liberal foes. One does not have to agree with their sentiments, but a prudent scholar should at least seek to understand them; Walsh does not.
In addition to these omissions, the book's narrative, particularly in its second half, undermines his thesis. Walsh's central claim is that the oft-cited Buckley purges of the far-right have been misrepresented by previous scholarship. Instead, he argues that earlier works exaggerated Buckley's ideological housecleaning and that his efforts did not represent a fundamental break between conservatives and those to their right. In Part Two, plainly titled, "The Purge that Wasn't, 1953-1991," Walsh attempts to show a continuity in the far-right's racist and antisemitic political thinking and their overlaps with conservatism.
But Walsh’s narrative does not show this. One of these means of supposed continuity was the National Youth Alliance, an explicitly white supremacist successor to the youth wing of George Wallace’s 1968 presidential campaign. Walsh prominently features the political life of the National Youth Alliance in Chapter 7. He argues that it served as a thread of continuity for the far-right and a mechanism of influence upon the conservative movement. However, rather than provide an argument based on solid continuity, perhaps inadvertently, Walsh catalogs the various excommunications surrounding and ideological splintering within the National Youth Alliance. Walsh notes that the group was consistently fractured ideological lines. As to the former, Walsh records the infighting between members like Willis Carto, who wanted to take the group in an explicitly neo-Nazi direction, and others, like John Acord, who, while assuredly a white supremacist, displayed disgust at that prospect. Walsh argues that these differences in personality and other factors "undercut" the effectiveness of the NYA.
Similarly, in Chapter 7, Walsh notes that William F. Buckley continued to clean his house after denouncing the John Birch Society. And even the John Birch Society purged the University of Illinois professor Revilo P. Oliver for his antisemitic views, former field organizer, and neo-Nazi sympathizer Louis T. Byers, and rejected the Minuteman, a right-wing militia group. Walsh promises an argument based on continuity. He treats the reader to a narrative of constant infighting, ruptures, decline, and political fringes upon fringes.
Rather than successfully argue that the conservative movement and the far-right represented a contiguous political body, Walsh recapitulated an existing argument that places the conservative movement at the core, with ever-shrinking radicalizing fringes radiating outward. Interestingly enough, Walsh virtually concedes as such and admits that "mainstream conservatives and the far-right" displayed "mutual antagonisms" and "increasing differences in strategies and tactics" Walsh attempts to dig himself out of this hole of his own making by asserting that, despite these differences, the two factions of the right drew "from a common set of social and political assumptions and, crucially, were competing for the same common pool of support." As with earlier chapters, Walsh's case in the book's second half rests on the assertion that because these two camps were ideologically adjacent, they were politically contiguous, an argument he fails to sustain.
In addition to the book's analytical and narrative shortcomings, Walsh's tone left much to be desired. Throughout his book, Walsh spiked his prose with scare quotes, snark, and condescension, displaying little effort to hide his biases. The historical profession has long abandoned objectivity, which Peter Novick referred to in his eponymously titled That Noble Dream. Yet historians, generally speaking, strive to be neutral in their tone and as detached as possible. Such is not the case with Walsh's scholarship. In addition to overly sympathetic language toward the left-wing and liberal actors, Walsh refers to law-and-order conservatives as "power fetishists" and accuses Republicans of "co-opting Black conservatives." Like others in the field, Walsh also charges that the post-Civil Rights Era GOP merely used the language of color-blindness to mask their erstwhile naked racism.
Such cutting prose may have a place on an academic's social media feed or even in an impassioned opinion essay, but it is inappropriate for a piece of formal (and presumably peer-reviewed) scholarship published by an academic press. Walsh's inability or unwillingness to mitigate or hide his biases sinks his already floundering work of argumentative history.
Walsh is not alone. Taking America Back joins a growing body of academic and popular histories that seek to explore the past of the American right with an eye on the present. Examples include Bradley Hart's Hitler's American Friends, Sarah Churchwell's Behold, America, Jacob Heilbrunn's America Last, and Rachel Maddow's Prequel. To Walsh's credit, unlike many of these other works, he does not attempt to affix the source of America's far-right to fascist movements overseas. His actors are the product of an often-fraught American history with race, labor-capital relations, and debates over the political economy. Like many of these works, however, Walsh presents the political economy of the New Deal, intervention into World War II, and the postwar Civil Rights Movement as normative and, therefore, any political formation outside their confines (at least on the right) as deviant.
Like most of the works above, Walsh's exploration of the topic is explicitly motivated by a desire to explain the rise of populism in the 21st century. Yet he does not attempt to explore more proximate causes. The reader will find no treatment of conservative opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement, no discussion of America's post-Cold War foreign policy, no analysis of the domestic impacts of the Global War on Terror, and no content on the immigration debate. While Walsh dedicates attention to Pat Buchanan, he spends that time exploring Buchanan's ideological proximity to far-right figures and his penchant for World War II revisionism that often brushed up against the more noxious practice of Holocaust denial. Yet Walsh does not dedicate any attention to the substantive issues that animated his career and influenced a subsequent generation of populists. Perhaps the sole direct link to present that Walsh identifies is paleoconservative turned white nationalist (and recently declared Joe Biden supporter and NATO enthusiast) Richard Spencer. Despite his stated goal, Walsh’s clear intention is to anathematize and exclude the right by linking it to Nazis—exactly the kind of victimization that worried critics of the New Deal and FDR’s foreign policy.
Given these shortcomings, Taking America Back offers little to readers interested in a disciplined history of the conservative movement and its malcontents on the right. As to the former, George Nash's The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 still holds up as a nuts-and-bolts history of the postwar American conservative movement. Michael Continetti’s recent The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism is a thoroughly narrativized yet tightly argued history of the American right that covers its institutional and populist factions. As to the authoritarian or antisemitic far right, Leo P. Ribuffo's The Old Christian Right remains the gold standard in historicizing illiberal and fascistic rightwing groups in America. Ribuffo does so without apologetics nor catastrophizing, all the while displaying analytical discipline and historical empathy, feats which are rarely found in modern treatments of the topic. George Hawley's Rightwing Critics of American Conservatism is another welcome exception to the modern trend toward scaremongering. Hawley covers many of the same actors as Walsh but does so with a level of analytical rigor and detachment largely absent in scholarship written in the Trump era, when passions are high and academic standards are seemingly low.
It is banal to repeat the obvious, but the United States is currently in political turmoil and likely transforming into a new party system. In this time of uncertainty, history can help to make sense of the present. Unfortunately, hamstrung by an ambitious and unrealized thesis, analytical shortcomings, and his own biases, Walsh's Taking America Back is not such a history.
Brandan P. Buck is a PhD candidate in history at George Mason University, where he recently defended his dissertation on the noninterventionist right in the 20th century.
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