David Austin Walsh. Taking America Back: The Conservative Movement and the Far Right. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2024. 320 PP. Paper $35.00. ISBN: 9780300260977.
Over the last few years, a growing body of scholarship has demonstrated how openly racist, antisemitic, and “fascistic” elements of conservatism came to see the Republican Party as their most politically viable organizational conduit.[1] Taking America Back, a new book by historian David Austin Walsh, builds on these developments by providing additional evidence that the conservative movement in the United States has had a long—if uneasy—alliance with a “fascistic” wing. To explain this “alliance,” the book appropriates a familiar phrase used to describe the broad leftist coalition of socialists, communists, and liberals who rose up to oppose fascism in the 1930s: the “popular front.” Walsh argues that the modern conservative movement also consisted (and consists) of a “popular front” characterized by a “fluid, dynamic, and deeply intertwined relationship between conservatism and the far right” (8). Walsh challenges readers to ask: Why did the far right continually find common ground with mainstream elements of the conservative movement? And, more provocatively, is there a long-standing, distinctly American “fascistic” political tradition?
To answer these questions, Taking America Back begins by analyzing the origins of this right-wing “popular front” in the 1930s. Part one concentrates on the group of extreme far-right activists who rose up to oppose the New Deal, labor organizing, and America’s entry into World War II. Walsh identifies Merwin K. Hart (1881-1962), a Harvard graduate (and one-time classmate of FDR), as a representative of this group. A Progressive politician in the early 1900s, Hart eventually decided that liberal democracy was “illegitimate” (23). Through the New York State Economic Council, which he founded in 1929, Hart advocated on behalf of business interests and urged corporate control of government. His influence on policy remained limited in New York—achieving some budget cuts—but his anti-labor, anti-government messaging catapulted the Council to “national prominence” (28). Most notably, he was a central figure in the development of the Mohawk Valley formula, an effort to undermine labor organizing at the Remington Rand Corporation in Ilion, New York.
Walsh argues that Hart’s anti-democratic and anti-labor politics eventually merged with anti-communism and served as a bridge that drew together disparate strands of conservatism in the 1930s into a substantive right-wing “popular front.” By collapsing New Dealism, socialism, and communism into a monolithic enemy, “kooks” like Hart and more mainstream conservatives were able to find common ground. Conspiracy-minded figures—including Hart, but also Elizabeth Dilling (1894-1966), George E. Sokolsky (1893-1962), and Gerald L.K. Smith (1898-1976)—forged political alliances with powerful conservatives like the Chicago Tribune owner Robert McCormick (1880-1955) and Father Charles Coughlin (1891-1976). Though not an international history, Walsh also attends to the international issues that further solidified this emerging right-wing alliance. Perceptions of a figure like Francisco Franco illustrated simmering fascist sympathies within the conservative movement, serving as a “Rorschach test, a psychological space where the ambitions and fantasies of the right-wing popular front could be enacted” (11). For some on the religious right, Franco was seen as upholding Western Christendom. His anti-labor policies, meanwhile, were lauded by free market advocates. Both camps revered him for his anti-communist rhetoric. Moreover, the plausible deniability of his fascism reinforced a shared sense of victimization among American conservatives—the idea that conservatives had been unfairly chastised for their beliefs—further binding this “popular front” together.
Throughout the later 1930s, 40s, and 50s, this group began to gain some political influence. Though electorally trampled, Walsh points out that elements of the core ideas that knit the right-wing “popular front” together—antisemitism, antipathy towards organized labor, anti-democratic sentiment—proliferated in legislative decision-making. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, for example, began to chip away at the protections afforded to unions. Antisemitism pervaded immigration debates as Jewish refugees were largely excluded through the Displaced Persons Act (1948). Perhaps most infamously, McCarthyism “consolidated these existing right-wing political traditions in the United States” (107) and served as a vivid illustration of this rightist “popular front’s” growing influence and power.
In part two of his book, “The Purge That Wasn’t, 1953-91,” Walsh shifts his attention to the publications that “amplified the voices” of the “loose but interlocking network of far-right activists within [this] broader right-wing popular front” (131): most notably William F. Buckley, Jr.’s (1925-2008) National Review. Walsh demonstrates that, after breaking with the American Mercury and Russell Maguire, whose antisemitism and fascist sympathies were broadly reported by NBC and Time magazine, Buckley remained “embedded within” a far-right “coalition during [its] formative years” (139). Buckley, who founded the National Review in part with seed money from John Birch Society founder Robert Welch Jr. (1899-1985), was aware of the political and economic risks of criticizing far right conservatives. Yet shortly after the electoral rebuke of Goldwater in 1964, Buckley recognized that the John Birch Society posed an “image problem” for American conservatism writ large. Thus, Buckley supposedly “purged” the most egregiously bigoted members of the conservative movement from the pages of the National Review, indicating that tolerance for a “popular front” that included the “kooks” had its limits (178).
So the story among more “principled conservatives” often goes, at least. Yet Walsh’s analysis of the archival records shows that any “purging” of the “kooks” at the National Review, to the extent it ever took place, was more strategic than principled. Joe Sobran (1946-2010), for example, whose columns drew ire among neoconservatives, many of whom condemned him as “little more than a crude and naked anti-Semite,” continued as a senior editor at the magazine through the 1980s (214). Meanwhile, Buckley himself defended Pat Buchanan, who challenged Bush in the 1992 Republican primary, even as Buchanan “flirted” with Holocaust denialism in the late 1980s and 90s (201). If anything, Walsh concludes, these instances illuminate Buckley’s role as more of an interlocutor (rather than a gatekeeper) between mainstream conservatism and the far right, laundering—if not outright promoting—the role that “fascistic” elements played in the political success of modern conservatism.
The myth that modern conservatism has little to do with the extreme right continues to persist, however, particularly in the wake of Donald Trump’s stunning 2016 presidential victory. Since then, many leading conservative intellectuals have loudly expressed their discontent with what they anachronistically refer to as the “new” Republican Party. For Roger Scruton, for example, Trump represented a “distorted vision” of conservatism. Max Boot made similar claims in his 2018 The Corrosion of Conservatism, registering as an Independent after 29 twenty-nine loyal years in the Republican Party. Collectively, such lamentations continue to trade in romantic recollections of an earlier, apparently more principled conservative past, one that “self-confidently enforced intellectual and moral standards,” as David Brooks has opined in the pages of the New York Times.
Taking America Back thoroughly discredits such nostalgic myths of a more moderate, tolerant past. Deeply engaging and rich in detail, Walsh’s book instead demonstrates that the modern conservative movement has long occupied a “liminal” space that separates respectability from “kooks”. An underlying antisemitism, sometimes “muted” or coded, has stitched together a right-wing “popular front” as early as the 1930s, even as nostalgic romanticism for an apparently more “principled” conservativism has become increasingly prevalent in a political era that views Trump as an historical anomaly. Nor has such romanticism been employed only by conservative “Never Trumper’s” in their rebukes of the contemporary party; it has been wielded by liberals in their targeted criticism of Trump as well. As recently as 2023, Nancy Pelosi claimed that the United States “needs a strong Republican party,” betraying a similar nostalgia for a past that, as Walsh demonstrates, never quite existed. These instances make clear that mainstream political figures across the aisle have been unwilling to confront an uncomfortable truth about American politics illuminated by Walsh: that contemporary American conservatism was forged, in part, with a right-wing movement that sympathized with, if not outright embraced, “fascistic” elements. By recasting mainstream conservatism as intertwined with the far right through the analytical lens of a “popular front,” Walsh allows readers to better understand both the historical and contemporary relationship between these two political factions.
[1] For other histories of a more active far-right movement in conservative politics, see, for example, John Huntington, Far-Right Vanguard: The Radical Roots of Modern Conservatism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), Nicole Hemmer, Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s (New York: Basic Books, 2022), John Ganz, When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024).
Maxwell Greenberg is a joint doctoral student in History and Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he studies the history of education and 20th century political economy. His research examines the role primary and secondary education curricula and programs have played in the development of modern conservative ideology and identity. More specifically, it explores the ideological motivations and goals of educational programs that emerged or were reorganized in the New Deal and post-war period. Prior to graduate school, Maxwell taught high school history in the Greater Boston area.