Responsible Conservatism Really Was a Thing for a While
David Austin Walsh’s intellectual history of the American right is excellent but overstates Trumpism's continuity with the conservatism that preceded it
Book Review
The trauma of the Trump years has struck historians as much as anyone. They have had to reconsider the American political tradition, seeking out the strains and threads that made an apparent aberration like Trump possible. David Austin Walsh, a postdoctoral associate at the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism, argues in Taking America Back that the right’s Trumpian turn did not represent a decisive break with conservatism’s past but was an outgrowth of the comfortable place extremism had enjoyed on the right for nearly a century. Walsh’s book certainly has its strengths, but its biggest weakness is that it reads the present moment of extremism too closely into the history of conservatism, blurring some very real boundaries that existed between the radicals and the mainstream well into the 2010s.
Rise of the MAGA Underworld
While poring over Walsh’s book, I was reminded of a passage from historian Norman Cohn’s Warrant for Genocide:
There exists a subterranean world, where pathological fantasies disguised as ideas are churned out by crooks and half-educated fanatics for the benefit of the ignorant and superstitious. There are times when that underworld emerges from the depths and suddenly fascinates, captures, and dominates multitudes of usually sane and responsible people. … And it occasionally happens that this subterranean world becomes a political power and changes the course of history.
Cohn argues that it is tempting for academics to dismiss crooks and fanatics and focus on sane, responsible actors. But history isn’t a political theory class where students read a series of rational, systematic arguments that can evaluated with logic and evidence. There is no rule that says that the “kooks” cannot sway public opinion, win elections, and wield power, even if their wild theories would never pass peer review.
The age of Donald Trump speaks to the need to take the unserious seriously. Cohn’s underworld has bubbled to the surface of public life, bringing liars, freaks, and conspiracy-mongers to the fore while assaulting the foundations of democracy. One sees the likes of Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn, Stephen Miller, and Roger Stone in a president’s inner circle and wonders what went awry. Such developments often prompt historians to ask different questions of the past to illuminate an unstable present.
The New Right’s Populist Front
Enter Walsh’s book, which seeks to debunk the narrative of anti-Trump conservatives and some of their liberal allies that Trump engineered a “hostile takeover” of the GOP and conservatism. According to the “Never Trump” narrative, responsible conservatives like Ronald Reagan and National Review editor William F. Buckley Jr. distanced themselves from “lunatic fringe” forces like the John Birch Society and open racists and anti-Semites. Trump’s triumph, in this view, fundamentally changed the nature of the GOP and conservatism.
Echoing John Huntington’s 2021 book, Far-Right Vanguard, Walsh contends that the far right and mainstream were more intertwined than the hostile takeover story admits. He uses the term coined by Buckley to trace the rise of the “right-wing popular front,” a loose network of conservatives that included white nationalists, anti-Semites, extreme anti-New Dealers, and other kooks. Walsh contends that Buckley’s purge of extremists was halting and partial and that mainstream conservatives were more than happy to harness the energy of radicals in their quest to remake American politics. The crazies were always part of the coalition, and in the 2010s they took over the asylum completely, an outcome that Walsh and others have argued reflects the deep-seated radicalism of the modern right.
Taking America Back orients readers towards appreciating the importance of racist, illiberal, and anti-democratic forces in American political history. The writing is also much more engaging than most academic work.
Fringe … or Friends?
But the book has significant problems. Most importantly, it defines responsible conservatism out of existence, leaping from the claim that mainstream conservatives never fully purged the far right to the idea that there was little meaningful difference between these groups. Claims like “in the early 2010s, conservatives and the far right were synonymous” speak to the overreach of this argument; Mitt Romney, after all, won the GOP nomination in 2012. There are of course important seeds in conservative history that eventually sprouted the rotten MAGA fruit, as Walsh documents. But a closer look at how Trump challenged the GOP and its establishment organs shows that he also dramatically altered these institutions, bringing the fringe to the center. This suggests that the “hostile takeover” thesis has some truth and that there was such a thing as responsible conservatism.
The strongest part of this book is the first half, where Walsh examines conservative activist networks from the 1930s to the 1950s, an era often overlooked in the historiography of conservatism. He focuses on fascist-curious types like Merwin Hart and Russell Maguire. Both were prominent figures in resisting the New Deal, which they viewed as a Jewish-Marxist conspiracy, and opposing U.S. entry into World War II. Despite their manifest antisemitism, they were not fringe elements of the nascent conservative movement and were connected to prominent figures like Chicago Tribune editor Robert McCormick and Father Charles Coughlin. They also played a critical role in orchestrating the McCarthyist panic of the early 1950s—to the extent that McCarthy felt compelled to hire Jewish staffers like Roy Cohn to neutralize accusations of antisemitism.
In the second half of the book, Walsh sets his sights on Buckley’s claim that he purged irresponsible kooks from conservatism, including the Birchers and Maguire, the antisemitic editor of the right-wing magazine American Mercury. While this is well-trodden ground, Walsh ably shows that Buckley’s purges were usually tactical and partial rather than principled and absolute. In other words, you had to step way over the line into outright antisemitism, racism, or conspiracism to get excommunicated. Buckley endorsed white supremacy openly in the 1950s and early 1960s and employed a good number of bigots and fanatics at National Review, although his record on race is more complicated than Walsh acknowledges.
When he broke with the extremists, Buckley did so in ways that preserved mainstream conservatism’s appeal to a popular base that found aspects of extremism enticing. For example, he directed his ire toward the fever-dreaming Robert Welch, the head of the John Birch Society, rather than the rank-and-file of Birchers, whom he still wanted as National Review readers. Buckley’s condemnation of Welch came years after the Birchers had been spreading insane claims like Dwight Eisenhower being a secret communist. Buckley fired or distanced himself from figures like Revilo Oliver and Joseph Sobran only after they veered into open antisemitism, threatening to embarrass the movement. This paralleled the Republican Party’s strategy of dog-whistling to resentful white voters, for instance, while retaining an official colorblind respectability.
Walsh makes a solid case that Buckley hesitated to “punch right” in ways that would upset the right-wing popular front. His section on Buckley’s apologia for Patrick Buchanan’s antisemitism is particularly strong in this regard. Still, Walsh is oddly resistant to the idea that Buckley nevertheless policed the boundaries of conservatism and rendered certain ideas and people beyond the pale. He did break from The American Mercury, the Birchers, Sobran, and others for outright fascism and racism. There is some difference between this and the “no enemies to the right” approach of contemporary right-wingers like Michael Anton and Christopher Rufo.
In its second half, the argument struggles with the problem of “responsible conservatism.” Walsh uses this term without defining it clearly, even though one of his goals is to question its existence. The issue might be the term “responsibility” itself, as no form of conservatism is responsible for some on the left.
Conservatism Has Never Been Trumpism All the Way Down
But the contrasts between Trump and the earlier mainstreams of the GOP and conservatism suggests that responsible conservatism did exist. As Walsh delves into feuds among intellectuals at magazines with modest readerships, he misses the forest for the trees of the larger trends of conservative and Republican politics in which the fringe was consistently held at bay even if it was never entirely isolated.
One reason for this shortcoming is that Walsh races from the late 1960s to the 2000s in his final chapter, overlooking key developments on the right. In this period, the “fusionist” style combined social conservatives like the religious right, economic libertarians, and hawkish anti-communists like the neoconservatives into a coalition that dominated the GOP from the 1960s to the 2010s and shifted the paradigm of American politics toward what Mark Lilla calls “the Reagan Dispensation.”
The “ultraconservatives” (in the parlance of Huntington and Matthew Dallek) who are the core subjects in Walsh’s narrative were just “one element in a set of shifting and unstable Republican conservative electoral coalitions,” as Dallek puts it. Walsh gives minimal treatment to the larger scope of the GOP and the conservative movement, and his focus on disputes within the orbit of National Review and other magazines risks exaggerating the fringe’s importance in this larger context.
Republican presidents in this era talked the conservative talk but governed far more pragmatically, accepting the basic tenets of the New Deal and civil rights while trying to limit their scope. Apart from Nixon, they did not subvert the bedrock principles of American democracy, particularly the transfer of power after elections. It is impossible to imagine Trump, the architect of Jan. 6, writing to Biden the way that George H.W. Bush wrote to Clinton in 1993: “Your success now is our country’s success. I am rooting for you.”
Far-right elements like paleoconservatives and white nationalists often felt alienated from the dominant conservatism, preferring anti-immigrant, anti-trade, non-interventionist, and sometimes overly racist politics. As Dallek puts it in his recent study of the Birchers, “the differences between these ultraconservatives and what I will call the mainstream right were real and substantive,” including “explicit racism, anti-interventionism versus internationalism, conspiracy theories, and a more apocalyptic, violent, anti-establishment mode of politics.”
This coalition started to show cracks in the 1990s as the glue of the Cold War receded and this old right returned under figures like Patrick Buchanan. Even then, the GOP continued to choose mainstream presidential candidates, and neoconservative influence over domestic and foreign policy skyrocketed, to the great chagrin of figures like Buchanan. On issues like the Iraq War and globalization, the neocons and the Buchananites remained divided.
The Far Right No Longer Feels Alienated from Mainstream Conservatism
A related problem with Walsh’s argument is that the far right today sees Trump as an ally in ways that it did not for previous Republicans, whom they viewed as moderate squishes. The political scientist George Hawley noted in a 2016 book that “white nationalists are some of the most bitterly anti-Republican ideologues I have come across.” This changed with the MAGA ascendency. Now Trump World is littered with fanatics and overt white nationalists, including Steven Miller, David Duke, and the Proud Boys, who see the 45th president as reflecting their values and growing power. As Duke said in 2016: “I represent the ideas of preserving this country and the heritage of this country, and I think Trump represents that as well.”
Trump not only failed to condemn these people (“I don’t know David Duke”), but he has amplified their ideas and enlisted them in his assault on American democracy, most notably in the lead-up to Jan. 6, when his call for a demonstration mobilized far-right groups into action. His administration also cut government grants to law enforcement agencies and other groups investigating right-wing extremists. This full-on embrace is a far cry from conservatives “competing for the same common pool of support” as white supremacists in previous decades, as Walsh contends.
For all their faults, the contrast of how previous GOP leaders handled extremism is stark. George H.W. Bush, possibly the quintessential “responsible conservative,” left the National Rifle Association because of its hyperbolic rhetoric about “jack-booted thugs” seizing Americans’ guns. He also unambiguously condemned Duke as he gained political ground in Louisiana in 1991, saying “I believe he should be rejected for what he is and what he stands for.” George W. Bush, in the aftermath of Sept. 11, condemned Islamophobia and reached out to Muslim Americans as equal members of the national family. One shudders to think what kind of Islamophobic mayhem Trump would have unleashed had he been president during a major terrorist attack from an Islamist group. “Compassionate conservatives” like Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson and the reformers who conducted the 2013 “Autopsy” tried to forge a conservatism that was more open to using state power to help the marginalized and more appealing to nonwhite voters. If the conservative establishment and GOP leadership could have chosen a candidate in 2016 without primaries, they would not have chosen Trump, although most eventually acceded to his takeover.
Longitudinal studies by political scientists offer further evidence that formerly extreme viewpoints have become more normal in the GOP over time. In the phenomenon of “asymmetric polarization,” both parties have moved toward the ideological poles, but Republican legislators have moved rightwards more dramatically. A party once stocked with moderate conservatives like John Warner now features Josh Hawley types as the new median. This trend helps explain why the GOP capitulated to Trump, but it also suggests that a more centrist conservatism held sway in the party for much of recent history.
Not as “Hostile” as Many Think … But Still a “Takeover”
A more balanced version of Walsh’s argument might look like this: the lunatic fringe was not as fringe as mainstream conservatives like to believe, but the conservative movement and the GOP still made efforts to keep them from seizing the reins of power. They played a dangerous game, trying to maintain control while harnessing the voting strength of the “radical undercurrent” in the base with strategies such as Reagan’s 1980 appeal to states’ rights in Neshoba County, Mississippi.
But the fringe’s attempts to take over failed until the early 2010s, showing the resiliency of mainstream conservatism. Trump seized control of the party both because of longer-term historical forces like the global resurgence of nationalist populism and contingent factors such as the crowded GOP primary field and the choices of party elites. Upon winning the presidency, he challenged positions that had been dominant in conservatism for a half-century, including free trade and commitment to NATO, while bringing nativism, white nationalism, and conspiracism into the mainstream in unprecedented ways.
In this alternative framing, the more interesting historical question becomes why the mainstream conservative strategy of boundary-policing failed at this juncture, enabling a latent faction of the right to seize control. This framing, adopted by analysts like Dallek, Tim Alberta, and E.J. Dionne, still enables scholars to bring the kooks into the story while respecting the contingency and contested nature of the Trump movement’s rise.
These criticisms aside, Walsh’s book does what historians are uniquely suited to do: challenge the narratives that the powerful create to justify their actions. His broadside against the “hostile takeover” thesis challenges centrist conservatives and liberals alike to grapple honestly with the relationship of the mainstream and the far right. The book also contributes to the growing literature on “Illiberal America,” or the idea advanced by scholars like Stephen Hahn and Matthew Rose that the United States has a meaningful anti-liberal and anti-democratic political lineage rather than a hegemonic liberal consensus. Walsh’s book is not entirely convincing or balanced, but it is a step toward a more forthright reckoning with the American political tradition.
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With all due respect, I think you err in calling George W. Bush a responsible conservative (even “for all [his] faults”, which is an impressive understatement) since it’s hard to think of anything less responsible than the War on Terror & its ignominious slaughter of ~4.5 million lives & counting.
I think "movement conservatism" was always just a thin intellectual veneer over a largely reactionary base. Also, this review neglects to mention (don't know if the book does or not) that both parties once had liberals and conservatives/reactionaries in them, which began to change after the enactment of civil rights legislation in the 1960s and Nixon's Southern Strategy.