The first episode of the notorious John Birch Society propaganda film Anarchy U.S.A. (1966) explicitly but accurately depicts the Leninist program for Communist revolution and its recent successes in China, Cuba, and Algeria. The second episode, however, makes the tragically misguided conceptual leap that the inflammation of feelings, radicalization of opinions, and accentuation of differences resulting from the contemporary American Civil Rights movement align with the destabilizing intentions of world Communism toward the American republic. Simply because some left-wing movements in some countries have ultimately resulted in Marxist revolutions does not mean that all left-wing activity will inexorably tend toward the same conclusions anywhere and everywhere. A similar conceptual objection might be raised against a recent book condemning all such forms and permutations of the “right-wing popular front”: David Austin Walsh’s Taking America Back: The Conservative Movement and the Far Right (2024), which argues that the “respectable” conservatism of William F. Buckley and his National Review were always fascist-adjacent, a near proximity that accounts for Donald Trump’s quick seizure of the Republican Party and much of the conservative movement.
A postdoctoral research fellow in history at Yale University, Walsh writes, “Twentieth-century American conservatism did not equal fascism, but it evolved out of a right-wing popular front that included fascist and quasi-fascist elements” (2). He continues, “the American far right—broadly defined as sympathetic to fascism or outright fascistic, nativist, antisemitic, skeptical of democracy, anti-labor, and fiercely anti-communist—was a key constitutive component of this popular front…There was no firm wall of separation between the ‘kooks’ and ‘responsible’ conservatism” (6). Walsh adapts the phrase “popular front” from the interwar Communists, socialists, and liberals who, according to him, stood shoulder to shoulder against fascism, but then applies this phrase to the post-WWII American right, including reactionary extremists like National Economic Council founder Merwin K. Hart, American Mercury publisher Russell Maguire, American Nazi George Lincoln Rockwell, classics scholar Dr. Revilo P. Oliver, and Holocaust equivocators such as Pat Buchanan and Joseph Sobran, all of whom were socially, intellectually, and institutionally more closely interwoven with Buckley than he cared to admit or than liberals cared to ascertain, argues Walsh. Furthermore designating Senator McCarthy the “lynchpin” (108) and the John Birch Society the “zenith” (150) of the right-wing popular front, Walsh reframes familiar political controversies such as the trial of Waffen-SS officer Joachim Peiper or the assassination of John F. Kennedy as well as ideological conflicts such as the ‘paleo’ against the ‘neo’ conservative factions in support of his main contention that “there really were racists, antisemites, and Nazi sympathizers in the ranks of conservatism in the 1950s and 1960s” (12, emphasis in original).
To the degree that anyone—conservative or otherwise—denies this, Walsh’s argument is correct; there have always been unsavory elements on the American right. Likewise, violent extremists move among the MAGA crowds, with Senior Airman Ashli Babbitt on January 6th and paying for her terrible misconduct with her life. More specifically, Walsh provides a welcome intervention regarding the highly problematic term isolationist (52) and the confusion that has resulted from its chronic misapplication. The sustained treatment of Pat Buchanan—whose ideas among those of the assembled dramatis personae perhaps most closely prefigure Trump’s—is especially effective. The overall result is therefore in numerous respects a lucid, measured, and articulate submission from a junior scholar.
The vitality of the biographical accounts cannot, however, entirely overcome the deficiency of Walsh’s theoretical reasoning, which relies too heavily upon contemporary partisan terminology. Few to none of the persons and groups Walsh retroactively designates as left-wing or right-wing ever described themselves as such; the writers of history ought to be more appreciative of the potential consequences of utilizing contemporary categories so uncritically. Completely absent from Walsh’s analysis, for instance, is the thought of the realist George Kennan, the Objectivist Ayn Rand, or the entire evangelical or religious right, all highly influential during the period. The attempt to impose a left-to-right axis upon all mid-century American politics is therefore exceedingly ill-advised, as is the incorporation of self-contradictory neo-Marxist criticism:
“Ironically, the most sophisticated analysis of the fascistic potential of [Senator Barry] Goldwater came not from an American but from a Polish Marxist economist named Michal Kalecki,” Walsh states, approvingly. “He noted that the economic basis of Goldwater’s support came from a ‘new’ group of capitalists with ‘young, dynamic concerns’ who rejected the New Deal regulatory state…unified by their fundamental commitment to preserving the global racial and political hierarchy” (177).
One of several such serious logical fallacies (168, 175), no abuse of Marx is more unpardonable than the misrepresentation of his program for proletarian revolution as somehow also concerned with the redistribution of power among different skin colors and nations. Apart from the sacrament of Holy Communion, nothing in this world more inexorably induces the congregation of otherwise distinct peoples than laissez-faire capitalism; wherefore the American conservative movement could logically be engaged in the covert defense of either white supremacy or capital accumulation, but not both, given the inherent conflict between them.
The empiricism of the historical, and the rationalism of the social scientific lines of inquiry mutually benefit from constructive criticism, a truth Walsh would do well to imbibe. The cobbling together of a tendentious polemic consisting entirely of the tangential connections between a highly esteemed public figure—in this case Bill Buckley—and a highly select compilation of misfits, buffoons, hatemongers, and oddballs cannot be said to exemplify either topical advance or conceptual sophistication. Both attainments in abundance, and much else besides shall be required to truly take America back.