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David Austin Walsh’s new book, “Taking America Back: The Conservative Movement and the Far Right,” had its origins in his experience as a college student editing a roundtable on Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism” for History News Network. In several senses, Walsh’s book is the polar opposite of Goldberg’s: It’s history, not polemics; it locates actual fascists on the right, where they actually were, and — most fundamentally — it meticulously includes the sort of messy, contradictory information that Goldberg’s polemic thoroughly excluded. 

For instance, legendary conservative William F. Buckley Jr. is a central presence in Walsh’s book, and it’s undeniable that Buckley tried to purge the American conservative movement of its most extreme elements. Indeed, he did so over and over again, because no clean break was ever really possible — there was simply too much common ground. Buckley overtly rejected what he called a “popular front” approach of accommodating the far right, even as he aimed for a “big tent” conservatism that implicitly welcomed it.

“Taking America Back” fits fairly comfortably within the framework of Edmund Fawcett’s “Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition” (author interview here), which traces the contested history of conservative politics across four countries and more than 200 years as “one overarching battle between hardcore resisters of liberal modernity — those Fawcett calls the ‘hard right’ — and those seeking accommodation, whom he calls ‘liberal conservatives.’” Walsh deals more specifically with a purely American 20th-century slice of that history, which still sprawls across generations, illuminating the pattern of internal conflicts that today’s “never Trump” conservatives would like to pretend never happened. In fact, there’s no way to fully understand the rise of the MAGA movement, or its conquest of the Republican Party, without reckoning with the history Walsh describes. 

My conversation with Walsh has been edited for clarity and length. 

You write that 20th-century conservatism evolved out of a popular front with fascist and quasi-fascist elements, and that while William F. Buckley explicitly tried to reject or expel the far right, his actions and associations reveal a more complicated reality. If that’s fair, how would you characterize that more complicated reality?

I would characterize the complicated reality as one of deep intertwinedness. Buckley does explicitly reject the so-called popular-front approach with the far right in the mid-1960s. He comes to this position over time, it’s not something he starts out with in the 1950s. He comes to it less, I would say, on principle and more because the far right is — at the time, at least — an electoral loser. Barry Goldwater goes down in 1964 in large part because of his association with the far right, because the John Birch Society is providing organizational muscle behind his campaign. 

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William Buckley, Barry Goldwater, Pat Buchanan, and Donald Trump (Photo illustration by Salon/Getty Images)

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