Yes, Moderate Conservatism Was A Thing

The Trump revolution represented a meaningful break with the past.

(Photo by Joe Raedle via Getty Images.)

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 his new book, 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 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 20^th century 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.

But Walsh contends that the far right and the 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 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 much more engaging than most academic work.

But the argument 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.

Walsh sets his sights on Buckley’s claim that he purged irresponsible kooks from conservatism, including the Birchers and Russell Maguire, the anti-Semitic 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 anti-Semitism, racism, or conspiracism to get excommunicated.

But when he did break with the extremists, Buckley did so in ways that preserved mainstream conservatism’s appeal to a popular base. 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.

Walsh makes a solid case that Buckley hesitated to “punch right” in ways that would upset the right-wing popular front. Still, he 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 and others for outright fascism and racism.

The argument also 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.

But the contrasts between Trump and the earlier mainstreams of the GOP and conservatism suggests that responsible conservatism did exist. 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 January 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 Matthew 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.”

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What Trump Might Do in Office

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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. But 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.

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 ascendancy. As white nationalist David 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.”

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.

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.

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.

Joseph Stieb is a historian and Assistant Professor of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval War College.¹

A version of this article was originally published by The UnPopulist, our editorial partner.

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1. The views expressed here are those of the author alone and do not necessarily represent the views, policies, or positions of the U.S. Department of Defense or its components, to include the Department of the Navy or the U.S. Naval War College.