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.
