Source: The UnPopulist
by Joseph Stieb
“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.” (06/18/24)
https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/responsible-conservatism-really-was