I Thought I Understood the American Right. Trump Proved Me Wrong.
Rick Perlstein (New York Times Magazine, 11 April 2017). Genre: long-form historiographical self-reckoning by the historian whose Before the Storm (2001) was a foundational text of the post-1990s scholarly consensus on “the respectable rise of conservatism.” Perlstein admits, four months into the Trump presidency, that the consensus narrative — the one in which Buckley excommunicated the Birchers and Goldwater carried the cleansed movement to mainstream legitimacy — was systematically too narrow to account for the right that actually exists.
Why This Source Is Load-Bearing for the Wiki
Perlstein matters here for two reasons:
- He is the historian who built the standard “Buckley-Goldwater-Reagan” narrative the wiki has been progressively dismantling. Before the Storm (the 2001 Goldwater study) is one of the canonical books in the modern academic literature on American conservatism. When Perlstein concedes the framework was too sanitized, that concession is far more weighty than yet another outsider critique.
- His piece is a concordant — not duplicative — companion to Debunking a Longstanding Myth About William F. Buckley (Dallek 2023) and to Conservatives or Counterrevolutionaries? (Tait 2024). Perlstein arrives at the continuity reading from the inside of the discipline he helped consolidate; Dallek arrives from archival reexamination of the NR correspondence; Tait arrives from political theory. Three different methods, one finding.
The Self-Indictment
Perlstein lists what the consensus narrative — including his own — left out:
- The 1920s “Second Klan.” Hiram Evans’s 1926 essay in the (mainstream) North American Review on “Americanism”: speaking for the “so-called Nordic race,” “abused white majority,” “men of plain people,” resentful of “strangers” who had “come to dominate our government.” Goal: “a return of power into the hands of everyday… not de-Americanized average citizens of old stock.” The Klan’s actual political strength included Anaheim, California (a “hotbed of Klan activity” in Before the Storm’s own subject region — McGirr’s Suburban Warriors mentions it but doesn’t discuss it; Perlstein himself didn’t either).
- The Black Legion (active mid-1930s industrial Midwest). FBI estimated 135,000 members; AP reported up to 50 suspected assassinations; assassinated a WPA official in Detroit; Humphrey Bogart starred in a 1937 film about it. Many leading historians of the right hadn’t heard of the group.
- Father Charles Coughlin’s Social Justice and the Christian Front (1938–1945). Reprinted the Protocols of the Elders of Zion; participated in a 1939 pro-Hitler rally at Madison Square Garden; raided by the FBI in 1940 for plotting to overthrow the government; carried out what The Day called “small pogroms” against Jews in Boston and New York during WWII.
- Local fascist enmeshment. A National Commander of the American Legion (Alvin Owsley) declared in 1922: “the Fascisti are to Italy what the American Legion is to the United States.” Chicago named a thoroughfare for Italo Balbo in 1934.
- Trump’s biographical inheritance. Fred Trump arrested at a 1927 Klan-vs.-police “free for all” in Queens; Woody Guthrie wrote about “Old Man Trump” stirring up racial hate in his Beach Haven housing complex; both Trumps named in a 1973 federal housing-discrimination suit. Donald Trump came of age in 1960s–70s NYC’s “hard-hat populism” — the political environment of the 1968 PBA referendum to dissolve the police-misconduct review board (won 63%) and the construction-worker assault on antiwar protesters at City Hall (1970, “It was just like Iwo Jima”).
- Direct-mail conservatism (Viguerie et al.) as conscious con-artistry. “Civilization on the verge of collapse” pitches fundraising tax cuts for the rich; the trajectory runs from 1970s direct mail to Amway to “miracle cures” (Carson, Huckabee) to Trump’s nutritional-supplements MLM (2009).
Perlstein’s verdict: “Future historians won’t find all that much of a foundation for Trumpism in the grim essays of William F. Buckley, the scrupulous constitutionalist principles of Barry Goldwater or the bright-eyed optimism of Ronald Reagan. They’ll need instead to study conservative history’s political surrealists and intellectual embarrassments, its con artists and tribunes of white rage.”
The Method Problem Perlstein Names
Perlstein cites Leo Ribuffo (George Washington University): historians of the right tend to be liberals, and “are prone to liberalism’s traditions of politesse.” They have been “attracted to polite subjects like ‘colorblind conservatism’ or William F. Buckley.” Perlstein quotes a hypothetical Ribuffo follow-up title: “Why Is There So Much Scholarship on ‘Conservatism,’ and Why Has It Left the Historical Profession So Obtuse About Trumpism?”
The diagnostic: the consensus narrative was unconsciously shaped by what its authors found respectable. The “modern conservative movement” was a discrete object only on the assumption that the embarrassing predecessors (1920s Klan, 1930s Christian Front, herrenvolk-republican populists) were not its constitutive ancestors. Once that assumption is dropped, the boundaries of the “modern movement” lose their sharpness, and the post-2016 trajectory becomes intelligible.
What Perlstein Does Not Yet Resolve
Perlstein is writing in early 2017. He sees that the consensus story is wrong but does not yet have a replacement framework. The wiki’s contribution — drawing on Tait (2024), Dallek (2023), Field (2025), and Kersch (2011) — is to fit Perlstein’s negative finding into a positive thesis: that American conservatism has been continuously functionally counterrevolutionary, that its “fusionist consensus” was held together by the cement of anti-communism rather than by genuine repudiation of its illiberal underside, and that the post-1991 New Right is the resurfacing rather than the return of what the older mainstream managed but never expelled.
A Note on Cowie’s Argument
Perlstein cites Vanderbilt historian Jefferson Cowie’s The Great Exception (2017), which argues that the New Deal order was an anomaly in American political development, made possible by the demographic suspension created by the 1924 Immigration Act. The 1965 Hart-Celler Act reopened immigration; the conservative backlash against liberalism then accelerated. The wiki should treat Cowie’s framing as a useful structural complement to Pat Buchanan’s, Sam Francis’s, and the paleocons’ demographic anxiety: those figures were arguing in real time for a political project the structural-historical record (per Cowie) suggests is actually about which demographic baseline counts as “America.” This is also what Democracy Faces a Reactionary Counter-Mobilization (Zimmer 2022) names as the reactionary — rather than merely conservative — character of the project.
Cross-References
- Rick Perlstein — the author
- Counterrevolution — the framework into which Perlstein’s findings fit
- Debunking a Longstanding Myth About William F. Buckley — concordant revisionism (Dallek)
- Conservatives or Counterrevolutionaries? — concordant theoretical frame (Tait)
- William F. Buckley Jr. — the figure Perlstein concedes was over-canonized
- Barry Goldwater — the political vehicle Perlstein wrote his first book about
- John Birch Society — among the embarrassments the consensus narrative under-discussed
- Russell Kirk — the canonical “respectable” benchmark against which Perlstein measures the gap
- Democracy Faces a Reactionary Counter-Mobilization — Zimmer’s complementary “counter-mobilization” frame
- MAGA New Right — the post-2016 condition Perlstein concedes the consensus narrative could not predict