Lauren Lassabe Shepherd on Rena Steinzor’s *American Apocalypse: The Six Far-Right Groups Waging War on Democracy*

The four year period between Trump administrations–the Biden intermission, we might periodize it–offers historians and pundits a short era of metaphorical forks in the road about which to argue. Having witnessed Trump 1.0 and the January 6th insurrection, what in that short interim could have been done to prevent Trump’s return to the White House? With the election behind us, we can say definitively what did not work.

American Apocalypse: The Six Far-Right Groups Waging War on Democracy (2024) by Rena Steinzor is a perfect primary source for any historian looking to study the intermission. If I were teaching with this book, I’d use it as an example of well-intentioned Democratic Party leadership refrains leading up to the 2024 election they lost.

As its subtitle suggests, the book’s motivating question asks who has been waging Apocalypse on American democracy. Its answer is the “far” right, which the author divides into six groups. But the subtitle doesn’t betray Steinzor’s surprise seventh group: the left. Perhaps that’s purposeful, Steinzor wants to focus attention on who she calls the extreme right; but as with any true liberal approach, the left is not spared criticism. The left takes the blame for Trump across a full chapter, as much space as dedicated to each of the six groups of the extreme right: corporations, the (now defunct) Tea Party, the Federalist Society, Fox News, white evangelicals, and self-organized militia groups.

Perhaps the reader sees why I am placing the “far” right modifier in scare quotes. Many of these groups are not extreme, but mainline constituencies of the Republican Party, especially corporations (which are often also Democrat partisans), Fox News, and white evangelicals. And while the former Tea Party (Steinzor alternately refers to the present-day House Freedom Caucus), the Federalist Society, and militias have what many would agree are extreme beliefs, they are powerful Republican constituencies whose control of the party transcends Donald Trump’s leadership.

This is the first key failure of the book: these groups are treated as somehow not representative of the Republican Party, as liabilities who need to be excised. The book imagines a lucid core of the Republican Party that does not exist. For that matter, it imagines a radical wing of the Democrats which has no real power. In this way the book takes for granted that both parties have somehow equal extremes, with equal respective party influence, who need to be moderated to save democracy.

While American Apocalypse isn’t framed this way, the author does deliver a helpful story of how mainstream conservatives (not the far right) have waged war on regulatory health and environmental protections since the Nixon years. Underneath it all, this is a book about the deregulation of environmental and worker and consumer safety legislation that ignores the bipartisanship inherent in American neoliberalism. She concedes the oversight: “The following analysis of how big business became an overpowering political force makes no effort to cope with globalization. Industrial sectors are not considered individually. The root causes of economic successes and failures are left unexamined” (p. 21).

Herein is the book’s second major analytical flaw. American Apocalypse places the demise of our federal regulatory system (Steinzor’s stand-in for democracy) squarely on the shoulders of an extreme right–a qualifier that obscures the cooperation of dominant neoliberalism within both parties since the Nixon years. It further offers a historical lesson as advice for 2024: Steinzor characterizes Bill Clinton as “one of the country’s most talented politicians ever to hold the office [of president], Clinton moved briskly to the political center and won reelection” outmaneuvering conservatives like Newt Gingrich (p.58). As we now know, the Clinton strategy of tacking to the center had disastrous results for the Harris campaign. For its abject blind spots regarding the failures of the Democrat’s turn to neoliberalism, any reader out to understand the history Steinzor wants to tell about the rollback of Nader-esque legal protections will find only part of the story in American Apocalypse.

Of course, the right’s role in this history is still important. If readers forgive the book’s overpromise to explain how a handful of nefarious far right groups and all of the left  ended American democracy, this is a worthwhile legal history of conservative attacks on the regulatory state. The book is at its best when the author traces the right’s legal campaign, especially in the chapter on the Federalist Society and the final chapter detailing the Citizens United case. These are topics to which the author has dedicated her career as Edward M. Robertson Professor of Law (emeritus) at University of Maryland and through her leadership in the Center for Progressive Reform, a D.C. think tank dedicated to social justice and environmental advocacy.

Other chapters, such as the one on white evangelicals, rely heavily on the reporting of a few interchangeable never-Trumper journalists of center-right fame: Tim Alberta (Wall St. Journal, National Review), Michael Gerson (George W. Bush speechwriter), Mike Giglio (Newsweek), and Peter Wehner (speechwriter under Reagan and both Bush administrations). The book leans uncritically on Atlantic, Politico, and New York Times analyses. For its overreliance on these sources, the chapter on the left, who are defined as antifascists, falls short on evidence for the left’s role in the end of the regulatory state. Instead, the chapter’s argument is that antifascist demonstrators are a liability for the Democrats for the way they fuel MAGA attacks. Antifascists are characterized broad brush as “radical left antifa cells… [who have] created the impression that left-leaning activists oppose free speech” (p. 208-209).

As she writes, “Antifa people,” such as Michael Reinoehl who killed rightwing militiaman Aaron Danielson in Portland during the 2020 George Floyd protests, “gave Donald Trump the opportunity to portray its loose network as a major threat, camouflaging the far more serious domestic terrorism threat posed by far-right groups and patriot militia” (p. 209). Throughout the chapter, Steinzor points to the weakness of the antifascist movement and then blames them, in their relative powerlessness, for diverting attention from Trump’s much more serious and larger patriot militias.

This logic dominates the chapter: activists should not resort to violence to resist, as Trump will finally have an example of apparent leftist extremism for his otherwise baseless attacks on liberalism. She does not consider that Trump–and the far right who are the subject of the book–have never relied on evidence or truth as a basis for attack. Nor does the book acknowledge that the Democrats have long done this work themselves, disempowering their left flank to satisfy elites and suburbanites.

For the book’s hyperfocus on a potential Trump victory in 2024, I strongly recommend American Apocalypse to anyone who takes seriously our collective failures during the Biden intermission to prevent Trump’s reascent. The author’s position as an emeritus professor of law with a long and respected career in D.C. think tank leadership excellently captures the perspective of those in Democratic leadership who Brent Cebul and Lily Geismer call professional class liberals. Gabe Winant’s chapter on academics and institutionalists is an especially helpful companion for reading American Apocalypse as a primary source.

For readers interested in the history of the far right–and how it has never been far from mainstream conservatism–I recommend David Austin Walsh’s Taking America Back, Ted Miller’s A Conspiratorial Life, John Huntington’s Far-Right Vanguard, and Nicole Hemmer’s Messengers of the Right. On the liberal myth of the responsible conservative, I recommend Walsh’s Boston Review explainer. For those who share Steinzor’s curiosity on how the right has cunningly rolled back civil liberties and other legal protections, one without the preoccupation of a looming 2024 election, I highly recommend Mike Collins’ recent work, The Anti-Civil Rights Movement.