Point of Origin
In most lines of work, a person does his credibility real damage by denying the obvious and asserting the manifestly untrue. Yet in the book world, there can be very large rewards for a writer who boldly turns reality on its head. With “White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the American Conservative Movement,” Allan J. Lichtman apparently hopes to claim some of those rewards for himself.
Lichtman’s thesis is embedded in his title: American conservatism should be seen as an ideology devoted above all to advancing “an antipluralistic ideal of America as a unified, white Protestant nation.”
…[snip]…
By that point, however, Lichtman, a professor of history at American University, no longer needs it. His discarded title thesis has done the work required: given him a special personal definition of the term “conservatism” that allows him to trace the origins of the modern movement not to the anti-Communism of the 1950s or the opponents of the New Deal in the 1930s, as is usually done, but to the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s. And not just to the Klan, but to all the other racialist and fascist groupings that troubled the peace of American society in the aftermath of World War I.