By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, May 20, 2026
I’ve long been fascinated with J.T. Flynn, but I put off
reading political scientist John E. Moser’s excellent biography, Right Turn:
John T. Flynn and the Transformation of American Liberalism, for nearly 20
years. It just sat on the shelf mocking me until last week. When I took it
down, I found that I had hunted-and-pecked it years ago, scribbling a few notes
in the margins. But I never gave it the time it deserved.
I have a lot to say about Flynn, but my aim today is to
talk about antisemitism in American politics, and use Flynn to do it.
It’ll take a few minutes to get there, though. First,
what you need to know is that Flynn made his name and reputation in the 1920s
and early 1930s as a consummate liberal in the muckraking journalist tradition
of the Progressive Era. That’s how he saw himself and how people saw him, for
much of his pre-WWII career. He wrote a regular column for The New Republic,
called “Other People’s Money.” “He detested Herbert Hoover, disdained
conservatives—especially members of the American Liberty League—who criticized
the New Deal, and mocked those who expressed fears of communism,” Moser writes.
“Moreover, he was a close friend of America’s best-known socialist, Norman
Thomas, and although he personally denied being a socialist, he endorsed
Thomas’s candidacy for president in 1936.” He was a member of New York City’s
Board of Higher Education, a non-Marxist lefty in good standing.
He is also considered, by his fans and foes alike,
perhaps the quintessential avatar of the “old right.”
Why? It boils down to three, or really two-and-a-half
things. He turned on FDR and the New Deal, and he opposed U.S. entry into World
War II as the head of the New York chapter of the America First Committee.
Ironically, Flynn was tapped to run the chapter because the AFC brass in
Chicago concluded they needed a progressive liberal in good standing to run the
New York operation. Flynn had been a major figure inside of the decidedly
left-wing Keep America Out of War Congress, which had been founded by Norman
Thomas and other socialists. The AFC, worried that it would get smeared as too
right-wing or fascist, poached Flynn to counter that impression.
How the left went right.
So how did Flynn become a patron saint of the old right?
I’ll run through a few reasons, very briefly.
The New Deal and the Great Depression. Say what
you will about the New Deal, but you cannot deny the truth in advertising. It
was billed as a fresh start, a do-over, a new compact or bargain. Stuart Chase
coined the term and inserted it into an FDR speech. The term stuck. And like a
new deal from a fresh deck of cards, all manner of old categories and
alignments melted away.
New labels. It’s worth keeping in mind that “left”
and “right” were very new labels in American politics in the 1930s, as Hyrum
and Verlan Lewis demonstrate in The Myth of Left and Right. The terms
may have their roots in an 18th-century French seating chart, but
they didn’t really start getting used in America—about American politics—until
well after the Bolshevik Revolution and the proliferation of communists and
communist sympathizers in the United States. The communists called themselves
left because they were parroting the lingo of the Bolsheviks who were obsessed
with cosplaying the Jacobins. So people who opposed the newly defined “left” in
America were increasingly called “right.” I can stop there or give you 20,000
more words about this. So let’s move on.
World War II. The Second World War scrambled the
international order, which is why we refer to the “postwar liberal order.” That
liberal order—which I rather liked—created new categories, and solidified the
idea that Nazism and fascism were right-wing and communism, progressivism, and
socialism were left-wing. We can argue about all that if you like, but that’s
what happened. But one thing a lot of people did was retroactively cast the
politics of the 1930s through the prism of what people only fully knew in the
1940s and 1950s. So a lot of anti-war people were indexed as “pro-Nazi” and
therefore pro-Holocaust. The former was sometimes fair—there certainly were
Nazi sympathizers in the 1930s and the Nazis were vicious towards the Jews from
the outset —but the latter is often unfair because most of them didn’t know
about the full horror of the Holocaust, because it hadn’t really happened yet.
The FDR cult. Comparisons between Donald Trump and
FDR are often ridiculous, particularly when meant as a compliment to Trump. But
there are similarities. FDR was not a friend of “democratic norms” as the term
is often used today, sometimes inaccurately (Many of the norms both men
violated should be described as “constitutional” or even “republican”). For
instance, he violated the longstanding precedent established by George
Washington of only serving two terms, successfully running for president four
times.
Some people get very angry—or very eye-rolly—when you
point out this sort of thing. I think it’s hard for some people to see or admit
FDR’s violations of democratic norms for a host of reasons, some good and some
bad. But if it’s fair to say there’s a cult of personality around Trump, it’s
fair to say there was—and remains—an FDR cult. This is hard for some people to
see, in part, because no one likes to admit they’re guilty of irrational
cultishness. But another obstacle to clarity is that, unlike Trump, FDR
literally had democracy—i.e. the demos—on his side. He commanded
massive majorities in Congress, so he could actually get congressional support
for many of his schemes. Napoleon III used democracy in much the same way, but
that’s a “news”letter for another day.
But when the Supreme Court stood in his way, he
threatened to pack the court with cronies which, even many of FDR’s fans had to
concede, was a violation of those democratic norms.
Another similarity between Trump and FDR is that they
both dominated the politics of their eras so much that they ended up defining
what it meant to be “left” or “right.” Very often, even if you attacked FDR
from the left, that made you “right-wing.” Once you look for it, you can see a
similar dynamic with Trump. Whether you watch Fox or MS NOW, if you’re
“pro-Trump” you’re right-wing and if you’re anti-Trump you’re either on the
left or an ally of it—at least for a lot of people.
“Isolationism.” World War I was a horrible war. It
tore America apart. It aroused all manner of Old World antagonisms in America.
Recent immigrants, but especially German-Americans, were demonized and
harassed. Domestic terrorism, government crackdowns, censorship, economic
rationing, the first Red Scares, not to mention the Spanish Flu epidemic, made
the whole period—still fresh in living memory at the time—something reasonable
people might not want to replay. Many decent 19th-century-style
liberals and fresher 20th-century progressives and socialists were
principled non-interventionists for wholly understandable reasons. Their
non-interventionism was often born of 19th-century anti-imperialism,
particularly anti-British imperialism, not 20th-century pro-Nazism.
Many traced their views back to the recent “war to end all wars” but also back
to the founding, and Washington’s farewell address. A lot of contemporary
interventionists and later historians unfairly fudged this distinction.
As the situation in Europe deteriorated and as
FDR—rightly!—moved the country closer to intervention, the combination of FDR’s
cult of personality, the meddling of pro-Soviet activists and intellectuals,
and FDR’s support for Britain combined to virtually define the American
left-right divide. You could be a solid progressive Republican like Robert La
Follette Jr. or a progressive Democrat like Burton Wheeler and be called a
right-winger, reactionary, or conservative because you opposed the war (and by extension
FDR). Oswald Garrison Villard, the great civil libertarian and
former editor and publisher of The Nation, dubbed by his biographer as
“the liberal’s liberal,” became known as a right-winger because he opposed
going to war in Europe again, though Villard, as with many others, initially
broke with FDR over executive overreach and his court-packing scheme.
Again, let me underscore this point. This dynamic was
clear before entry in World War II became the central debate of American
politics. But that debate accelerated and intensified the dynamic. Flynn was
considered an enlightened liberal when he attacked the Herbert Hoover
administration. When he broke with the New Deal and started criticizing FDR for
out-Hoovering Hoover, he became right-wing, long before the debates over
intervention kicked in. He didn’t change, the terms of the debate did.
So: When you add all of these factors together, today’s
familiar ideological scorecards become a hot mess. Father Coughlin, the famous
“right-wing radio priest,” was a huge supporter of the New Deal at first. He
was courted and defended by FDR and his surrogates until he broke with FDR from
the left. His antisemitism was tolerable when he was on the team, it was
disqualifying when he was off. Charles Beard was the greatest living
progressive historian until he ended his career as a conspiratorial
anti-interventionist right-wing crank, at least according to his detractors
(though he did get super cranky and conspiratorial).
I didn’t plan on such a long detour, but I think this
stuff is not just fascinating and important, it’s also so wildly misunderstood
and just plain forgotten that I think clearing the brush is necessary.
So, let’s talk about “the Jews.”
One of the things you often hear about the old right was
that it was antisemitic. I hope I’ve already given some indication of why it
might not be so simple. But let’s clarify more. It is absolutely true that some
on the old right were antisemites. If we’re going to put Coughlin as part of
the old right then, sure there were antisemites among the old right. But it
doesn’t end there. William Dudley Pelley, Gerald L.K. Smith, and Gerald B.
Winrod were also open Jew-haters and traffickers in antisemitic garbage (Leo
Ribuffo’s excellent The Old Christian Right is a good primer on many of
those guys).
Without getting too distracted again, I need to say that
the causality is complicated. Smith, for instance, was a Huey Long protégé and
early champion of the Share Our Wealth movement, which was a kind of 100
percent American socialism. When Long was assassinated, Smith picked up
antisemitism and later fascism as his focus. I’m okay calling him right-wing,
but I’m not okay with saying that Smith or Coughlin were right-wing because
they were antisemitic. Spend five minutes on Twitter or read Karl Marx’s “On
the Jewish Question,” or Pierre-Joseph Proudhon on the Jews, or the writings of utopian socialist Charles Fourier or foundational anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, or, until recently, Graham Platner’s
chest, and you’ll understand that right-wingers do not have a monopoly on
antisemitism.
But you know who you can’t meaningfully call
antisemitic? J.T. Flynn. Moser’s biography relentlessly documents how much he
struggled to keep antisemites out of the America First Committee. He closed
chapters the moment he suspected they were infiltrated by Jew haters or agents
of the German American Bund and similar groups. He tried to kick out pro-Nazi
jackasses from AFC events. He’d lose his mind with rage when critics of the AFC
accused it of being a “Nazi transmission belt.” He fought valiantly, in his
words, “to keep the Jewish issue completely out of the argument” about
intervention.
I don’t mean to say that Flynn was a raging philosemite,
though several of his colleagues in the New York office were Jewish. Rather,
Flynn felt that antisemitism undermined the cause. Antisemitism, Flynn wrote,
“never had the support of reputable people in this country.” What really drove
him crazy was that the charge that the AFC was antisemitic made his job of
keeping the Jew haters out all the more difficult. The “war groups,” Flynn
wrote, “by daily advertising to the community that the members of our committee
were sponsoring an anti-semitic [sic] movement,” led Jew-haters “to crawl out
of their holes and try to enlist,” in the AFC.
I can understand the frustration, and as fundamentally
wrong I think Flynn was about so many things, I have sympathy for him all the
same. I also have sympathy for the people who thought the America First
Committee was a Nazi transmission belt. Why? Because some chapters and
some representatives were objectively pro-Nazi.
I don’t think I can be accused of overstatement when I
say there’s a lot of overlap in the Venn diagram of pro-Nazism and
antisemitism. Today, with the benefit of hindsight, that overlap approaches 100
percent (I’ll shave off a percentage point or two to allow for morons and
trolls). But the shaded portion was smaller back then. Lots of people just
didn’t want to go to war again, especially German-Americans in the Midwest
where non-interventionism was strongest.
Again, I think they were wrong, but it wasn’t crazy to
believe that American Jews wanted America to stop Hitler. You know why? Because
he was Hitler!
In 1941, when Charles Lindbergh—a sincere lover of all
things German and a passionate non-interventionist—said in a Des Moines, Iowa, speech that the Jews were among the
“powerful forces” pushing America to war, he played into all manner of
antisemitic tropes about string-pulling Hebrews manipulating society. It was
gross. But it also had some truth to it. Jews wanted to stop Hitler, again, because
he was Hitler—and he was winning. This was three years after Kristallnacht, two years after
the invasion of Poland, and eight years after Dachau was set up. If you can
accept that Jews are human beings, is it really so crazy or outrageous that
they might be in favor of stopping Hitler?
The double standard for Jews is really amazing. Various
ethnic groups had emotional investments in foreign policy. German-Americans
weren’t all Nazi sympathizers, but you can understand their reluctance to go to
war with Germany. Some East Europeans saw the Bolsheviks as the real threat to
their kin in Europe. Others, say the Poles and Czechs, understandably supported
stopping the guy who invaded their ancestral homelands.
But Jews? How dare they get all Jewy about the Nazis
rounding up Jews, taking their homes and businesses, and beating old men and
women in the street? How dare they organize and speak up?
Flynn was livid about Lindbergh’s speech. He sent his
colleagues—many of whom loved the speech—a furious telegram laying out how he
was “profoundly disturbed” about Lindbergh’s comments and how they “literally
committed the America First movement to an open attack on the Jews.” Flynn
wrote Lindbergh a furious letter. He later met with the “Lone Eagle”—as he was
sometimes called—and had it out. Lindbergh later wrote in his diary about the
meeting, saying “[A]pparently he [Flynn] would rather see us get into the war
than mention in public what the Jews are doing.”
I think charges of Lindbergh’s antisemitism can be
overstated. But I also think, screw that guy.
When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and Germany
declared war on America four days later, Flynn demanded that the America First
Committee be shut down. Many of his colleagues objected, but Flynn vowed to
have nothing to do with the group and worked assiduously to thwart it.
I think there are a lot of important takeaways from this
chapter in American history. I’ve run too long to get into many of them (tune
into the solo Remnant!). But when I look at the scrambling of American
politics these days, I find that this largely forgotten history becomes more
relevant. Rep. Thomas Massie ran for reelection by railing against the “Epstein
class,” Israel, and Israel supporters. The term “Epstein class” isn’t
necessarily antisemitic or anti-Israel, but when it comes out of Massie’s mouth
I think it is. Massie became a darling of a lot of mainstream
progressives—including some who support Israel—because he defied Trump. His
political sidekick, the execrable Rep. Ro Khanna, doesn’t call Massie “left-wing” but he might as well.
Marjorie Taylor Greene has found ample Strange New Respect on the left for the
same reason. The ranks of the younger apparatchiks of the GOP swell with
mini-Massies and worse. Tim Miller of The Bulwark is no antisemite, but
the ardor of his anti-Trump passion (which I obviously have some understanding
of) has driven him to defend not just Hasan Piker, but Massie,
and Israel bashers generally.
And, once again, the double standard is amazing. Russia
and China are settler-colonial imperial powers that can fairly be accused of,
at minimum, cultural genocide (in Ukraine, in Xinjiang, in Tibet etc). But
Israel is the pariah that arouses passion.
I get that pro-Israel groups and donors spent money on
defeating Massie. Fine. Can you blame them? The echo with the 1930s is there if
you’re willing to listen for it. Jews get targeted for persecution and
elimination. Jews take offense and do something. Jews get attacked for doing
what virtually any other group would do, and are treated as a uniquely
insidious and manipulative undifferentiated blob of people for it.
By the way, depending on how you measure these things,
Israel doesn’t particularly stand out for its spending on lobbying in America. For instance, from 2016 to
2024 according to Foreign Agents Registration Act data (I
checked), China, Japan, Liberia, South Korea, the Marshall Islands, Saudi
Arabia, Qatar, the Bahamas, and the UAE spent more, sometimes a lot more
than Israel (something even the Quincy Institute tacitly acknowledges). I’ve heard quite a bit about the China and
Qatar lobbies. When was the last time you heard the anti-Israel lobby fanatics
talk about Bahamian or Liberian “meddling” in America?
We don’t have room for a seminar on the dividing lines
between antisemitic, anti-Israel, and “anti-Zionist” views, but I can concede
such lines do exist, at least on paper. But those distinctions get blurry in
the real world. As Flynn learned, when you take a position—no matter how
intellectually defensible—that finds “the Jews” on the other side of that
position, people who really dislike “the Jews” will flock to it. That doesn’t
make you antisemitic. But if you welcome antisemites into your ranks because they’re
somehow on your team, you are part of the problem. For some, it’s all about
Trump and resisting him. For others it’s all about supporting Trump (see
J.D. Vance’s and Kevin Roberts’ “big tent” talk). And yet for still others it’s
all about opposing Israel or the Jews, and if that leads to opposing or
supporting Trump, so be it. And for a great many it’s a bit of both.
Flynn, to his eternal credit, tried at least to fight
that tide. When I look around today, I don’t see many people willing to tilt at
similar windmills the way Flynn did.
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