Matthew Continetti, The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism (New York City: Basic Books). 496 pp., $18.99.

IN 1962, Frank Meyer outlined three elements of the right-wing voting bloc: responsible conservatives, like himself; Barry Goldwater followers, both Republican and Southern Democratic; and those with a “continuing, instinctive opposition to the whole kit and caboodle of the Roosevelt revolution.” This last group provided the shock troops for right-wing movements from “the Liberty League and America First through the Taft campaigns, the McCarthy days, and today.” They were the “hard right,” with “undoubtedly a strong element of know-nothingism in it.” These responsible conservatives had a duty to blunt the “know-nothing” leaders and their votaries in what the ex-communist Meyer called a united front against the “Liberal Establishment.” The problem, as William Rusher, the dour publisher of National Review, pointed out, was that this right-wing mass didn’t look to Meyer and National Review for leadership. They were merely “a delightful ally who can deftly spear the Left.”

In The Right, Matthew Continetti traces the dissolution, reconstitution, ascent, and second dissolution of the twentieth and twenty-first-century American Right as he attempts to make sense of the dilemma Meyer and Rusher described. Continetti promises neither hagiography nor pathology—a history of the Right willing, we are told, to confront its darker recesses as our cicerone locates conservatism within a broader Right, or indeed, Rights. The core dynamic he identifies is an ongoing and shifting alliance between “elites” and “populists.” Continetti is a true believer steeped in the conservative movement’s history. He takes on the conservative search for meaning post-Glasnost and traces Trumpism’s absorption of conservative institutions. But as a self-conscious heir of the conservative movement—he is, among other things, the son-in-law of William Kristol—Continetti cannot bring himself to deliver a necessary reassessment of the Right. Without a clear sense of what the Right is, he ends up offering a callow and unoriginal history of movement conservatism.

Continetti’s framing of the Right as a “war,” more from the subtitle than body of the book, hardly makes sense. A “war” implies bitter conflict between “populists” and “elites,” or some other set of factions. There is very little intra-Right war here. With a handful of exceptions, the exclusions, “readings out,” and struggles over the institutions of power are largely absent. Instead, the history of the American Right, and conservatism’s place within it, is more often a tortuous series of alliances and justifications between nostalgic, aristocratic, or intellectual elites and white middle-American populists, as the author of The Persecution of Sarah Palin well knows. Continetti clearly hopes for a restoration of fusionism. To this end, he might have written a latter-day Buckleyite polemic against the Trumpist, populist Right. It would have been a false history, but a useable one. Instead, too aware of the darker recesses of the Right’s history, Continetti cannot simply whitewash conservatism’s past. Nevertheless, he is too committed to the cause to confront the deep roots of the post-liberal Right in both conservatism and the American Right writ large. As both conservative paladin and as historian, Continetti comes up short.

THE RIGHT starts smartly with Warren Harding and the conservative Republicans’ boasts about returning to normalcy after World War I and Woodrow Wilson’s progressivism. Continetti identifies three planks of Republican Americanism: free-market economics, isolationism, and constitutionalism (the “Ark of the Covenant of American Liberty,” per Harding). Events of the twentieth century delegitimized these foundations. The Depression destroyed faith in the market; World War II (and the Cold War) made isolationism redundant. More insidiously, progressives from Franklin Roosevelt on undercut constitutionalism in a “jujitsu-like rhetorical move,” replacing it with “an ever-present behemoth that regulated American life and dispensed benefits.” Statism has been so potent that “only intermittently in the years since has the electorate found the GOP rebuttal persuasive.”

The fusty Harding exemplified the fundamental ideas of modern conservatism as we know it, alongside a few references to Gilded Age political philosophy and jurisprudence. But it tips readers to Continetti’s view that the Right is a story of “conservatism” and the Republican Party. For example, despite the outsized role the Southern Democrats played in twentieth-century politics—surely a key component of any broader story of the American Right—they only really appear when making common cause with the GOP.

Continetti can be impatient. He races through the prewar American Liberty Leagues, the National Association of Manufacturers, Southern Agrarians, the Black Legion, the Second KKK, University of Chicago economists and humanists, and the anti-Stalinist Partisan Review at a rapid clip. Continetti also has little time for critical analysis, and much of the material is familiar territory. He usefully accounts for the America First isolationist Right, represented at one pole by the statesmanlike Robert Taft and at the other by the flyboy fascist-sympathizer Charles Lindbergh. Isolationism earned the Right a popular voter base, Continetti argues. But to succeed, it would need to match “its nationalist sentiments and appeals with a public that accepted the necessity of overseas engagement.” Anti-communism and the Cold War became, in Continetti’s view, the dynamic unifying force of the postwar Right, bringing each faction together under one banner. His treatment of early postwar conservatism is also familiar. We get Friedrich Hayek, Henry Hazlitt and Human Events, meet William F. Buckley and a bevy of ex-communist luminaries such as Frank Meyer, Whittaker Chambers, James Burnham, and Willmoore Kendall. We visit Russell Kirk in Mecosta, and so on.

Joseph McCarthy figures prominently. Continetti shows Tailgunner Joe perfecting a right-wing populist playbook. McCarthy turned the plebeian Harry Truman into “the protector of a corrupt establishment,” redirected populist rhetoric toward “hidden Communists” and their “liberal Democratic protectors” all the while dismissing procedural norms. Continetti’s McCarthy is awfully Trumpy: he stared down critics, undermined political rivals, and dealt out gendered nicknames. Continetti recognizes how closely many conservative icons—including Buckley, Kendall, and Burnham—supported, even worshipped, him. “McCarthy had enveloped the Right in his elaborate conspiracy theory. He fed off conservative alienation from government, from media, from higher education.” These fantasies could not withstand reality, and McCarthy was censured, over conservative objections, and marginalized—although the book leaves out how National Review published his byline until his death. Continetti contends McCarthy’s main legacy was accelerating the shift of ex-Marxists from Left to Right. He bizarrely misses his earlier point about the threat of demagogues on the Right and the extent to which “respectable” conservatives were willing to alibi McCarthy, while moderate Republicans like Dwight D. Eisenhower and “New Conservatives” repudiated him. Continetti traces the conservative search for coherence and respectability. His argument closely echoes Jonathan M. Schoenwald’s Time for Choosing—that the so-called “respectable Right” had to discipline out the “irresponsible Right.” Continetti hits familiar beats: the Sharon Statement, Draft Goldwater, Phyllis Schlafly, the problem of the John Birch Society, Gen. Edwin M. Walker, the Buckley Mayoral Campaign, and “Teflon” Ronald Reagan. The problem was this: “Conservatism could attain neither elite validation nor nationwide success if it was associated with Birchism”—a reference to the paranoid John Birch Society. “But it also could not sustain itself if Birchism was excised – it would have no constituency.” Continetti argues the responsible Right’s belated disciplining of the movement prevailed.

By the end of the 1960s, Continetti presents conservatism as a more-or-less developed ideology increasingly brought to public attention by the consciousness-raising electoral campaigns of Goldwater and Buckley. Conservatism was poised to capitalize on the breakdown of the New Deal coalition on the shoals of race, Vietnam, and liberal permissiveness, only to be gazumped by Richard Nixon—a right-winger unaligned with the conservative movement riding a wave of “street corner conservatism.” Other right-wingers—not just Nixon, but also Alabama’s George Wallace and the emergent “New Right”—demonstrate that the American Right was and is more than movement conservatism. Indeed, “the challenge that Wallace posed to the Right was unequivocal,” Continetti writes. Buckley needed to “keep George Wallace from swallowing American conservatism whole.” He excoriated him on television, but, Continetti notes, downplayed the “issues that animated” Wallace’s supporters. Likewise, Barry Goldwater praised Wallace’s “straight talk, appeal to patriotism, law and order, antagonism toward liberal intellectuals, talent for public speaking,” and flair for the dramatic in National Review, only cautioning right-wingers not to waste their votes by picking a losing candidate. Wallace was fueled by “the politics of racial polarization,” Continetti writes euphemistically. But we should note that like Huey Long, Southern Democrats, and to some extent Nixon, Wallace shows how easily the American Right endorses authoritarian and welfarist—if racially loaded—policies. Likewise, the Right is more often motivated by racial and cultural animus than dogmatic policy. Barry Goldwater barely won his home state in 1964, but won six formerly solid Deep South states. Are we to think they were overnight small government purists?

ENAMORED WITH the esoterica of movement conservatism, Continetti struggles to grapple with the broader Right—and misunderstands conservatism’s relationship with it. The core problem is definitional. Precisely what Continetti means by “the Right” is unclear. Is it a structural defense of social or economic privileges? An ideological defense of hierarchy? Early on, Continetti mentions preserving the status quo, by which he means “free enterprise, foreign policy restraint, US patriotism, and non-sectarian (though Protestant-tinged) civil religion,” and opposing the bureaucratic state. Elsewhere he calls conservatism a defense of “Classical Liberalism.” But even as definitions of conservatism, these don’t exhaust the variety of conservatism, let alone a broader Right. Other than “US patriotism” and “civil religion,” there’s not much here about culture—the gender, racial, moral, and symbolic issues that now and often have been the front line of Left-Right conflict in America. By default, the Right becomes whatever opposes the Left, bound together in battle against overreaching liberals. This decision means otherwise unrelated actors come under the same banner, and Continetti shifts the historical initiative to the Left, which itself remains nebulous and monolithic.

Continetti makes no argument about the underlying unity of interests on the Right, beyond opposition to the Left. Had he done so, Continetti may have been able to make larger claims about the Right and about America. The Right is best understood as opposed to the Left’s belief in reducing inequalities on the basis that inequalities are either natural or ineradicable—and perhaps even good. This shared assumption, and the political and intellectual efforts to resist challenges to various hierarchies, define the Right. Recognizing this would have let Continetti make more sense of the disparate American Right—both its values and the way it coalesces into coalitions. This understanding would also have allowed Continetti to dig into the peculiar hierarchies and privileges wending through American history that give the American Right its character. For example, business above workers, natural-born citizens above immigrants, (often Protestant) Christianity above secularism or other faiths, Jacksonian masculinity above other expressions of gender, the United States above the rest, and, inevitably, white above black. Of course, not everyone on the Right has faith in the same hierarchies. Unpacking these differences would have helped Continetti explain the intra-right conflicts he details.

Without a robust organizing concept of the Right, Continetti trips over the Right’s problem with racism. For instance, he claims the “Republicans of the 1920s were caught” between “their belief in equality and their belief in limited government. This contradiction would ensnare the Right for ages.” Even within conservatism, the idea that equality is a conservative principle has been deeply controversial, and the suggestion that 1920s Republicans believed in anything like modern equality is far-fetched. And suppose we take it at face value, the Right has always chosen limited government over equality. Continetti laments personal racism and the Right’s frequent inability to “discuss families, culture, crime, educational and financial attainment, and personal agency without tripping over the color line.” Again and again, Continetti assesses men who slipped into racist views, whether William F. Buckley, Jr. writers for National Review, Richard Weaver, the Southern Agrarians, James Kilpatrick, George Wallace, paleoconservatives, Charles Murray in The Bell Curve, or Dinesh D’Souza. But without recognizing the historic place of whiteness in American society, Continetti is unable to explain just why the Right is so often preoccupied with defending racially controversial issues. Instead, we hear how Jack Kemp’s drive to win black and Hispanic voters failed to “capture the imagination of white voters.” Please.

ELSEWHERE, CONTINETTI argues “the conflation of arguments against government expansion with defenses of white supremacy limited the reach of conservatism.” It’s true “States’ rights” and to a lesser extent “federalism” are suspect today as the slogans of segregationists. But Continetti’s claim contradicts a mountain of scholarship that has found activists—from Atlanta, to Boston, to Detroit, to Southern California—reached for anti-government, private property arguments in their opposition to desegregation as race facilitated the breakup of the New Deal coalition. In this respect, while the tortured history of racism in America has perhaps limited the attractiveness of conservatism, it has also been a motivating force. The truth is that conservative ideology has always appealed to a relatively small band of insurgents. Many voters are motivated by partisanship and deep-seated if inchoate beliefs—not by ideology. Ideas may have consequences, but they don’t motivate mass coalitions. Continetti argues that “the Right has toggled between elite-driven strategy in both content and constituencies and a populist strategy that meets normal people where they are and is driven by their ambitions, anxieties, and animosities.” In framing the Right as “elites” and “populists,” though, Continetti too often cabins off the conservative elite and ascribes the Right’s worst tendencies to “populism” and extremism. His ideal is a Right with the electoral strength of everyday voters disciplined by wise elites. Continetti doesn’t dwell overlong on when and how conservative elites have abetted “populists,” or consider the ramifications of an elite movement reliant on morally dubious populists.

Following Nixon’s implosion, Continetti writes knowledgeably and sympathetically about the neoconservatives and the mainstreaming of conservative ideas, including supply-side economics, as well as the emergence of a populist-driven New Right. Continetti deftly moves beyond the conservative ascent to its breakdown post-Reagan. No clear successor to Reagan emerged—neither George Bush, Pat Buchanan, nor Jack Kemp united the Right, although Continetti highlights Buchanan’s melding of Old Right ideas with popular enthusiasm. Continetti describes the “third generation” of conservative activism characterized by Dinesh D’Souza, and the creation of a conservative ecosystem that rivaled the liberal-dominated mainstream all the while isolating conservatives intellectually and professionally in right-wing silos. After the Cold War, the Right desperately sought a unifying force, and it trained its fire explicitly on domestic liberals. Continetti highlights Rush Limbaugh, whose “importance to the conservative movement cannot be overstated.” Bill Bennett said Rush was doing to culture what Reagan had done to the political movement. At the height of this search, Continetti cites Christopher Caldwell to the effect that “Monica Lewinsky became a substitute for anti-Communism.” The Right failed to convict Bill Clinton, but conservative media thrived. “Populist” energies intensified in the form of the Sarah Palin vice-presidential campaign, the Birther Movement, and anti-immigration and anti-interventionist sentiment (although Continetti never mentions QAnon). Continetti identifies how the Iraq War destroyed the credibility of conservative elite guardrails. By 2016, Continetti has set the stage well for Donald Trump not only to win “folk libertarian,” populist support over the likes of Jeb Bush, pointing out how New Right organizations were the first to align with Trump, but also how Trump assiduously won over conservative bodies like the National Rifle Association, the pro-life movement, the Federalist Society, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and supply-side economists. In doing so, Trump “disestablished the postwar conservatism of Buckley and Goldwater, of Irving Kristol and Ronald Reagan, William Kristol and George W. Bush.”

NOW, THE MAGA Right resembles the GOP of the 1920s, this time out of power. Instead of confidently defending American institutions, it is anxious and apocalyptic. It is closer to the “populism” of William Jennings Bryan, “who rallied under one banner all those who felt excluded from or dispossessed by the economic, social, and cultural powers of his time.” Continetti concludes, “The job of a conservative is to remember.” He is too much of a self-conscious heir of the conservative movement to be truly critical. He warbles, “over the past century, conservatism has risen up to defend the essential moderation of the American political system against liberal excess. Conservatism has been there to save liberalism from weakness, woolly-headedness, and radicalism.” He neglects to mention how much the conservative movement allowed the extremism of broader Right—by allying with it, justifying, and fostering the apocalyptic anti-liberalism that fuels it. Continetti credulously buys conservative claims when he argues a movement built in opposition of liberalism and that made its bones by demonizing liberalism has, somehow, been liberalism’s savior.

A thorough reading of academic scholarship about the broader Right would have helped Continetti place conservatism within it more than the hagiographic histories he cites. Continetti is also too much of a conservative to imagine an alternative to MAGA as anything but a return to the golden era of movement conservatism with some Trumpist concessions. He calls for the usual balderdash—a return to the principles of anti-statism, constitutionalism, patriotism, and antisocialism, never mind that on the Right these have largely been obstructive values. Compare Continetti with Garry Wills, the conservative wunderkind turned wide-ranging cultural critic. He learned directly from the chief theorists and practitioners of conservatism. His conservative conscience—the product of living experience—let him skewer the contradictions of conservatism and the Right. As self-appointed heir, Continetti can only defend conservatism’s entombed traditions.

Joshua Tait is a historian of American conservatism. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Image: Reuters.