The Rise And Fall Of The Conservative MovementMatthew Continetti's new history of the right tracks American conservatism from the introduction to the expulsion of its liberal element.
DECLAN LEARY
APRIL 22, 2022
The Right: The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism, by Matthew Continetti, (Basic Books: 2022), 496 pages.Matthew Continetti opens his new book on the history of American conservatism with a reminiscence of his first day at the D.C. offices of the Weekly Standard “on July 6, 2003, three months into the Second Iraq War.”
Luminaries like David Brooks and Bill Kristol worked there in those days. George W. Bush was among the journal’s readers. The Project for a New American Century and the American Enterprise Institute were housed in the same building. “At the time,” Continetti writes, “1150 Seventeenth Street was more than an office building. It was an intellectual hub—the frontal cortex of the American Right.”
Two months later, in September 2003, I showed up for my very first day of preschool at 18 North Ave. in Rockland, Massachusetts. The building, which had housed the parish grade school until my mother’s sixth-grade year, still bore at the top of its facade a solid stone cross and the seal of the cardinal archbishop of Boston. It was an intellectual hub of roughly the same caliber.
As the fawning introduction makes clear from the get-go, The Right is driven largely by nostalgia. It is, in part, an elegy for two overlapping traditions: that of the Cold War, which saw classical liberals, religious conservatives, ex-leftists, and others aligned against Soviet communism; and that of the Weekly Standard, which unified the fusionism of National Review with the neoconservatism of Commentary, promising a new path forward for an alliance whose common enemy had vanished.
This is an odd time to publish a positive history of either. The strange liberal conservatism that bubbled up in the GOP for just under a century is almost entirely gone now—consigned to the ash heap of history, to borrow a Reaganite phrase. Second-generation neoconservatives like Kristol (Continetti’s father-in-law) have abandoned the pretense of conservatism entirely; eminent paleo-neoconservative Norman Podhoretz, meanwhile, is publicly pro-Trump. Those who stand athwart history yelling, “Okay, fine, but could you be a little nicer about it?” no longer control the conservative movement.
So The Right is a study of the “true conservatism” issued just as it disappears. History written by the loser can be a fun genre, done correctly. But Matt Continetti does not have Jeff Davis’s flair for the dramatic—only his propensity for detail.
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-conservative-movement/
