Getting Conservative History Straight
Matthew Continetti: The Washington Post's go-to authority on conservatism
By Paul Gottfried
August 6, 2023
Washington Post reached for superlatives last year in describing Matthew Continetti’s The Right. This voice of the establishment Left explained that Continetti, besides being an AEI senior fellow and a onetime distinguished editor of the Washington Free Beacon, may be the premier intellectual historian of the American Right. Continetti’s admirers found something exceptional in his analytic examination of his controversial subject. He spared no effort telling us a harsh truth: American conservatism is beset by right-wing extremists, like the hoi polloi who just “can’t be weaned away” from Donld Trump. This movement also includes other more conventional conservatives who are putting up with extremism in their ranks. Conservatives need vigilant gatekeepers, and Continetti believes he is up to the job.
According to the Post, “Continetti tells a story of conservatism that has often been marked by an elite inability or unwillingness to police extremism, and at times an active embrace of it.” Moreover, “in Continetti’s telling, those events partly represented long-festering tendencies inside the movement and the GOP. When racist, white supremacist and alt-right elements sought to violently overturn democracy, he writes, ‘all of the unreason and hatred that had been slowly growing in the body of the Right burst into the open.’”
Supposedly these telltale tendencies did not first emerge in the last few years. Repeatedly falling prey to its own extremism, ”the right’s noninterventionist streak during the lead-up to World War II too easily collapsed into Charles Lindbergh’s antisemitism and flirtation with Nazism. The anti-communism of the 1950s too easily shaded into support for Joe McCarthy’s witch hunts.” Continetti just can’t get certain facts straight. For example: Conservative anti-Communism did not collapse into “McCarthyite witch hunts.” Many of those whom the late Wisconsin senator accused of being Communist collaborators or unreliable government workers for security reasons, were exactly what McCarthy and congressmen of both parties stated they were. Not only the conservative researcher M. Stanton Evans but the more centrist historian Arthur Herman demonstrates that the investigations of McCarthy and his colleagues were usually something more than “witch hunts,” although these hearings were not always conducted as dispassionately as they might have been.
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https://amgreatness.com/2023/08/06/getting-conservative-history-straight/
