If only this book could be returned to print, and if only Mr. Hentoff had lived to update it . . .
I dunno, I am somewhat of the school of Joseph Sobran on matters of right and left. Sobran used to say that it better serves the aspirations of the left to couch political debate in terms of right and left.
The spectrum of political ideology is not represented well by using the terms right and left for a lot of reasons. The spectrum which probably suits reality better may be with anarchy on one end and a fascist police state on the other. It makes little difference whether either one is placed to the right or the left, the only good place to be is in the middle - along with Goldilocks.
Anarchy is really a transitional state because it never lasts for long. Some other form of rule always comes along before too long to replace anarchy. The most common replacement has always been fascist oligarchy (tyrannical rule of the few over the many).
Our Founders envisioned a government that was just right - not too powerful to oppress and bully the populace forcing them to do and be things they didn't want or need to be. And neither would it be too weak, providing nothing in structure to ensure longevity or enforce civilized morality on a hard, cruel competitive world.
Furthermore, I submit that no genuine conservative would ever identify with repressing free speech because genuine conservatives are idealists, not ideologues. The difference is of course enormous. An ideologue sees good as only coming from the enforcement of their own specific, rigid doctrine and nowhere and nothing else. Therefore, an ideologue thinks nothing of eradicating any and all order or law which impedes or conflicts with their faction's preferences.
An idealist takes as their own some aspects of ideology, but more importantly and more precisely idealists live by PRINCIPLES founded in firm foundations of morality which do not essentially change according to situations or context.
For an idealist who believes in the rule of just laws, murder is and always will be wrong and illegal. But for an ideologue, committed to the notion of enforcing their own beliefs on everyone else, murder in order to accomplish that "perfect world" would be in many cases, entirely justifiable and proper.
So I guess my quibble is with the use (or misuse) of the term "right" in relation to conservatism. A doctrinaire person who favors repressive measures to enforce their own specific notions of order or social good, be they notions derived from Stalin, Marx, Rousseau, Mao, Trotsky, Saddam Hussein, Simon Bolivar, Hannibal or Alexander the Great would all be the same essential nature of "excessive government", not right or left.
See, assigning the identity of "political right" to something equating to nothing more than the opposite of the "political left" is unwieldy and (forgive me) virtually meaningless. There is no opposite of morality except immorality - and neither the self-described political right nor left ever describe themselves as being amoral.
Only a doctrinaire Constitutionalist, or fundamentalist religionist, or militant non-interventionalist etc. would be accurately described as "far right" or "extremist" in my view. To be extreme in any ideological direction automatically excludes one from being a conservative, and therefore, not a qualified "rightist" in the modern classical sense of the term "political conservative".
If we use the ideals of Classical Liberalism as the base, then any ideology that is outside the middle (moderate government which enforces those ideals) would be non-conservative. If conservatism is an ideal associated with the right, then no ideology which ascribes to excessive governance, ultra vires actions or other means outside Constitutionally sanctioned behavior would be considered "rightist". The term right would only apply in terms of "right vs. wrong" not "right vs. left".