The Right: The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism by Matthew Continetti

His conservative bias peeks through from time to time

I've been a liberal and a Democrat ever since I had any political understanding at all. I disagree with Republican policies in general, and I'm on the exact opposite side of the culture war issues that have driven Republican politics for the past fifty years or so. All that said, I never regarded figures like Nixon, Reagan, or the Bushes to be threats to the democratic institutions and procedures of the United States. I may have disagreed with them on the issues, but I took it for granted we were all playing by the same rules. Donald Trump's refusal to concede his loss in 2020, and his subsequent attempts to overthrow the election, changed all that. The continuing refusal by many on the Right to admit that Trump lost the election, nearly two years later, as well as the number of Republican candidates who run for office embracing the "Big Lie," leads me to believe that democracy in the U.S. is in real danger from the Right.

Review

So I thought I would read Matthew Continetti's book The Right to see if it would help me place the Republican party's embrace of Trumpism in the past six years into some kind of historical context. Indeed, now that I've read it, I think the takeaway from this hundred-year (1920-2020) history of the Right in the United States is that the Republican party's current turn toward national populism really is a return to impulses the party has exhibited since the turn of the last century.

If you're like me going in, you probably don't know much about Republican Warren Harding's campaign to defeat Democrat Woodrow Wilson's successor, but it entailed disavowing internationalism, rolling back progressive domestic policies, installing strict constitutionalist judges, opposing immigration, and recognizing the importance of "religious piety." All of this sounds familiar in the context of today's political dynamics. It should also be noted that the Harding/Coolidge administration (Harding died in office) saw the rise of the second Ku Klux Clan and the Tulsa race massacre on "Black Wall Street." For what it's worth, his campaign pledge had been to bring back a "return to normalcy."

Then as now, political philosophies were divided between the elites and the populists. The 1920s saw the rise of intellectual groups such as the New Humanists and liberal theologians who promoted what they called the Social Gospel. At the same time, a religious group who called themselves Fundamentalists came to prominence. They saw the Social Gospel (i.e., a Christian social justice movement) as back-door Marxism. Liberalism, they said, is inherently opposed to religion. Cue the Scopes "Monkey Trial."

In 1930 a group of Southern writers wrote a defense of agrarianism, conservatism, and religiosity, which were values embodied by the Old South that they romanticized. The group became known as the Southern Agrarians, and today, they are regularly lauded in conservative media. The Agrarians, unsurprisingly, failed to reckon in any way with Black slavery or the need for Black civil rights in their lament for the loss of traditional Southern culture. Continetti further writes: "Agrarians flirted with another danger implicit in radical critiques of America: an openness to authoritarianism."

Continetti gives short shrift to the Hoover's one-term presidency, which coincided with the beginning of the Great Depression. In 1932, Franklin Roosevelt defeated him by a landslide and inherited the depths of the Depression along with a brewing war in Europe. The Right maintained its isolationist stance. Meanwhile, members of the even-farther Right held a rally in Madison Square Garden in 1939 to express their support for Hitler. The America First Committee was formed in 1940 to oppose the U.S. taking an active role in World War II. Its most prominent member, Charles Lindberg, spoke about the divided loyalty of Jews, who were in his estimation "not American." Pearl Harbor would, however, put an end to the Right's isolationist stance for a while.

After World War II, recognizing that withdrawal from world affairs wasn't tenable, the Right found its raison d'etre for the next forty years in fighting "godless" Communism at home and abroad. "Anticommunism provided a shelter where free marketers, traditionalists, foreign policy realists, and Cold Warriors united to oppose Communist activities and bureaucratic centralization. Eventually all of these groups would find themselves on the side of the GOP," writes Continetti.

When Roosevelt died in office, his vice-president Harry Truman served out the remainder of his final term and won the succeeding election in 1948. Truman presided over the beginning of the Cold War, as well as a hot war in Korea. Truman's firing of Douglas MacArthur led to calls for his impeachment from then-Senator Robert Taft (son of the former Republican president William Howard Taft). Robert Taft would become a thought leader in the Republican party whose influence is felt to this day. The unpopularity of Truman's handling of the Korean conflict had a lot to do with the election of his successor, Republican war hero Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953. But Eisenhower also opposed the isolationist attitudes of Taft, who was against NATO. Eisenhower was also a moderate who continued the New Deal policies of his predecessors. Thus, you don't hear a lot of conservatives today citing him as a hero of the movement. ("Movement conservatives" are those who argue that big government is the root of all problems. Reagan was the first movement conservative to be elected president.)

Eisenhower was certainly anti-Communist, but he wasn't a rabid "red-baiter" like his vice president Richard Nixon or the Senator from the great state of Wisconsin, Joe McCarthy. In time, McCarthyism would come to be seen by most Americans as the real threat to liberty and the rule of law in this country. "McCarthy's demagogy pushed the political system to the limit," says Continetti. "He fed off conservative alienation from government, from media, from higher education."

After the death of Robert Taft and the censure of Joe McCarthy, an emerging conservative thinker named William F. Buckley Jr saw that the Republican party needed intellectual grounding. For that purpose, he founded National Review in 1955. Throughout the rest of the book, besides looking at the political fortunes of prominent politicians such as Barry Goldwater, Pat Buchanan, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush, Continetti also devotes a lot of space to the internecine struggles of conservative writers and thought leaders such as Russell Kirk, Norman Podhoretz, Daniel Bell, Jeane Kilpatrick, Leo Strauss, and his father-in-law Bill Kristol in the pages of magazines such as National Review, the Weekly Standard, Claremont Review, and others. Along the way, he touches on the many divisions within conservative thought, including movement conservatism, new conservatism, neoconservativism, paleoconservativism, nationalism, populism, constitutionalism, fusionism, traditionalism, libertarianism, reform conservatism, and so on, and so on. If I have a criticism of this book, it's that you sometimes feel that you're reading lots of names of people and publications and political philosophies without really getting a clear grasp of them.

Did The Right answer my questions about fitting Trump into a historical context? In many ways, I believe it did. The chapter dealing with Trump's presidency is titled "The Viral President," which works on many levels. Trump seized upon those pre-War themes of the Republican party going back to Harding and Coolidge: isolationism, protectionism, and immigration restrictions. But he was also a populist demagog who used the power of the modern "attention economy" and social media to whip up anger and backlash among self-proclaimed anti-elitists in red states and rural areas. Theocratic law professor and Trump appointee Adrian Vermeule wrote that the Right should now embrace a common-good constitutionalism whose object is "to ensure that the ruler has the power needed to rule well." Evangelicals, always a force in American politics, seized on Trump as their Cyrus. Meanwhile, as Continetti notes, "In some precincts on the right, Trump, Brexit, and Muslim immigration contributed to a reevaluation of strongmen." In their embrace of Orban, Putin, Salvini, and other rightwing autocrats, some Republicans today are beginning to conjure memories of the 1939 rally in Madison Square Garden that extolled George Washington as "America's first fascist."

Trump's support among the faithful never wavered, but COVID came along and Americans began to die, the pandemic brought down the economy, and Charlottesville and the BLM protests spread unrest across the country. Biden won the election. But it's important to remember that he won Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin by a total of fewer than 45,000 votes. The nationalist populists who once embraced Huey Long, Father Charles Coughlin, Joseph McCarthy, and George Wallace, are waiting to lift Donald Trump back up onto his pedestal again. I fear we may not recover if they do.

Revival by Stephen King

King pays tribute to the Weird Tales writers

There are some mild spoilers in this review. I'll touch on a several major events in the novel, though I won't go into detail.

Review

Early in the novel, a shadow falls across a boy named Jamie who is playing in the dirt with his toy soldiers. The boy looks up to discover that the shadow belongs to a young minister named Charles Jacobs who has come to town to serve at the First Methodist Church of Harlow, replacing the retiring lay preacher Bill Latour. Charlie, as he likes to be called, is the sort of friendly adult who gets down in the dirt to help out with the fortifications.

Charlie Jacobs has a lovely wife named Patsy and a sweet young son named Morrie. The Jacobs fit right into the community and are liked by everyone. Charlie and Patsy start a Methodist youth group that Jamie and his brothers and sister join, along with several other kids in their small town. Besides the Bible lessons, they sing songs with Patsy on piano, and Charlie wows them with electrical experiments he has devised. (Reverend Jacobs is obsessed with electricity.) The reverend even heals Jamie's older brother Conrad of a case of laryngitis using electricity, though he confides to Jamie later that the cure was mostly psychological -- the power of suggestion.

But soon enough, something terrible happens. Patsy and Morrie are maimed and killed in a horrifying automobile accident. In the aftermath, Reverend Jacobs loses his faith. This is, of course, a grim reality that anyone who is raised in a religious faith and believes in a just and merciful God must face. How can it be that such a God can allow innocent people, even little children, to be maimed and killed, even abused and tortured in some cases. After taking several Sundays off, Reverend Jacobs returns to his church and preaches a final sermon, which comes to be known by his parishioners as the "Terrible Sermon," in which he rubs their faces in the meaningless evil and injustice of the world, finishing with, "Believe what you want, but I tell you... there is nothing but a lie."

Unsurprisingly, Reverend Jacobs is asked to leave. Jamie assumes this is the last he'll ever see of the reverend. Many years later, however, Jamie crosses paths with Jacobs again. Jamie has reached a low point in his life -- broke, homeless, jobless, and addicted to heroin. He wanders into a carnival looking to score, but what he finds instead is a sideshow in which Charlie Jacobs, now known as Dan Jacobs, is amazing the rubes with his electrical magic. Jamie is so wasted he passes out and next awakens in Jacobs' trailer. Jacobs cures him of his heroin addiction using what he calls "secret electricity" and hires Jamie as an assistant for a while. He even helps Jamie back on his feet by getting him a job that turns out to be Jamie's long-term calling in life.

Many years go by, and the next time Jamie becomes aware of Jacobs he's a television and tent-show evangelist who specializes in healing. Jamie knows it's a grift because Jacobs lost his faith in God a long time ago and remained cynical about religion. Through research, Jamie learns that many of the people who are healed by Pastor Danny have severe "after effects." Some go crazy. Some commit suicide. Jamie confronts Pastor Danny with this, but Jacobs shrugs it off. After all, he points out, even doctors and surgeons have a certain percentage of failures.

Eventually Jacobs gives up the faith healing racket and retires to an estate where he continues to work on his so-called secret electricity experiments in private. He asks Jamie to be his assistant, but Jamie refuses. Jamie knows there's something off about Jacobs' secret electricity and he wants no part of it. But, eventually, Jacobs gains a hold over Jamie that forces him to become a part of his ultimate experiment. While Jacobs no longer believes in the Bible, he's sure there's something beyond death -- and he's determined to find out for certain where Patsy and Morrie are now. And we slowly realize the title of the book has nothing to do with religious services calling sinners to repent.

The novel meanders along for nearly five hundred pages and touches on all aspects of its protagonist Jamie's life, from childhood to old age. That's all fine: as any reader of Stephen King knows, there's often more fun in the journey than in arriving at the destination. The novel is somewhat elegiac in tone as it devotes a lot of space to ruminating on the experiences of growing old. You really don't know where Revival is going until close to the end, and, unfortunately, it felt as if King were trying to graft on a part that really didn't fit. I was surprised by how very Lovecraftian the story becomes in the finale, though the early mention in the story of the forbidden book De Vermis Mysteriis (a fictional grimoire created by Robert Bloch and incorporated by H. P. Lovecraft into the the Cthulhu Mythos) gives the astute reader a clue as to what is afoot.

Jamie's journey is entertaining and often moving, but, overall, the story was a bit shaggier than it needed to be; and the Lovecraftian ending didn't really work for me.


Postscript: 

Total ripoff!

Those toy soldiers Jamie is playing with at the beginning of the novel are from a comic book ad that was very common in my childhood (and King's) for 100 Toy Soldiers "Packed in This Footlocker!" all for roughly a buck and a quarter. Jamie loves these toy soldiers and plays with them all the time. I'm here to tell you that I was one of the kids who sent in his five quarters. What I got were one hundred tiny, barely three-dimensional soldiers packed in a cardboard box that was slightly smaller than a typical kitchen matchbox. You couldn't get them to stand up, and they were utterly useless -- a total ripoff! I quickly tossed them into a corner of the closet and never played with them again, as I suspect most other kids also did. We certainly didn't play with them for months like Jamie. I assume Stephen King couldn't con his parents out of the buck and a quarter and always longed for that footlocker of soldiers. You were better off without them, Stevie. Trust me. I know.

Pamela Colman Smith

 

"Pixie" illustrated the most popular form of the tarot deck

I came across this photo on Mary K. Greer's blog and wanted to save a copy for myself. Here's what Mary had to say:

I just discovered this previously unknown photo of PCS by her friend, the well-known photographer, Alice Boughton. The source is The Literary Digest, July 4, 1908. Enjoy.

--marykgreer.com

Firestarter by Stephen King

Bad things happen to kids in Stephen King land

Firestarter (1980) is a fairly early King novel -- the eighth counting ones he wrote under the Bachman pseudonym. I'm not a fanatical Stephen King fan, but after finishing Firestarter I wondered just how many of his books I've read. I found an online checklist, and it turns out I've now read 29 of them, which is probably more books than I've read by any other single author. Still, he's written 80 and is at work on more, so I've got a long way to go if I want to catch up.

I've never seen either of the two movie adaptations of this novel, so I went into it not knowing anything other than the fact that it's about a little girl who can start fires with her mind. In the book, this power is call "pyrokinesis." The critic S.T. Joshi claims the correct coinage should be "telepyrosis," but I believe that Joshi's version would mean heartburn from a distance. Pyrokinesis sounds just fine to me anyway since it sounds like you're throwing fire.

Review

Stephen King starts this one with the tried-and-true technique of dropping the reader into the middle of the action. Seven-year-old Charlene (better known as Charlie) McGee and her father, Andy, are on the run from government agents who have killed her mother, Vicky. A pair of agents had already taken Charlie captive by the time the narrative starts, but Andy managed to catch up with them and use his own mental powers to neutralize them. The secretive agency known only as "The Shop" has plenty more agents, though, and they will keep coming until they have Charlie in their clutches.

In flashbacks we learn that Andy and Vicky met in college. The psychology department was running an experiment where a dozen student volunteers would be paid $200 each to take a mild hallucinogenic drug called Lot Six while being monitored. They both could use the money and ended up doing it together to provide each other a little moral support. As it turned out, the experiment was a sketchy operation being run by The Shop, and some of the students who took part died or were mentally impaired afterward. Vicky and Andy experienced what seemed to be telepathy with each other. As a result of the experience, they grew closer, eventually marrying and having a child. Vicky and Andy also each retained weak psychic abilities. Vicky could use telekinesis to move objects, while Andy's ability allowed him to "push" other people into doing what he asked them to do, like a very strong case of post-hypnotic suggestion.

This is where I have to say that I had expected that this would be a story about an adolescent girl slowly discovering her awakening psychic powers and having to learn to control them. While the latter does come into play, the surprise for me was that Charlie had her pyrokinetic ability from infancy. This brought to mind the Superman comics of the 1960s that I read when I was growing up, where Ma and Pa Kent were always amusingly having to deal with and/or hide the fact that their baby could lift the farmhouse off its foundation if he was looking for a lost toy. Raising a baby who could cause random spontaneous combustion events didn't come across nearly as funny as Superbaby's antics, though.

To sum it up, without going into much more detail, I will note that Firestarter falls into three well-defined acts. In the first, Andy and Charlie are desperate and on the run until they are finally captured by The Shop's implacable Native American superagent, Rainbird. In the second act, the two are prisoners of The Shop, where they are drugged into submission. Psychological techniques are used to gain their trust. The Shop wants to understand the extent of Charlie's powers (which she refuses to show them at first) with the idea of perhaps developing a eugenics program using parents who have been doped with Lot Six to produce superpowered mutants. All of this is being done in name of national security, of course. In the third act, Charlie and Andy finally gain some agency of their own and manage turn the tables on their captors. The climax is unputdownably exciting and cathartic. The denouement that follows provides a satisfying sense of closure.

I never read at the beach. I don't even understand why anyone would. But this is a great book to read on an airplane or anywhere else that you want the hours to fly by unnoticed.