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.