Continetti, a journalist and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is a career conservative. The movement, he writes, “has been my life.” He adds the nuance of an insider and the indifference of a historian to the ambitious task of writing the biography of the American right, and he adds a journalist’s talent for deft portraiture and narrative detail. (Franklin Roosevelt was “sly, impetuous, and charming”; Milton Friedman, “elfish, mischievous, implacable.”) His accuracy is also impressive; in its 400+ pages spanning 100 years, I found no claims to scold against.
His account has a dramatic arc, and it is a tragic one. In the early 20th century, conservatism was a loose bundle of temperaments and policies, not philosophy or movement. “The Republican Party of the 1920s represented a popular mix of unrestrained trade, high tariffs, disarmament, foreign policy restraint, and commitment to the constitutional foundation of American policy.” Then came the Depression, the New Deal, and the war. Alarmed by what they saw as Roosevelt’s socialism and the prospect of being swept up in the carnage of Europe, the right drifted toward isolationism, nostalgia and irrelevance. The Republican Party “tended to adopt a hostile and catastrophic attitude toward the government that it never completely shook off.” By the late 1940s, liberals had every reason to dismiss justice as the domain of “excitable mental gestures that try to resemble ideas” (as Lionel Trilling pointed out in 1950).
And then, starting in the Eisenhower era, came a Cambrian explosion of ideas. Much of it was about William F. Buckley, the founder of National Review. Though not a great thinker, Buckley had a sharp pen, a magnetic personality, an eye for talent, and a view of conservatism as more than the sum of its dyspeptic parts. Around Buckley, fearless and far-reaching debates raged, involving intellectuals such as Russell Kirk and Frank Meyer, Whittaker Chambers and James Burnham. Everything was discussed, everything was tried, and even failures, such as the demise of Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election, were learned. By the time Daniel Patrick Moynihan declared in 1981, “Suddenly the GOP has become the party of ideas,” the right had assembled a three-pillar building of strong defense, traditional values, and growth-oriented economy.
That was the right I encountered when I first came to Washington as a journalism intern in the summer of 1981. There wasn’t a desk in town that didn’t have an open copy of the Heritage Foundation’s magnum opus, “Mandate for Leadership.” . a phone book thick compendium of conservative policy proposals, many of which inspired legislation. David Stockman, the child prodigy budget director under Ronald Reagan, was stirring the capital with reforms that resulted from years of political sloppiness in magazines like Irving Kristol’s The Public Interest. The stage was President Reagan himself, a visionary whose optimism and confidence overturned the gloom that had plagued conservatism since the days of Calvin Coolidge.
Or so it seemed. Little did we know then that Reagan’s triumph was also a highlight. The end of the Cold War dissolved the glue of the conservative coalition, Buckley’s sparkling generation withdrew, Kristol’s diary closed, Rush Limbaugh rose. George W. Bush’s attempts to frame an activist, idealistic conservatism never lasted. Encouraged by the incendiary rhetoric of conservative media and confrontational entrepreneurs like Newt Gingrich, the grassroots steered straight into the abyss of pessimism, authoritarianism, nativism, and grievances that Buckley and Reagan had worked so hard to escape.