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The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American ConservatismHachette

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The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism Kindle Edition

by Matthew Continetti (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.5 387 ratings

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A magisterial intellectual history of the last century of American conservatism

When most people think of the history of modern conservatism, they think of Ronald Reagan. Yet this narrow view leaves many to question: How did Donald Trump win the presidency? And what is the future of the Republican Party?

In The Right, Matthew Continetti gives a sweeping account of movement conservatism’s evolution, from the Progressive Era through the present. He tells the story of how conservatism began as networks of intellectuals, developing and institutionalizing a vision that grew over time, until they began to buckle under new pressures, resembling national populist movements. Drawing out the tensions between the desire for mainstream acceptance and the pull of extremism, Continetti argues that the more one studies conservatism’s past, the more one becomes convinced of its future.

Deeply researched and brilliantly told, The Right is essential reading for anyone looking to understand American conservatism.

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546 pages
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English
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Basic Books
Publication date

April 19, 2022
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From the Publisher

Editorial Reviews

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“Matthew Continetti applies what scholars of all persuasions should do with American conservatism, treating it as a complex, contradictory movement, often at war between its populists and its intellectual elite wings… Continetti is skilled in going places and making conclusions other rightists don’t.”
―The Federalist

“[A] sturdy account of the many divisions within modern conservatism… Rational, well thought out, and impeccably argued—of interest to all students of politics.”―Kirkus

"A worthy analysis.”―Publishers Weekly

“Matthew Continetti has earned his luminous reputation as the foremost contemporary chronicler of American conservatism’s path to today’s problematic condition. He traces conservatism’s rich intellectual pedigree, from the founders’ classical liberalism through twentieth-century conservatives’ responses to the challenges of progressivism. The result is a thinking person’s map for the road ahead.”―George F. Will, author of The Conservative Sensibility

“Matthew Continetti has written an instant classic, sure to become the essential one-volume history of modern American conservatism. Balanced and subtle, it offers an engaging combination of intellectual and political history that makes sense of the immensely complicated story of the Right.”―Yuval Levin, author of A Time to Build

“Deft and authoritative, Matthew Continetti illuminates conservatism’s present through its long and often tumultuous past. The Right isn’t just an engaging history and incisive analysis of the intra-conservative debate, but an essential contribution to it.”―Rich Lowry, editor in chief of National Review --This text refers to the hardcover edition.

About the Author

Matthew Continetti is a journalist and intellectual historian of the Right. He is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, the founding editor of the Washington Free Beacon, and a columnist for Commentary magazine. The author of The Persecution of Sarah Palin and The K Street Gang, he lives in Virginia. --This text refers to the hardcover edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B09BN44V68
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Basic Books (April 19, 2022)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ April 19, 2022
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 1417 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 546 pages
Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 1541600517

Best Sellers Rank: #174,724 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #31 in Political Parties (Kindle Store)
- #79 in 21st Century History of the U.S.
- #107 in Political Parties (Books)

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4.5 387 ratings

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Matthew Continetti

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Matthew Continetti is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where his work is focused on American political thought and history, with a particular focus on the development of the Republican Party and the American conservative movement in the 20th century.

A prominent journalist, analyst, author, and intellectual historian of the right, Mr. Continetti was the founding editor and the editor-in-chief of The Washington Free Beacon. Previously, he was opinion editor at The Weekly Standard.

Mr. Continetti is also a contributing editor at National Review and a columnist for Commentary Magazine. He has been published in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post, among other outlets.

Mr. Continetti is the author of "The Right: The One Hundred Year War for American Conservatism" (Basic Books, 2022), “The Persecution of Sarah Palin: How the Elite Media Tried to Bring Down a Rising Star” (Sentinel, 2009), and “The K Street Gang: The Rise and Fall of the Republican Machine” (Doubleday, 2006).

He has a BA in history from Columbia University.

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EarlyBird

VIP Tour of Important American Ideas

Reviewed in the United States on February 7, 2023

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This is an educational and entertaining tour through modern American conservative/right wing impulses and ideology, starting with Harding and ending with Trump.

It reminds that American conservatism, at its best, is a different beast than European or other forms of conservatism, one which, as George Will states, seeks to "conserve the Founding." Which is to say, seeks to conserve liberty. It's a weird conundrum, therefore, to be an American conservative - an image associated with stuffiness and putting the brakes on change - when the idea is to conserve the notion of the least government society can get away with.

The book is most interesting in how Buckley, et al., found a voice for this libertarianism when the US was at the zenith of state power and post-War ascendancy. How plucky little conservative publications changed professors and their students, and ultimately created the modern conservative movement, is fascinating.

It's also a very honest book, which uses the term "the right" not just to describe ordered conservativism, but it's descents into angry populist reactionism ala' the John Birchers, Dixiecrats and Trumpism.

I came away once again convinced that conservatism as a temperament does better than conservatism as a program.

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Heidi P

Required reading for anyone running for office or in the media. Fantastic for the rest of us too.

Reviewed in the United States on February 15, 2023

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Comprehensive book about the right side of the aisle for the last 100 years. Continetti does an excellent job of laying out the most consequential legislation and issues of the day that drive the ebbs and flow in politics. He describes the battles among the factions on the right and the animating issues of the time. I was surprised to see how often the same issues using the same language pop up over the years. The issues around populism are not new. The issues around elites are not new. It's worth learning from history. This book is well researched and comprehensive in its content. Well worth the read!

Reviewed in the United States on June 23, 2022

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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.

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 them 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.

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Susan Drent

Puts American Conservatism Into Needed Perspective

Reviewed in the United States on February 4, 2023

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An excellent review of American conservatism from the 1920s through 2022. The author puts history in the making into an understandable perspective. The book helped me to appreciate the various factions of conservatism, who led them, and how they evolved. Left me wanting more!

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Jose Suerte

Good overview on the evolution of republican party

Reviewed in the United States on September 6, 2022

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I was concerned this was going to be very biased but I thought the author did a good job of trying to be balanced. I also appreciated his skill as a writer. It could have been very dry, but it was well written and engaging. Good background on how the GOP has changed over the years.

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Joseph Myren

AWESOME

Reviewed in Canada on May 22, 2022

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AWESOME

Cjay

Easy read - great chronological description

Reviewed in Canada on July 25, 2022

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I lived through a great deal of this, and remember most of it. However, this book filled in a lot of spaces that I had not known. It describes well, touching the most salient points at a high level, the American right's journey towards its present situation. An easy read and entertaining as well.

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