The Strange History of American Conservatism

A journalist and senior fellow on the American Enterprise Institute, Continetti is a profession conservative. The motion, he writes, “has been my life.” He brings an insider’s nuance and a historian’s dispassion to the formidable process of writing the American proper’s biography, and he provides a journalist’s knack for deft portraiture and telling particulars. (Franklin Roosevelt was “wily, boisterous and charming”; Milton Friedman, “elfin, mischievous, implacable.”) His accuracy is spectacular, too; in his 400-plus pages spanning 100 years, I discovered no claims to cavil with.

From his account a dramatic arc emerges, and it’s a tragic one. Within the early twentieth century, conservatism was a unfastened bundle of temperaments and insurance policies, not a philosophy or a motion. “The Republican Social gathering of the Twenties stood for a well-liked mixture of untrammeled commerce, excessive tariffs, disarmament, international coverage restraint and devotion to the constitutional basis of American coverage.” Then got here the Melancholy, the New Deal and the conflict. Alarmed by what they noticed as Roosevelt’s socialism and the prospect of being dragged into Europe’s blood tub, the precise veered towards isolationism, nostalgia and irrelevance. The Republican Social gathering “tended to undertake an adversarial and catastrophizing angle towards the federal government that it by no means fairly shook off.” By the tip of the Nineteen Forties, liberals had each motive to dismiss the precise because the protect of “irritable psychological gestures which search to resemble concepts” (as Lionel Trilling wisecracked in 1950).

After which, starting within the Eisenhower period, got here a Cambrian explosion of concepts. A lot of it centered on William F. Buckley, the founding father of Nationwide Overview. Although not an awesome thinker, Buckley had a pointy pen, a magnetic persona, an eye fixed for expertise and a imaginative and prescient of conservatism as greater than the sum of dyspeptic elements. Round Buckley swirled fearless and far-reaching debates involving intellectuals like Russell Kirk and Frank Meyer, Whittaker Chambers and James Burnham. Every little thing was mentioned, all the things was tried, and even failures, like Barry Goldwater’s wipeout within the 1964 presidential election, have been discovered from. By the point Daniel Patrick Moynihan declared, in 1981, “Of a sudden, the G.O.P. has grow to be the occasion of concepts,” the precise had assembled a three-pillared edifice of sturdy protection, conventional values and growth-oriented economics.

That was the precise I encountered once I first got here to Washington as a journalism intern in the summertime of 1981. There was not a desk within the metropolis that didn’t boast an open copy of the Heritage Basis’s magnum opus, “Mandate for Management,” a phone-book-thick compendium of conservative coverage proposals, lots of which impressed laws. David Stockman, the wunderkind price range director beneath Ronald Reagan, was electrifying the capital with reforms culled from years of coverage wonkery in journals like Irving Kristol’s The Public Curiosity. Bestriding the scene was President Reagan himself, a visionary whose optimism and confidence overthrew the gloom that had conservatism because the time of Calvin Coolidge.

Or so it appeared. We didn’t then know that Reagan’s triumph was additionally a fruits. The Chilly Warfare’s finish dissolved the conservative coalition’s glue, Buckley’s glowing technology receded, Kristol’s journal closed, Rush Limbaugh ascended. George W. Bush’s efforts to border an activist, idealistic conservatism by no means took maintain. Cheered on by the inflammatory rhetoric of conservative media and confrontation entrepreneurs like Newt Gingrich, the bottom steered straight for the abyss of pessimism, authoritarianism, nativism and grievance that Buckley and Reagan had labored so onerous to flee.