Review of The Right: The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism by Matthew Continetti (2022). Continette is a Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a journalist, and an intellectual historian of the political right. This book is one of the best histories of conservatism or more broadly the political right that I have read. His primary thesis is that there has never been one single conservatism or political right. It has always been made up of competing versions of that have been present in the US since the 1920s including libertarianism, traditionalists, majoritarians, Cold Warriors, Southern Agrarians, fusionists, radical traditionalists, religious neoconservatives, paleoconservatives, neoconservatives, the New Right, and the originalists.
He illustrates the interactions between conservative intellectuals and US institutions, policies, politics, world events, and politicians since the 1920s. He explains how conservatism in the US has bounced back and forth between populism and an elite driven strategy in both content and constituencies. He shows how the conservative policies have changed over the years. Beginning with the anti-statist, anti-immigrant, and isolationism of the 1920s to the anti-New Deal, isolationism of the 30s to the anti-communist internationalism, pro-free trade, pro-immigration of the Cold War era through the neo-conservative internationalist, anti-terrorism of George W. Bush. He discusses the rise of the isolationist/anti-immigration/anti-free trade/anti-government of Trumpist populism. He ends the book with a warning that Trumpist populism, if taken too far, can and did lead to violence (January 6) against the very institutions of our democratic government that conservatives cherish so much. It could serve to discredit both the Republican Party and the political right in the future.
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