Where the Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency.

• Author: Basham, Patrick
• Position: Book Review

Where the Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency Patrick J. Buchanan New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2004, 272 pp.

The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge New York: Penguin Books, 2004, 400 pp.

What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America Thomas Frank New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004, 320 pp.

There is certainly disagreement among liberals, conservatives, and libertarians over how the American Right rose to prominence during the past generation. There is also obvious and highly spirited disagreement regarding the consequences for American public policy. However, nearly everyone agrees that the conservative movement has made most, if not all, of the intellectual and political gains since the Watergate era. Each of these books attempts to articulate the nature of this conservative revival in modern American political life. Although their respective emphases overlap rather than parallel one another, all of the authors expend much energy tracing the rise of the Right since the unsuccessful presidential candidacy of Mr. Conservative, Barry Goldwater, in 1964.

John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge's highly readable and comprehensive survey of the history of the conservative movement reflects both the authors' journalistic skills and the foreigner's occasional knack for appreciating the forest that may appear to the native born as a mere collection of individual trees. Micklethwait and Wooldridge provide the most detailed account of the pivotal role played by the think tank industry (and the think tanks' financial patrons), both conservative and libertarian, that sprouted and thrived in the past three decades. Patrick J. Buchanan and Thomas Frank also recognize the invaluable intellectual infrastructure provided by the Cato Institute, Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, and others, although Buehanan's account is both more informed and largely more sympathetic than Frank's more cursory and partial acknowledgement that, in politics, ideas do matter and that, in contemporary American political life, the ideas of the Right, broadly and loosely defined, have mattered the most.

Complementing the praise for the Right's intellectual energy is criticism of the American Left's inability (according to Micklethwait, Wooldridge, and Buchanan) or unwillingness (according to Frank) to counter the Right's...