The Right Way.

• Author: Tait, Joshua

Matthew Continetti, The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism (New York City: Basic Books). 496 pp., $18.99.

In 1962, Frank Meyer outlined three elements of the right-wing voting bloc: responsible conservatives, like himself; Barry Goldwater followers, both Republican and Southern Democratic; and those with a "continuing, instinctive opposition to the whole kit and caboodle of the Roosevelt revolution." This last group provided the shock troops for right-wing movements from "the Liberty League and America First through the Taft campaigns, the McCarthy days, and today." They were the "hard right," with "undoubtedly a strong element of know-nothingism in it." These responsible conservatives had a duty to blunt the "know-nothing" leaders and their votaries in what the ex-communist Meyer called a united front against the "Liberal Establishment." The problem, as William Rusher, the dour publisher of National Review, pointed out, was that this right-wing mass didn't look to Meyer and National Review for leadership. They were merely "a delightful ally who can deftly spear the Left."

In The Right, Matthew Continetti traces the dissolution, reconstitution, ascent, and second dissolution of the twentieth and twenty-first-century American Right as he attempts to make sense of the dilemma Meyer and Rusher described. Continetti promises neither hagiography nor pathology--a history of the Right willing, we are told, to confront its darker recesses as our cicerone locates conservatism within a broader Right, or indeed, Rights. The core dynamic he identifies is an ongoing and shifting alliance between "elites" and "populists." Continetti is a true believer steeped in the conservative movement's history. He takes on the conservative search for meaning post-Glasnost and traces Trumpism's absorption of conservative institutions. But as a self-conscious heir of the conservative movement--he is, among other things,the son-in-law of William Kristol--Continetti cannot bring himself to deliver a necessary reassessment of the Right. Without a clear sense of what the Right is, he ends up offering a callow and unoriginal history of movement conservatism.

Continetti's framing of the Right as a "war," more from the subtitle than body of the book, hardly makes sense. A "war" implies bitter conflict between "populists" and "elites," or some other set of factions. There is very little intra-Right war here. With a handful of exceptions, the exclusions, "readings out," and struggles over the institutions of power are largely absent. Instead, the history of the American Right, and conservatism's place within it, is more often a tortuous series of alliances and justifications between nostalgic, aristocratic, or intellectual elites and white middle-American populists, as the author of The Persecution of Sarah Palin well knows. Continetti clearly hopes for a restoration of fusionism. To this end, he might have written a latter-day Buckleyite polemic against the Trumpist, populist Right. It would have been a false history, but a useable one. Instead, too aware of the darker recesses of the Right's history, Continetti cannot simply whitewash conservatism's past. Nevertheless, he is too committed to the cause to confront the deep roots of the post-liberal Right in both conservatism and the American Right writ large. As both conservative paladin and as historian, Continetti comes up short.

The Right starts smartly with Warren Harding and the conservative Republicans' boasts about returning to normalcy after World War I and Woodrow Wilson's progressivism. Continetti identifies three planks of Republican Americanism: free-market economics, isolationism, and constitutionalism (the "Ark of the Covenant of American Liberty," per Harding). Events of the twentieth century delegitimized these foundations. The Depression destroyed faith in the market; World War II (and the Cold War) made isolationism redundant. More insidiously, progressives from Franklin Roosevelt on undercut constitutionalism in a "jujitsu-like rhetorical move," replacing it with "an ever-present behemoth that regulated...