The World Turned Right Side Up: A History of the Conservative Ascendancy in America.

• Author: Olson, Walter

"Libertarians: See conservatism" - thus the index of this book. Story of our lives, right? No matter what we say or do, we keep getting lumped with the right.

The connection, never exactly comfortable, is getting harder to defend these days, as many traditional conservatives lurch toward a policy agenda of decidedly coercive content. Even aside from (Pat) Buchananism with its dirigiste economics, more conservative public figures are devoting themselves these days to their pet "culture war," increasingly conceived as a campaign to get the state to suppress cultural developments welcomed and pursued by a large body of their fellow citizens. "Liberty," "individualism," and "pursuit of happiness" crop up as pejoratives in the season's hot right-wing book, Robert Bork's Slouching Toward Gomorrah, which calls for bringing back censorship in ferociously stringent form; for example, Bork would apparently ban private adult reading of prose on grounds of excessive violence as well as sex. (Don't even ask about the Internet.) The Weekly Standard, which aspires to set the tone for younger conservatives, seldom lets a week go by without taking a swipe at freethinkers, libertarians, the Enlightenment, and suchlike. Capitalism itself, having spawned such pet hates as MTV and IBM's domestic-partner benefits, is fast coming under fire on the right, as more trads make common cause with explicit left-communitarians like Daniel Bell, Eugene Genovese, and the late Christopher Lasch.

Back in the 1950s Frank Meyer proposed that classical liberals and trads belonged together, being "arrayed against a common enemy." But with post-Soviet Marxism consigned to the cobwebs of the academy and Western ideas surging through what used to be known as the Third World, do the constituent groups of the old right - advocates of individual liberty and of quasi-military social discipline, convinced secularists and those who'd enforce biblical law, cosmopolitan techies and agrarian despisers of development - still share enough of a "common enemy" to swallow their increasingly apparent differences?

We could certainly use a few good books on how American conservatism came this far, how it got into its present fix, and where it's headed. Unfortunately, this particular book won't help much.

Author Godfrey Hodgson has penned several books of popular history, including America in Our Time and a biography of Henry Stimson. His effort to make sense of the American right is not without its...