Where did Trump come from? a new history of the American right sheds light on the GOP in 2016.

• Author: Kinney, Jay
• Position: George Hawley's "Right-Wing Critics of American Conservatism" - Book review

Right-Wing Critics of American Conservatism, by George Hawley, University Press of Kansas, 376 pages, $34.95

George Hawley appears to have completed Right-Wing Critics of American Conservatism before Donald Trump began his rise, which makes it all the more surprising that this scholarly tome is the best guide we're likely to find to the bizarre reality of the 2016 GOP.

As Hawley, a political scientist at the University of Alabama, points out in considerable detail, the post-World War II conservative movement has never been a monolithic bloc. Many of its left-wing critics have perceived it that way, but those who Hawley calls its right-wing critics have known better--particularly the ones who were purged and consigned to the ideological equivalent of Siberia. The movement has always been beset from within and without by dissension, even as its leaders have tried to fashion a sense of unity.

Even the definition of "right-wing" is up for grabs. In Europe, conservatives have historically defended a hereditary aristocracy, an established church, and other fixed social hierarchies. ("The men who supported King Louis XVI during the French Revolution," Hawley notes, "would have had no interest in wars to spread liberal democracy in the Middle East, a free market capitalism that recognizes no social distinctions, or a populist form of evangelical Christianity.") Not so in America. "From the major figures of the conservative movement," he writes, "we consistently hear the same values advanced: limited government, strong traditional families, and strong national defense."

But conservatism is not always identical to the right, more broadly defined. If the left is characterized by holding social and economic equality as its primary value, the right is characterized by its skepticism toward--or outright opposition to--equality as a political goal. Hence Hawley's compact definition of the right as "all of those ideologies that, while not necessarily rejecting equality as a social good, do not rank it at the top of the hierarchy of values. The right furthermore fights the left in all cases where the push for equality threatens some other value held in higher esteem."

In similar fashion, the right-wing critics of the present conservative movement criticize it for what they see as its ongoing capitulation to the left's values. Almost without exception, those "purged" from the conservative movement have been so for being too far to the right, not too far to...