A new history shows a movement in a constant struggle for self-definition.
A new history shows a movement in a constant struggle for self-definition.
I t is fitting that William F. Buckley Jr., the founder of National Review and an instrumental figure in the creation of the post-war American conservative movement, was so fond of sailing. The pursuit involves maneuvering, assessing the prevailing winds, tacking, and, most important, knowing one’s ultimate destination. That many of sailing’s terms have passed into more common use, sometimes even when discussing Buckley and conservatism themselves — the late National Review editor Jeffrey Hart once referred to Buckley as NR’s “helmsman” — makes the metaphor more apt.
In figuring out what conservatism is and where it should be going, however, conservatives have sometimes found it easier to say what they are against rather than what they are for — which treacherous seas to avoid rather than which ports to seek out. In a 1963 essay, “Notes Toward an Empirical Definition of Conservatism . . . Reluctantly and Apologetically Given,” Buckley archly offers as a definition that of Richard Weaver: “a paradigm of essences toward which the phenomenology of the world is in continuing approximation.” He then recounts two contemporaneous instances of defining conservatism by the negative: rejections of the anti-communist conspiracist John Birch Society, and of the objectivism of Ayn Rand. Figuring out what conservatism is has often required debating what it is not — or shouldn’t be.
Matthew Continetti’s The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism adds tremendously to this perspective. Conceived and drafted amid great tumult for its subject, The Right recontextualizes the movement’s present strife in light of its own history. It is far too tempting, both for conservatives who would defend the legacy of the movement’s post-war years and those who would challenge it, to look at the state of conservatism today and see a straightforward story: Once upon a time, William F. Buckley, National Review, and other affiliated individuals and organizations created what came to be known as American conservatism, and they saw it and it was good. Then, they worked to get Reagan elected, won the Cold War, and all lived happily ever after — until, more recently, they didn’t, and it all fell apart. Continetti finds such treatments “too neat.” He argues that, when it comes to the many histories of conservatism, “the edges of the movement have been smoothed over. Its blemishes have been covered up or ignored.”
Continetti seeks a broader view. One way he does this is by looking further into the past than most histories of conservatism do. He begins in the 1920s, a time when the Right in this country — restrictionist, isolationist, leery of foreign trade — had a certain consonance with tendencies supposedly ascendant within it today. (The name of Buckley’s first boat, in honor of his father? Sweet Isolation.) He also stresses that, whatever the appearance of comity on what we broadly refer to as the Right, there has always been churn:
Conservative writers and thinkers disagree more than they agree. They comprise a movement defined by a lively debate over first principles. They look for deviation and betrayal. And sometimes they form a circular firing squad.
If it is true that, as he argues, “there is not one American Right” but several, then the sailing metaphor breaks down: There is no single helmsman — or even, necessarily, a single boat.
Taking readers along this hundred-year voyage, Continetti stresses that his is not “strictly an intellectual history.” It mixes theory and practice to demonstrate how conservative ideas have — and have not — been realized. The Right is an incredible collection of origin stories, not simply of political tendencies and intellectual movements, but also of individuals and institutions. Those wondering where the uneasy relationship between Christianity and modern media began, from whence Clarence Thomas (and John Marini and Ken Masugi) first broke onto the political scene, and how figures as temperamentally distinct as Pat Buchanan (formerly “Nixon’s ambassador to National Review”) and George Will got their starts can find all this information and more tucked into the book’s meticulously researched and amply packed pages.
But perhaps the most useful function Continetti’s book serves is to remind us how far back many of the seemingly novel arguments now consuming conservatism actually go. The internecine strife at National Review itself, between Frank Meyer and Brent Bozell, over the primacy of freedom or virtue makes today’s debates over the same subject seem stale. One might also find familiar Meyer’s rejection of the argument some on the right made that “if only governmental power can be seized and held by governors imbued with true principle, men can be forced to be virtuous.” (He wrote this in . . . 1957.) Or his dispute with Donald Atwell Zoll, who argued that things were so bad in America that conservatives had a choice “either to go down with liberalism, clinging to the common values and abiding by the traditional rules of the game, or to elect to fight, uninhibited by the liberal thanatos or by liberal proprieties as to method.” (Zoll wrote this in . . . 1969.) Meyer was hardly the only person involved in these myriad disputes that have roiled and continue to roil conservatism (nor was he always right), though Buckley did consider him essential, calling him “air-traffic control.”
Such debates in the movement also turned on questions of strategy and orientation, at home and abroad. National Review has constantly been assessing its own relation to the politics and culture of its day. For the magazine to defend Joseph McCarthy’s actions against the domestic threat of communism (amid internal division, with, notably, Whittaker Chambers not trusting the man), to distance itself from and then ultimately to condemn the activities of the John Birch Society, and then to reject the demagoguery of George Wallace on grounds partly principled and partly pragmatic — all of this bespeaks an institution accumulating wisdom as it made and recovered from errors, looking for the best path forward. (Buckley, for example, concluded that McCarthy, however serious the problem he highlighted, ultimately damaged conservatism “a good deal.”) NR was hardly alone on the right in tacking this way and that. Nor was it alone in its uneasy relationships with 20th-century Republican presidents, against one of whom (Nixon) it led a crusade on principled grounds, attempting to marshal the forces of movement conservatism to prevent his renomination in 1972 . . . and failing. Continetti reminds us that even Ronald Reagan, so often a kind of protagonist of other histories of conservatism, was not inevitable. “His triumph in 1980 was contingent, unplanned, and unpredictable,” Continetti writes. “It was not until he left office that he acquired mythic status.” In light of this history, conservatism’s relationship with 21st-century Republican presidents is somewhat more intelligible.
And through all of this, those who at one time or another seemed to dominate the mainstream of conservative opinion were fending off challenges from a variety of sources, who embodied tendencies that never disappeared entirely. From both traditionalists (via Bozell and his reactionary publication Triumph) and libertarians (such as the crankish Murray Rothbard), one encounters skepticism of the Vietnam War, and even of America’s moral status vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. In such charismatic persons as George Wallace, one finds eerie prefigurations of modern patterns. (“Whether one approves of him or not, he is doing it and all you sissies do is stand around wringing your hands,” read one NR letter to the editor responding to the magazine’s criticism of Wallace.) Past, indeed, is prologue. The fantasies of QAnon can seem uniquely lurid until one considers, say, John Birch Society founder Robert Welch’s speculation that Ohio Republican senator Robert A. Taft was stricken with a fatal cancer by a “radium tube” concealed in his Senate seat.
Amid all this flux and discord, it is tempting to pick out a few select quotes or ideas and pronounce, “This is conservatism,” as though drawing a straight line through a scatter plot. One could, for example, look at Buckley in 1957 calling himself “a revolutionary against the present liberal order” and define all of modern conservatism as an insurgent pose. Or, one could look at Buckley in 1969, writing that the responsibility of conservatives is “to defend what is best in America” — “at all costs [and] against any enemy, foreign or domestic” — and cast all of modern conservatism as an attempt at preservation. But this would not capture the maturation that led him from one position to the other, or the fact that, at various times and in varying circumstances, different strategies may be called for — so long as one keeps one’s underlying principles. And so with conservatism as a whole.
Continetti’s contextualization of conservatism, while necessary and — for the most part — fair-minded, can provide a humbling perspective: All of this has happened before, all of it will happen again. But it can also induce a kind of Sisyphean frustration: If conservatives are just constantly going back and forth, having the same arguments over and over again, recurring to the same principles, what is the point? Are we just sailing in circles? Even the possibility that changing circumstances dictate different postures or distinct emphases can make the whole enterprise seem ultimately reactionary — and not even in the fun sense of the word. Must conservatives only ever be on the defensive?
Not necessarily. Even if some debates and problems recur eternally, it is possible to advance on others. There have been genuine steps forward for conservatism in its hundred years. On the question of race, for example, the movement is far removed from defenses of segregation, from nostalgia for the institutions once in service of southern prejudice. This “conflation of arguments against government expansion with defenses of white supremacy” had “limited the reach of conservatism,” making it “suspect in the eyes of Americans of all races,” as Continetti writes. A movement thus tainted would never gain true purchase; we have, in large measure, Harry Jaffa to thank for moving past this, and his Claremont Institute to thank for conservative reclamation of Abraham Lincoln’s statesmanship. Today, when one encounters some of the more dramatic instances of this taint from the past, one is shocked — and it’s that shock that tells us how much ground has been gained. Yet like some kind of eldritch abomination, racism can also mutate over time, presenting itself in new ways and from unfamiliar (and familiar) sources, requiring new arguments and new methods to dispel it.
Amid real setbacks for conservatism, there nonetheless stands the example of the pro-life cause, at one point an uneasy principle of the Right but now a non-negotiable one possibly on the brink of a historic triumph. A triumph that will — if realized — have been enabled by the movement of constitutional originalism, a decades-long attempt, albeit imperfect, to restore fealty to the Constitution and to instantiate such fealty throughout America’s legal culture.
This is just one example of how conservatism, though still outgunned in elite institutions, is at least no longer without institutional redoubts. A thread that runs throughout Continetti’s book is the steady accretion of such enterprises, arguably peaking during the Reagan and George H. W. Bush years. Continetti even describes Reagan’s successor not as a person but as the “network of think tanks, foundations, special interest groups, activists, columnists, magazines, and newspapers” that “had grown beyond reckoning” during this time. It has largely persisted to this day, often labeled “Conservatism Inc.” But this very growth points to another theme of the book, and another struggle of conservatism: the tension between popular sentiment and elite direction. “The Right has toggled between an elite-driven strategy in both content and constituencies and a populist strategy that meets normal people where they are and is driven by their ambitions, anxieties, and animosities,” he writes. A successful movement needs both, but for conservatism, a true synthesis has been difficult, and transitory when achieved. Popular sentiment is a necessary source of energy and direction for conservatism, but such energy can become excess; some kind of elite is necessary for conservatism but risks calcifying into stale, self-serving consensus or outright corruption. Continetti admits to being part of the Beltway apparatus, so when he faults it for having diverged from the voters it theoretically represents, the criticism rings true. This is an abiding problem for conservatism.
We are now a generation or more removed from the Cold War, for so long the focusing agent of conservatism. Yet it is still the case, as Continetti writes, that “the Right never settled on a strategy for the post–Cold War world.” Its end launched the Right into a largely introspective quest for self-definition that is still ongoing. Bush-era foreign adventurism, as Continetti concedes, failed in its lofty ambition to end this aimlessness. (If anything, it only made the quest for self-definition more tempestuous.) Thus, The Right closes on a somewhat pessimistic note. Conservatism, alas — even as the Republican Party is on the brink of possibly historic electoral success — remains rudderless and unmoored.
The conclusion of The Right speaks to one of the flaws of the book. Yet it is a flaw for which one should blame not Continetti but rather time itself. The historian’s remove suits him well throughout, and if his record doesn’t include everything, that’s because to do so would be impossible. But the historical nature of his inquiry weakens as it approaches the present. The “history,” if one can even call it that, of the past six or so years is still being written.
What Continetti offers is the wisdom of history and its lessons. He calls for a “rediscovery of America,” centered on America’s Founding documents, accepting some of the Trump-era reinvigoration of political tendencies once thought dormant while rejecting others, perhaps most significantly the temptation to apocalyptic rhetoric. His recounting of the multiple obituaries for conservatism, for the Republican Party, and for America itself reminds the reader to be skeptical of similar pronouncements today.
What will conservatism look like from here on out? It remains difficult to say. But it seems to me it must look to America’s heritage and history to underwrite our political life, and it must stand up to those who deprecate them. It must promote federalism as the best way to balance conservatism’s elite and popular components, ensuring that Washington, D.C., does not become — or can’t remain — the arbiter of American life. Where once the Cold War animated conservatism, it must now come to terms with the threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party. These are just a few of the tasks facing conservatism in the coming years.
“The sea always has something lying in wait for you,” Buckley wrote. The waters may be choppy, but the vessel, having weathered much, remains sound. With our eyes ever on the destination, conservatives may yet find ourselves “moving at racing speed, parting the buttery sea as with a scalpel, and the waters roar by . . .”