Matthew Continetti rewrites the history of American conservatism.
Matthew Continetti rewrites the history of American conservatism.
M atthew Continetti has decided to recast the history of American conservatism. The story that the American Right told itself at its conferences and in many previous books was that there were just isolated conservative impulses before World War II and in the immediate post-war period, and it took the Cold War to turn unify these impulses of protest into something coherent. William F. Buckley defenestrated (his word) the Birchers and other kooks from the movement, Barry Goldwater flamed out in 1964, and then Ronald Reagan arrived on the scene to usher in a golden era of conservatism. Previous histories tend to treat this as the end of the story, with the Right descending into infighting after Reagan left office.
If it had done nothing at all beyond de-emphasizing Reagan’s centrality to the story, Continetti’s sweeping, brisk book, The Right: The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism, would be worth its sticker price. But its really valuable provocation is the premise on which it stands: the author’s (perhaps unhappy) acceptance that Donald Trump was not a radical departure from or postscript to the story of conservatism, but just another chapter. By beginning his story of the Right in the 1920s, Continetti starts with a Republican Party that devotes itself to the Constitution, even while it is self-consciously nationalist in orientation, protectionist on trade, hawkish on immigration, and skeptical of foreign commitments.
The Right’s mantra is that ideas have consequences. But in trying to make their own ideas consequential, Continetti says, conservatives have “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.” The theme running throughout his book is this conflict: As the right tilts toward the masses, conservatism makes itself repugnant to the liberal institutions it must persuade or bend, but as it tilts too much toward the elite, it becomes disconnected from an electoral base.
In general, Continetti’s account sees the populists as led astray by extremism, conspiracy theories, narrowness, and bigotry, while the elites suffer from a certain airy aloofness. But it is impossible to believe the author is unaware of the comical ironies this framing produces. Continetti writes that the elite Jack Kemp was a man who believed in a politics of “inclusion and consensus,” whereas the populist Patrick Buchanan practiced the politics of “division and confrontation.” But Kemp’s politics failed to include one important constituency: voters. Continetti describes his 1988 presidential bid this way:
His campaign . . . exhibited the differences between conventional opinion inside the Beltway and the sentiments of the rest of America. Kemp’s smarts and polish may have appealed to the political press, but they failed to impress Republican primary voters. Kemp lacked stature. No member of the House had gone straight to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue since James Garfield in 1880. Nor did Kemp’s missionary quest to broaden GOP ranks by including Hispanic and black voters capture the imaginations of white Republicans.
So the “inclusion” was notional. The missionary quest failed to interest the GOP church faithful, let alone the named targets of Kemp’s proselytizing. Meanwhile, the meaningful shift of Hispanic voters, along with a tiny but noticeable trickle of black men, into the GOP coalition came at the end of the presidency of Donald Trump, who took on the mantle of Buchananite politics and turned the volume up to eleven.
Readers will sense, throughout The Right, that Continetti’s sympathies lie mostly with the Kemp-like figures and the first generation of neoconservatives. But his summaries of events sometimes cut against his preference for respectability. Consider his treatment of Buckley’s famous attempt to expel the John Birch Society from the right, which begins:
The real threat to the coherence and sustainability of conservatism was not its intellectual debates but its more florid manifestations. Conservative doctrine needn’t be worked out for the Right to prosper politically — so long as the general public considered it mainstream. That was why Buckley had to confront the John Birch Society.
Continetti goes on to write that:
The entanglement of the Birch Society with both the conservative movement and the Draft Goldwater effort presented the Right with a dilemma. Conservatism could attain neither elite validation nor nationwide success if it was associated with Birchism. But it also could not sustain itself if Birchism was excised — it would have no constituency. The internal stress was most acute for conservatives who wanted to be taken seriously by liberal institutions.
What happened next is well-known: Prominent conservatives associated with the American Enterprise Institute met with Buckley, Goldwater, and Russell Kirk — and a planned attack on the Birchers and their leader, Robert Welch, was unveiled at National Review. What is usually forgotten is the episode’s aftermath:
This well-choreographed, intellectual-political pas de deux may have shaken the confidence of some Birchers in their leader Welch. It certainly put Buckley, Kirk, and Goldwater on the record against him. But its overall effect was minimal. Welch didn’t go anywhere. And the media continued to portray the Right as fanatical and extreme.
Well, of course. This was the same media that just a few pages earlier had made up an entirely fake news story about Goldwater’s having responded to the news of JFK’s death with a terse “no comment.” The same media that then went on to smear the American Right at large for JFK’s assassination, a murder that had been committed by an avowed communist. They would never respect Buckley and his cohort. They wouldn’t even acknowledge Buckley’s good deed until long after the Birchers had ceased to be a threat, and even then their kudos were only a prelude to demanding more conservative in-fighting and purges. Perhaps conservatives should not feel so acutely stressed about the high opinions of such jackals.
The conceptual clarity of Continetti’s book — the nimble toggling between elite-driven strategies and populist ones — also sometimes obscures the more complicated reality, which is that his equation of populism with extremism and elites with a failure to appeal to voters doesn’t always hold up. After all, the Wall Street Journal editorial page is part of the elite and respectable face of conservatism, and its editorial position in favor of a five-word constitutional amendment — “There shall be open borders” — is not just extremism but utopianism. And can we really say that when George W. Bush appealed to Buchananite voters with a “more humble foreign policy,” he was giving in to extremism? Or that he had found sensible, elevated moderation when, following the advice of foreign-policy voices who had won the elite validation of Christopher Hitchens, he committed America to “light a fire in the minds of men” by waging a war against tyranny the world over? Sometimes Beltway conventional wisdom is its own kind of distempered extremism.
The neat populist-elitist dichotomy is further complicated by the friendships and strange bedfellows that have sometimes formed across the two factions. As Continetti notes, Kemp and Buchanan were friendly to each other. Continetti began his career at the hawkish, immigration-friendly the Weekly Standard, and I began mine at the American Conservative, which was at the opposite end of the right-wing spectrum on those issues. Yet Continetti and I have been friendly since we first bumped into each other at CPAC in 2006, and now our shared affiliation with AEI seems to coordinate our efforts. A history of the Right that plotted out the way in which the ideological divides are regularly bridged by such personal relationships would be just as true as the one that Continetti has produced.
One of the reasons that America conservatism is the way it is — always caught between a populism that alienates elites and an elitism that alienates the populace — is that the American establishment has no conservatism in it. The Mainline Protestant Churches and the spirit within them went wholly over to progressivism around the time that Continetti’s book begins. Instead, with notable exceptions, at the intellectual level, American conservatism is almost completely dominated by Catholic, Jewish, and imported British voices. (Some in this last group, I assume, are good people.) There has always been this “arriviste” element to the movement, as Corey Robin has pointed out, which explains why at the level of intellectuals, conservative attachment to the American Constitution is bound to be shaded by a little contempt for those who have abandoned it.
Finally, Continetti’s theme of elitism and populism points to a lacuna in conservative ideology and theorizing, especially over the last half-century. Conservatives have spent a great deal of energy in that time focused on “liberalism” — on tracing its evolution from John Locke through to our Bill of Rights, and thinking about its applications to fields such as economics. Another, smaller, subset of the Right has focused on tradition and virtue. But the problem that bedevils Continetti’s subjects is not new. The question of the elites and the masses, or “the few and the many,” was a serious one confronted by the Framers both at the time of the Founding and in the life of the American Republic in the decades afterward. For all the conservative veneration of the Founders, we have nearly forgotten that they did not call themselves “liberals” but republicans.
By now, the Right has mostly outsourced thinking about republicanism to liberals such as Gordon Wood, occasionally dashing in to fetch from them one insight or another. Yet republican thinking concerns itself precisely with building institutions, ethical premises, and an intellectual foundation that restrains the self-seeking of the elite and tries to elevate the masses above swells of vulgar passions. After a century of internecine war, we must recognize that neither the Right’s Jack Kemps nor its Pat Buchanans can do it alone; they need each other to succeed.