Matthew 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.
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