An historian must have a passion for the past, a compelling desire to learn all there is to learn about an age, a movement, or an event and the men and women who shaped it and were shaped by it. He must have an equal desire to tell the story of that past as completely and objectively as possible, never allowing a mesmerizing personality or an overarching event to distort the telling. And he must have a judicial temperament that enables him to differentiate between the sensational and the consequential, the fleeting and the fundamental.

American conservatism has been fortunate for more than 30 years to have a masterly historian studying and writing about the individuals and institutions that have transformed a congeries of “irritable mental gestures” — Lionel Trilling’s words — into a major intellectual and then political force. George H. Nash’s first book, published in 1976, was The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945. It immediately became and remains a classic work, indispensable reading for anyone interested in American conservatism.

Many of us have waited and hoped for a sequel, and implored George Nash to write it. We now have the next best thing — a collection of his articles, lectures, and ruminations. Like the earlier work, Reappraising the Right is essential reading for the conservative.

In his introduction, Nash acknowledges that following the decisive Democratic victory in 2008, American conservatism is at a crossroads. He points to the open squabbling between elitists like David Brooks and populists like Rush Limbaugh about what American conservatives should do to “regain their footing in the new political terrain.” Should they go back to basics and proclaim first principles with renewed fervor? Or should they concentrate on devising fresh public policies that appeal to a “putatively . . . pragmatic electorate”? In what way, if any, should the movement reconfigure itself?

Nash recalls Whittaker Chambers’s advice to William F. Buckley Jr.: “That is what conservatives must decide: how much to give in order to survive at all; how much to give in order not to give up the basic principles.” Nash says flatly that whatever the decision, whatever the balance achieved and maintained, “Conservatism in America is not dead.”

The book begins with a 1987 Nash lecture at the Heritage Foundation in which he explores the American experience, concluding that there has been a tradition of conservative reform from the beginning. He singles out the core values of individual merit, equality of opportunity, and progress or, as he puts it, “improvement.” Ronald Reagan, he says, epitomizes one strong aspect of the American temperament — our optimism, our belief that we can solve almost any problem. Some traditional conservatives were uncomfortable with such triumphalism and winced whenever Reagan quoted Tom Paine, as he often did, to the effect that “we have it in our power to begin the world over again.” But Reagan’s remarkably successful presidency at home and abroad trumped their disquiet.

The one thing, Nash argues, that has enabled the nation to overcome all its economic, social, political, and military crises is the people’s “Christian religious belief.” While conceding that America is a modern nation, Nash concludes that its modern elements must be conjoined with what Russell Kirk called the “permanent things” — things of the spirit and the institutions that sustain them. Without this fusion, “the American experiment may fail.”

Nash then offers deft, insightful profiles of conservatives such as newspaper columnist John Chamberlain, longtime ISI president E. Victor Milione, the brilliant, disputatious Willmoore Kendall, and polymath Ernest van den Haag.

In an essay on Russell Kirk, Nash says that his magisterial 1953 study The Conservative Mind not only breached the wall of liberal condescension but stimulated the development of a new conservative movement. Kirk’s book gave American conservatism what it had previously lacked — an identity. More than 50 years after the publication of The Conservative Mind and some 15 years after his death, writes Nash, Kirk’s legacy as a moralist endures: “He elevated our discourse — and our vision.”

Nash also pays homage to another eminent intellectual of the post-war Right — Richard Weaver, author of the justly acclaimed Ideas Have Consequences. This work, says Nash, is a “luminous example” of the literary tradition of “cultural pessimism.” By linking the rise of modernity with cultural disintegration, Weaver put “modernity itself on trial.” In so doing, he dramatically extended “the mental horizon” of American conservatism. The crisis of the West, Weaver wrote in 1948, was not simply a battle against Communism or the welfare state but “a civilizational catastrophe,” born of unintelligent choice and philosophic error deep in our past. This was to be a central tenet, Nash says, of traditionalist conservatism for years to come. I would add that it remains a core idea of conservatism to this day.

The second part of Reappraising the Right is about every conservative’s favorite conservative, Bill Buckley. Nash revisits Buckley’s first bestseller, God and Man at Yale, which he says will live on because it addresses the fundamental questions about faith, freedom, and education that continue to roil public life. He examines Buckley’s astonishing literary output — a Mississippi River of words. In addition to all the published books, columns, editorials, articles, and other works, his unpublished files (most of them correspondence) in the Sterling Library at Yale fill nearly “a thousand hefty boxes.” Even Nash, a prodigious researcher, has not gone through all of them.

Nash predicts that Buckley’s works will endure because 1) his career coincided with two great Western dramas — the struggle against totalitarian Communism abroad and the struggle to bolster the foundations of liberty at home; 2) his commentaries concern not just the ephemera of politics but “the vast cultural matrix out of which our political life evolves”; and 3) their central subject is people, and their author is “a person of singular joie de vivre.”

The author then surprises us with several chapters about conservatism and the American Jewish community — a topic that seemingly could be covered in a couple of paragraphs. But, mirabile visu, there was the New York–based American Jewish League Against Communism, which garnered considerable publicity in the late 1940s and 1950s through, among other things, its highly visible support of Sen. Joe McCarthy. Owing to limited resources and controversial leadership, Nash says, the league never successfully mobilized a base among Jewish voters.

In its early days, National Review was sometimes described by critics as a “Catholic” magazine because Bill Buckley was Catholic, as were such associates and contributors as Priscilla Buckley, Garry Wills, Russell Kirk, and Thomas Molnar. But Nash writes about the forgotten Jewish godfathers of the magazine, including Austrian émigré Willi Schlamm, journalist Eugene Lyons, longtime literary editor Frank Meyer, religion editor Will Herberg, contributor Ralph de Toledano, Hollywood writer and satirist Morrie Ryskind, and arch-libertarian Frank Chodorov.

Nash completes this part of Reappraising the Right with a look at Commentary magazine, which made a long march from Cold War liberal to New Left to neoconservative under founding editor Elliot Cohen and his successor, Norman Podhoretz. In 1956, Commentary had greeted National Review with an article titled “Scrambled Eggheads on the Right.” In 1973, Podhoretz invited Bill Buckley to participate in a Commentary symposium. While the two editors became good friends, their publications remained apart on issues like the appropriate role of the federal government. On this question, Commentary remained faithful to its liberal roots.

Although Commentary did not convert a majority of Jews to its brand of conservatism, says Nash, it made conservatism “a respected and unignorable presence in the Jewish community.” And it opened a door to a new generation of conservative Jewish writers. Thanks to Podhoretz and his colleagues, Nash writes, “it was now respectable . . . to be both a Jew and a conservative.”

A respected biographer of Herbert Hoover, Nash offers four chapters that posit the question: Is Hoover “a neglected conservative sage”? He does his considerable best to answer yes, concluding that the former president was orphan, engineer, humanitarian, statesman, the embodiment of an American ideal — “the ideal of upward mobility.” But I must rejoin that, as our president at the beginning of the Great Depression, Hoover was not a conservative sage but a committed progressive who conceived society, as Nash admits, as something to be “deliberately, continuously, and endlessly reformed.”

Nash ends his thoughtful reappraisal asking “Whither conservatism?” and responding that the following points should be kept in mind. Modern American conservatism is a “coalition with many points of origin and diverse tendencies.” By the end of the Reagan presidency, there were five distinct impulses: libertarianism, traditionalism, anti-Communism, neoconservatism, and the interfaith Religious Right. Reagan gave “each faction a seat at the table and a sense of having arrived.”

Conservative scholars have now noted the rise of “populist” or majoritarian conservatives, accompanied by a weakening of the anti-statist ideology that had long united conservatives. As the conservative universe has expanded it has also divided into subgroups like the paleocons, theocons, crunchy cons, immicons, and Leocons (disciples of Leo Strauss). I cannot resist suggesting another category — con cons (constitutional conservatives). The possibility of a coalition’s dissolving is always there, Nash admits, but the dissolution of the conservative coalition can be avoided if conservatives remember “the ecumenism of Reagan,” and avoid the temptation to “retreat into a fatal passivity” induced by disillusionment or despair.

On the very last page, Nash urges conservatives to break out of their comfortable cocoons, stop spending so much time talking to one another, and communicate their vision of a free, virtuous, and safe society in language that “connects not only with our own coterie but with the great majority of the American people.” That is very sound advice from a conservative sage.