Reminding the Right

By Ben Sasse

Thursday, April 14, 2022

 

 

The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism, by Matthew Continetti (Basic Books, 496 pp., $32)

 

If the American idea is not great, American conservatism is rotten and Matthew Continetti’s new book is a real bore. Thankfully, the American idea is beautiful and The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism is an engaging and indispensable history.

 

Continetti concludes his new book by charging conservatives “to remember.” What exactly? The American idea. Self-evident truths assert that government must be limited because human dignity is limitless. That world-changing proposition — declared in Philadelphia, enshrined in the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and reaffirmed in the poetry of the Gettysburg Address — must still guide us nearly two and a half centuries later. “The preservation of the American idea of liberty and the familial, communal, religious, and political institutions that incarnate and sustain it — that is what makes American conservatism distinctly American,” he writes. “The Right betrays itself when it forgets this truth.”

 

Continetti’s name and views will be familiar to readers of these pages, as will the feelings he says inspired his work: that the confidence and purposefulness that marked the mainstream of American conservatism from the 1980s through the early 2000s have decayed into a bitter contest among apocalyptic factions, that “the Right is confused, uncertain, anxious, and inward looking,” and beholden more and more to cranks, demagogues, and swindlers. Can conservatism’s past teach us about our current moment?

 

Continetti makes two interesting and important choices: First, he writes a history — not a hagiography; second, he dates conservatism from the 1920s instead of the more typical 1950s. The book encloses a tidy century: The 1921 inauguration of Warren G. Harding is bookended by the inauguration of Joseph R. Biden in 2021. In contrast to familiar landmark histories of conservatism — e.g., Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind or George Nash’s The Conservative Intellectual Movement since 1945 — Continetti treats intellectual and political developments with a balanced hand, and attempts to correct previous histories that “covered up or ignored” the Right’s unflattering blemishes. The aim throughout is to show how American conservatism has, albeit with no small amount of fumbling and failure, sought to conserve the unique tradition established by the American founding against subversive or corrosive forces.

 

Continetti identifies the start of modern conservatism with the response to the Progressive movement that dominated American politics in the first decades of the 20th century. The late 1800s and early 1900s saw the transformation of American life along nearly every front: economics, immigration, migration, science, education, and religion. Clashes between workers and owners over compensation and working conditions often turned violent; social anxieties grew as millions of immigrants settled in major cities; and America found itself drawn onto the global stage, intervening in conflicts in Latin America, Asia, and ultimately Europe. The Progressive movement, animated by these events, imposed far-reaching changes. Most famously under Woodrow Wilson, America found itself under new theories of “living” constitutionalism and technocratic “administration” that seemed to be little more than cover for an altogether new and destructive American revolution.

 

Against these disruptions Harding and his successor, Calvin Coolidge, proposed a “return to normalcy.” As Continetti writes, they conceived of their political project as the preservation of the American founding, filtered through Lincoln’s statesmanship, against Wilson’s political “novelty.” Coolidge’s speech on the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence set out the position: “If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions.” Harding and Coolidge were not recommending a policy of nostalgia, but reminding America that the Founders’ ideals were the permanent framework of American life. Abandon those ideals and you abandon America.

 

After wandering in the wilderness in the first few decades of the 20th century, American conservatism found its footing in the 1950s. The massive centralization of state power that occurred under Wilson and Roosevelt, along with alarming developments in Europe, forced conservatives to sharpen their critiques and locate common causes. In the aftermath of the Second World War, surveying Soviet designs on Europe and the Third World, conservatives of various stripes found themselves consolidating around a new suite of anti-totalitarian convictions inspired by Lincoln’s declaration that America is the “last, best hope” for liberty.

 

National Review, launched in 1955, played a central role. William F. Buckley’s upstart magazine became the forum for contesting the definition and direction of conservatism. Buckley himself reflected the maturation of the movement. Continetti makes a valuable contribution to the history of the conservative movement by demonstrating how Buckley’s own thinking developed — away from, in Continetti’s reading, various European lines of thought and toward a self-consciously American conservatism. Buckley gradually came to appreciate that it was the American founding, and the constitutional settlement of the Framers, elevated by Lincoln, that ought to be the guiding light of American conservatism.

 

Politicians are not philosophers, and shaping the Republican Party according to this insight was a further challenge. Barry Goldwater proved that conservatives had established themselves as a force within the party, but Goldwater’s many liabilities doomed his candidacy long before Election Day. Richard Nixon’s administration split conservatives from beginning to end: Pat Buchanan, who had joined Nixon as a political aide in 1965 and stayed at his side through his resignation, served as the president’s unofficial liaison to National Review and the party’s conservative wing; George Will, meanwhile, sharply criticized Nixon in the pages of National Review, as the Watergate scandal metastasized and Republicans closed ranks.

 

It took a onetime Democrat from Hollywood to bridge the gap. Ronald Reagan, like Coolidge and Lincoln before him, reminded the American people of our task to renew for each generation the vitality of the American founding and to allow it to guide American political life. But Continetti argues for a correction to familiar, “mythic” accounts of the Reagan years: “Reagan’s presidency was not the inevitable outcome of the conservative movement. His triumph in 1980 was contingent, unplanned, and unpredictable,” and his two terms in office were marked by extraordinary successes — a revival of free-market principles, a period of pro-growth deregulation, the end of the Cold War, and the beginning of NAFTA.

 

Like a megachurch that splinters when a charismatic pastor leaves, the Right began to unravel after Reagan. The administration had its noteworthy failures (Iran–Contra) and unintended consequences. Reagan brought to Washington not only a “temperament, rhetoric, and policies [that] made the American Right seem more populist, more forward-looking, and more optimistic” than ever before; he became the totem of a fractious Right that broke apart as the Cold War dissipated. Likewise, he galvanized the vast network of conservative interest groups, think tanks, and media outlets that sought to capitalize on an ascendant right-wing politics. Consider just the transformation of the media landscape in the ten years after Reagan left office: Rush Limbaugh hit the airwaves in 1988, Fox News lit up television screens in 1996, and the Drudge Report website launched in 1997. Continetti argues that this messy web of institutions and personalities, rather than any individual, was Reagan’s true successor.

 

The present echoes the past: The fragmentation of the Right into warring camps in the late 1980s — paleocons, neocons, etc. — remains largely the situation in which the Right finds itself today. The Right has struggled to find a leader who can plausibly lay claim to the politics of prudence that extends from the Founding through Lincoln and Coolidge to Reagan. The Right has also struggled to articulate shared purposes and convictions relevant to a post–Cold War world. Despite the horror of September 11, the “War on Terror” was too vague a purpose to concentrate the mind of our foreign policy, and the domestic upheavals of the 2000s and 2010s, including the Great Recession and the failures to repeal and replace Obamacare, only deepened the Right’s divisions.

 

Continetti’s history ends at the beginning of the Biden presidency, with a Right afflicted by infighting, grift, and anger — in sum, purposelessness. Dissatisfaction and polarization might combine to deliver Republicans the Congress in November’s midterms, and perhaps the White House in 2024. But are there any indications that a robust, reconsolidated conservatism is on the horizon?

 

In the book’s final pages, Continetti writes: “The conservative movement, in its present disagreeable and hesitant condition, must forge a new consensus, based on the particularly American idea of individual liberty exercised within a constitutional order, that addresses the challenges of our time.” There is not space here to elaborate a program at length, but let me briefly suggest three challenges that confront us, and where I believe the Right will have to forge a new consensus firmly rooted in our constitutional tradition, if we hope to persevere.

 

(1) We need a principled conservative approach to China. Great-power politics has returned. The emergence of an age when the United States will no longer be the undisputed global hegemon is not approaching; it’s already here. China’s economic coercion and projection of force abroad pose a direct challenge to American allies in Asia, Oceania, and Africa, and also threaten our ability to protect our own economic and military interests. Likewise, China’s combination of digital surveillance, social credit, and state-directed capitalism at home suggests a civilizational alternative to American constitutional democracy — an alternative that, take note, has found American admirers recently on both the left and the right. Conservatives need to renew our confidence that America can play a hopeful role in the world, as Lincoln recognized, while operating with strength, concentration, and prudence.

 

(2) We need a principled conservative approach to large-scale economic transformation. The progressive, power-centric policies of the current administration are reckless, and we’re already suffering for them. Washington’s unspoken and bipartisan agreement to ignore America’s looming debt crisis is not a strategy, and inflation rates are at a 40-year high with no sign of abating. Yelling about the size of government isn’t enough. Conservatives need to appreciate our present economic woes against a larger backdrop: We are in the midst of a transformation in the nature of work akin, in scale, to the Industrial Revolution. Digitalization, automation, and artificial intelligence are going to displace enormous numbers of workers across a variety of industries, in everything from trucking to legal writing. Technocratic solutions from either the left or the right are insufficient. Conservatives need to outline a program for institution-building. We ought to start by upending the antiquated 1890–1940 factory-model education system. Conservatives should rethink all monopolistic K–12, higher-education, and job-retraining models. We ought to reimagine the roles of local, state, and federal governments in promoting diverse forms of education. Too many Americans fall into higher education’s vicious debt trap. Too many college administrators are committed to a collapsing business model. Too many politicians pretend that the economy of 2050 will look like the economy of 1950.

 

(3) We need a principled approach to the determinist Left. The rise of hegemonic, illiberal “woke-ism” is a threat to our constitutional spirit as grave as the Progressivism that confronted Harding and Coolidge. The conviction that America is irredeemably corrupt, advanced in places such as the New York Times’ 1619 Project, or that race and sex establish certain groups as essentially oppressive or oppressed, are counsels of destruction and despair. The American constitutional tradition is against every type of tyranny — including the tyranny of determinisms. Conservatives must oppose these dehumanizing movements at every turn and renew the vision of human dignity, personal freedom, and moral agency that has inspired so many previous generations.

 

These are not our only challenges, but each of the above threatens the tradition that has come down to us from the Founders, mediated, elevated, and refined by the better angels of every generation. Renewing the life of that tradition for our own time is our urgent task. Matthew Continetti has done the American idea and those who want to conserve it a great service. By helping conservatives remember where we’ve been, he helps us prepare for what’s ahead.