How the Right Misunderstands Its History

By Matthew Continetti

Thursday, April 28, 2022

 

Conservatives like to say that their movement began in the wilderness. Then William F. Buckley Jr. came along and founded National Review in 1955. He led the Right to political relevance by winning the 1964 Republican nomination for Arizona senator Barry Goldwater.

 

Goldwater lost that year, but the ashes of his candidacy were fertile soil for Ronald Reagan, who brought conservatives to power in 1980. Since Reagan’s presidency, conservatives say, the movement has endured setbacks and diversions. But the Right still shapes American democracy through intellectual institutions and media platforms that were unimaginable when the movement began. Conservatives admit that Donald Trump caused friction within the Right. But they also believe he recalibrated the Right along populist and nationalist lines and attracted new constituencies to the movement.

 

This story contains elements of truth. But it is too neat. The edges of the movement have been smoothed over. Its blemishes have been covered up or ignored.

 

The Left’s counter-narrative, however, overcorrects for the Right’s mistakes. It reduces a complex movement to nothing more than the ongoing expression of prejudices such as sexism, racism, and homophobia. This diagnosis might explain some of the men and women who have associated with conservatives. But it does not explain the whole.

 

Another problem with the conservative and liberal stories is Ronald Reagan. Reagan’s charisma and clarity were remarkable but something of an exception. His unique political talent led almost every faction of American conservatism to think that he was on its side. The truth is messier. His triumph in 1980 was contingent, unplanned, and unpredictable. It was not until he left office that he acquired mythic status.

 

And he was one among many. There is not one American Right; there are several. Yes, conservatives are firm believers in the Constitution. Yes, they oppose state intervention in the structures that lie between the individual and the government. Yes, they resist totalitarian regimes.

 

Go further, however, and fault lines appear. These fault lines are not new.

 

Libertarians such as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman valued personal freedom above all. Traditionalists such as Russell Kirk thought that freedom had to be balanced with order and justice. Majoritarians such as Willmoore Kendall believed that communities had the right and responsibility to exclude ideas and individuals subversive of public order. Cold Warriors such as James Burnham argued that the fight against communism was the preeminent issue of the 20th century. Southern Agrarians such as Richard Weaver wanted to insulate the culture of the South from federal intrusion. Political philosopher Harry Jaffa said that conservatism needed to be anchored in the Declaration of Independence’s proposition that all men are created equal. Fusionists such as Frank Meyer thought that both libertarians and traditionalists could agree that true virtue is uncoerced. Radical traditionalists such as L. Brent Bozell thought that virtue was more important than freedom. Neoconservatives such as Irving Kristol believed in retaining many programs of the New Deal and even some of the Great Society. Religious neoconservatives such as Michael Novak said that capitalism and Christianity were not opposed but complementary. New Right activists such as Phyllis Schlafly sought political power to block and reverse liberal social change. Originalist jurists such as Antonin Scalia gave deference to legislatures based on strict adherence to the constitutional text. Paleoconservatives such as Thomas Fleming blamed neoconservatives for polluting the Right with immigration, free trade, and intervention overseas.

 

To understand the American Right in the third decade of the 21st century, you have to go back not to 1955 but to the third decade of the 20th century — when the modern Right seemed well entrenched and Presidents Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge identified rapid economic growth with fidelity to limited constitutional government, patriotism, and piety. You must see how this conservative status quo was delegitimized twice over. First the Great Depression robbed the Right of its claim to prosperity. Then World War II discredited the Right’s noninterventionist foreign policy.

 

Fierce opposition to communism made post-war American conservatism distinct. Anti-communism became the touchstone for the religious and economic conservatives, foreign-policy realists, and ex-communists of the Cold War Right. To really know conservatism, you have to see how the bipartisan anti-communist foreign policy of containment broke down in the jungles of Vietnam. Anti-communist liberals and the “hard hat” working-class voters of the “silent majority” found themselves driven away from their party and into the GOP.

 

You have to understand that from 1947 to 1989, national security was the paramount concern of national life. The Cold War loomed over America in ways difficult to relate to someone born after 1991. The slaughter of World War II was within living memory. Nuclear war could end civilization, and political freedom stood on a precipice. The world was less free and less rich than it is today. For most of the men and women who made the conservative movement, there was no greater threat than a communist world. That danger required compromises. And it could lead to extremes.

 

The Cold War revived the anti-communist American Right. It provided the impetus for conservatism’s growing network of institutions. The conservative establishment began as a response to New Deal liberalism at home and to Soviet totalitarianism abroad. It grew as crime, inflation, and national humiliation discredited the Democratic Party in the eyes of voters. It culminated in a Republican governing class under the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush.

 

What happened next came as a shock. The Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991. The Cold War ended. Deprived of anti-communism as a common denominator, the establishment found itself looking for a new purpose. But it could not settle on a unifying mission. And as this establishment wondered what to do with itself, it came under attack from a number of dissidents who objected to its internationalist economic and foreign policies.

 

If the Vietnam War splintered the Democratic coalition, then the 2003 Iraq War fractured the Republican one. Conservatism was never the same. The public’s rejection of the war, the economic calamity of 2008, and the Republican Party’s continued support for an amnesty of illegal immigrants delegitimized the establishment in the eyes of the populist independents, conservative Democrats, and disaffected voters who had been crucial to GOP victories in years past.

 

The Tea Party became their vehicle to remove pro-war, pro-immigration, pro-trade Republicans from office. Then Donald Trump became their battering ram. The same talk radio, cable news, and digital and social media that conservatives had used to question liberals turned inward. Now they undermined the authority of the conservative establishment.

 

In its protectionism, immigration restrictionism, religiosity, and antipathy to foreign entanglements, Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again movement resembled the conservatism of the 1920s — but with a significant difference. In the 1920s, the Right was in charge. It was self-confident and prosperous. It saw itself as defending core American institutions.

 

One century later, in the early 2020s, the Right had been driven from power at the federal level. It no longer viewed core American institutions as worth defending. It was apocalyptic in attitude and expression. It resembled more closely the populist Democrats of William Jennings Bryan — who rallied under one banner all those who felt excluded from or dispossessed by the economic, social, and cultural powers of his time — than the business-friendly Republicans of Warren Harding.

 

There had been warnings that this might happen. Every so often the Right has embraced a demagogic leader who pulls it toward the political fringe. From Tom Watson to Henry Ford, Father Coughlin to Charles Lindbergh, Joseph McCarthy to George Wallace, Ron Paul to Donald Trump, these tribunes of discontent have succumbed to conspiracy theories, racism, and antisemitism. They have flirted with violence. They have played footsie with autocracy.

 

Such a temptation toward extremism is present on both sides of the political spectrum. Indeed, one reason conservatives assumed power in the last quarter of the 20th century was that the electorate judged the radical Left to have abandoned seriousness and sobriety for its own fanaticisms. Think of the segregation-supporting Southern Democrats (including Wallace himself), the rage-filled bombings of the anti-war, revolutionary Weathermen, the mayhem associated with many of the Black Panthers, the beyond-the-mainstream politics of George McGovern, and the antisemitic bigotry of Louis Farrakhan. What matters, though, is the willingness of intellectuals and politicians to confront and suppress the extremes. One way to think about the hundred-year war for the Right is to conceive of it as a battle between the forces of extremism and the conservatives who understood that mainstream acceptance of their ideas was the prerequisite for electoral success and lasting reform.

 

The Right today is confused, uncertain, anxious, and inward-looking. But the story does not end here. When you study conservatism’s past, you become convinced that it has a future.

 

Note: This essay is adapted from the author’s just-published book The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism.