president or members of Congress. World War II
only increased the size and power of the federal
government. Nor has this turned out to be reversible.
Perhaps the greatest hero of the right, in this telling, is William F. Buckley Jr., who enters the scene as a young Yale graduate in 1950, having written God and Man at Yale, a cri- tique of the culture of elite academia. Buckley quickly became a leading member of the conservative intellec- tual elite.
His magazine, National Review, was the fi rst political magazine to self-consciously set about creating a national movement, by bringing in members of diff erent factions. And by pushing out the racists and anti- Semites on the right.
The Cold War gave American con- servatism its great organizing princi- ple. Being anti-communist was criti- cal for reasons all too real, but also it was useful politically. Except when it went too far, as with Joe McCarthy. The Eisenhower years, though anti- communist, were more mainstream Republican than conservative.
When Richard Nixon, who was not
endorsed by National Review, lost in 1960, the publication saw its task as being “the Remnant . . . keeping alive the sacred wisdom of the past.” Luckily, the staunchly conserva-
tive, constitutional defender Barry Goldwater was on deck. This was the fi rst appearance of what Buckley called “the Apparatus” — the vitu- perative liberal mass media. And even though Goldwater lost overwhelmingly to Lyndon Baines Johnson, he ran a deeply conserva- tive campaign, which laid the ground- work for Ronald Reagan. A more conservative Nixon won
in 1968, running against the rampant counterculture, increasing crime, and the start of family decay. “Street-corner conservatives” emer-
A more conservative Richard Nixon won in 1968, running against the rampant counterculture, increasing crime, and the start of family decay.
ged to support him. Aide Patrick Buchanan was the emissary to the con- servative movement. Nixon’s silent majority included increasing numbers of white ethnics, Catholics especially, who left the Democratic Party. Then, having abandoned much of
the conservative agenda, including enacting wage and price controls, affi rmative action, the Environmen- tal Protection Agency, and outreach to China, Nixon won by a far greater majority in 1972, before being forced from offi ce by Watergate, the fi rst of the deep state coups. In the mid ’70s the neoconservative movement fl owered. Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and other ex-com- munists who had moved rightward started infl uential magazines and pub- lished books that made a diff erence on domestic policy and the continuing fi ght against the Soviet Union. The neocons did not oppose state
action, per se. They cared about incen- tives and unintended side eff ects of government programs. After his loss in the 1976 Repub-
lican primary, Reagan assembled a team and a platform to combat Jimmy Carter’s stagfl ation and rising Soviet aggression. His base was the three-legged stool
of religious conservatives, foreign policy conservatives, and economic conservatives. In offi ce, supply-side economics
grew the economy, to the extent that both Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton continued to benefi t from the policy. Reagan was the conservative
everyone had been waiting for. He had a natural rapport with ordinary Americans and made the country proud again.
But in the second term, his admin-
istration began to fall apart. Con- tinetti is clear about how sadly it ended, despite the policy and political accomplishments. Was Reaganism the high point
and, perhaps, the end of true move- ment conservatism? Was Bush a conservative? In hind-
sight, not really. The Soviet Union offi cially fell on his watch, which cost the right its unifying principle, with- out which conservativism is much harder to pin down. China should be moving into that space about now. Ditto for George W. Bush, who
planned a heavily “compassionate conservatism” agenda — keep the welfare state but change incentives — until his administration was reshaped by the 9/11 attacks. The failure of the Iraq War crushed his administration. And then came Trump. Trump is
the great example of the grassroots pushing out the elites to install their choice as president, largely because he addressed the problems resulting from shipping millions of blue-collar jobs overseas and illegal immigration. In the end, Continetti is not san-
guine about the current place or path forward for conservatism. The intel- lectuals have fractured, with each faction seeking to emplace a new defi nition. Populism is ascendant. Conserva-
tism is necessary, he says, if only as a brake on the excesses of liberalism. “The proper question for conserva-
tives: What do you seek to conserve?” George Will wrote in 2019. “The proper answer is concise but deceptively simple: We seek to con- serve the American founding.”
Lisa Schiffren is a political and cultural commentator and former speechwriter for Vice President Dan Quayle.
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