From Silent Cal’s restraint to MAGA

Self-proclaimed conservatives used to rally around the ideas of free markets, religious morality, and strong national defense, but in the last decade that coalition has begun to splinter. Now we see various groups within the Republican Party accusing others of not being “real” conservatives. There’s “the establishment,” “the RINOs,” “the alt-right,” and many names not fit to print. What does it even mean to be “conservative” in America? And who gets to decide?

Matthew Continetti offers a thorough history of the movement in his recent book The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism. Continetti has spent his 20-year career as a conservative insider. He worked at the now-defunct Weekly Standard, a conservative news magazine; helped found The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative political website; and currently serves as a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank.

The book’s subtitle, The Hundred-Year War, communicates how Continetti understands the movement’s history. Conservatism has never been one thing, and its very nature is messy and contested. The movement, as well as the Republican Party that often houses it, has always been prone to infighting, grudges, defections, and purges. Reading the history of the movement helps put contemporary conservatives’ bickering in perspective. Conservatism has always had a pugnacious streak to it.

The Founders conceived America upon the liberal principles of Adam Smith and John Locke, but 150 years later politicians had begun to take that liberalism in new directions. Continetti begins the story in the 1920s with President Calvin Coolidge’s resistance to progressive liberalism. Coolidge emphasized fiscal responsibility and limited government, and he tried to keep America free of international entanglements. The Great Depression caused America to abandon Coolidge’s restraint, and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal moved the country in a direction it’s never abandoned.

Trying to regain classical liberalism through opposition to the New Deal became the core of conservatism. But a concern with the Soviet threat defined conservatism in the second half of the 20th century. A staunch opposition to communism held the various threads of conservatism together.

The Soviet military threat required a strong national defense, communist ideology threatened free markets, and communism’s atheism attacked Christian morality.

The cultural chaos of the ’60s and the economic failure of the ’70s allowed conservatives to make their case. Finding a winsome spokesman in Ronald Reagan also helped. Reagan managed to get the disparate and often cranky voices of conservatism to work together.

But even Reagan, the conservative savior, didn’t roll back FDR’s New Deal or LBJ’s Great Society. He didn’t appreciably shrink the government, and even his tax cuts weren’t particularly conservative. Reagan’s supply-side economics promised tax cuts would promote growth so the government could collect even more revenue.

Successive presidential administrations frame the book’s chapters, but the heroes of this story are the writers—men like Friedrich Hayek, Russell Kirk, Milton Friedman, Irving Kristol, and Bill Buckley—who wrestled with the meaning of conservatism.

Once the communist threat ended, the strands of national defense, religious morality, and free markets started to unravel. The movement found itself entrenched in Washington and flailing, but conservative media thrived, shifting the locus of thought from intellectuals to populists who were more concerned about ratings than consistency.

The populist turn would eventually lead to a Trump presidency, and it’s hard not to read The Right without a looming sense of Donald Trump. When early conservatives argue about immigration, trade deals, and international entanglement, we hear echoes of what’s to come.

The Right shows conservatism has always experienced disagreement and controversy and no one’s ever earned the right to define the whole movement. But it also shows a love of freedom undergirds the movement, but freedom isn’t found in government. It’s enshrined in the institutions of family, community, and church—institutions that promote human flourishing.