https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/11/the-view-from-the-cocoon/
A review of The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism, by Matthew Continetti (Basic Books, 496 pages, $32)
Sometimes one begins a book with such low expectations that one is delighted to find the printed material is not quite as bad as what one expected. This is precisely my impression of Matthew Continetti’s much touted monograph, The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism. As someone who holds the honor of being Bill Kristol’s son-in-law (and who holds his father-in-law’s vacated place at Fox News), and a prominent NeverTrumper to boot, Continetti is hardly an unbiased interpreter of conservatism. A revealing passage from his book tells us clearly where on the ideological divide he stands: “The one hundred years 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.”
As the world’s most notorious critic of misused political taxonomies, I shall allow myself to quibble about Continetti’s eccentric use of the term “Right.” For him and his well-connected friends, the designation mostly serves as a synonym for “Republican.” There are two groups on his telling, both located in the GOP, that are fighting to be the true face of the Right, but only one passes muster as “non-extreme.” This is where I start to part ways. Today, I would argue, the populist Right is the true American Right because it alone is fighting the cultural Left and its allies in the deep state, media, and educational establishment. I have no idea what makes its neocon and Republican establishment adversaries any kind of Right, since on most domestic social issues and certainly on foreign policy, this group happily cooperates with leftist power elites.
In explaining how the current populist Right came along, Continetti stresses the divisive character of the Iraq War and the failure of the George W. Bush Administration to carry along all self-identified conservatives. That prolonged struggle “delegitimized the conservative movement in the eyes of populist independents, conservative Democrats, and disaffected voters crucial to past GOP victories.” This observation is entirely correct. Bush’s invasion unleashed acrimonious debate at home, and a populist Right was able to consolidate itself by standing in opposition to a course of action heavily endorsed by neoconservative journalists and policy advisers. But cultural and moral issues, often intertwined with economic ones, soon became the sustaining themes of the populist revival, which has taken cultural wars and the plight of the working class more seriously than neocons and establishment Republicans have done.
