Conservatism Traced to its Source

[Chris]

Conservatism Traced to its Source is a review of Matthew Continetti's The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism and compares it to George Nash’s The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945.

Where Nash starts with reaction against FDR's liberalism with Buckley, Meyer, and Kirk, Continetti starts with Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge who rejected Progressivism.

...Continetti makes the essential point that the Republican Party and the conservative movement are two different institutions. The GOP is a political organization dedicated to winning elections and securing political power. In any conflict between principle and politics, the GOP will invariably choose politics. The conservative movement is an intellectual/political movement committed to ideas like limited government and traditional American values. In any conflict between principle and politics, the conservative movement will or at least should choose principle. The movement cannot be judged a success or a failure based on the returns of the last elections. It is successful when it creates an environment in which its ideas prevail, as during the Reagan presidency.

The framework of The Right, the author says, “is the endless competition and occasional collaboration between populism and elitism.” Another word for collaboration is fusionism, the meeting of the traditionalists and libertarians who are the main characters of his history. A superb writer, Continetti offers sharp sketches of the figures whose stories show why conservatism came to dominate American politics: individuals like the libertarian Milton Friedman, who valued personal freedom above all; traditionalists like Russell Kirk, who thought freedom had to be balanced with order; Cold Warriors like James Burnham, who argued that the fight against communism was the preeminent issue of the twentieth century; fusionists like Frank Meyer, who thought that libertarians and traditionalists could agree that freedom is the indispensable condition for the pursuit of virtue, which is the ultimate end of man as man; New Right activists like Phyllis Schlafly, who sought political power to reverse liberal social change; and originalist judges like Antonin Scalia, who deferred to the constitutional text.

...The conservative movement, Continetti says, must forge “a new consensus” based on “the American idea of individual liberty exercised within a constitutional order.” The Republican Party and the conservative movement must be untangled; they are quite different institutions. The movement must shift from a focus on personalities to the principles that have guided the movement for half a century: anti-statism, constitutionalism, patriotism, anti-socialism. There must be a “rediscovery of America” that centers on the Constitution with its balance of individual rights and popular sovereignty guaranteed through the separation of powers and federalism.

At the core of these suggestions is “the American idea of liberty and the familial, communal, religious and political institutions” that make American conservatism distinctively American. An American conservatism based on ordered liberty inspired master fusionists like Ronald Reagan and William F. Buckley Jr. and made the right an often dominant actor in American politics. Conservatives are indebted many times over to Matthew Continetti for capturing the heart, mind, and soul of the right in this masterly work.