The Right presents a comprehensive study of 100 years of the intellectual and political history of the American conservative movement. Extensively researched and brilliantly told, it tells the story through the experience of its participants describing how they have interacted with, influenced, and been influenced by institutions including political scientists, politicians, economists (Chicago and Austria), philosophers and religions. The book is less about a litmus test for who is a true conservative or what conservatism “really” is than an analysis and description of how the varieties of conservatism differed from one another, why disagreements arose and their effect on politics.
The author, Matthew Continetti, is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and an intellectual historian of the right. He has extensively researched the history of conservatism, and his presentation is without polemics. George Will, prominent conservative, touts Continetti as “the foremost contemporary chronicler of American Conservatism’s path to today’s problematic condition.”
The book starts with a description of the Harding and Coolidge administrations and in 14 chapters plus a conclusion continues to the events of January 6. Although he favors the conservative position, he does not hesitate to reject the positions taken by some conservative politicians in their support of or failure to object to George Wallace, Joseph McCarthy, Robert Welch and the John Birch Society, and antisemitism. The book is very readable and will be certain to create a lively and stimulating discussion in this SDG.
