Review: Matthew Continetti’s “The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism”

“It is to Continetti’s credit that he develops his narrative after this with fair-minded even-handedness for the most part, even if he lets his own views bleed through in the chapters concerning President Trump’s rise and fall, as well as the mix of grift and genuine intellectual ferment that he dragged in his orange wake.”

Americans have become accustomed to the fractious and combative nature of their national politics as a whole, as well as to the cracks and crevasses in each of the national parties. One has frequently heard the lament, increasing in pitch and intensity these last few years, that “our politics has never been this divided,” and that “if we don’t sort out our differences and unite, the other side (unified and whole) will win.” Each side thinks it is witnessing unique, unprecedented levels of division, with purists screeching louder and louder, while normal people—who are nevertheless politically active—go quiet.

It is tempting to see all of this as new, but the advantage of the historical perspective is that one can measure and compare his own time against the past for rhymes and similarities. Matthew Continetti does this in his truly excellent book The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism, demonstrating that, as ever, what is new is old, and while different periods have their own pathologies, there is more that binds them together than one would expect, if ignorant of what has gone before.

The Right in America has been in a state of flux for years. Former President Donald Trump was a cause of the present turmoil, but he was also a symptom of a deeper division within the Republican Party, and his candidacy and presidency revealed the cracks that had been widening for a long time. Calling the book “The Right” is a smart move on Continetti’s part, as it speaks to the cleavage between the small, ideological “conservative movement” and its various institutions and the larger, more diverse American right. President Trump initially drew his support and built his base in the Right and not in the conservative movement, the latter of which initially repudiated him.