Matthew Continetti’s new book, 'The Right,' delivers bracing honesty about the conservative movement’s origins and true nature. jonathanchait writes
Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump at an event in 1990. Photo: Bei/Shutterstock The conservative intelligentsia greeted the rise of Donald Trump with revulsion that has followed a well-worn script. It laments how the once-grand standards of the conservative movement have fallen into a sorry state. Where William F. Buckley had expelled kooks and bigots from the party, now his heirs were inviting them in.
Photo: Basic Books Continetti overstates just how “repressed” this memory was, but let’s put that aside for the moment and appreciate how heretical and surprising his book has turned out to be. Continetti is no moderate. He is the author of The Persecution of Sarah Palin, and once inaugurated his slashing partisan organ with a manifesto calling for “Combat Journalism.” But rather than produce another gold-embossed portrait of a legend he has burnished in the past, Continetti instead debunks it.
Continetti is trying to write a history of how Donald Trump happened, but he does draw together the strands in American conservatism that make Trump’s rise explicable, if not inevitable. He synthesizes the plutocratic, populist, and racist strands on the right to show elements of a movement that is unable to come to terms with the political compromises inherent in a multiracial democratic capitalist state.
The neoconservatives, argues Continetti, seized leadership of the party and brought it to its heights, only for their reign to come crashing down with the failure of the Iraq war. This opened the door for the unreconstructed elements of the right, lurking all along in the shadows, to regain the upper hand.
He likewise ignores Reagan’s oft-used denunciations of a “welfare queen” or “strapping young buck” using food stamps, as well as the habitual racism of another of his protagonists, Rush Limbaugh, whom he lauds.
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