The Right Stuff

...And while The Conservative Ascendancy does an adequate job of cataloging some of the tick-tock of his presidency, it fails to capture the transformation of the conservative movement during those remarkable eight years...

...He accurately describes the times of Richard Nixon, and his “pathological concern with the opposition,” as a period of betrayal...

...He understood that, like liberals, conservatives were a coalition—and a dynamic and fl uid one at that...

...These liberal Democratic presidential aspirants coyly demur on tax increases...

...By the waning days of the Ford administration, the conservative movement had the elemental architecture of a political movement...

...Nelson Rockefeller, was a kind of cotillion ball for a new mix of anti-Communists, libertarians, and southerners who would eventually form the conservative base of the Republican party...

...But let’s be clear: This was not a principled defeat...

...The broad national popularity of F.A...

...While much conservative rhetoric has been devoted to dismantling government, in the political arena, it has succeeded only when it has been an advocate for transforming government...

...Reagan’s presidential primary challenge against Gerald Ford in 1976 was surely one of the most exciting contests in modern American politics, creating a convention fl oor fi ght that we may never see again...

...But betrayal of whom...

...But the truth is that, in 1964, the conservative voting bloc didn’t extend much beyond the John Birch Society and its sympathizers...

...George Gilder’s Wealth and Poverty appeared just as Reagan was taking offi ce...

...But no one can read The Conservative Mind, or any of Kirk’s subsequent writing, without getting a sense that Kirk was never comfortable with 20th-century American life...

...It emerged slowly...

...What conservatives really needed after Nixon was an infl ux of new blood, new ideas, and a system of outreach that created a national network...

...Critchlow offers a too-brief description of that primary battle, perhaps because he sees it as just another chapter in the forward march of the conservative movement...

...The 1964 election was a wipeout that illustrated how far out of touch Republican conservatives were with the American mood...

...While earlier conservatives had been determined to root out Soviet espionage (much of it very real), Reagan had a more aggressive program: to challenge Soviet military superiority and confront its advances in Afghanistan and Central America...

...It brought to the forefront of political debate the “silent majority” that Nixon had spoken about but never really understood...

...That was what political power meant, and he proved that you could still deliver conservative ideological goals even when you didn’t govern as a full-time, principled conservative...

...But the lesson of Reagan that emerges from The Conservative Ascendancy— and a lesson for the next generation of Republican leaders—is that conservatives thrived only after burying the hatchet and making peace with modernity and the pursuit of political power...

...Alexander Bickel’s penetrating attack on the Warren Court, The Morality of Consent, was published in the mid 1970s...

...That said, Donald T. Critchlow has the misfortune of publishing a book entitled The Conservative Ascendancy at a moment when conservative prospects have never looked worse and conservative activists are depressed...

...Supplyside economics, the Strategic Defense Initiative, mandatory welfare-to-work policies, school vouchers, energy cap and credit trading, private accounts for Social Security—all these ideas stretch far beyond (and even contradict) the vision of the “founders” of American conservatism...

...And instead of talking about the minimal state, Reagan had a thoroughgoing legislative program to win tax cuts, a move he knew would eventually undermine congressional spending...

...Immigration policy, trade, defense spending, foreign intervention, Social Security reform, George W. Bush—these comprise just a short list of the topics that send self-identifi ed “conservatives” into paroxysms of fury...

...Its little magazines, from The American Spectator to The New Criterion, have been best in opposition...

...Today, that unity is found almost nowhere in conservative ranks...

...While Nixon relied on advance men and PR executives for his image, Reagan came to power in the midst of a rich conservative intellectual climate...

...It would take a long time to shake that sentiment completely out of conservative thought...

...Perhaps his greatest strength as a politician was that he was never troubled by the need to juggle the various factions—libertarians, neocons, traditionalists, business— that put their trust in him...

...The paradoxical success of conservatism in America is that it has been a force for change, and it must continue to be so...

...Then came the think tanks and the arrival in Washington of something that had heretofore never existed: the conservative policy expert...

...You have to wonder: Does the latter quote capunderstood Daniel Casse is a senior director of the White House Writers Group, a public-policy communications firm...

...Critchlow’s narrative reminds us of how long it took them to get organized after Goldwater...

...The Reagan Justice Department, by contrast, was staffed with muscular law professors, building an intellectual case for strict constructionism...

...Many of the early Goldwater conservatives believed that all that was needed was a public call for minimal government and opposition to New Deal liberalism...

...But these were intellectual achievements, not political ones...

...Maybe fury, at least the slow-boiling kind, is good for the conservative soul...

...The emergence of National Review, founded almost a decade earlier, surely helped stir a broader movement...

...So did the unexpected success of Phyllis Schlafl y’s A Choice Not An Echo, the fi rst populist outcry from Middle America against the Eastern Establishment...

...Still, it is hard to imagine the conservative movement going anywhere without Ronald Reagan’s arrival on the scene...

...True, Nixon pandered to conservatives whenever it was expedient, but Nixon was also a realist when it came to partisan politics...

...First came the professionalization of direct-mail campaigns, directly targeted at religious voters...

...For the limited government crowd, he promised smaller government and fewer federal programs...

...Reagan had no such qualms about embracing these new, variant strains of conservatism...

...For the foreign policy hawks who were recoiling from Jimmy Carter’s hapless national security management, he offered a bracing attack on d?tente and arms control...

...Critchlow tells us that Reagan responded by writing to editor John Lofton, an old fi rebrand, calling the piece “one of the most dishonest and unfair bits of journalism I have ever seen...

...There are other solid histories of the conservative movement in America, notably George Nash’s The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America...

...Nearly 20 years on, Russell Kirk published The Conservative Mind, a much better book that introduced readers to some neglected parts of American history...

...The old guard of the conservative movement never fully understood how Reagan was moving beyond them...

...Yes, there was the steely rhetoric (“extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice”) along with the states’ rights strains of Barry Goldwater’s own book, The Conscience of a Conservative...

...As a political matter, this was clearly a problem...

...Conservative leaders need to add something to their principles that will create and energize a realigned conservative coalition...

...But it is precisely these ideas that permitted conservative thought to have a political life in the United States...

...Reagan, unlike any previous conservative leader, began drawing on the various strains of conservative thinking and activism that were still relatively new in the mid-1970s...

...The late William F. Buckley Jr., early in his career, coined a motto for the movement that stuck: A conservative is someone willing to “stand athwart history yelling ‘Stop!’” Almost four decades later Vice President Dan Quayle offered another pithy self-description: “I wear their scorn as a badge of honor...

...It was more than that...

...But the simplicity of such arguments can be deceiving...

...Without any of Nixon’s manipulative cynicism, Reagan seemed to have something for everyone...

...He realized that there wasn’t a large-enough conservative movement to make it a reliable political base...

...For the traditionalist and evangelical blocs, he talked of a family-oriented social agenda...

...They talk about effi ciency in government...

...But there is no escaping the fact that the ERA battle was still an essentially negative act, not the basis for a national political agenda...

...Norman Podhoretz’s nervy essay on the Soviet threat, The Present Danger, was published in the spring before the 1980 election...

...Goldwater stood fi rmly against the Civil Rights Act—an early example of conservatives’ persistent attachment to losing causes...

...Yet it is not clear that the Goldwater campaign amounted to a conservative program...

...Despite its masochistic tendencies, conservative politics have been an effervescent and transformative force in American politics for the past few decades...

...Critchlow argues, as many others have, that the 1964 Goldwater campaign, with its testy primary battle between the Arizona senator and New York’s Gov...

...yet surely they refl ect how much of the conservative fl avoring has seeped into the Democratic drinking water...

...It is now nearly two decades since Ronald Reagan left offi ce, and during that time conservatives have been in constant tumult...

...To his credit, Critchlow does not try to analyze the coming presidential season or place any bets...

...ture the political temperament of modern conservatives better than the fi rst...

...Hayek’s Road to Serfdom (which sold 600,000 copies in a single year), Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom, and even Ayn Rand’s novels, surely helped cement the conservative movement to the defense of personal liberty...

...And its most outsized, colorful fi gures—Patrick Buchanan, Charlton Heston, William Bennett, George Will, Ann Coulter—have more verve when they are fi ring from the trenches...

...Yes, conservatives know these are poll-massaged, manufactured personas...

...Their discussions of foreign policy invoke American credibility...

...In the early 1960s the conservative response to the Supreme Court’s activism was to place “Impeach Earl Warren” billboards along the highways...

...That Reagan was continually secondguessed by self-appointed guardians of the conservative movement illustrates the extent to which he moved beyond the vision of the early conservative network...

...While projecting themselves as a new force in the political debates, neoconservatives were elitists who upheld the seemingly oxymoronic theory of democratic rule by elites...

...Today, there is much manly talk of “getting back” to conservative principles...

...To him, the Reagan-Ford match was an updated version of the GoldwaterRockefeller fi ght 12 years earlier: the moderate Establishment wing fending off attacks from the New Right...

...Conservative Digest attacked Reagan in 1982 for raising taxes, part of a broader legislative agreement he had reached with a hostile Congress...

...That was, and remains, a chimera...

...His discussion of the intellectual roots of the neoconservatives is largely respectful and detailed, but he can’t hide his doubts about whether they really belong in the club: The neoconservative current was rife with personal ambition and intellectual arrogance...

...In fact, it is hard to say when conservatives evolved from a fragmented collection of economists and traditionalists to a political movement with electoral heft...

...As Critchlow points out, the unavoidable issue with the reactionary conservatives is that “they offered no programmatic alternative to modern liberalism...

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...His book is part intellectual history, part policy analysis, with each part trying to explain how the ideas that motivated the conservative movement translated, however roughly, into political power...

...Critchlow, a professor at Saint Louis University, is no stranger to the conservative universe, having already written books on federal social policy and grassroots conservatism...

...More than anything else, that posture defi ned his campaign and preordained his defeat...

...The battle over ratifi cation of the Equal Rights Amendment in the mid1970s was the cause that, more than anything else, brought a conservative coalition into mainstream political struggles...

...Critchlow, so thorough in his description of early conservative thought, takes little notice of this change...

...These were not ideas dusted off from the Goldwater campaign: They were a result of a new coalition of conservative thinking, emerging in the face of humiliation in Vietnam, a collapsing economy, and a seemingly rudderless domestic policy...

...Reagan and others recognized that if conservatism was ever to become something more than a reactionary bumper sticker, it needed a steady injection of new ideas that went beyond bedrock principles...

...Perhaps that background allows him to identify quickly a nagging problem buried in the roots of conservative thought: Many of the earliest theorists hated modern American society...

...Unlike liberalism, American conservatism has always proudly worn the cloak of the embattled and neglected underdog...

...Albert Jay Nock’s 1935 classic Our Enemy, the State captured the isolationist, antiNew Deal tendency that, at the time, was the essence of what it meant to be a conservative...

...And it didn’t end there: A year later Howard Phillips of the Conservative Caucus accused the Reagan administration of “pandering to win votes from the homosexual community...

...By 1980, he was on the brink of redefi ning the conservative movement and winning its fi rst national political victory...

...But there was not much more...

...Looking back, the Hiss verdict, California’s tax-cutting Proposition 13, the Reagan presidential victories, the failed fi ght for the Bork nomination, now seem like relatively rare, halcyon moments of conservative unity...

...In effect, they offered managerial conservatism at a time when bureaucratic liberalism was under attack...

...In a way, he treats these new intruders on the conservative scene with a degree of suspicion...

...What is remarkable about the cautious, unimaginative campaign speeches of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton is how much they bear the stamp of conservative intellectual debates that preceded them...