Revolution Betrayed
A review of The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism by Matthew Continetti, Basic Books, 496 pages (April 2022)
“So inevitable and yet so completely unforeseen” was Alexis de Tocqueville’s verdict on the French Revolution. Much the same can be said of Donald Trump’s hostile takeover of the Republican Party and the conservative establishment, which by 2016 had lost the strength and the will needed to contain a prince acting like a beast (to borrow Machiavelli’s phrase) in their midst.
Since the end of the Cold War, the trajectory of the American Right has been unrelievedly grim: a political movement stuck in ideological nostalgia whose traditional constituency is dwindling with each passing election. Instead of responding to novel circumstances in a rapidly changing country with a forward-looking agenda, the Right was shackled to “the carcass of dead policies,” as a great British conservative, Lord Salisbury, might have put it. With the enthusiastic backing of an insular conservative institutional superstructure, the Republican Party presented an obsolete program in a bombastic tone that repelled the very voters it desperately needed to win.
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