Lost Continetti
The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism
By Matthew Continetti
Basic Books, 2022
503 pp.
Why should readers of The Austrian be interested in this book? At first glance, it appears that we shouldn’t be. Though the history of American conservatism is of great importance, and the author has amassed a great deal of information about it, he lacks an illuminating analytic framework; the “history” he recounts is little more than one item after another, and when he touches on intellectual matters, he is often wrong. The answer to our question is this: Continetti has a distinctive vision of what American conservatism should be that is derived, for the most part, from neoconservatives. He views the political and economic ideas of Murray Rothbard and Ron Paul as inimical to the ideas he favors, and correctly so; to him, we are the enemy, albeit not the only one. We ought, then, to have a look at his book, if only to see what he says about us.
Continetti makes crystal clear where he stands. As a young man of twenty-two, he was employed at the Weekly Standard, located in an office building he regards as “an intellectual hub—the frontal cortex of the American Right.” Also to be found at this address was “the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). It was a small think tank cofounded by the magazine’s editor that since its inception in 1997 had advocated for a defense buildup, containment of China, and regime change in Iraq.” The editor mentioned is Continetti’s father-in-law, Bill Kristol, and throughout the book, Continetti proves a faithful follower of that paragon of neoconservatism. In sum, American hegemony, perpetual war, and a modified New Deal that recognizes the free market but calls for the state to promote virtue and welfare: that is the path to be followed.
Continetti does not confine his support for war to the recent past and the present; it is a motif present through the whole course of the book. He sees, and this is a real if hardly original insight, that elitism—the view that an educated and well-off upper class needs to keep the masses firmly in line— and populism—the view that wisdom resides in the American people—have been clashing strains within American conservatism. In Continetti’s opinion, the excesses of populism are particularly to be feared, especially when people have the audacity to oppose war. He says, “Antiwar populists and Progressives joined forces. They assailed the intervention [of Woodrow Wilson in World War I]. They said that shadowy business and political interests were behind it. They lamented the changing demographic makeup of the nation caused by immigration from eastern and southern Europe. Their writings were often anti- Semitic.” Away with those bigots!
Continetti is less than surefooted when he writes about the ideas of the Progressives. He says that Wilson “shared the view of historian Charles Beard, who had written in 1913 in The Economic Interpretation of the Constitution [sic] that the nation’s founding document was the product of a group of selfish men primarily interested in shielding themselves from revolt.” This is not Beard’s thesis: Beard argues, rather, that the framers of the Constit
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