Briefly Reviewed: July-August 2023

The Right: The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism

By Matthew Continetti

Publisher: Basic Books

Pages: 496

Price: $32

Review Author: Alex Pinelli

The post-Trump political atmosphere has encouraged reconsideration of the history of American conservatism. Historians, journalists, political scientists, and a slew of academics have propagated a clichéd narrative of the evils on the Right that culminated in Donald Trump’s presidency. Indeed, many on the Left believe Trump to be the true embodiment of all the darkest forces of conservative dogma — privilege, greed, racism, and paranoia — and the worst aspects of human nature. All this feeds the notion that conservatism is, and always has been, a virus to be eradicated. But not all recent scholarship has veered off the cliff of rationality, and some scholars still bring prudence and historical perspective to their research. To appreciate the depth and nuance of such writing, a quick look at the opposite is in order.

 David Corn’s American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy (2022) is one example. His main argument, ineffectually pieced together, is that a “line runs from the 1964 [Republican] conventions to Trump’s riot” on January 6, 2021. Corn opines that modern American conservatism is built on “extremism and paranoia,” and its adherents are “hawkers of political hate and fear.”

Corn is not alone in his viewpoint. Washington Post writer Dana Milbank, in The Deconstructionists: The Twenty-Five Year Crackup of the Republican Party (2022), more forgivingly sees conservatism as being truly repugnant only since the 1990s, when conservatives “destroyed truth, destroyed decency,…patriotism,…national unity,…racial progress,…[and] the world’s oldest democracy” — a pretty impressive track record for only 25 years. What made these malevolent conservatives do such things? Corn argues that it was the echo chamber created by social media, Fox News, and talk radio, combined with a renewed focus on cultural issues and inherent racism.

Corn and Milbank are only the latest to take hold of past presumptions about conservatism and run wild with them. Richard Hofstadter was the precursor with The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964), though he was much wittier and more articulate than his followers. Countless scholars have walked in Hofstadter’s footsteps, arguing that conservatism is, at its core, nothing more than a reactionary force to be overcome in order to complete the liberal consensus. Others, such as historian Dan T. Carter, have focused solely on racism as conservatism’s motivating force in the 20th century. Some serious academics have added context and nuance to the field, including Lisa McGirr, Gregory L. Schneider, Donald T. Critchlow, and Kim Philips-Fein, but the mainstream has ignored their work while favoring Milbank- and Corn-style sensationalism.

Good scholarship, smooth prose, and a polished and fast-moving historical narrative can still be found if one is willing to look. Matthew Continetti’s The Right: The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism adeptly adds to George H. Nash’s foundational The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945 (1976; new edition, 2006). By creating a prologue to Nash’s work, going as far back as the 1920s and working his way to the present, Continetti has filled an historiographical gap with a one-volume survey of the subject. He treats the New Deal as an inflection point and winds his way through the post-war era of conservative growth.

Continetti contends that neither the 1960s nor the 1980s were as important to conservatism as the 1970s, when various conservative factions and grassroots organizations coalesced into a cohesive movement. Like other recent scholars, Continetti sees Ronald Reagan as a unique figure, not the epitome of conservatism but a figurehead around whom conservatives could rally. Continetti’s most insightful and timely contribution is his take on Trump. He rightly sees Trump’s presidency not as a continuation or culmination but a harkening back to the populism of William Jennings Bryan, the demagogy of Huey P. Long and Father Coughlin, and the “disengaged nationalism” of Charles Lindbergh and Robert Taft during the 1920s and 1930s. Thus, Trump’s presidential victory was one that “disestablished the postwar conservatism” of William F. Buckley (probably the central figure of Continetti’s work), Barry Goldwater, Reagan, Irving and William Kristol, and George W. Bush.

Continetti simply tells the tale of the Right over a century. It is neither a glorification nor a polemic. His combination of intellectual, political, and social history shows the twists, turns, infighting, and astonishing growth of one of the most important social and intellectual movements of the 20th century. The work may be even more apropos amid the Republicans’ seeming reshuffle of influence. If conservatism detaches itself in a meaningful way from Trumpism, then Continetti’s insights might become all the more important.

Aristotelian Meditations

By Howard Kainz

Publisher: Independently published

Pages: 85

Price: $12.50

Review Author: Mary Brittnacher

Do you find Aristotle in the original challenging? Howard Kainz, emeritus professor of philosophy at Marquette University, can assist you. An alternative title for his new book could be Ideas from Aristotle Purposefully Garnered and Explained in Contemporary English. The title he chose is Aristotelian Meditations. What it loses in specificity it gains in succinctness.

Aristotelian Meditations is slight in size but not in content. Kainz has selected passages from Aristotle’s volumes — after a lifetime of teaching, reading, and thinking about Aristotle’s works and philosophy in general — that he finds particularly pertinent to today’s world. Kainz’s language and arguments are easy to follow, and the reader who wishes to do so can go back to Aristotle’s original writings, as the source material is well referenced. This reviewer cannot say how the chosen topics pertain to Aristotle’s work as a whole, but in the book’s preface Kainz indicates that his aim is to address some of the paramount problems of our time and apply basic philosophical reasoning to them. What surprises the reader is that concerns from over 2,300 years ago are still relevant.

One of these relevant issues is the ascendance of materialism. Aristotle declares that the mind thinks in concrete terms that come from sensory experience. But it is apparent that the mind can use abstract concepts as well. How does that happen? Aristotle says abstract thinking emanates from the potential, or matter-based, intellect. Kainz explains it this way: “The intellect has two aspects: on the one hand, it is something like a receptacle that potentially could receive all ideas; on the other hand, it is also the ability of actively distinguishing all intelligible aspects in the world.” What’s more, “Since the active intellect is outside the material world it is not subject to material disintegration at death.” So, contra materialists, part of the intellect survives the death of the body. Consideration of our immaterial qualities leads to consideration of the human soul and its intimate relation to our specific body. Esoteric though these ideas seem, the ramifications shoot through the bad ideas that are rampant in our culture.

The forms of government and their perversions, according to Aristotle, are: “of royalty, tyranny; of aristocracy, oligarchy; of constitutional government, democracy. For tyranny is a kind of monarchy which has in view the interest of the monarch only; oligarchy has in view the interest of the wealthy; democracy, of the needy; none of them the common good of all.” Regarding government, Aristotle frequently promotes the “middle ground.” He writes that the middle class “is the class of citizens which is most secure in a state, for they do not, like the poor, covet their neighbor’s goods; nor do others covet theirs…and as they neither plot against others nor are themselves plotted against, they pass through life safely.”

Other fascinating subjects to which Kainz applies Aristotle’s logical arguments include: what the thoughts of God are, the existence of pure spirits without bodies, what happiness is, intuitive reasoning as a gift, moral responsibility in the case of intoxication, and honest self-love versus popular “self-esteem.”

As might surprise the ever-growing number of unbelievers, Aristotle presents reasons for accepting the reality of solely spiritual beings. He apotheosizes the rational-thinking qualities of man and posits “another order like man or superior to him.” He considers this species, composed of beings of pure thought, to be the highest order of creatures, with God as the head. St. Thomas Aquinas, who used the writings of Aristotle as a basis for his philosophy, calls these beings angels and elaborates on what kinds of thought would occur when there is no sensory input, and from where these pure thoughts would come. The idea of angels, of course, goes back to the Old Testament and continues in the New Testament and throughout history, and Aquinas builds on Christian teaching on the hierarchies of angels.

To take one more example of shedding ancient wisdom on current thought, Kainz looks at the “self-esteem” movement. Aristotle maintains that self-love is based on actual virtue, not on the false bolstering-up of a person who does not have the qualities needed for true self-love. The good man knows he has acted with honor, and he has positive feelings about himself going forward.

On all such topics, Kainz asks if Aristotle is relevant to current societal problems, and his response is a resounding “yes.”

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