VOX -- How conservatism conquered America -- and corrupted itself
American conservatism was an attempt to tame the untamable: to domesticate this reactionary impulse and channel it into electoral politics in service of an elite-driven agenda. Its leaders managed to exercise some control over radicals in the specific context of Cold War America — but the effort was fated to fail eventually.
Matthew Rose’s recent book A World after Liberalism tells the story of a handful of “radical right” thinkers who built intellectual foundations for anti-egalitarian politics. The writings of the people he highlights — German cultural essentialist Oswald Spengler, Italian quasi-fascist Julius Evola, American Nazi sympathizer Francis Parker Yockey, French philosopher Alain de Benoist, and the proto-Trumpian pundit Sam Francis — range from mystical treatises about cultural symbology to conspiracy theorizing to more conventional political journalism.
Continetti’s new book The Right, a history of (as the subtitle puts it) “the hundred-year war for American conservatism,” tells the story of a mainstream conservative movement that tried to include the far right in its political coalition while maintaining control — a balancing act that started failing the second Trump began running.
Unlike Continetti, Tim Miller has made a decisive break with Trump and the Republican Party. A longtime Republican campaign operative who worked for John McCain in 2008, the Republican National Committee in 2012, and Jeb Bush in 2016, he was one of the authors of the now-infamous “Republican autopsy” after the 2012 election, which argued that the party should embrace a more socially moderate agenda (especially on immigration) to win over younger voters and people of color.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2022/7/6/23144343/end-of-conservatism-roe