The Right

A magisterial intellectual history of the last century of American conservatism

When most people think of the history of modern conservatism, they think of Ronald Reagan. Yet this narrow view leaves many to question: How did Donald Trump win the presidency? And what is the future of the Republican Party?

In The Right, Matthew Continetti gives a sweeping account of movement conservatism’s evolution, from the Progressive Era through the present. He tells the story of how conservatism began as networks of intellectuals, developing and institutionalizing a vision that grew over time, until they began to buckle under new pressures, resembling national populist movements. Drawing out the tensions between the desire for mainstream acceptance and the pull of extremism, Continetti argues that the more one studies conservatism’s past, the more one becomes convinced of its future.

Deeply researched and brilliantly told, The Right is essential reading for anyone looking to understand American conservatism.

• “Matthew Continetti applies what scholars of all persuasions should do with American conservatism, treating it as a complex, contradictory movement, often at war between its populists and its intellectual elite wings… Continetti is skilled in going places and making conclusions other rightists don’t.”
   
  The Federalist
• “[A] sturdy account of the many divisions within modern conservatism… Rational, well thought out, and impeccably argued—of interest to all students of politics.”
  Kirkus
• "A worthy analysis.”
  Publishers Weekly
• “Matthew Continetti has earned his luminous reputation as the foremost contemporary chronicler of American conservatism’s path to today’s problematic condition. He traces conservatism’s rich intellectual pedigree, from the founders’ classical liberalism through twentieth-century conservatives’ responses to the challenges of progressivism. The result is a thinking person’s map for the road ahead.”
  George F. Will, author of The Conservative Sensibility
• “Matthew Continetti has written an instant classic, sure to become the essential one-volume history of modern American conservatism. Balanced and subtle, it offers an engaging combination of intellectual and political history that makes sense of the immensely complicated story of the Right.”
  Yuval Levin, author of A Time to Build
• “Deft and authoritative, Matthew Continetti illuminates conservatism’s present through its long and often tumultuous past. The Right isn’t just an engaging history and incisive analysis of the intra-conservative debate, but an essential contribution to it.”
  Rich Lowry, editor in chief of National Review