Continetti has a more favorable opinion these days of the man he once called “a misogynist and bigot, an ignoramus and doofus.” With Trump’s presidency safely in the rearview mirror, for now, Continetti describes the doofus of 2016 as “a disruptive but consequential populist leader,” who was only forced into “the ranks of American villains” by his crusade to overturn the 2020 election. (He notes, too, that most of Trump’s signature achievements could have been the handiwork of a President Rubio: tax cuts, deregulation, and a litany of judges stamped with the Federalist Society’s seal of approval.) But he cannot resist casting a mournful look at the institution that Trump did the most to disrupt. Even if the White House borrowed much of its agenda from GOP orthodoxy, Trump’s rise “disestablished the postwar conservatism of Buckley and Goldwater, of Irving Kristol and Ronald Reagan, of William Kristol and George W. Bush”—and, he could have added, of Matthew Continetti and Paul Ryan.
Except the story of the American Right isn’t so simple. Because, as Continetti’s own research shows, even when gatekeepers tried to draw a bright line between a respectable establishment and unhinged populists, time and again the divide broke down in practice. Historians will already be familiar with most of Continetti’s examples of collaboration between elite conservatives and the grassroots Right, but seeing them parade one after another through the decades makes its own kind of argument. Conservatives and the Right weren’t fighting a war. They were partners in a joint venture kept alive by strategic silences, willful blindness, and mutual self-interest. Together, they cleared a path that led directly to Donald Trump. And Continetti is a good enough historian to mark the key points in this itinerary, even if he isn’t willing to reckon with the implications of his own findings.
Consider, for instance, the purging of the Birchers. Continetti is clearly on Buckley’s side, but even his sympathetic account leaves the mythology in tatters. Buckley’s turn against JBS founder Robert Welch came after years of dancing around the issue. When he was finally dragged into the fight, Buckley took pains to exclude Welch’s followers from his critique. This was less of a purge than an attempt to maintain plausible deniability. As Continetti explains, Buckley was responding to the logic of his situation. “Conservatism could attain neither elite validation nor nationwide success if it was associated with Birchism,” he writes. “But it also could not sustain itself if Birchism was excised—it would have no constituency.”