Up From Conservatism: Revitalizing the Right after a Generation of Decay
Edited by Arthur Milikh.
Encounter Books, 2023.
Hardcover, 240 pages, $32.99.
Reviewed by Shaun Rieley.
In recent years, it has become common on the Right to ask rhetorically, “what has conservatism conserved?” Surveying the social, cultural, institutional, and political landscape after nearly 70 years of the post-war conservative movement, many have come to question the efficacy of conservatism both as an idea and a movement. This discontent birthed a movement that has been loosely labeled the “New Right” and—fueled in part by the political success of Donald Trump—has increasingly gained traction.
As might be expected, there have been a number of publications seeking to articulate and expand on the disparate and inchoate ideas associated with the New Right. Up From Conservatism: Revitalizing the Right after a Generation of Decay, edited by Arthur Milikh, seeks to combine these disparate strands into a unified and coherent critique of the reigning conservative paradigm. Herein, Milihk and the other contributors seek to chart a new course for what has hitherto been called “conservatism” in American politics.
Milikh is well-qualified for the task. Currently serving as the executive director of the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life in Washington, DC—an institution that has established itself as a leading proponent of New Right ideas—while having worked for many years for the Heritage Foundation, long considered the center of orthodox Reaganite conservatism, he has ample experience in both the “old” and “new” Right.
Milikh begins his introductory essay by straightforwardly asserting that the goal of the book “is to correct the trajectory of the Right after several generations of political losses, moral delusions, and intellectual errors.” Many of these failures, he contends, result from “The Right’s own ideas, its failure to grasp the nature of the Left, and to arrest the latter’s growth.” But there are more than intellectual errors to blame. Additional contributing factors include “fear of the Left, combined with underlying belief in the Left’s moral superiority.” All of this, he claims, is complicated by the additional problem of establishment conservative elites “who really wanted, above all, to belong to the ruling class.”
Even more specifically, Milikh points to conservatives’ abandonment of the culture to the Left, replaced by a myopic focus on economics and attendant “narrow understanding of freedom which became about private indulgence and ‘choice.’” This narrowed focus, Milikh contends, directly contributed to the Right’s failure to defend and advance civilization—for “one cannot defend civilization, or do what is necessary to preserve it, when consumption and private frivolity are the goals.” The New Right, then, aims to correct these deficiencies through a renewed set of goals, strategies, and, just as important, a changed attitude characterized by “a growing boldness that restores something nearer to real politics: overt contention concerning core questions of the common good.”
One marked change is the willingness to use the term “common good.” This term has been the source of much debate and, in extreme cases, dismissed outright as meaningless or even dangerous by proponents of libertarian (and hence by mainstream “conservative”) socio-economic views.
Nevertheless, a conservatism that gives due attention to what is common—alongside what is private—has long been needful. In fact, one of the reasons the Right has lost to the Left on so many fronts is that its focus on the private, the economic, and the individual—over against the public, the political, and the common—left it unable to address itself to basic human needs, including the need for justice and community. Given its inability to offer a compelling vision of these indispensable human needs, it is little wonder why the establishment Right has consistently lost out to a Left that was unafraid to pronounce on them.
Milikh’s essay concludes with some thoughts on why the Right must no longer consider itself strictly “conservative.” The book’s title takes its reference point from William F. Buckley’s 1959 Up from Liberalism (itself a reference to Booker T. Washington’s memoir Up from Slavery). Buckley sought to declare the conservative movement’s intent to move beyond the post-war ideological Liberalism that, by the 1950s, was already beginning to metastasize into a decadent and contradictory mass of social instincts and policies. But in the current moment, Milikh argues that the needful thing is not a conservative right but a “counterrevolutionary and restorative” one. This requires developing strategies for “creating and retaking space . . . breaking and replacing captured institutions, and liberating them from the moral horizons of the Left.” Hence, preserving the status quo is no longer sufficient. In order to revitalize itself, restore the American regime, and defend civilization, the Right must move beyond (or “up from”) conservatism.
The essays in the book present New Right perspectives on topics ranging from education to economics, foreign policy to feminism, immigration to institutional capture, and beyond. While many authors have come to prominence recently as proponents of New Right ideas, some—such as Roger Kimball, John Fonte, and Robert Delahunty—have long tenure as prominent voices on the Right, “old” and “new” alike. As might be expected, given the kind of book that it is, the essays are distinctively practical in orientation, typically detailing the problems with the status quo in the various areas under consideration before concluding with concrete policy proposals aimed at remedying the ills.
Notably, topics are included that, not long ago, might have been considered outside of the scope of a book such as this—or topics that might have been deemed too incendiary to address.
In the former category, Roger Kimball’s essay “What the Right gets Wrong About Art” takes on the art establishment and its promotion of banality or even ugliness in the name of artistic expression. While the Right has long stoked outrage at offensive “art” being promoted by highbrow art galleries, the idea that art could—and should—be something other than the domain of the culturally transgressive is relatively new on the Right (despite Roger Kimball’s long fight toward that end, especially through The New Criterion).
In the latter category, my colleague David Azerrad’s essay “Race and the Conservative Conscience” argues forcefully that conservatives should cease allowing the Left to set the terms of the debate concerning race but instead should “develop a clean conscience on race” by “rid[ding] themselves of what guilt they still feel over America’s past mistreatment of blacks” and “root out from their souls the pathological pity for blacks, masquerading as compassion, that is the norm in contemporary America.” These are hard words to hear, but it is impossible to deny that the Left has for decades used these feelings as a weapon by which to eliminate conservative voices from polite company, or at least to keep them under their thumb. A more confident Right will need to become more comfortable dismissing spurious smears along these lines.
Notably absent from this book is an essay addressing abortion—long the most prominent focus of conservative social and political activism. This omission is striking, not least because, as the outcome of a combination of decades of activism and the strategic placement of judges through establishment conservative organizations like the Federalist Society, the 2022 Supreme Court decision Dobbs v. Jackson represents perhaps the most visible conservative victory in recent memory. The omission could, perhaps, be read in two ways. In one sense, it could reflect a tangible move away from abortion as a rallying point in Right-leaning activism (also present in the watered-down language of the 2024 Republican platform). On the other hand, it could reflect the need—and newfound ability—to focus on other things in light of that victory.
In any case, as Donald Trump begins a second term in office—accompanied this time by New Right-friendly J.D. Vance—it seems clear that the New Right is here to stay. Anyone interested in learning more about the future of the American Right—or seeking fresh ideas for policy on a range of issues facing the country—can do no better than to read the perspectives offered in Up From Conservatism.
Shaun Rieley is Director of Educational Programs and Teaching Fellow at Hillsdale College’s Washington, DC campus. He holds a Ph.D. in political theory from the Catholic University of America and an M.A. in liberal arts from St. John’s College.
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