What It Means to Be “Right Wing”
Right-Wing Critics of American Conservatism, by George Hawley, Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 2016, 366 pages, hardcover.
The history of “American Conservatism” in the 20th and 21st centuries is one that is marked by internecine strife, and so any effort to recount that history is destined to raise the hackles of anyone who has lived part of that history, or who at least has a fixed understanding of the nature of the movements, organizations, and individuals who shaped that history. One must presume that George Hawley, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Alabama, understood the controversy he could unleash when he authored Right-Wing Critics of American Conservatism; in the author’s own words, he “sought to provide a new interpretation of the conservative movement in America — one that differs both from the narrative the movement provides itself, and the narrative promoted by its progressive critics.”
Within the body politic, certain assumptions regarding the general content of conservative thought have been shaped and disseminated by publications that have presented themselves as the bastions of “conservatism.” As Hawley notes in his chapter “The Twilight of the Old Right and the Birth and Rise of the American Conservative Movement”:
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