The mainstream American conservative movement was founded in the 50s by a patrician young man named William F. Buckley. He and his like-minded thinkers abhorred the grand ideas of social engineering that were gaining popularity among the liberal intelligentsia (despite constant horror stories from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe). They were skeptical about science, progress, and human nature, and they placed their faith in God and the Constitution.Buckley managed to forge an intellectual movement to support the conservative political agenda by successfully identifying the greatest common denominator of the different strands of conservative thought. The defining traits of the emerging movement were anti-communism combined with a strong military presence in the world, reverence for religion, and the commitment to small government. Buckley was not only the de-facto leader of mainstream conservatism in the next half-century, and an inspiration for generations, but also an active gatekeeper of it. For decades he decided what and who stood the test of acceptability, pushing overt antisemites and racists out, and keeping sympathetic but radical thinkers at arm's length. This book is about these rejected extremes, the schools of thought that did not get into the canon. George Hawley offers a guided tour through this versatile territory of intellectual currents that are usually referred to simply (oversimply), as the Right.
