Among the many anniversaries that fall in the year of America’s semiquincentennial is the 50^th anniversary of George H. Nash’s The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945. The book was a landmark when it first appeared in 1976, at a time when conservative institutions were multiplying despite the setback Republicans had suffered with the Watergate scandal. New think tanks, publications, grassroots groups, and single-issue advocacy organizations were springing up on the American right—and one of these green shoots was a magazine called Chronicles.

The conservative movement needed an account of itself before there was too much to account for. Nash provided that canonical intellectual history at just the right moment. He’d earned a Ph.D. in history from Harvard in 1973, and he did not set out to write a group hagiography. Yet he did approach his subjects with the sympathy and understanding of a fellow conservative. In academic circles, Nash has never been forgiven for that: his book is a standard text for classes on conservatism; there is nothing better. Yet Nash is an independent scholar, not a tenured professor, and that, together with his conservative outlook, is enough to make him suspect in the eyes of academics with much heavier political biases of their own. 

The story Nash’s book tells is so familiar today in part because Nash told it. The Conservative Intellectual Movement is sometimes seen as a “fusionist” work—fusionism being National Review senior editor Frank Meyer’s conception of the conservative movement, distilled from a mixture of libertarianism, traditionalism, and anti-Communism. Those were indeed confluences that historically helped to form the conservatism of the mid-to-late 20^th century. Nash’s account is true to the history but has, quite naturally, been shaped by the author’s choices and arrangements of his material. The story of the 20^th-century intellectual right, as most conservatives know it (to the extent they know it at all), is Nash’s story.

The book’s chapters proceed in pairs. The first contrasts “The Revolt of the Libertarians” with “The Revolt of Against the Masses”—that is, the revolt of early traditionalists like Richard Weaver against the mass society of 20^th-century America. The second pair examines the civilizational hopes and fears of the traditionalists and the anti-Communists. The central pair of chapters looks at how National Review drew these elements together and Meyer’s attempts to harmonize them, as well as the resistance he faced from non-fusionists.

Two further chapters consider the question “What is conservatism in America?” and two more investigate the relationship between the intellectual movement and politics. The last chapter of the original text is devoted to assessing conservatism as it entered the 1970s; 30 years later, Nash added a further chapter to look back on the Ronald Reagan era as a time when conservatism was ascendant. A new conclusion added to the 2006 edition attempts to summarize recent developments on the right and assess the prospects of intellectual conservatism in the 21^st century. 

The most dated material in Nash’s book is the additions. “While certain paleoconservative themes—notably anxiety about unrestricted immigration to America’s shores—resonated in parts of the conservative camp,” he writes in the new chapter inserted in 2006, the paleoconservatives and their themes, he says, “did not dominate conservative discourse.” At the time, that was true. Not anymore, thanks both to President Trump and to the sheer gravity of the immigration crisis. While Nash notes, “Significantly, the circulation of Chronicles remained small compared to that of National Review and the American Spectator,” it’s Chronicles that proved to be the window into the right’s future.

Nash’s book is a monument of scholarship, but it’s also limited in scope, which  may be why neither Nash nor anyone else ever wrote a follow-up to it. Nash was not writing about intellectual conservatism at all times and everywhere, but only what it meant and what thinkers wore the “conservative” label in America between 1945 and 1976. He doesn’t attempt to offer a timeless philosophical definition of conservatism. And the logical implication of his time-bound approach is that the conservative intellectual movement in a later day might be a very different kind of story, not simply a continuation of the one Nash had told.

If someone were to write a sequel to The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, the place to begin would be the debut of Chronicles, a magazine that in its own way would prove as significant for the next half-century as National Review had been for the first two decades of the conservative movement—not because Chronicles was at the heart of the movement’s institutions in D.C. or New York, but because Chronicles, from its vantage point in Middle America, saw by the dawn of the 1980s what was amiss with the older movement. The Reagan era was a triumph that nevertheless revealed the limits of fusionism, especially as neoconservatives reinterpreted and repurposed the doctrine.

There will never be a better book about the conservative intellectual movement that developed in the 30 years after World War II. And Nash remains the model of a scholar and a gentleman—an American to treasure. More remains to be written about the modern intellectual right, however, and its story after 1976 was first foretold in these pages. ◆