A review of Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement by Justin Raimondo (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books), 375 pages, $18.

Justin Raimondo’s Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement, although somewhat polemical, belongs on a reading list of the best books about the American Right’s intellectual development. [1] Raimondo traces the role in this development of classical liberal intellectuals and public figures before and during the Cold War who believed that the unquestioned growth of government for purposes of national security posed a threat to liberty.

Reclaiming the American Right is a fantastic resource for anyone who wants a well-rounded view of the Cold War history of traditionalist, anti-communist, libertarian, and classical liberal intellectuals. Raimondo’s prose is engaging, and he offers fascinating miniature intellectual biographies of various classical liberal figures. The additional content—a foreward by Pat Buchanan, an introduction by George W. Carey, and critical essays by Scott Richert from Chronicles and David Gordon from the Ludwig von Mises Institute—offers valuable insights as well.

While Raimondo’s book is commendable and worthwhile as an intellectual history, the direction in which he wishes the American Right to go today in light of the past is inadvisable. Historical recollections of the American Right in popular magazines like National Review and more recently The Weekly Standard often begin with the Right’s supposedly unified development in opposition to international communism and Soviet plans for aggressive territorial expansion. National Review itself, under the guidance of William F. Buckley, James Burnham, and Frank Meyer, played a significant role in that history, bringing together an assortment of figures on the Right who offered cultural resources to counter communism. These Cold Warriors gave a spirited defense of American democratic capitalism and the national security measures necessary to defend that system of political economy in the Cold War era.

The “fusionist” conservatives affiliated with National Review attempted to bring together traditionalism, classical liberalism, and anti-communism and used the print medium to influence the direction of the politically acceptable Right during the Cold War. In this same period, classical liberal economists such as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman shaped the Right’s free-market thinking. These economists also offered insights beyond their particular disciplinary specialty, but their non-economic views—which frequently were at odds with other fusionist conservative positions—did not gain the attention in the pages of conservative publications that their opinions on economic policy did.

For instance, Milton Friedman’s efforts in opposition to the military draft remain relatively unknown in comparison to his views on the virtues of free markets, though all of his views were shaped by his classical liberal outlook. Individualists such as Frank Chodorov, H.L. Mencken, and Albert J. Nock—who receive considerable attention from Raimondo—also were distinctive American literary voices for the classical liberal tradition. These men, who were more significant prior to World War II, spoke out against the growth of the warfare-welfare state in the early days of the Cold War. They understood government growth during a time of crisis rarely is followed by any decrease in the size of government once the threat no longer looms.