David Farber's well-written book is, as he puts it, “a short history of political conservatives' evolving and contingent disciplinary order and the constituencies who embraced it, from the time of Robert Taft through the presidency of George W. Bush” (1). Farber argues that this is an order “generated by hostility to market restraints and fueled by religious faith, devotion to social order, and an individualized conception of political liberty” (1). He notes that conservatives have not always been in complete agreement on all these points. They have, however, been very effective in creating a counterestablishment of idea factories and activists and arousing a voter base to support them. Mainly, the Right, he contends, has been successful in reaching out to Americans' never-ending search for “order and stability” (4). Where Farber claims to have broken new ground, he contends, is in his linking of “economic conservatives and social conservatives into the larger disciplinary order” that he claims has been a constant in American history (4).

Thus in each successive chapter, Farber examines an important individual in this growing conservative movement since World War II. His story, however, quickly becomes a familiar one. Senator Robert Taft, he contends, was a fairly effective conservative legislator who began to perfect the conservative counterargument to liberal social legislation, arguing that liberals did not understand that their social engineering hindered the productive capacity of the free market and fostered dependency among Americans who became hooked on government handouts. Liberals, Taft claimed, did not grasp that their policies prevented the disciplining of American individuals into independent, capable beings able to fend for themselves. Taft lacked the charisma and the personality needed to become a truly great political champion. But he did begin the process of honing conservative arguments on the economy, bringing the free-market libertarian Right into the conservative movement.

William F. Buckley Jr. meanwhile used charm, wit, and his dashing ways to begin the conservative attack against the liberal takeover of higher education and then to found National Review magazine. NR started the Right's long march toward establishing a conservative counterestablishment: of creating a network of institutions, think tanks, and activists united around certain ideas, with the goal of making the Right's ideas respectable and able to be heard in the national political arena. Buckley was also very effective at realizing the danger that extremist, kooky ideas posed to conservatives, and was able to expel conservative anti-Semitic groups and the John Birch Society from the ranks of the respectable Right. And he did this without seeing conservatives splinter and lose their unity. It was at least partly due to NR's work of unification and popularizing that Senator Barry Goldwater, Farber's next topic, was able to put together all the pieces of the conservative coalition and ride it to victory at the Republican National Convention in 1964. His nomination effectively gave conservatives control of the GOP, a control they basically have not relinquished some fifty years later. Goldwater lost the election that year, of course; he lacked the optimism and the political skills that later heroes of the Right possessed in abundance. And though he brought Southern whites into the Republican Party, Farber argues that he did so, and later conservatives kept them there, by perhaps winking at racist attitudes and, at the least, by ignoring the civil rights movement of the 1960s and its cry for justice.

Farber then moves on to Phyllis Schlafly. She was, he contends, a brilliant political activist who, in her anticommunism, support of Barry Goldwater, and opposition to feminists' sacred objective, the Equal Rights Amendment, mobilized yet another stream of conservative activists—this time many of them conservative, Republican women who perhaps had not been active in politics before. But Schlafly helped bring them into the Right as well, and brought to the fore another conservative argument that has remained with us—an opposition to feminism and liberalism on the grounds that they present a danger to traditional moral values and gender roles. Schlafly's work, along with that of Taft, Buckley, and Goldwater, all then helped pave the way for Farber's next focus—which, naturally, is Ronald Reagan. Reagan, he contends, was a man who was aware of all of these conservative arguments that came before him and was able to put them into practice. But he was only able to do so because Reagan had extraordinary political gifts. He had a natural optimism, a sunny outlook on life. He knew how to compromise. And by doing so he achieved many of the conservative goals he sought.

Farber argues that both Reagan's stint as governor of California and his time as president of the United States saw the passage of much conservative legislation, and he believes the Right got more from Reagan than perhaps it realized at the time, from tax cuts to government regulations that at least limited abortions to a very anticommunist foreign policy.

Finally, Farber deals with George W. Bush. He claims that although Bush was certainly not steeped in the history and the ideas of the conservative movement à la Reagan, he still greatly benefited from it, as he was able to mobilize it behind his candidacy for the presidency in 2000 and ride it to his razor-thin victory. And he believes Bush was indeed an authentic conservative—a passionate evangelical Christian and a believer in its moral values, a tax cutter, and a supporter of a muscular foreign policy which must fight evil in the world, be it communism, which had been the case in previous decades, or terrorism, which Bush came to believe he had been fated to do battle with following the events of September 11th. However, Farber is far more critical of Bush than he is of any other of the figures of the Right with which he deals. Farber argues that the disaster of Hurricane Katrina, the economic crisis of 2007 and after, and the difficulties of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan prove basically that Bush's antitax, limited-government, global war-on-terror policies have been failures; no wonder, he concludes, that the conservative movement by 2008 was very divided, and that Barack Obama and liberalism won back power in that year's election.

Farber's work does have some things to recommend it. It can be a useful, quick read for undergraduates unfamiliar with the rise of conservatism. Farber's writing flows well. He does a good job of showing the connections between different conservative leaders and their work, how anticommunism and the belief that there is evil in the world, be it from communists or terrorists, has influenced the Right down through the years, and how Buckley's attacks on liberalism in education in the 1950s led Reagan and others in the 1960s to similarly attack the campus radicals of that era. But one also has to conclude that there are problems with this book, too. For example, there are a few too many typographical errors and small mistakes. The uprising of workers in East Berlin occurred in 1953, not in 1952 as Farber claims. It was not Theodore Roosevelt who called the Spanish-American conflict of 1898 a “splendid little war”; it was Secretary of State John Hay.

But more importantly, one doesn't find much new in this account of conservatism's rise. Taft's political career, Buckley's wit and wisdom and his forging of conservative unity through National Review, Reagan's optimism and its impact on the Right—it is all very familiar ground and, when all is said and done, it doesn't seem Farber has added much that is new to our understanding of the meaning of it all. One also gets the feeling that Farber's current political opinions and his opposition to George W. Bush's presidency have greatly affected his conclusion to this story. Is it really true that the Bush administration's free-market views were solely responsible for the economic crisis of 2007? Many conservatives and others would today still disagree. Were the Bush administration's policies concerning the war on terror disastrous? Farber believes so, and yet, as I write, the Obama administration has yet to abandon many of them. Have the American people abandoned many of the conservative beliefs they held throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and the early years of Bush? Farber argues that they might have; he argues that the election of 2008 showed that the Right was maybe “on the wrong side of history” in many of its tenets (260) and goes on to contend that perhaps conservatism “has outlasted its historic purpose in Americans' continuing political struggle to find social order and individual meaning in the world's most dynamic and diverse nation” (262).

And yet… Conservatives, a mere two years after their defeat in 2008, were able to unify again and win big victories in the midterm elections, creating a conservative Republican majority in the House of Representatives. The Right mounted a very effective counterattack against the Obama administration's initiatives on health care; even a year after the passage of a major new health care bill sought by the administration, that initiative in all polls remains unpopular. It is certainly true, one must concede, that conservative unity might be tenuous. Just what are conservatives for? Will they be able to find a leader, as they did in 1980 with Ronald Reagan, who can lead them back to prominence and forge real unity? Those questions are yet to be answered. But Farber, it would appear, was too quick to suggest that an obituary for conservatism need be written. Ironically, Farber should have seen his possible error from the story he himself wrote. He notes well how in 1964, after Barry Goldwater's landslide defeat, many analysts and pundits forecast the end of the Right. They were wrong then, and Farber says so. One fears he fell into the same trap they did. Time will tell.