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Random House
September 2009
On Sale: September 1, 2009
144 pages
ISBN: 1400068843
EAN: 9781400068845
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
Sam Tanenhaus’s essay “Conservatism Is Dead” prompted
intense discussion and debate when it was published in The
New Republic in the first days of Barack Obama’s
presidency. Now Tanenhaus, a leading authority on modern
politics, has expanded his argument into a sweeping history
of the American conservative movement. For seventy-five
years, he argues, the Right has been split between two
factions: consensus-driven “realists” who believe in the
virtue of government and its power to adjust to changing
conditions, and movement “revanchists” who distrust
government and society–and often find themselves at war
with America itself. Eventually, Tanenhaus writes, the revanchists prevailed,
and the result is the decadent “movement conservatism” of
today, a defunct ideology that is “profoundly and defiantly
unconservative–in its arguments and ideas, its tactics and
strategies, above all in its vision.” But there is hope for conservatism. It resides in the
examples of pragmatic leaders like Dwight Eisenhower and
Ronald Reagan and thinkers like Whittaker Chambers and
William F. Buckley, Jr. Each came to understand that the
true role of conservatism is not to advance a narrow
ideological agenda but to engage in a serious dialogue with
liberalism and join with it in upholding “the politics of
stability.” Conservatives today need to rediscover the roots of this
honorable tradition. It is their only route back to the
center of American politics.
At once succinct and detailed, penetrating and nuanced, The
Death of Conservatism is a must-read for Americans of any
political persuasion.
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