I very much enjoyed reading the Exit Right: The People Who Left the Left and Reshaped the American Century (Simon & Schuster, 2016), which details the movement of six very different individuals from the political left to the political right. The book’s subjects are Whittaker Chambers, James Burnham, Ronald Reagan, Norman Podhoretz, David Horowitz, and Christopher Hitchens, each of whose apostasy is explicated in a chapter.
The subject matter intrigued me. As a graduate student at NYU, I seriously considered writing a dissertation on the history of conservatism in America. (I switched to another topic when it became plain to me that my subject would not get me a teaching job anywhere.) So, reading this book was a pleasure as it allowed me to once again read about the intellectual tumults of the second half of the 20th century, which birthed new voices on the right…. (Read more on the R Street Institute Blog)
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