As a graduate student long ago, I considered writing my dissertation on the history and permutations of 20th-century American conservatism. I abandoned that task when it became clear to me that few universities had any desire to employ an expert on the right. My colleague Matthew Continetti rescued me from the recurrent itch to resurrect that research project when his The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism was published last year. (It’s very good.) Yet my interest in conservative political thought endures, and I recently read a book that had some striking lines worth sharing….(Read more)