[The European Conservative] Les Droites en Amérique

Continetti’s capacious history of the first 100 years of the American right holds lessons for the next 100.

“Independence (Squire Jack Porter)” (1858), an oil on paperboard by Frank Blackwell Mayer, located in the Smithsonian American Art Museum. As a self-sufficient landholder and businessman, ​“Squire Jack” embodied an independent and enduring spirit that, by the 1850s, had become an American ideal, celebrated by painters and writers alike.

The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism. By Matthew Continetti. Basic Books; 496 pages; $18.99.