[The European Conservative] New Right, New Fights

A novel essay collection depicts the modern conservative movement as vain and ineffectual.

Up From Conservatism: Revitalizing the Right After a Generation of Decay. Edited by Arthur Milikh. Encounter Books; 345 pages; $29.99.

With primary season underway just about then, June of this year may seem an odd time for Encounter Books to release Arthur Milikh’s sensational compendium of essays, Up From Conservatism (2023). Presidential aspirants and their campaign staff can no longer be receptive to these kinds of intellectual tomes the moment they’ve launched themselves into the electoral fray. Neither can the voters, really. Even taking at face value what’s prescribed by his roster of contributors, the conservative lay reader is simply in no headspace to pay much attention to Milikh’s case for “revitalizing the right after a generation of decay”. There’s the urgency of Trump’s legal troubles, on one hand. On the other, with debaters like DeSantis, Vivek, Pence, Christie, and Haley, viewers are likely more consumed by the many verbal skirmishes gone viral between them than by the theoretical dissent they could be construed to belie. There’s also, after all, a question of resource timing. However dire the American right’s straits in the overarching culture war, nine months away from Super Tuesday is hardly a time to reset the foundations of the conservative edifice, even if such a reset were as easy as Milikh suggests. In politics as in life, you run with what you have and leave the soul-searching for later.

Continue reading the entire piece at The European Conservative here.