Since Donald Trump shook up the American Right in 2015, many books and manifestos about the conservative movement and its future have appeared. Most of these works seek to stake out positions on familiar political and economic questions. Revisionists such as Julius Krein have called for an industrial policy to replace America’s free-trade orientation. Others like Adrian Vermeule counsel a move away from originalism as a governing judicial philosophy. The signatories of First Things magazine’s “Against the Dead Consensus” want immigration restriction, pro-worker legislation, and other policies they believe would strengthen the American family. For their part, defenders of more open markets, like Donald Devine and Samuel Gregg, deny that there is anything fundamentally wrong in these policy areas and that conservatives should reject calls for radical changes.

Claes Ryn appears to think that all these debates are beside the point and that these authors are whistling past the graveyard. Now a Professor Emeritus of Politics at the Catholic University of America, Ryn has critiqued the prevailing winds in American conservatism for decades in books such as The New Jacobinism (1991), America the Virtuous (2003), and A Common Human Ground (2003). Now, in The Failure of American Conservatism and the Road not Taken, readers will find a collection of Ryn’s previously published essays along with roughly seventy pages of new material intended to structure the collection. Together they form a bracing introduction to Ryn’s corpus for those unfamiliar with it and a useful compendium for others who have appreciated his contributions to the debates over conservatism in recent decades.

Following the introductory section of newly composed material, we find more than 350 pages of previously published essays, articles, and book excerpts. These are divided into five sections: “America’s Divided Self,” “The Constitution and Its Enemies,” “Challenges and Fissures,” “The Great Neglected Power,” and “In the Eleventh Hour.” The titles give some indication of the ideas treated in each, but the nature of the collection means that the division of topics among sections is neither neat nor tidy. Readers should use the selections’ titles and Ryn’s short introductory comments at the beginning of each piece to guide them to the material they will find most interesting or useful.

Several important criticisms of postwar conservatism first surface in the Introduction and then recur throughout the collection. Focusing on them here might be the most helpful way to explain the book’s significance.

Ryn believes that the postwar intellectual conservative movement began with great promise in that several of its most prominent figures were serious proponents of high culture. Among these were Russell Kirk and Peter Viereck, two history professors with a strong literary bent. Kirk wrote critical essays, short stories, novels, and a monograph on T. S. Eliot in addition to his historical writings and books on Anglo-American political thought. Similarly, Viereck wrote fiction and won a Pulitzer Prize for poetry in addition to his work on history and politics.

However, Ryn argues that a “powerful utilitarian bias” in the movement relegated these figures and others like them to the margins by the mid-1960s in favor of a focus on economics, business, and practical politics. This choice was a strategic error because electoral and policy victories could not check or reverse the eroding of America’s moral and cultural foundations. Conservatives today tend to have “unmusical personalities” and “feel no deep existential need for poetry, novels, paintings, symphonies, films, and such.” But by ceding to the Left, literature, the arts, and culture more generally—the fields that shape society’s moral vision—conservatives unwittingly opened the door to woke capitalism and cancel culture.

Anyone looking at the survey data of university faculty and practitioners of the arts and humanities would be hard-pressed to refute Ryn’s contention that the conservative movement has neglected these fields in relative terms. My own firsthand observations confirm this. Over the past decade, I have attended several dozen conferences and other events organized and hosted by conservative institutions. At probably 90% of these gatherings, lawyers, economists, and policy wonks make up the vast majority of attendees. Many, if not most of these people, are products of discipline-specific fellowship and degree programs developed and funded by conservatives over the past several decades. By contrast, writers of imaginative literature, philosophers, historians, and artists—disciplines toward which little or no movement funding is targeted—are few and far between.

This disdain for “merely” cultural concerns, writes Ryn, led conservatives to neglect “perhaps the most powerful and prophetic American thinker of the twentieth century,” Irving Babbitt (1865–1933). Throughout the book, Ryn echoes many of the arguments that this leader of the “New Humanists” of the early twentieth century developed in books such as Literature and the American College and Democracy and Leadership. Perhaps the chief among these is the insistence that moral virtue consists of carefully cultivated habits and deliberate, rational acts of the will rather than the “idyllic imagination” of figures like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and a naive reliance on the supposed innate goodness of humanity. Ryn sees Babbitt as having prophetically warned of the “destructive sham spirituality” characteristic of Progressivism that came to redefine public virtue in the twentieth century. This transformation of the Western imagination downplayed or repudiated outright the need for self-discipline and restraint and instead located the causes of societal problems “somewhere out there” to be addressed by social reformers.

Similarly, the utilitarian bias has led conservatives to shy away from philosophy proper. Even though the movement has always had capable intellectuals and vigorous debates, “movement conservatives were disinclined to look beyond general ideas to systematic, in-depth treatment of the most difficult issues of religion, ethics, aesthetics, and epistemology.” Of course, conservatives have counted prominent philosophers among their number, but Ryn finds them lacking for the most part. He writes respectfully of the contributions of Eric Voegelin in places, but also criticizes him for his suspicion of “systematic, conceptual intellection,” a trait he shared with Kirk and Viereck.

Ryn is even more critical of Leo Strauss, who, in his view, infected conservatives with the virus of “anti-historicism” more than any other thinker. Strauss taught that only abstract rationality could lead us to an understanding of what is ultimately normative; history and tradition, on the other hand, have no authority in this area. He and his students, particularly Harry Jaffa, popularized among conservatives the belief that the American Founding was a self-conscious break with the past and a triumph of abstract, ahistorical ideas. America was the first “proposition nation,” and its principles are universally applicable around the world.

For Ryn, all this is nonsense with potentially deadly consequences and should have been immediately recognized as such in a movement that looked to Edmund Burke as one of its founders. Burkeans view history and tradition as essential means by which we gain knowledge, wisdom, and virtue, although they do not offer final answers. Tradition is an essential support for religious life, and Christian doctrine rests in large part on the affirmation of particular historical events such as the Incarnation and the Resurrection. The architects of the American Founding were able to accomplish what they did, not because they made a fundamental break with the past, but because they carried forward and were faithful to classical, Christian, and British traditions: “Their constitutionalism grew out of and depended for its survival on the habits of moral virtue and responsibility that these traditions had fostered.”

Ryn acknowledges that historicism has its weaknesses, but he insists that a systematic philosophical approach can produce a “value-centered historicism” that “explains how the historical consciousness of a Burke is not only compatible with but also necessary for making sound moral, intellectual, and aesthetical choices.” This connection between history and universality is available for excavation in the writings of German and Italian philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, and Benedetto Croce. Unfortunately, writes Ryn, American conservatives with the right instincts, e.g., Kirk and Viereck, avoided wrestling with professional philosophy, whereas other conservatives like Strauss and Voegelin misunderstood or distorted the thought of these authors.

The anti-historicism of the Straussians makes conservatives susceptible to what Ryn calls the “new Jacobinism.” New Jacobins wish to replace traditional societies with “modern” societies that embody universal principles. At home, this means a reluctance among the conservative movement’s leaders to push back too strenuously against the latest egalitarian advance from the Left. Abroad, it means an interventionist foreign policy of the type long advocated by neoconservatives.

This was the message Ryn conveyed to conservatives less than two weeks after the 9/11 terrorist attacks when he was serving his one-year term as president of the Philadelphia Society, the organization for conservatives and libertarians founded by William F. Buckley and Milton Friedman in 1964. In a speech to the society (included in this volume), Ryn warned against the “dynamic of empire building” in Washington and urged a refocusing on the moral and cultural preconditions that would determine America’s economic and political direction.

At that moment, Ryn might as well have been King Canute ordering the tide to stop coming in. A few days earlier, George W. Bush had proclaimed in the National Cathedral that the United States’ “responsibility to history” was to “rid the world of evil.” New Jacobin pundits and advisors took the reins. Americans in short order got foreign wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and a reduction of civil liberties at home via the Patriot Act from their putatively conservative government. Ryn himself left the Philadelphia Society in frustration a few years later as hawks gained the ascendancy there for a time.

But it seems that Ryn is likely to get the last laugh. As he warned, American efforts at “nation building” in the Middle East failed dismally. Many of the architects and cheerleaders of those policies later jumped ship and disavowed their responsibility for the failures. Today, most conservatives acknowledge George W. Bush’s foreign policy to have been counterproductive, if not downright hubristic. Some of them probably owe Ryn an apology.

The Failure of American Conservatism and the Road Not Taken gives readers tremendous insight into the mind of a self-confessed “exasperating dissenter” within the conservative movement. Having taught topical seminars to graduate students on Irving Babbitt’s “New Humanists” and on Russell Kirk, I am particularly receptive to Ryn’s argument that conservatives need to recover an appreciation for and emphasis on high culture generally and these authors in particular. I also find Ryn’s reading of the American Founding more plausible than that of the Straussians. But who knows? Perhaps historicists corrupted my understanding in the course of my seventeenth-century specialization during my doctoral studies. Conservatives should consider Ryn’s arguments carefully for themselves and decide whether the American Right needs to begin reincorporating some of the ideas and dispositions it began to jettison as far back as the 1960s.