Among scholars of American political development, public law, and American political thought, there has been an explosion of interest in the growth and empowerment of the modern conservative legal movement. Recent research in this area has paid particular attention to the ways in which the Rehnquist Court, Ronald Reagan’s US Department of Justice, the Federalist Society, and specific moral causes united the political Right in the United States and have worked effectively since the 1980s to push an array of laws, policies, and regulations in a more conservative direction (see, e.g., Steven M. Teles, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law, 2008; Amanda Hollis-Brusky, Ideas with Consequences: The Federalist Society and the Conservative Counterrevolution, 2015; and Daniel Bennett, Defending Faith: The Politics of the Christian Conservative Legal Movement, 2017).

With his new book, Conservatives and the Constitution: Imagining Constitutional Restoration in the Heyday of American Liberalism, Ken I. Kersch has left his mark on this popular area of political science inquiry. Kersch’s book seeks to complicate the conventional narrative of a 1980s critical juncture; he does so largely by pushing back the clock and delving into a larger and more fractious coalition of mid-century conservative constitutional theorists in the United States. Instead of approaching modern legal conservatism as having erupted rapidly via elite law schools and Reaganite officialdoms in the 1980s, generating a surprising—yet durable—revolution across our constitutional order, Kersch argues that powerful stories of constitutional restoration and plans for redemption had been percolating and evolving among conservatives for decades. Even during the “heyday of American liberalism,” conservative constitutionalism did not sleep. Instead, the Right was busy laying the intellectual groundwork and building new ideological alliances that would later transform the American constitutional order.

Kersch does not attempt to track the advance of conservative constitutional theory through detailed analyses of US Supreme Court cases, or by identifying the main shifts in ideologies, constitutional priorities, and interpretive frameworks between the Warren Court and the Burger Court, or even by evaluating the constitutional politics of the Nixon and Ford administrations. Instead, Conservatives and the Constitution spotlights the various members of the clergy, journalists, university professors, filmmakers, writers, activists, and conservative media outlets that made, remade, relayed, and popularized multiple genera of conservative constitutional stories between the conclusion of World War II and Ronald Reagan’s ascent to the White House.

Millions of mid-century conservatives were faced with challenging and existential questions: “Where have we been? Where are we now? What went wrong? How can we set things right?” (p. 29). According to Kersch, conservatives answered these foundational queries with various stories about the Constitution and about our constitutional order. These stories supplied conservatives with lasting identities and generated profound meaning and personal pride in conservatism and in American citizenship.

Kersch organizes Conservatives and the Constitution around several of these “deep stories” (pp. x, 25), each of which provides the reader with a glimpse into the emotions, memories, and values that helped construct a constitutional consciousness across different groupings of conservatives. Each chapter is dedicated to a separate genus of conservative constitutional stories. Kersch focuses on the stories told by constitutional originalists, libertarians and assorted free marketeers, anticommunists, evangelical and fundamentalist Christians, and conservative Catholics. This story-driven approach to the development of conservative constitutionalism means that each chapter is jam-packed with dozens of abbreviated biographies, supplemented with highlights from the oeuvre of a kaleidoscopic range of conservative figures. Kersch’s methodological approach also propels the book along unexpected routes, including a 14-page exegesis of evangelical pastor Francis Schaeffer’s documentary films (pp. 263–77) followed by 5 pages dedicated to the films’ “political impact” on the Right (pp. 277–81).

Curiously, Kersch’s approach leads him to act exactly as many of his subjects did: Conservatives and the Constitution returns to earlier generations of American history to rescue and reimagine select people, ideas, and institutions, in the process attaching them to more theoretically sophisticated, culturally relatable, or morally principled understandings of conservatism than is commonly portrayed in the academy or the mainstream media. Kersch, like the mid-century conservative Harry Jaffa, reanimates lost figures, texts, and normative crises by reassembling them into a compelling and usable history about the American constitutional order.

Conservatives and the Constitution will prove to be an invaluable resource for social scientists and legal scholars interested in discovering diverse strands of modern American conservatism. As a rich, accessible, and abbreviated “Who’s Who Encyclopedia of Modern American Conservatism,” the book succeeds. Moreover, it is certain to pique readers’ interest in the two forthcoming installments of Kersch’s conservatism trilogy. But in tension with its title, Conservatives and the Constitution frequently does a better job offering biographical details and theoretical disquisitions on underappreciated conservatives than centering the distinctly constitutional narratives of these forgotten persons. Kersch correctly notes that it would be “impossible to seriously discuss conservative constitutionalism in this formative era without studying its embeddedness in the broader currents of conservative political thought more generally” (p. 25). Accordingly, Kersch accomplishes the herculean task of introducing, annotating, and ideologically classifying a myriad of conservative people, ideas, and institutions. But it is not always clear what the discrete constitutional narrative was for each “Who’s Who” entry, how each narrative was translated into political actions or enduring conservative constitutional projects, or why we should care about each individual entry in the encyclopedia.

Too often, historically motivated research problematically flattens and oversimplifies complex and contradictory political phenomena. Kersch’s aim to avoid monolithic portrayals of mid-century conservative constitutionalism by incorporating lost voices and digging into diverse (and constantly evolving) theoretical currents is commendable. But Conservatives and the Constitution does, at times, run dangerously close to overinclusivity. It can be difficult to perceive where or why an individual fits within conservative constitutionalism, which presents obstacles in tracking—let alone proving—the unities and disunities in conservative constitutional storytelling and theorizing across the twentieth century. For example, the book’s extended passages on Ayn Rand, Eric Voegelin, and the law-and-economics movement make more sense as brief descriptions of influential conservative voices in American conservatism than as expositions of how leading movement conservatives contributed to conservative constitutional theory from 1945 to 1980.

One of the most admirable aspects of Conservatives and the Constitution is its unwavering effort to take seriously the tangled lives and protean ideas of mid-century conservatives. Conservatives and the Constitution convincingly outlines how liberal elitism has blinded generations of Americans to conservative theory and movement mobilization. Kersch’s exhaustive compendium of influential conservative after influential conservative likely will amaze and enlighten many readers, which powerfully underscores the extent to which elite media and educational institutions have rendered conservatives’ deep stories about the American constitutional order invisible to large sections of America. For decades, leading conservative theories and theorists have been “hidden in plain sight,” even as they have shaped large numbers of conservative political actors (pp. 100–1).

One hopes that the upcoming installments of Kersch’s trilogy will expand on these salient concerns about academic versus nonacademic modes of knowledge production, distribution, and institutional influence. But, for the present, Conservatives and the Constitution is sure to provoke political engagement and debate while serving as essential reading for scholars interested in the religious, legal, literary, philosophical, and social roots of modern American conservatism.