Donald J. Trump’s upset victory took professional observers of American politics by surprise. Irrespective of the results of the 2016 elections, however, Trump’s ascendancy already signaled a power shift within the right-wing of American politics. After spurning a series of presumptive Republican favorites such as Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and John Kasich in the primaries, voters flatly ignored “Never Trump” spoiler efforts by party leaders. Not only did Trump’s campaign serve to crystalize nagging dissatisfactions with mainstream conservative politicians and opinion makers; it also tapped into illiberal undercurrents of right-wing politics long suppressed by the respectable GOP establishment.

Many have dismissed Trump as sui generis—a charismatic figure whose authoritarian predilections and penchant for nativist, xenophobic, and misogynistic rhetoric are unprecedented. But is his brand of conservatism really so new? As George Hawley reveals in a fascinating and timely study, Right-Wing Critics of American Conservatism, there are historical antecedents to Trumpism. Although the name Trump does not appear in this book, which went to press sometime in early 2015, it is impossible to make sense of the past year and a half of electoral politics without considering the history of extremist challenges to reigning postwar neoconservative orthodoxy.

As Hawley points out, the right wing of American politics has been a hotchpotch for the last 50 years or so. In contrast to the “Old Right” that dominated in the 1930s, the postwar right of “organized conservatism” is “fusionist” in nature (pp. 30–37). Before Trump came along, the GOP operated as an uneasy coalition of free-market-touting libertarians; hawkish advocates of U.S. foreign policy; evangelical Christians and other traditionalists dedicated to family values and opposing abortion, gay marriage, and women’s reproductive rights; as well as sundry figures loosely tolerated at its fringes. What then, if anything, defines conservatism in America? While “there is not a single ideological principle that unifies the right,” Hawley contends, what keeps these groups together, and allows us to speak about “the Right” in some meaningful sense, is that they “hold some other social value in greater esteem than equality” (p. 268). If the Left is broadly defined by its unqualified acceptance of the value of equality, then the Right necessarily opposes the Left “in all cases where the push for equality threatens some other value held in higher esteem,” as for, example, economic liberty, national security, or traditional forms of morality (p. 12).

Like any political ideology fraught with centrifugal tendencies, conservatism needs to be able to determine what passes—or rather does not pass—as legitimate. Hawley’s narrative is focused on efforts by mainstream conservatives and their institutional organs to suppress unorthodox factions of the Far Right. We are reminded that “Never Trump” is but the latest in a long series of establishment struggles against such figures as Robert Welch and the John Birch Society, David Duke and his white supremacist opposition to Civil Rights, Ayn Rand and “Godless” Objectivism, Patrick J. Buchanan’s electoral flirtations in the 1990s with a Trump-style nativism and “America First” isolationism, and paleo-conservative Mel Bradford’s ouster in favor of William Bennett as Ronald Reagan’s nominee for chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. These and countless other figures whose views strayed too far beyond the pale of respectable right-wing orthodoxy were cast out by conservative leadership.

William F. Buckley’s role as high priest of modern-day conservatism has been noted by the likes of Paul Gottfried, who coined the term “Alternative Right” to characterize radical variants of conservatism “purged” by the neoconservative movement. And yet if Buckley’s pulpit at National Review was essential for enforcing conformity, whither conservatism today in the absence of some new spiritual leader “who commands universal respect among conservatives” or “one who has the power to almost single-handedly excommunicate figures from the conservative movement”? Absent such an authority, Hawley predicts (thinking here of the Tea Party) that mainstream Republicans will lose the ability to prevent “more radical—or simply different—right-wing voices from reaching a larger audience or exercising a major influence on the Republican Party” (p. 70). Case in point for Hawley’s prognostications: One has to marvel at the ease with which Trump shrugged off such critics as Senator John McCain, Mitt Romney, and the entire Bush dynasty. William Kristol’s brand of Weekly Standard establishment neoconservatism failed to close the GOP ranks and ended up discrediting itself in the process. Hawley’s book reminds us of just how far we have come from those halcyon days of conservatism when a strongly worded editorial in the National Review was the political equivalent of being banned for life from professional baseball. Ask Pat Buchanan, apostate neocon and failed Republican nominee who anticipated Trump’s worldview by several decades (pp. 56–61).

Besides these household names, Hawley catalogs a long list of more obscure right-wing journalists, novelists, philosophers, economists, and bloggers whose ideas range from utopian to downright repugnant. Subsequent chapters trace major intellectual movements, such as the Southern Agrarians, Crunchy-Cons, Localists, and various species of communitarians (Chapter 3); mainstream libertarian followers of F. A. Hayek and Milton Friedman, as well as anarcho-capitalist devotees of Ludwig Von Mises, Murray Rothbard, and Ayn Rand (Chapters 5 and 6); and, most troubling of all, pale-oconservative traditionalists, the European New Right, and white supremacists and nationalists (Chapters 7, 8, and 9). Hawley strikes an admirable balance between unfeigned disgust for the racism and anti-Semitism that inhabit certain corners of the far right, while at the same time evincing a legitimate sympathy for the predicament of many localists, communitarians, or libertarians who find themselves trapped in political purgatory where any hope of electoral influence requires compromising their ideals.

Assuming Hawley is correct about mainstream conservatism’s obsessive gatekeeping, why did the establishment suddenly lose its grip in 2016 and fail to stem the barbarian tide? Even without the benefit of hindsight, the author gives some hints as to why this time proved to be so different. One possibility is atrophy of leadership on the right. Successors to Buckley and National Review have proven to be anemic, as noted here, for reasons as much structural as personal. The rise of new media, the Internet, Twitter, and other decentralized forms of communication and organization have rendered institutional control by party leadership nearly impossible. Another suggestion is that the postwar conservative alliance never made much sense in the first place. Only the exogenous threat of the Cold War was sufficient to ally conservative Christians, hawkish neocons, and free-market libertarians in their abhorrence of collectivism at home and abroad. A few decades of the “War on Terror” postponed the inevitable crackup, but the failure of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, the Great Recession, and mounting fiscal deficits shattered old allegiances once and for all. Enter stage right—the Tea Party, a harbinger of the breakdown of mainstream conservatism to which, in hindsight, the author might have paid more attention.

In his concluding thoughts, Hawley lays out two potential scenarios “Looking Ahead” to an impending “postconservative America.” The first possibility, and one that he deems “most likely,” is that “moderate and mainstream libertarianism” will come to “enjoy greater influence in the coming decades” (pp. 288–89). The other (and grimmer) alternative is that “if conservatism breaks down, many of its present constituents may embrace a more radical right-wing ideology, making American politics far more unstable” (p. 288). Brace for the worst and hope for the best, the author might say.

If Hawley’s analysis can be faulted, it is perhaps that it fails to generalize beyond the late experiences of the right-wing and ignores analogous dynamics on the left. To what extent are struggles over ideological orthodoxy unique to postwar conservatism? Transcending the traditional Left–Right polarities in America, new waves of bipartisan dissatisfaction testify to concerns about economic precariousness, social disintegration, and growing gaps between masses and elites that neither party’s leadership has yet figured out how to address. In the wake of the groundswell of support for the unlikely candidacy of Bernie Sanders, and Hillary Clinton’s lackluster performance, the Left faces its own insurgency. “Left-Wing Critics of American Liberalism” is likely to be a growing subject of interest, and if so, Hawley’s astute study of conservatism provides a model for writing such a book.