Much recent scholarship on conservatives and the Constitution examines the movement's remarkable success in shaping legal and constitutional rules. In his rich and sophisticated analysis of conservative constitutional discourse from the 1950s to the 1980s, Ken Kersch argues that those discussions are much more than tools to advance a conservative agenda in courts. The book's motivating claim is that the remarkable durability of the conservative movement is not caused solely or—perhaps even predominantly—by shared policy preferences or by common class, racial, or economic interests. Instead, a shared identity and common worldview has bound together a potentially fractious coalition that includes libertarians and social conservatives, anti-abortion activists and entrepreneurs, foreign-policy hawks and religious fundamentalists. Kersch's book artfully describes how conservative intellectuals used stories about the Constitution to produce that shared identity.

Through six chapters, the book traces a dizzying array of arguments about the Constitution by conservative writers, political scientists, and others in journals of opinion like The National Review, more popular outlets like Readers Digest, and books by conservative presses. The first two chapters demonstrate that prior to the 1980s, a multiplicity of constitutional understandings luxuriated across those outlets. Originalism, today's near-exclusive conservative approach to the Constitution, was only one of those perspectives, and there was even little agreement about what it meant to privilege the Constitution's original meaning. Straussians, neoconservatives, Southern positivists, and Roman Catholic supporters of natural law argued with liberals and each other about how best to understand the Constitution. The next four chapters describe how conservative intellectuals developed the “ethically constitutive stories” (xvi) that made modern conservatism an ideological movement rather than an ad-hoc alliance. It is impossible to summarize briefly the variegated texture of those stories, but each chapter shows how they slowly congealed around a consensus that being a conservative meant being committed to protecting America's constitutional ideals from liberal challenges.

Chapter Three, for example, focuses on how conservative writers integrated an opposition to active economic regulation with constitutional structures and limits. Straussian political scientists and conservative economists worked to seamlessly connect market capitalism and the Constitution. Austrian and public choice economists argued that constitutional constraints on democratic governance were necessary to protect the freedom provided by a capitalist society. Others found constitutional defenses for robust property rights, the right to work, and other economic rights. Chapter Four recounts how the constitutional dimensions of arguments against communism froze a Manichean approach to political debate into conservative orthodoxy. What liberals during the Cold War saw as discussions about the appropriate protection for core civil liberties and the recognition of a clear distinction between communism and regulated capitalism, conservatives viewed as capitulation to a dangerous, “evil empire” that was opposed to foundational constitutional commitments to God, individual choice, and private property. That apocalyptical framework became a common conservative trope. Chapters Five and Six address the integration of constitutional narratives and religious conservatism. Representative of the care Kersch takes throughout to identify the separate streams of conservative thought is his differentiation among the arguments of Catholics, those of Protestant Evangelicals, and those of Protestant Fundamentalists. Core to these two chapters is an account of how these once-adversarial groups found the intellectual and emotive resources for a lasting alliance in the idiosyncratic intellectual history of James Madison and the Constitution produced by fundamentalist theologian and political activist Francis Shaeffer.

This is an important book for scholars of conservatism and American political development. It recovers and describes with insight a mountain of constitutional theorizing that has helped create and sustain the contemporary conservative movement but that has been hidden in plain sight by a scholarly focus on the professional debates of conservative lawyers, judges, and legal academics. Other work has recognized that conservatives often talked about the Constitution, including George Nash's The Conservative Intellectual Movement Since 1945 (New York: Basic Books, 1976). Kersch's work is different, however, because his subject is the way a common conservative identity and worldview grew out of constitutional debates. That concern with identity allows him to see the importance of debates while finding more conflict and less principled philosophical agreement than Nash recognized. The book's efforts to explain how conservatives came to understand themselves has limits. Its focus on intellectual debate means that it does not demonstrate how these arguments shaped political behavior or identify how the project benefited specific political and economic interests. By taking conservative self-understanding as its subject, the book also de-emphasizes extreme groups some might classify as conservative, such as the John Birch Society and segregationists. But those groups are examined elsewhere, and Kersch does not deny their importance. He does, however, offer an important new explanation for how an unruly conglomeration of interests was turned into an ideologically cohesive political movement. That explanation helps us understand not only conservatism's past, but also how it has remained largely unified through the convulsions of the current presidency, and where it may go from here.