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David Farber's well-written book is, as he puts it, "a short history of political conservatives' evolving and contingent disciplinary order and the constituencies who embraced it, from the time of Robert Taft through the presidency of George W. Bush" (1). Farber argues that this is an order "generated by hostility to market restraints and fueled by religious faith, devotion to social order, and an individualized conception of political liberty" (1). He notes that conservatives have not always been in complete agreement on all these points. They have, however, been very effective in creating a counterestablishment of idea factories and activists and arousing a voter base to support them. Mainly, the Right, he contends, has been successful in reaching out to Americans' never-ending search for "order and stability" (4). Where Farber claims to have broken new ground, he contends, is in his linking of "economic conservatives and social conservatives into the larger disciplinary order" that he claims has been a constant in American history (4).
Thus in each successive chapter, Farber examines an important individual in this growing conservative movement since World War II. His story, however, quickly becomes a familiar one. Senator Robert Taft, he contends, was a fairly effective conservative legislator who began to perfect the conservative counterargument to liberal social legislation, arguing that liberals did not understand that their social engineering hindered the productive capacity of the free market and fostered dependency among Americans who became hooked on government handouts. Liberals, Taft claimed, did not grasp that their policies prevented the disciplining of American individuals into independent, capable beings able to fend for themselves. Taft lacked the charisma and the personality needed to become a truly great political champion. But he did begin the process of honing conservative arguments on the economy, bringing the free-market libertarian Right into the conservative movement.
William F. Buckley Jr. meanwhile used charm, wit, and his dashing ways to begin the conservative attack against the liberal takeover of higher education and then to found National Review magazine. NR started the Right's long march toward establishing a conservative counterestablishment: of creating a network of institutions, think tanks, and activists united around certain ideas, with the goal of making the Right's ideas respectable...