The unalienable right

Alfred S. Regnery grew up with the American conservative movement.

It even affected a family vacation one year when his father, conservative book publisher Henry Regnery, reviewed a manuscript of “The Conservative Mind,” a 1953 book by Russell Kirk, one of the early leaders in the conservative movement.

“My brother, sisters and I could not extract him from the chair because he’s reading this manuscript. He was so enthralled with it, and we would have liked to have had him come out with us and gone swimming and climb mountains,” Mr. Regnery recalled in an interview.

Mr. Kirk’s book bolstered a fledgling conservative movement facing the dominant political philosophy of liberalism, which emerged in the first half of the 20th century, Mr. Regnery says in his new book about the history of the conservative movement. In “Upstream: The Ascendance of American Conservatism,” Mr. Regnery chronicles the movement from its formative years in the 1940s and ‘50s all the way to the presidency of George W. Bush.

Many intellectuals, politicians, activists and writers built the movement to fight liberalism, Mr. Regnery says in his book. The Republican Party, the movement’s dominant political wing, has failed to win and might lose again, but the philosophical wing always lives on, he said.

President Wilson ignited the political force of liberalism in the 1910s with his policies of expansive government, followed by Presidents Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt, Mr. Regnery notes.

The government’s fight against the Great Depression and the success of the government-run World War II operation led to liberalism’s dominance, Mr. Regnery said.

“So in the view of most people, both the Great Depression and World War II had been won by big government,” he writes.

Conservatism worked against liberalism with the combined efforts of libertarian, traditionalist and anti-communist conservatives, he says in his book. The philosophical movement began with writers like Mr. Kirk, a conservative philosopher, and William F. Buckley Jr., founder of National Review, a biweekly conservative magazine that claimed a circulation of 155,000 in 2004.

Anti-communists such as Whittaker Chambers also played a major role in the conservative movement, along with Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona and California Gov. Ronald Reagan, Mr. Regnery said.

Mr. Goldwater’s 1964 presidential bid marked the first time that a conservative candidate received Republican Party approval, Mr. Regnery writes.

“With Goldwater came the idea that conservatism was more than an academic exercise. It was actually politics as well,” Mr. Regnery said.

In 1980, Mr. Reagan became the first conservative elected president and then showed that conservatives can govern successfully on their principles, Mr. Regnery said.

Mr. Reagan’s presidency also signaled the movement’s maturity, Mr. Regnery asserts in his book.

“It’s, I think, a fair statement to say that Reagan-style conservatism has been the dominant political ideology of the United States for the last generation,” said Donald F. Kettl, director of the Fels Institute of Government at the University of Pennsylvania and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a center-left think tank.

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