Creation Story.

Right Face: Organizing the American Conservative Movement 1945-65, by Niels Bjerre-Poulsen (Museum Tusculanum Press, University of Copenhagen, 333 pp., $29.95)

In the ever-quickening tumult of current political debate, it is easy to forget that American conservatism has become middle-aged. Fifty years ago this spring Russell Kirk published The Conservative Mind. Forty-three years ago next September, Young Americans for Freedom was born. Later this year the Intercollegiate Studies Institute will celebrate its fiftieth anniversary. In two years National Review will do the same.

What happens when a political movement reaches maturity? For those within its ranks, the impulse grows to proclaim success and salute its intrepid founders. For those outside its ranks, passion yields to curiosity: How, they wonder, did such a phenomenon come into prominence and power? In short, present-mindedness gives way slowly to self- consciousness and to the historian's quest for deeper understanding.

So it is with contemporary American conservatism. Long neglected by most serious scholars, conservatism in the last half-decade has suddenly become a historiographical frontier.

Among the new generation of historians who have discovered conservatism from the outside is Niels Bjerre-Poulsen, an associate professor of American studies at Copenhagen Business School. Like most of his confreres, Bjerre-Poulsen is less interested in conservatism's intellectual history than in its "political mobilization." Conservative ideology, that is, is less fascinating to him than the vehicles by which this ideology was carried into the political arena. In Right Face, he tells the story of how, in the first two decades after World War II, a "would-be political elite" of conservatives set out to "institutionalize their political ideas" and create a powerful "network" of influence and advocacy.

And what a story it is. In the late 1940s and 1950s the American Right was a hodgepodge of uncoordinated intellectual and political figures -- religious traditionalists and doctrinaire classical liberals, business tycoons and zealous ex-Communists, leftover isolationists and crusading Cold Warriors, near-anarchists and converts to Catholicism, learned college professors and rambunctious McCarthyites -- united principally in their opposition to Communism and to Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. How to forge out of such discordant elements an effective resistance to their "collectivist" enemies?

As Bjerre-Poulsen explains, the process unfolded on essentially two fronts. In the 1950s conservative leaders concentrated on developing an infrastructure of journals and related transmission belts for conservative discourse. Here National Review, founded in 1955, was preeminent. In its first decade or so of existence, NR -- under William F. Buckley Jr., James Burnham, Frank Meyer, and William Rusher -- functioned as the general staff of the conservative movement, as its clearinghouse of news and ideas, and increasingly as its gatekeeper and arbiter of respectability. Without the intellectual coherence and camaraderie supplied by its leading journal, the conservative movement would not have become what it aspired to be: a political force determined to put its ideas into action.

Intellectual consolidation was Phase One. Phase Two commenced a few years later. In 1960 Buckley and his allies founded Young Americans for Freedom, an invaluable source of talent for future battles and future conservative leadership. In 1962 came the creation of the New York Conservative party in the very belly of the liberal beast. Above all (and this forms the bulk of Bjerre-Poulsen's story), between 1960 and 1964 enthusiastic and disciplined conservative activists successfully captured the biggest political vehicle of all -- the Republican party - - in their drive to nominate Barry Goldwater for the presidency.

Bjerre-Poulsen clearly has a multifaceted tale to tell. One theme that vividly emerges from it is the many pitfalls that conservatives had to overcome in their struggle to build a viable counter-establishment. Some conflicts were philosophical: the enduring tension between libertarians and traditionalists. Some were geopolitical and strategic: the residual isolationism of the Old Right versus the Cold War interventionism of the New. Some were temperamental and tactical: between elitists who saw themselves as an anti-political Remnant and populists who wanted to rouse the "silent majority."

Time and again these differences of perspective clashed: in polemics at and around National Review; in power struggles at Human Events and The Freeman; in the pitched battle at the Republican national convention of 1952; and in the ambivalent response of conservative intellectuals to Senator Joseph McCarthy. The early attempts to create a conservative community were fraught with strife. Nevertheless, what Bjerre-Poulsen narrates is mainly a success story. As he makes clear in a brief epilogue on conservatism from 1965 to the present, the Goldwater campaign was not the beginning of the end; it was, for embattled conservatives, the end of the beginning.

All this and more Bjerre-Poulsen covers with clarity and insight. He is particularly effective in linking the internal history of Human Events and The Freeman to the larger ideological rifts within the Right in the first postwar decade. He notes astutely how McCarthyism ushered in a more majoritarian consciousness among conservatives and how McCarthyite anti-Communism served as a bridge between former isolationists and emerging Cold Warriors. He recounts how Buckley and National Review dealt with the dilemma posed by the rise of the John Birch Society. He discloses the catalytic, behind-the-scenes achievements of conservatism's PR guru, Marvin Liebman. He deftly illuminates the surprising friction that arose between Barry Goldwater and his conservative kingmakers in 1963-4.

Indeed, after reading this book some may wonder whether conservatives were prudent to put so many eggs in the reluctant Goldwater's basket in the years before his presidential run. Their campaign to secure Goldwater's nomination was brilliant, but (as Bjerre-Poulsen shows) the campaign's chosen vessel proved to be flawed. The conservatives constructed their "network," and it survived the debacle of Goldwater's defeat. Still, as conservatives ruefully learned, infrastructure alone is not enough unless it produces sound leaders.

But if Bjerre-Poulsen's book is by and large a story of success, its tone is by no means triumphant. In his epilogue he insists that in the years since 1980 (and 1994) no conservative "revolution" has "swept the country." Conservatism, he acknowledges, has become "institutionalized and professionalized." It has held onto its power base in the Republican party. Its organizational work has been "a major success." But it has not, he says, replaced "the New Deal order," nor has it yet devised a "coherent political program" capable of winning "sustained" victories at the polls.

Bjerre-Poulsen is also highly skeptical of the "fusionist" brand of conservatism (long associated with National Review) that endeavored to reconcile libertarian and traditionalist visions of the good society. A true fusion of these perspectives, he claims, never happened in the 1950s and 1960s: The conservative coalition "remained a shotgun marriage" held together "almost entirely" by antipathy to "New Deal liberalism."

Many conservatives will strongly contest this categorical dismissal -- at the level of everyday experience if not of abstract theory. Talk to an average conservative today and you will likely find a harmonious mix of libertarian and traditionalist sentiments. Fusionism remains the de facto conservative consensus. But Bjerre-Poulsen is probably correct to note that since the 1970s organized libertarianism and organized traditionalism have increasingly gone their separate ways. What this portends for conservatism's future as a coalition is problematic.

Bjerre-Poulsen's judgment on these points raises the issue of his own angle of vision toward his subject. As with so many historians who are now writing about conservatism, this Danish scholar's political sympathies appear to lie on the left. Occasionally these biases surface. Thus he refers to the Communist-subversion controversy of the late 1940s and early 1950s as the "second Red Scare": a tendentious term employed by some historians to connect the episode with the discredited Red Scare of 1919-20. (The very word "scare," of course, carries the pejorative message that anti-Communist concerns at the time were groundless.) Similarly, he repeatedly labels McCarthyism a "witch- hunt," again suggesting by his terminology that the furor over Communism in America in the early Cold War lacked any valid foundation. Bjerre-Poulsen does not argue this point; he simply seems to assume that it is self-evident.

He is more overtly critical of conservatives when he analyzes their response to the civil rights movement in the late 1950s and 1960s. At one point he describes conservatives' constitutional objections as "in most instances . . . sheer hypocrisy."

Fortunately -- whether one agrees with him or not -- these lapses into judgmentalism are infrequent and generally unobtrusive. Nor does his opining emanate altogether from one direction. He is pointedly unimpressed by the efforts of certain left-of-center social scientists in the 1950s to depict the resurgent Right as a form of social pathology. While Bjerre-Poulsen is unafraid to evaluate his subject, he does not (for the most part) argue with it -- a welcome sign of intellectual maturity. Like most of the younger historians (including liberal ones) who are now tilling the field of conservative history, Bjerre-Poulsen has sufficient detachment to treat his topic respectfully. This is a mighty step forward.

In essence, Right Face is a concise, analytic survey of a 20-year struggle by conservative activists to establish a sustainable beachhead in American public life. As a survey, the book cannot cover individual episodes in substantial detail. For a fuller rendering of the 1964 Goldwater campaign, readers will want to consult Rick Perlstein's Before the Storm; for the story of YAF, Gregory L. Schneider's Cadres for Conservatism; for the New York Conservative party, George J. Marlin's Fighting the Good Fight; for broader accounts of conservatism's political trajectory, Lee Edwards's The Conservative Revolution and Jonathan M. Schoenwald's A Time for Choosing.

But what Right Face necessarily lacks in narrative depth, it more than compensates for in breadth and incisiveness. Bjerre-Poulsen's compact but comprehensive volume is a worthwhile addition to the historiography of American conservatism. And he underscores a valuable point. Conservatives like to say that ideas have consequences, and it is true. Every institution chronicled in this book was the embodiment of ideas that eventually blossomed into organized political activity. Ideas are crucial in motivating people; "consequences," after all, do not just happen by chance. From 1945 to 1964 and beyond, the power of intellectual conviction propelled countless conservatives into self- sacrificing action, year in and year out, in fair weather and foul. As the conservative movement of 2003 enters a comfortable middle age, this is a history lesson worth remembering.