One man's platoons.

Right Turns: Unconventional Lessons from a Controversial Life, by Michael Medved (Crown Forum, 448 pp., $26.95)

IF you want to understand how thoroughly the American elite moved from the right to the left in the 20th century, consider this: The most talked-about conversions are those that went the other way. Whittaker Chambers, Ronald Reagan, the neoconservatives, and the like are remembered not because their stories are so representative of the times, but because they are so unusual.

There is a further irony in these stories, and it is exemplified by the journey of the film critic and social commentator Michael Medved. After a small measure of success as a politically neutral writer in his twenties and thirties, Medved became prominent in the late 1980s for saying something everybody already knew: that the Hollywood films of his time were overwhelmingly left-wing, irreligious, immoral, and disturbed. Predictably, the Left denounced him as "an angry evangelist," "the magistrate of morals," and "a humorless, authoritarian mind," whose bestselling book Hollywood vs. America (1992) was "chilling." Just as predictably, the Right embraced him warmly.

In short, Medved was seen as a turncoat by one side, and as a welcome convert by the other. This characterization of his "right turn," however, is not quite accurate. Like Ronald Reagan, who always said that he didn't leave the Democratic party but rather the party left him, Medved didn't leave liberalism--liberalism left him.

Medved makes that clear in his new memoir, Right Turns, while continuing to embrace the conservative label. During the early 1970s, Medved notes, he associated the term liberal with "positive values like compassion, generosity, enlightenment, and integrity." The American Left, however, though still called liberal, had moved away from those notions, and they were coming to be more commonly associated with the Right. As a result, liberalism became exceedingly perverse and dangerous.

Medved was at the center of these changes, at Yale in mid-1960s, in Berkeley during the 1970s (where he worked for the radical-Left Democratic congressman Ron Dellums), and at the Public Broadcasting System in the 1980s on the movie-review program Sneak Previews. What he learned from all of this was that America's powerful liberal elite was increasingly diverging from both the American people of the time and the nation's historic values. Medved notes, for example, that young Americans in the 1960s were actually very different from the radically engaged hippies of the press's favored stereotype. He points out "the other voices among American youth--pro-military, conventionally patriotic, and resentful of all the countercultural propaganda. Nixon, in fact, won a majority among voters between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine, 52 percent to McGovern's 46 percent."

Countering the received image of his Baby Boom generation, Medved openly celebrates the joys of bourgeois life, explaining that his extensive hitchhiking as a youngster paradoxically revealed to him the great decency of Middle America: "I met a stunning assemblage of kind and vital people. [The experience] protected me from the contemptuous and dismissive attitude of so many coastal elitists to what is famously known as 'flyover country.'" What makes Middle Americans so much more appealing to him than the liberal elite is their concern for individual moral choices--as opposed to mere words, which are notoriously easy to bestow. He says "one of the most depressing, dysfunctional aspects of contemporary culture" is "the focus on faraway problems over which we have no control rather than achievable aims in our immediate surroundings."

Lauding this "Do-It-Yourself Conservatism" over what he calls the Do-Something Disease of modern liberalism, Medved says that prosaic activities--such as his embarrassing daily habit of picking up trash off his neighborhood streets--are a very simple way in which we can all make the world better. "Despite the alarming pronouncements of big-government demagogues who want us to feel powerless and paralyzed without their grandiose new programs," he says, "we can make the private choices that determine destiny."

Echoing Edmund Burke and classical-liberal thinkers, Medved sees the development of personal moral habits as paramount: "The steady application of properly regulated habits . . . can guarantee progress." Noting that success comes from constant effort, he praises the dedication of independent business owners, the police and military, and other hardworking people. "No one should underestimate the significance or power of such brazenly bourgeois virtues," he writes. The proof that these values work, he says, is in the fact that "conservatives aren't just more astute and practical than their liberal counterparts, they are also happier, more fulfilled in their lives and work." He provides poll evidence for this claim, but does not suggest that conservatives start off as better people; instead, he says that "they benefit from better ideas," and he cites "the unfailingly depressing impact of leftist thinking," with its emphasis on "national guilt [about] past American atrocities; competitive claims of victimhood; . . . reports of impending environmental disaster," and the like.

Medved's main concern as a writer has always been for how individuals live their lives, how their moral choices affect their enjoyment of their time on earth. This perspective is reflected in the book's organization as a series of "lessons" from his life, and was also evident in his work as film critic. He continually argued that values and ideas are the most important aspect of movies, the characteristic that affects people most lastingly, and he held that what "matters most" in a work of art is its morality. This notion, of course, goes completely against the grain of 20th-century critical custom, and is a powerful corrective to the excesses of deconstructionism and other relativistic processes.

Similarly, he sees his nationally syndicated radio show "as one more means to apply the gradualist Do-It-Yourself approach by winning one argument at a time, changing a few minds every day, and building support bit by bit to advance the causes I [care] about." Such incrementalism is not flashy like the grand schemes of modern liberalism, but it is what works: It's the everyday employment of real compassion by society's "little platoons." These compassionate people tend to have something else in common. Medved, an Orthodox Jew, writes that "on every significant challenge--whether it's crime or poverty or family breakdown or drug addiction or educational inadequacy--serious Christianity represents part of the solution, not part of the problem. Whether rehabilitating convicts, counseling drug addicts, feeding the homeless, facilitating adoptions, or building schools and clinics and hospices in America and around the world, people of faith play a vastly disproportionate role in trying to heal and redeem humanity."

What motivates them is the simple conviction that problems are best solved by individual people caring for one another, and that we are all personally responsible for our neighbors. Their faith stirs them to action: In gratitude for what God has given to them, they give to others. Medved shares that feeling, having seen the hand of the Almighty moving in his own life, providing unexpected opportunities to change the world bit by bit, in his own way. As a result, the lessons he finds in his personal story go well beyond the merely political--to the far more important question of what each of us should do with the next few minutes of our own time.

Mr. Karnick is senior editor at the Heartland Institute, associate fellow at the Sagamore Institute for Policy Research, and coeditor of the Reform Club website (reformclub.blogspot.com).