The Failure of American Conservatism and the Road Not Taken

A Powerful, Profound Assessment of Conservatism and America

An impressive burst of creativity gave rise to a vigorous conservative intellectual movement in the United States after the Second World War. Yet, according to Claes Ryn, the great potential of the movement was not realized because of major flaws. The movement became preoccupied with politics to the neglect of academia, history, philosophy, religion, morality, the arts, and entertainment. In the 1980s when Ronald Reagan won great political victories the movement celebrated "the triumph" of conservatism, but this reaction confirmed a superficial understanding of what most fundamentally shapes society. Developments in "the culture" were actually radicalizing the American mind and imagination and eroding America's constitutional order. Conservatism also resisted intellectual discourse of the most rigorous kind and failed to make crucial distinctions. Paradoxically, it even made room for abstract universalist ideology, including Straussian anti-historicism and neoconservative imperialistic democratism. Ryn was a very early critic of all these weaknesses. ­

The Failure of American Conservatism analyzes these weaknesses in depth. It explains the current disorientation of conservatism and why "cancel culture" and Woke were predictable. Mixing new and previously published writing, the book bristles with provocative ideas. It sets forth its own strongly argued view of how to understand and address America's crisis.

Claes G. Ryn is Emeritus Professor of Politics, Distinguished Senior Scholar, and Founding Director Emeritus of the Center for the Study of Statesmanship at the Catholic University of America, where he was also Chairman of his department. His many books include A Common Human Ground, America the Virtuous, Will, Imagination and Reason, Democracy and the Ethical Life, and the novel A Desperate Man. An internationally recognized political thinker, he has lectured widely in the United States, Europe, and Asia, especially China, where three of his books and many of his articles have been published. He was President of the Philadelphia Society, Chairman and co-founder of the National Humanities Institute, and President and co-founder of the Academy of Philosophy and Letters.