Alfred S. Regnery
Upstream: The Ascendance of
American Conservatism.
Threshold Editions, 464 pages, $26

The most far-reaching political development in the United States over the past half century has been the rise of conservatism from a minor intellectual movement to its status today as the nation’s governing philosophy. The conservative insurgency was all the more impressive because hardly anyone a generation ago thought it was remotely possible. Barry Goldwater’s landslide defeat in the 1964 election convinced many experts that conservatism was a lost cause that could never win the support of anyone who was not already a committed believer. “These are the years of the liberal,” John Kenneth Galbraith said shortly after that election. “Nearly everyone describes himself so.” That verdict was accepted by everyone except for a small band of conservative activists, writers, publishers, and donors who through their combined efforts managed within a few decades to turn the tables on Galbraith and his liberal allies.

Alfred S. Regnery’s Upstream: The Ascendance of American Conservatism is a finely wrought history of American conservatism from 1945 to the present told from the point of view of one who knew personally its early leaders and whose own coming of age as the son of a prominent conservative publisher mirrored that of the movement itself. Mr. Regnery, formerly president of Regnery Publishing Company and now publisher of The American Spectator, adds immeasurably in this volume to previous books on the subject, such as George Nash’s The Conservative Intellectual