Matthew Continetti offers a sweeping intellectual and political history of American conservatism over the past century, arguing that the movement is far older and more varied than the Reagan-centered story usually told about it. Continetti, a conservative writer and analyst, traces the American right from the Progressive Era through the present, showing how it began as networks of intellectuals and journalists who developed and institutionalized a set of ideas, and how that project grew, splintered, and repeatedly collided with more populist and radical currents. He follows the major figures and factions across the decades—the interwar critics of the New Deal, the postwar fusion of traditionalists, libertarians, and anti-communists under William F. Buckley Jr. and National Review, the rise of Barry Goldwater and then Reagan, the neoconservatives, and the successive insurgencies that culminated in the populist nationalism of Donald Trump. A central theme is the recurring tension between the movement's desire for mainstream respectability and the persistent pull of extremism, demagoguery, and conspiracism at its edges—a struggle Continetti sees playing out again and again over the conservative century. He argues that understanding this long history is essential to explaining how Trump captured the Republican Party and where the party might go next. Written from within the tradition but with a critical eye, and updated with a new epilogue, the book is an accessible synthesis of a hundred years of ideas, institutions, magazines, think tanks, and personalities. The Right serves as both a reference for the movement's evolution and an argument about the sources of its present turmoil and its possible future.