The Rise of Common-Sense Conservatism

In the years following the election of Donald Trumpa victory that hinged on the votes of white Midwesterners who were both geographically and culturally distant from the medias coastal concentrationsthere has been a flurry of investigation into the politics of the so-called common man. The notion that the salt-of-the-earth purity implied by this appellation is best understood by conservative politicians is no recent development, though. As Antti Lepist shows in his timely and erudite book, the intellectual wellsprings of conservative common sense discourse are both older and more transnational than has been thought. In considering the luminaries of American neoconservative thoughtamong them Irving Kristol, Gertrude Himmelfarb, James Q. Wilson, and Francis FukuyamaLepist argues that the centrality of their conception of the common man accounts for the enduring power and influence of their thought. Intriguingly, Lepist locates the roots of this conception in the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment, revealing how leading neoconservatives weaponized the ideas of Adam Smith, Thomas Reid, and David Hume to denounce postwar liberal elites, educational authorities, and social reformers. Their reconfiguration of Scottish Enlightenment ideas ultimately gave rise to a defining force in modern conservative politics: the common sense of the common man. Whether twenty-first-century politicians who invoke the grievances of the people are conscious of this unusual lineage or not, Lepist explains both the persistence of the trope and the complicity of some conservative thinkers with the Trump regime.