BEHIND ENEMY LINES

A veteran political writer assembles a collection of essays defending conservative principles.

Keating has had an impressive and long career as a conservative essayist; over the course of three decades, he’s written more than 8,000 pieces for various outlets, including the National Review. In this lengthy volume of nearly 700 pages, he collects a sampling of his works, which generally read like newspaper editorials—pithy, lucidly argued, stridently confident, and singularly partisan. He covers a remarkably broad landscape of intellectual ground on subjects such as free enterprise, Catholicism, President Donald Trump, and the estate tax, among many others. Keating is at his best when tackling the issue that introduced him to the world of conservative thought: the benefits of the free market. On this topic, he provides clearly articulated and snappily brief examples of common arguments. Some columns are too narrow to inspire broad interest, such as one about property taxes for Long Island golf courses. Overall, though, Keating’s writing has a pugnacious charm, especially when he rails against the largely liberal culture of New York City. However, the anthology as a whole lacks philosophical depth and nuance, and it won’t convince those who don’t already share the author’s political sensibilities; his undeveloped contention that liberalism is incoherent, for instance, won’t change any minds. He also provides little reflection on how his conservatism holds together theoretically and doesn’t contribute very much to ongoing debates about the incompatibility of free market individualism, limited government, and a Christian conception of a common good. This limitation is particularly disappointing, as today’s conservatism is in dire need of such disambiguation; instead, Keating portrays, without adequate argument, it as “traditional, American and Reagan-esque, firmly rooted in Judeo-Christian values, Western Civilization, the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and some essential ideas and institutions, such as the Christian Church, the intrinsic value of each individual, the role of the family, freedom and individual responsibility, limited government, and free enterprise and free markets.”

The crisp clarity of this collection doesn’t make up for its tendentious simplifications.