Creed & Culture author Robert Dean Lurie says that one of the takeaways from a new biography of Frank Meyer is that the right used to be fun.

Noel Parmentel’s quote, “The right wing was fun back then,” is one of the takeaways from Daniel J. Flynn’s new book The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer. Fun? The progenitors of post-World War Two American conservatism were, as portrayed here, a high-spirited lot. They were also intemperate, combative, self-destructive, often brilliant, not infrequently loony, and always deeply interesting.

One could apply those qualities to the subject of the book, a character who looms large in the minds of intellectual conservatives and hardly anywhere else.

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