Some might say that I am a little too idiosyncratic in my political and historical views, but I found this part of the review of Regnery’s Upstream (via Jeremy Lott) a bit odd:

Although I find myself in accord with most of Regnery’s interpretations, some of them would be regarded as idiosyncratic even by people who consider themselves conservative. He frankly regrets American entry into the First World War, which he sees as having established the circumstances that led to the Bolshevik Revolution and the rise of Adolf Hitler. He objects to domestic institutions like the income tax, direct election of senators, and many innovations of the Progressive movement (in which he locates the origins of vote-buying through redistributionist policies). He takes many Republican icons to task — most notably Herbert Hoover and Dwight D. Eisenhower — for veering too far from their stated philosophies. (Hoover, he explains, really became a spokesman for conservative ideas once he left the White House.) He reminds us that the Nixon administration — whose unlovely fruits included an embrace of the Brezhnev Doctrine, wage and price controls, creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Endowment for the Arts, and minority set-asides — was (not surprisingly) devoid of any movement conservatives; indeed, many of the latter didn’t even want their president reelected in 1972. (“It was not that people liked Nixon — nobody ever liked Nixon,” he writes in one of his more lapidary phrases, “but that they were appalled by McGovern.”) The one movement conservative who managed to be elected to the White House, Ronald Reagan, was (not surprisingly, in Regnery’s view) the most successful.

I would qualify the point about WWI just slightly, since I think it was our entry that did more to allow for the Bolsheviks’ cause to flourish post-1918, when a different peace settlement could have allowed the Germans to participate in the anti-Bolshevik interventions during the Civil War (and also make those interventions more feasible and effective).  The idiocy of Kerensky and the insistence of Russian liberals to persist in fighting the war with Germany were key factors in giving the Bolsheviks their opportunity to gain power.  Nonetheless, there is nothing all that idiosyncratic about this view–this was a leading, if not the conservative view for a very long time.  Even if you don’t support repealing the 16th Amendment today on pragmatic grounds, I can’t think of very many on the right who wouldn’t object to the principle of the income tax (perhaps I am not imaginative enough).  Having seen what the 17th Amendment has given us, does anyone actually support the direct election of Senators?  Perhaps this is an all together too old-fashioned constitutionalist sensibility, but vesting the election of Senators in state legislatures was one means of ensuring that the interests of states would be represented at the federal level.