>> there have been a few regnery best sellers. >> from 1986 until four years ago, i published 22 new york times best sellers, so, yes, some of them make money but you lose money on the other books, it evens out. >> when did you start publishing political books? >> well, we published, soon after "red horizons," i got a book that we called "the senatorial privilege" and that was the big book on chappaquidock, it was a book a new york publisher agreed to publish and then had breached the contract because, well, because they didn't want to publish it. we did, and it was a huge sensation, so that was certainly a very political book, and then there were a lot of others. the first -- when bill clinton was elected, obviously, that gave us a very green pasture for all sorts of stuff to publish, and the first one -- i think we published eight or nine clinton books that were best sellers, the first was a book written by a reporter in little rock that covered clinton for the time he was governor and attorney general, she'd see him every day, meredith oakley, and she wrote a book -- we called tha

regnery's home in virginia. >> al regnery, the author of "upstream: the ascendance of american conservatism." when did the modern conservative movement get organized? >> well, it started after world war ii, people ask me that question and don't put modern in, and i like to say that it really started in about 1789 when the constitution was ratified, but the modern movement really started up after world war ii, and the reason it did was because -- and people are -- often don't recognize how liberal a country this was at the end of world war ii. there were no conservatives. the republican party, the democratic party were basically the same, there were a few people in congress who -- people like bob taft, who certainly most of them isolationists from the midwest, others who were anti-communists like joe mccarthy, but they didn't call themselves conservatives or think of themselves as having a cohesive set of principles that they believed in, and the predominant intellectual attitude in the country was toward central planning, big government, government regulation, and the reason for that was be

>> guest: i ought to confess that title came from the publisher, from my editor at regnery, a gentleman called harry crocker. i had a far more artful and elusive title that he thought was for losers and would guarantee we sold, you know, 2,800 copies.as [laughter]er he thought that was, he thought "america alone" was a hittite l, and he proved right on that. a e proved right on that. >> host: what was your original title? >> guest: i'm keeping that to when i'm in a multibillionaire and i can afford to indulge myself by writing books with oblique titles that sell 204,000 copies. >> host: what is the book about? >> guest: the book is -- my original title was on the same theme as "america alone" turned into. which is civilizational collapse, which is my shtick, my niche, and what hair didid is he getsow to focus on your selling point, and he says all this tap-dancing around the issue in the first 50 pages is a waste of time. get rid of that. and that's the book. and he was right on that. >> host: you write in "america alone, the end of the world as we know it": it's hard to deliver a wakeu