“Conscience of a Conservative” takes its title directly from Barry Goldwater’s 1960 manifesto. Like Goldwater — who was also a Republican senator from Arizona — Flake bemoans the crisis facing conservatives, and like Goldwater, he believes that conservatives have only themselves to blame.

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The contexts are different, naturally. In 1960, liberalism was ascendant; the problem, Goldwater wrote, was that conservatives seemed “unable to demonstrate the practical relevance” of their philosophy — free markets, limited government, a strong defense. Today, conservatism is ascendant, at least in name, with Republicans controlling both the legislative and the executive branches of the federal government. But it has been drained of precisely the principles Goldwater cherished, principles to which Flake very badly wants to return and for which he rebuilds a case. What, Flake wonders, would Goldwater have made of a Republican commander in chief who threatens to dismantle free trade agreements, undermines his own intelligence agencies and cozies up to autocrats?

Flake doesn’t take much of a stab at explaining why a significant portion of the electorate came to embrace such a presidential candidate. But the senator does try to explain why his fellow conservatives did, tracing the winding path of how “gamesmanship replaced statesmanship” in Washington. Among the many culprits: redistricting, the roaring lobbying industry and Gingrich, whom he considers the Typhoid Mary of today’s politics-of-personal-destruction epidemic. In exchange for control of the executive branch, Flake argues, congressional Republicans turned a blind eye to an unstable figure who put American institutions and values at risk. “If this was our Faustian bargain,” he writes, “then it was not worth it.”

This book will no doubt make Flake the baron of the rubber-chicken-dinner circuit, should he want the title, and a momentary darling of the left. (Not that the left shares anything in common with him politically. His politics are basically anathema to the left.) And “Conscience of a Conservative” has an undeniable rhetorical power — it is fluid, well written, mature in tone. But Flake also has the material power to change things. How reconcilable are his words with his deeds?

In the Senate, Flake has shown himself to be a pleasant fellow of integrity. He tweeted warmhearted congratulations to his friend Tim Kaine when Hillary Clinton selected him as her running mate; he condemned the “lock her up” chants at Trump rallies; he worked on the bipartisan Senate immigration bill in 2013. In his book, he says outright that he never voted for Trump. A recent essay in The Atlantic by McKay Coppins gives a good window into his character. Growing up on an Arizona cattle ranch in a Mormon family of 13 certainly helps build one.

But Flake has also cast most of his votes in favor of Trump’s policies. Just last week, he voted for the bill to repeal Obamacare without replacing it, and then he voted for the hastily assembled “skinny repeal.”

On that point, he seems to be at odds with his book, in which he specifically cautions Republicans against engineering a sloppy repeal of Obamacare behind closed doors. “Legislation executed without hearings and written by only one side is always a bad idea, regardless of who does it,” he writes.