Conservatism Vs. The Right

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0:00:07.6 Trevor Burrus: Welcome to Free Thoughts, I’m Trevor Burrus. Joining me today is Matthew Continetti, Senior Fellow and the Patrick and Charlene Neal Chair in American Prosperity at the American Enterprise Institute. He was also the founding editor and editor-​in-​chief of the Washington Free Beacon. Previously, he was opinion editor at The Weekly Standard. His new book is, The Right: The Hundred-​Year War for American Conservatism. Welcome to Free Thoughts, Matthew.

0:00:29.3 Matthew Continetti: Thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.

0:00:33.7 Trevor Burrus: Your book walks through the 100-​year history of American conservatism, but when I saw the title and I opened it up, it begins with Warren G. Harding essentially, but I thought it would begin with Roosevelt, with Theodore Roosevelt. Why didn’t you start with him?

0:00:50.7 Matthew Continetti: The main reason I started with Harding and not Theodore Roosevelt was Harding and Harding’s Vice President and then successor, Calvin Coolidge, really defined themselves against progressivism. And Roosevelt, while he certainly belonged in some ways on the right, especially during his earlier years, by the time he runs for president in 1912 in the famous election, he’s definitely associating with the philosophy of progressivism. And so for me, the one thread in my story is that the American right and specifically the American Conservative Movement has always been critical of the progressive philosophy, the idea of expertise, bureaucratic management, the federal government is the agency of social change and economic uplift. And for that reason, it was just easier for me as a writer to begin with Harding and Coolidge, where they’re kind of coming out of the progressive era after Woodrow Wilson in establishing what Harding called normalcy. Coolidge and Harding both called Americanism rather than having to explain Teddy and all of his idiosyncrasies.

0:02:22.5 Trevor Burrus: Oh, the reason I ask is, you could of course started anywhere, but there does seem to be a current of Teddy Roosevelt’s thought that doesn’t ever completely leave the right to American conservatism, and now you see it again with like, say Josh Hawley, of whom Teddy Roosevelt is his idol, that there is a desire to use government for positive aims, to crack down on businesses, so that thing never goes away. You see some of it in Eisenhower, you see some of it in Nixon. So there are parts of Teddy Roosevelt’s philosophy, maybe not by 1912, with the famous tripartite election, but parts of his philosophy that still are in conservatism arguably.

0:03:04.9 Matthew Continetti: Yeah, if you look at Roosevelt’s famous speech, The New Nationalism, that is definitely an important text for Senator Hawley, but I think it’s important to recognize that Senator Hawley now defines himself against much of what the conservative movement stood for, for many decades. And so what I wanted to do was really tell the story of the conservative movement, which most people associate with the Cold War and the post World War II era. What I found though is that in order to tell the story in the full and around, I had to begin earlier. I had to show where those conservatives were coming from, what they were responding to and then I had to show why FDR and the New Deal represented to them, such a huge break in American history. And for that reason, I began in the 1920s, so you’re right that Hawley definitely sees a lot of himself in Teddy Roosevelt, draws inspiration from Teddy, but he is more of a development that is set against the greater current that I talk about, and could be when I write the sequel, it could be that Hawley is much more important to the story and so I do need to kind of talk about Teddy’s looming shadow.

0:04:42.1 Trevor Burrus: Yeah, we’ll see.

0:04:42.3 Matthew Continetti: We’ll have to see what happens in the next 20 years.

[chuckle]

0:04:44.9 Trevor Burrus: Yeah. Do you make a distinction between conservatism and the right?

0:04:51.0 Matthew Continetti: I do. So this is why the book is called The Right, which is that I think that we hear American conservatism. We think Barry Goldwater, we think Ronald Reagan, William F. Buckley, Jr., George F. Will, but that’s actually a fairly limited circle of thinkers and ideas and institutions and there’s a much broader category that I call the right, which is composed of intellectuals, activists, groups who despite not sharing all of the ideas of American conservatism are nonetheless opposed to the left. So that’s kind of the distinction I make between this broad category of the right and in the smaller group of the American Conservative Movement. And I felt that in order to understand the American Conservative Movement better, it needed to be set against this larger backdrop, because that way we can understand that there are still people and figures who are anti-​liberal, they’re anti-​left, but they’re not quite the members of the conservative movement.

0:06:19.1 Trevor Burrus: And that of course I think has come a little bit more to the fore in the post-​Trump era that just opposing the left is what can be defining characteristic of being on the right, but why is that the inverse not true? I don’t think… If there was a book, a hypothetical book called The Left, with the story of that… ‘Cause that’s a huge group of people, from Marxists to Social Democrats to progressives. Do they, I mean, define themselves as against the right, or are they doing something different?

0:06:53.6 Matthew Continetti: That’s a great question. I think it actually kinda has to go to kind of the roots of ideological politics. In order for there to be a right, there needs to be a left. The left doesn’t need the right in the same way. So if you think about it, there was no Orthodox Judaism before there was Reformed Judaism. There was just Judaism. There was no Catholic Church before the Protestant Reformation, it was just the church, it was just Christianity. There was no conservatism before the French Revolution, because it was just the way things were. So you kinda need the left to establish the right, because… And this is a problem for the right, because the right often feels imprisoned by the left’s categories and always feels that it’s reacting to the left’s agenda. But this is a long-​standing dilemma on the right. For liberals, for the left, in fact, they so don’t require the right that they’re often puzzled that the right exists. [chuckle] What don’t you… Why aren’t you on our side? And they respond to the existence of the right in a couple of ways. They pathologize it, they accuse it of false consciousness, they say it’s just a group…

0:08:30.1 Matthew Continetti: They attack its motives. The right doesn’t have that luxury, ’cause the right is always responding to the left. The left does one thing and the right has to say, oh no, this is why you don’t wanna do it that way. It’s very rarely that the right is able to formulate a positive agenda of its own. In fact, that’s one of the criticisms Friedrich Hayek makes of European conservatism, of traditionalist conservatism. In his famous essay, “Why I’m not a conservative,” he says that it’s just purely reactive. To be like Hayek, what… Hayek calls himself in that essay a liberal, he also calls himself a Whig. He associates with James Madison, interestingly enough. He says, we have, we the Whigs or the Madisonians or the liberals, have principles, and those principles allow us to have a forward agenda. So you’re right to point out that relationship. It’s a very interesting one that I think often causes people on the right a lot of frustration. ‘Cause you know, you hear it all the time, I’m sure, it’s like, well, we’re always on defense. That’s kind of baked into the cake. If you’re a conservative, you’re always trying to defend something.

0:09:50.0 Trevor Burrus: Well, of course, libertarians have an uneasy relationship with the right, I think, and especially myself. But then where… We talked about, so what defines the left if it’s not defined by being antagonistic to the right? Is it defined by just pushing for certain types of social upheaval and social change essentially as a broad category?

0:10:15.4 Matthew Continetti: Well, look, I would say that if the roots of classical liberalism are in basically emancipation of the individual from basically corporate identities and also the establishment of this sphere of freedom from interference, the traditionalist right, as we know, is hostile to that. Right? Then there are more radical forms of leftism, which kind of stem from the idea that, well, freedom is not enough. To truly be free we need to be equal, and not just equal in opportunities or in rights, we need to be equal in condition. And that then requires some agency to make us equal. The agency of the state, usually. Right? And so if you look at the classical liberalism, that’s more about freedom, but when I think of the left I think more about the egalitarianism, the drive toward equality of condition, the drive to a race difference, because difference prevents the community of citizens.

0:11:57.5 Trevor Burrus: Well, that makes… So that’s not endorsing some sort of idea, which I think correctly not endorsing the idea that the right is for limited government in a general sense. Because it’s for a limited government maybe, if the left is defined, you kinda define it by what would be a domestic policy aim or at least internal social policy aim, but the right is not for limited government when it comes to say military and also when they decide to do things like… Well, schools are a good example. Like, running public schools are everything about using the power of government to determine what the public schools are going to teach, which has been in recent controversies, which is not necessarily indictment as someone who’s across the board for a limited government. But you didn’t mention many sort of foreign policy or individual rights aspects of your little kind of distinction there, which I found to be interesting.

0:12:54.9 Matthew Continetti: Well, I think maybe that’s because the foreign policy flows from these deeper ideas about the world. The traditionalist right wants to uphold the social order, it doesn’t really matter what social order that is. If you read the Israeli philosopher, Yoram Hazony’s new book, he’s like, “Well, America should have a Christian Polity because the majority of Americans are Christian, and if the majority of Pakistanis are Muslim, then it should be an Islamic polity,” right? This is one of the early criticisms of Russell Kirk, the great traditionalist conservative of the 20th century, where figures from Hayek to Walter Berns, Austronesian philosopher, to even Samuel Huntington, the political scientist at Harvard, said, this type of traditionalism is completely contextual. There’s no principle to it, it’s just, well, whatever social order we have we have to defend.

0:14:13.8 Matthew Continetti: And that means that it tends to want to have a sense of hierarchy, a preservation of long-​standing institutions such as the family, the church, the locality, and in foreign policy terms, it probably leads to kind of a very restrained foreign policy of the national interest. You’re not trying to go out. As John Quincy Adams says, “We’re not searching for monsters to destroy, we wanna preserve what we have.”

0:14:58.5 Matthew Continetti: That changes from a more foreign policy influenced by classical liberalism, say, would probably be a little bit more assertive in the world and that would run the… And I know that the Libertarians, of course, tend to have a more restrained foreign policy as well, but I do think that when you value a principle, you like to see it defended or you kinda have a sympathy to it abroad and that can run from the gamut from just like pursuit of the national interest to kind of a more Wilsonian, well, we need to change the world to reflect our principles. And then for the radical left too, I think there that the aims are very globalist in the sense that the revolution is not done until we’re all part of it. So yeah, I think the foreign policies reflect these deeper philosophical dispositions and attitudes toward the nature of the individual and his or her relation to the social world.

0:16:15.0 Trevor Burrus: One of the interesting things that I kind of picked up in the book and I do think… I like how you start with Harding, I think it’s a good decision. But for my whole life, I was born in 1980, it seemed to me that American conservatism, since the Reagan era and maybe a little bit before, is sort of a persecution movement, that you basically you have Reagan, you have William F. Buckley Jr., you have Russell Embos starting in the ’80s, you have… And even talk radio people in the early ’60s, they’re always saying, “Here is what they are not telling you.” And by they, they mean the media, Hollywood, the Mainstream media Hollywood, public schools and universities. And so they’re gonna tell you the secret truths that no one is telling you and then you develop this persecution complex, which Fox News is like, we’re gonna finally have our own network and the Conservatives still have it. And even though Fox News is the most popular cable news network, they still think that they are the outsiders and everyone is against them and they have secret truths. And the interesting thing is it seems like that has always been a little bit of a theme in American conservatism on the right. When FDR and the New Dealers take over, there’s this John, John T. Fleming and people saying, let me tell you the actual truth, so this sort of persecution and movement against what is perceived as the dominant culture.

0:17:38.5 Matthew Continetti: Right. And that’s why I think I felt I wanted to talk about the 1920s where that didn’t necessarily exist. It was a different dynamic where you had Harding and Coolidge and the Republican Party at its height, which is kind of, this is what America is, it’s laissez-​faire economics, with a high protective tariff but also limited government and we love the Constitution, and then you have the New Deal, and the New Deal changes everything. It changes the nature of that relationship between the citizen and the State, it changes the nature of the state, it centralizes power in Washington, DC, grows all these bureaucracies, concentrates authority within the executive, and the right is now on the outs and the sense of cultural and estrangement that you’re talking about, that’s present from the 1930s. What’s going on here? This is not us, this is not our country. We’re left out of government ’cause we’re not running the show, and by the way, the Republican party basically are smoking ruin, in the 1930s it takes forever to recover. We don’t have any access to the universities, universities have been taken over by progressives, they’ve been taken over by natural philosophers or materialist philosophers.

0:19:08.0 Matthew Continetti: The media is a little bit different. There’s conservative media. Even in the Hearst first papers, the Cornet court papers hated Roosevelt, but Roosevelt is the dominant force. So it’s the sense of exile that’s present, we’re on the outs, right? And so you get to the point where in 1950 the famous lament, it’s actually a lament of the literary critic, Lionel Trilling, where he says in the United States there are no conservative ideas in general circulation, right? So conservatives feel like they’re just not included, and you’re absolutely right to suggest that that continues today even… And I often want to tell my friends, the Conservatives or on the right, it’s like, “Guys, it’s not as bad as you think.” Compare the situation to 1964. Barry Goldwater runs for president, he becomes a Republican nominee, the first conservative nominee of the Republican Party since 1936. There’s no Fox News, there is no talk radio. You have the… Clarence Manion has a show, but it’s not what it is today. There’s no real conservative publishing. National Review is nine years old. And then you look at the situation today: You have a conservative media, you have conservative publishing, you have talk radio, you have conservative institutions, you have the Republican Party. It still has conservative elements, even though it’s gone in a much more MAGA, or now even ultra-​MAGA direction, right?

0:20:53.8 Matthew Continetti: But yet that sense of kind of alienation is present. And then look at the school, look at the schools and it’s the same institutes institutions you mentioned: The schools, the media, the entertainment industry, and they’re saying, “Where are we? We’re not seen. We’re losing.”

0:21:08.4 Trevor Burrus: I think that’s one reason that it can create… Persecution complexes in general can create that bad thinking. I think you have to be aware if you have such a persecution complex. But it also gets to the point for some people, and especially in the MAGA sphere and some of the crazy ideas we’re dealing with today, that it kinda seeps over to the point where you say, “Well, they always lied to me. They never told me the truth, and so I’m now presuming that they’re lying. And they’re, the groups that we’re talking about, some sort of amorphous ‘they’, they’re lying to you” and then leading to, I think, very bad thinking. But I think that even happened… Like Father Coughlin, you talk about, he led people to some very bad thinking and different figures and different time, by participating in this sort of persecution complex.

0:21:57.9 Matthew Continetti: I think conspiracy theory, which is what you’re referring to there, is a constant danger for the right. Now, people have asked me, as I talk about the book, they say, “Well, is it just the right that has conspiracy theories?” And then I say, “No.” I think that the JFK assassination theory, it’s kind of associated with the left. The idea that the CIA was pumping drugs into the inner cities in order to create the crime wave of the ’80s, that’s a conspiracy theory of the left. Anti-​Semitism, of course, is a giant conspiracy theory that has expressions left and right. So it’s not that conspiracy theory is limited to the right, but it is, I think, a constant temptation of the right precisely because conservatives have felt themselves outside since the New Deal. They’re outside, we don’t… It’s like the talk about the deep state, right? Well, we don’t control the bureaucracies, we’re not in charge. Someone else is in charge. The schools, what’s happened? Now, I think sometimes when they make these points, they’re onto something. [chuckle] Clearly their ideas have not penetrated the public school system. But the danger, as you suggest, is going from there to just kind of cockamamie ideas, or another danger, which is to say, “Well, things are so bad. Things are so apocalyptic, we need to take emergency measures or instill authority into some type of demagogic leader.

0:23:36.7 Trevor Burrus: Yeah. And that kinda gets into another theme of the book, which is the populism versus… I’ll just call it principlism of a sort, meaning ideas as this… The party of ideas kind of situation. But then this populism creeps in, and you point out that it’s not like Donald Trump discovered conservative populism in 2015, right?

0:24:00.0 Matthew Continetti: [chuckle] Right.

0:24:02.0 Trevor Burrus: ‘Cause if you’re just sort of a Reagan-​era person and you think that the conservatives actually believe in something, free markets, free trade, things like this, you realize that that’s not always the case. Sometimes the rabble-​rousing comes in against the left, as you say, against the elites, against the left, and just riles up the masses to be just against something.

0:24:23.4 Matthew Continetti: Yeah. One of the reasons that I really wrote this book was to make this point, that not only is populism not new to America, it’s been there since the beginning, but right-​wing populism is not new either. And I’ve spent a lot of effort trying to trace this movement over time and I think you can see it beginning with the McCarthy era. I think you can see it through the era of George Wallace in the ’60s and ’70s and the attraction of many on the right to Wallace. You see it with Pat Buchanan after the Cold War in the 1990s and then, of course, its most successful variant, so to speak, was Donald Trump, because unlike those other populist leaders, Trump not only won the Republican nomination for President, he ended up winning the presidency. And once you become President, you imprint yourself, not only on the world but also on your political party and the movements associated with it. And I often think that even if Trump had won the nomination in 2016, had he lost the general election, the Republican Party and the Conservative movement might be in a very different place than it is today.

0:25:50.9 Trevor Burrus: Is Reagan a blip in your story in the sense… Well, on one level he is, because he is a kind of generation defining president in a way that other presidents… I mean, it’s 40 years after he was elected and we’re still talking about him consistently, which I think that… I’m thinking about, say, 1922, did they spend a lot of time talking about Garfield and Chester Alan Arthur in 1922? And I don’t think they did. And Reagan comes in and he says, from Cato standpoint, my standpoint, one of his sort of famous quotes is, “Libertarianism is the heart of conservatism and that this is… ” He’s got ideas and he’s governing not based on populism and he’s going to be a transformative President we still talk about. Is it kind of that we have the Reagan era and then now we’re probably in the Trump era that just signals the end of the Reagan era?

0:26:44.3 Matthew Continetti: Yeah, it’s a great question. I mean, just to your point about consequential presidents, there’s really only one other president of the 20th century who we refer to as much as Reagan, and that’s FDR. And I think they kind of… They’re the two poles of the 20th century in a lot of ways. Reagan is a unique figure and when you set him against this backdrop of 100 years, his novelty kind of becomes more visible. It’s not just the principle and also the constancy of the principle. I have quotes from him in the 1940s that are very much like the quotes that he gave when he left the office in 1989. It’s also the way that he was able to act as an ecumenical figure. Basically everyone on the right wanted to be associated with Reagan or felt that he was kind of on their side and yet he had his own distinct approach.

0:27:57.0 Matthew Continetti: He could appeal to populists, he could appeal to the religious right, he could appeal to Neo-​conservatives and kind of a love-​hate relationship, he could appeal to libertarians too. But he appealed to all these groups. He also had a way about him, which was unique among conservative leaders, which is to say he was happy, he smiled, he had a sense of humor, he was self-​contained. One of his aides, John Sears, who managed his campaigns in the ’70s and ’80s, he said that Reagan had negative capability, which is a literary term, but what Sears meant is that Reagan just kind of like was immune to criticism. He was aware of it and anyone who reads his diaries knows, he paid attention, but it just… He was unflappable. So a very, like Liam Neeson in Taken, particular set of skills Reagan had, and they’re definitely unique when you compare them with some of the other major figures on the right in my history.

0:29:22.1 Trevor Burrus: We mentioned it a couple of times, and you talk about in the book that the right… This is about the American right, not the right in other countries, but do you see there’s at least some things in common with parts of the American right because of say… Well, in international, Europe, for example, or South America, ’cause with Trump, I’ve always said that Trump seemed to kind of turn the American right into what the right is in most other countries, which is populist, nationalist and traditionalist, whatever that means within the country. And many of my European friends were the ones who were the least surprised that Trump won, ’cause they saw him come up and they said, “Yeah, we’ve seen these people before. You thought that the conservative or the right was standing up for free markets and limited government, but really it’s just standing for traditionalism, nativism and populism.” So are there lessons we can learn from other right wings in other countries?

0:30:22.1 Matthew Continetti: My Israeli friends told me the same thing during the Trump presidency. They were always like, “Matt, we don’t understand why Americans are so all riled up about him, he’s like every… You should see some of our Israeli right-​wing politicians.” It’s a very good way of putting it. I do think that for the post-​war, post-​World War II, American Conservative movement, that movement drew on certainly some European thinkers, typically émigrés, so drew from the Austrian school, drew from Leo Strauss and his ideas and also had connections to British conservatism, long-​standing connections. And of course, the interplay between Thatcher and Reagan was very important, and Thatcher even coming to power prior to Reagan, kind of a sign of where things were headed. You’re right to say that as the Republican Party has moved from Reaganism toward Trumpism, the Conservative movement, it seems, has also begun looking more and more outside the so-​called Anglosphere for inspiration. Now partly, there were ties between the Trump movement and the Brexit movement in England, but now of course, the right is fascinated by Hungary. You’ve had some more fringey folks openly supportive of Putin or some figure like Trump is actually kind of like Putin curious, like sympathy, friendly toward Putin, right?

0:32:19.4 Matthew Continetti: You have the phenomenon of CPEC Brazil in the Bolsonaro era. So it is an odd dynamic that the more nationalist the right has become in the United States, the more international it also is in trying to draw these connections between the Hungarian right or the Brazilian right or the Israeli right or the Indian right. The relationship between Trump and Modi was always of great interest to me because they were very similar figures in a lot of ways and they got along. So yes, I think there’s something to that. I lament the fact that the right is moving in this direction. I think that the conservative movement stood for a set of ideas that was rooted in philosophy, that was more than just, as you said, nationalism, populism, traditionalism. It had a framework that touched on all those aspects in some ways but also had a set of principles that could lead it to formulated plans and actually maybe even achieve something once it was in power. We see less of that now.

0:33:51.7 Trevor Burrus: Yes, and it’s interesting to try and think of what unites all of those regimes that you pointed out. And anti-​elitism seems to be maybe the biggest uniter in that, and that is their definition of what an elite is. Because they’re, of course, elites within their system but their definition of what an elite is within their country and a distaste for that, which is a running theme in American history before the founding, and of course in other countries’ histories that, maybe that’s all the right is, and in some sense not all, but that doesn’t mean free markets, it could… If the elites are against free markets, then maybe they’d be for free markets and it doesn’t necessarily mean isolationism, unless the leaders for some sort of non-​isolationist foreign policy, it’s just sort of standing against, which seems quite rudderless if you don’t give it more. And maybe that’s what you’re saying you’re afraid of, that the Trump-​ism is not moor, they were rudders to the conservative movement and now, and the right in general, and now there are fewer rudders to guide them with principles.

0:35:01.2 Matthew Continetti: Well, think about the Trump presidency for a second. He of course wins office on the basis of this national populist traditionalists right while also benefiting from, I think, the electorates distaste for Hillary Clinton, right? So he comes into power and there’s all this talk about what is…

0:35:24.6 Trevor Burrus: That is a very specific form of anti-​elitism too, just being anti Hillary Clinton…

0:35:27.4 Matthew Continetti: Yes, yeah. Well, it’s peculiar to one person.

0:35:30.6 Trevor Burrus: Exactly.

0:35:30.7 Matthew Continetti: Yeah, but it helped him become president by winning the electoral college. And yet, what were his most significant achievements? They were all based on long-​standing goals of the conservative movement. The tax reform, the judges, the deregulation, spending more on defense, these are things that are stand-​bys. He had to kinda see them through, I think, because he was afraid of losing what little support he… His coalition was so kinda, it was almost like a neutron star, so compact, you lose one part of it and then you’re totally done. But by the time that he had achieved those things, what was left? He didn’t start building that border wall until the final year of his presidency. What’s left was the anti-​elitism, the fights with Dr. Fauci, the going back and forth over the pandemic, “Liberate Michigan” one day, “We need to be cautious” the next day. I think you do need a set of ideas to shape and channel the populist rejection of expertise and elite opinion, otherwise the populists will just become more frustrated. ‘Cause I am sympathetic to the idea that experts in elites get it wrong a lot, or they’re not seeing what needs to be addressed, but if you don’t have answers to those questions of what to do about the problems, you’re just gonna get angrier, and I think we’ve seen that when the Republicans control just the House of Representatives during the Obama years. And I think we saw some of that in the Trump years as well.

0:37:43.7 Trevor Burrus: Of course. I have to ask, in your opinion, and maybe you’ll just turn it around to me, but are libertarians on the right?

0:37:52.8 Matthew Continetti: Yeah, this is the big conceptual dilemma. I would say that in the American context they are. In their criticisms of kind of the New Deal structure of government, the economic coercion that’s involved, the centralization of power, the magnification of the executive. And I think that they were on the right in the sense that they had, in many cases, shared goals as the conservative movement. But there are of course huge areas where these two movements diverge and the most important that I kind of get into in the book is on the issue of foreign policy, whereas the… I talk about that 1969 Young Americans for Freedom convention, which basically collapsed into a riot between the conservatives and the Libertarians over the issue of Vietnam foreign intervention. And of course, we see that played out as well during the W. Bush era where the Ron Paul Liberty Movement comes into being to criticize the war on terrorism and the invasion of Iraq. So I think it’s on foreign policy, where the conservatives and the Libertarians are the most distinct.

0:39:31.5 Trevor Burrus: Now you touch on this in many different areas and I think quite open about racism and nationalism because of course, there are racists on all sides of the political spectrum, but it does seem to be the case that as nationalism and traditionalism are, and anti-​elitism are a cornerstone of what the right is, then it’s more susceptible to racism because nationalism and racism are very easy to get intertwined with each other, at least on that level, than the left. And you’ve seen that, I think, in different things that identify themselves as of the right that definitely had have racist components to them. Or am I mischaracterizing? You don’t say that explicitly but I kind of see it in there.

0:40:19.3 Matthew Continetti: You can’t tell the story of America without talking about race. And so this book in a lot of ways is a work of American history because I’m telling the story of American politics from this angle over 100 years, and so it had to address the question of race. And I wanted to show the points where leaders on the right or leaders who the right, elements of the right welcomed and championed engage in racist behavior. And for me, the most painful example is that in the 1950s William F. Buckley Jr., wrote the editorials opposing the 1957 and 1959 Civil Rights Acts passed under Eisenhower and he did so in ways that we’re not talking about limited government and having a constitutional structure and the federal government really can’t interfere in the state police powers, he was using cultural arguments. And that’s something I felt I had to recognize in the book and that sometimes conservatives try to minimize or shy away from, but it is true. Many of these leaders I talk about, they recant their views later, but the fact that they were on the wrong side of the Civil Rights Act, of the Voting Rights Act, certainly of the Civil Right Act of the Eisenhower era, I think has always put a ceiling on the appeal of American conservatism. And I think that was an important point to make in the book as well.

0:42:24.0 Trevor Burrus: The interesting thing that was unclear to me getting into the last chapter and the conclusion is that, you tell the story and part of it is, as I said, it could have been a kind of full circle to some extent. When I saw the book, I’m like, “Okay, it’d be interesting to see how populism and ideas have gone back and forth in the history of the American Right.” And if you grew up in the Reagan era, it’s not always gonna be that way. Populists will come back and ideas will change and there’s sort of back and forth based on reaction to the left. That being said, that would just put Trump in context and just say, another example of another populist conservative coming up, like we’ve had many in the past. Or is it different? Is this different than before? Is what Trump has done, is what the ideas that he’s talking about, is the level of anger, is something different about this for the history of the American right than other times in the past that such things have come up?

0:43:24.8 Matthew Continetti: Well, I think it’s different in that Trump was president, Trump’s influence as a president really began to show itself when he started having the Matt Gaetzs and the Lauren Boeberts and the Marjorie Taylor Greenes of the world come out and they’re kind of mini Trumps, they are kind of the MAGA squad, which is the antithesis of the socialist squad that Alexandria Ocasio-​Cortez leads. You had Trump who has always embraced conspiracy theories, that’s how he really entered politics during the Obama years by embracing the birth of a conspiracy theory. So the guard rails that tried to push back against the growing fringes collapsed under Trump. I think social media plays a role in this as well. But ultimately, I think it’s leadership that counts a lot too and leadership validates certain ideas and certain tactics. And of course with Trump’s response to the election in 2020, a whole new set of norms was broken. That’s what makes it different. Now what I don’t know the answer to is eventually… Trump won’t be alive. [laughter] Eventually we all die. He’s got great genes, we know that. He tells that Dr. Ronnie told him that, but no one is immortal. He hasn’t figured that out yet.

0:45:13.3 Matthew Continetti: And the question to me is, when he is no longer able to exercise the role in the Republican Party that he has exercised since 2015 and that he wants to continue to exercise, I believe, what does that party look like? It’s obviously going to carry with it the legacy of the Trump years, the Trump era. And that means that it’s going to be more populist, it’s gonna be more nationalist, it’s gonna be more traditionalist. But will there be an opportunity for a new set of leaders to emerge? Will there be the opportunity for people who believe in a fusionism of libertarianism and traditionalism, the more classic conservative philosophy of the 20th century? Will we be able to kind of reassert ourselves? Will there be a willingness among Republican elected officials to think seriously about policy and governance, or will it just be reflexive collapse into culture war, into anti-​elitism and into kind of a disengagement from the world, that means we close up the borders, we close up trade, we try to reduce all of our commitments overseas? I don’t know the answer to that question, but I do know that one of the lessons in my books, my book is, is that it is an open question, because these tendencies have always been in circulation, they’ve always been jostling for supremacy.

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0:47:03.7 S3: Thanks for listening. If you enjoy Free Thoughts, make sure to rate and review us in Apple Podcasts or in your favorite podcast app. Free Thoughts is produced by Landry Ayres. If you’d like to learn more about libertarianism, visit us on the web at lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org.