Matthew Continetti on The Right
Matthew Continetti, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), talks about 'The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism.'
I recently sat down with Matthew Continetti, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), to chat about his new book, The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism. What follows is a lightly-edited transcript of a portion of that conversation:
ML: It took me a long time to realize that the brand of conservatism I knew my whole life (until about 2016) wasn’t the default norm. In a sense, what we're experiencing today with Donald Trump is actually a throwback to the Old Right before the Cold War.
MC: Oh, absolutely, and that's one reason why I began my book, The Right, in 1920. I thought it was important to present the prehistory of the American conservative movement, everything that happened prior to World War II, which is when most standard histories of the conservative movement begin. And what I found is that when you begin your story in 1921, with Warren Harding’s inauguration, and follow the American Right in the 1920s…you see a lot of similarities between the Republican Party of the 1920s and the Republican Party of the 2020s. And when you think about the party's reluctant attitude toward foreign intervention, when you think about the party's opposition to immigration, when you think about its attitude toward protectionism, you see many parallels between the GOP of that time and the GOP of our time. So I think you're right. By starting my story in 1920, I found that the Cold War conservatism, which shaped you and which shaped me early in my life, was unusual, in some respects, when set against the larger backdrop of the American Right over the last century.
ML: One of the things your book really makes clear is that the conservative movement—which I've always felt a part of and still do—has always been crazier and more racist than I thought. Were you shocked by some of what you discovered?
MC: I wouldn't say I was shocked, but I was dismayed by many things I found in my research, especially the blind spots of one of my heroes, William F. Buckley Jr, who later repudiated a lot of his views of the 1950s and early 1960s. But I think you're right to latch on to this theme in The Right, which is that the American right is not a monolith. There are many different groups competing with each other and against the Left over the past 100 years. And some of these groups are attracted to the fringe, and they're attracted to conspiracy theories, and they're attracted to strongmen, and for 100 years they've been this way. And one of the tensions in my book is between conservatives who want to present a package of ideas and policy initiatives that can can appeal to the broadest public [versus] other groups on the right that want to look inward—that are suspicious of all elites—and sometimes turn anti-American in their sentiments. This is a tension that runs throughout the history of the Right. And we can see how in the conservatism in which you and I came of age, those elements that were more conspiratorial that were fringier, that were more even contemptuous of modern America, had been cabined off... But that's no longer the case, and now that [brand of] conservatism, in which you and I came of age, is in retreat, and these other forces have a more dominant role in the coalition.
ML: I guess it was inevitable, right? It makes sense that once the Cold War ended, the glue holding the conservative movement together would begin to erode.
MC: I think that's a major part of it. The external threat that the Soviet Union and world communism presented not only was a unifying force on the Right, it was a unifying force on America at large, and in some ways it tied the Right to popular sentiment. The American public was anti-communist, and was concerned about national security. So it was drawn to the Right in ways that it hadn't been prior to the onset of the Cold War. I think another huge factor here is leadership. Both Buckley and Reagan, were able to encompass all the varieties of conservative even as they still held true to their principles. They were acknowledged leaders among the entire Right. Reagan leaves [office] in 1989, and then he leaves public life in 1994, when he discloses his Alzheimer's disease to the public. Buckley has a long retirement; he leaves the editorship of National Review in 1990... So he's gone, we lose him in the winter of 2008, so there's no unifying figure. And I think leadership is important. I think leaders define the alternatives. They set an agenda, and they set an example. And so a figure like Pat Buchanan or Ross Perot couldn't get into a position where they could set the agenda… [But then] Donald Trump won in 2016. And we say as conservatives “ideas have consequences,” but events have consequences, too. And by becoming president, Trump became the leader of the Republican Party. He redefined the conservative movement, and now he has set an example, which many of his followers emulate. And that is not the example that, say, Ronald Reagan set.
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