The Battle for the American Right
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This is honestly. I used to have a pretty clear idea of what the word liberal meant. It meant socially progressive, skeptical of big business and of war, on the side of the little guy. It meant fans of Whole Foods and Subarus and cities. I also used to have a good idea of what conservative meant, skeptical or at least cautious of rapid change, a believer in muscular foreign policy and free market capitalism, and

Fans of Brooks Brothers and Milton Friedman and the Constitution. But those labels, liberal and conservative, but also Republican and Democrat, are less and less meaningful right now because they contain less and less actual information. That's because we're living through a seismic political realignment. The parties and the political movements that fuel them are being dramatically redefined.

They're up for grabs now in ways that would have been unthinkable even two decades ago. Today, we're focusing on the right side of that divide, what the right or the conservative movement has meant historically, what it means today as it clearly faces a crossroads, and what it will look like five, ten, a hundred years from now. My guest is Matthew Continetti. He's the author of the new book, The Right, The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism.

Matt and I talk about Trump, of course, but more so we talk about whether or not Trump was a departure from conservatism or actually a return to something deeper in American history that the movements, elites, and gatekeepers had long kept to the periphery. We also talk about the gap between those elites and the base. And we talk about the emerging group known as the New Right and whether or not they and their vision represent the future of American politics. Stay with us.

Hey guys, Josh Hammer here, the host of America on Trial with Josh Hammer, a podcast for the First Podcast Network. Look, there are a lot of shows out there that are explaining the political news cycle, what's happening on the Hill, the this, the that.

There are no other shows that are cutting straight to the point when it comes to the unprecedented lawfare debilitating and affecting the 2024 presidential election. We do all of that every single day right here on America on Trial with Josh Hammer. Subscribe and download your episodes wherever you get your podcasts. It's America on Trial with Josh Hammer. Matthew Continetti, thank you so much for doing this. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

Okay, well, the left and the right to me feel more confusing now than they have in my entire lifetime. And I actually find myself shying away from even using those labels anymore because to be honest, I'm not even sure what they mean because they seem to be shifting in a radical way. And to me, the group that epitomizes this transformation is often being called the new right. So I wanted to start there with you.

Who is the new right? Who are the figures of this part of the conservative movement? And what exactly are they championing? Well, I think the way to talk about the new right is to understand them through the lens of the Trump election. We must break free from the petty politics of the past.

America is a nation of believers, dreamers, and strivers that is being led by a group of censors, critics, and cynics. When Donald Trump won the Republican nomination in 2016... No longer can we rely on those same people.

in the media and politics who will say anything to keep our rigged system in place. He brought to the fore a lot of groups within the American conservative movement and the broader American right who had been questioning

many of the principles of the mainstream American conservative movement. We will no longer accept politicians who are all talk and no action, constantly complaining, but never doing anything about it. So, for example, the figures associated with Patrick Buchanan. The establishment that has dominated the Congress for four decades is as ossified and out of touch with the American people

as a ruling class in the White House. Who had always been a critic of trade internationally, a critic of foreign intervention overseas, a critic of border policies that welcomed immigrants or didn't crack down on illegal immigration on the southern border. There is no substitute for a president who will fight.

We are losing industries like autos and steel. We have lost TVs, VCRs, radio. Where is the administration plan to make America first again in manufacturing by the year 2000? All those figures were drawn to the Trump phenomenon, and they became empowered when Trump won first the nomination and then the presidency. From this day forward, it's going to be only America first.

America first.

So that's one tier of what you might call the new right. There's another tier, which are figures who are kind of questioning of liberal democracy itself. The conservative movement of the past generation has crafted a very well-burnished portrait of America as inherently and as fundamentally the land of individual freedom. Figures like, say, political theorist at Notre Dame, Patrick Deneen. The depiction of America from the very outset is...

is told as a tale of an ever more perfected, but still more perfectable realm of individual liberty, especially in the domain of economic life and social life. Whose famous book, "Why Liberalism Failed," says that, you know, America is kind of headed for the rocks by design. It was promised to us that an ethos of live and let live would usher in a society of peace and prosperity.

But in fact, look around you. Because there's something about the philosophy of liberalism that makes America corrupt and doomed. We have in fact witnessed the exact opposite. A society that is increasingly divided between have and have-nots of all races, and one that is riven by a deepening division marked by growing violence.

especially because of the growing class and cultural divide that defines this country. And he's joined by other critics of Enlightenment liberalism, from the Israeli nationalist Yoram Hazony, also a political philosopher, to someone like Adrian Vermeule, the Harvard legal scholar, who espouses what he calls common good constitutionalism and a very Catholic approach.

approach to governance. So that's the second tier of thinkers primarily who are critics of what they call liberalism or liberal democracy or enlightenment liberalism. And then there's a third tier, Barry, and those are just the very online. Those are just kids, a lot of kids, a lot of young people in their 20s

who like to post memes, who kind of have a punk attitude toward their elders, including their elders in the conservative movement and in the Republican Party. And they too are attracted to not only the sort of ideas in those first two tiers, but in some cases, even more radical ones, even more ideas that are border, say, white nationalist sentiment.

I think many people won't have heard of Patrick Deneen or Adrian Vermeule or even Yoram Hazzoni, but I suspect that they will have heard the name Tucker Carlson. I wonder how you situate a figure like him, you know, far and away the most popular figure on cable news ever.

into how you're describing the new right? Well, Tucker, you know, has had a journey himself. He started off as a magazine journalist, actually at the same publication where I worked for many years, The Weekly Standard. We did not overlap. And then he went into television where he was hosted at Crossfire. Welcome back to Crossfire. We're talking to Jon Stewart, who was just lecturing us on our moral inferiority. Jon, you're bumming us out. Tell us, what do you think of the Bill O'Reilly vibrator story? Oh, I'm sorry. I don't.

Then he was canceled on CNN, and he went to Fox News, and he also started a website called The Daily Caller. And eventually, through kind of accident, as he, I think, would be the first to say, he wound up in the 8 p.m. slot on Fox.

What the others aren't covering, what the media is missing, and what America needs to know. When it comes to the issues impacting you, no one tells you the truth like Tucker. Tucker Carlson Tonight, premiering tonight only on Fox News Channel. And it's now the most watched cable news host. Good evening and welcome to Tucker Carlson Tonight. Happy Friday. A lot going on, but some big trends too. And you think about them, you often wonder what is going on.

And for quite some time now, we've wondered what's going on with congressional Republicans. A lot of nice people in the Republican Party. But the point of a political party is not to be nice, it's to represent the interests of its voters. That's the only reason political parties exist in the first place. There's no other reason to have them, except to represent their own voters.

Yet year after year, on issue after issue, the leadership of the Republican Party fails to represent its voters. And we're not guessing about that. We know what Republican voters care about. They tell pollsters all the time. And since they kept getting ignored in 2016, they elected Donald Trump just to make it incredibly clear what they cared about. If that wasn't a wake-up call, nothing would be.

And then nothing really changed. Tucker has become one of those critics of mainstream conservatism and the Republican establishment. He made this clear as early as 2016 when he penned an essay in Politico saying Donald Trump is rude, uncouth, and right.

And he was among the few people who counted as, say, conservative celebrities to really say Donald Trump was onto something. And he's used his position and the show to great ratings to really kind of promote the new right worldview, which is that basically America is in steep decline.

America is run by elites of both parties who are out of touch, who have actually in many cases a nefarious agenda and political correctness

is the weapon that these elites use to basically keep the rest of America down. And so he's always pushing the envelope in what can be said in order to infuriate the people in charge. He's also, I should say too, he also incorporates some of those Buchananite themes. He's very critical of American intervention and involvement overseas. He is a critic of U.S. immigration policy.

And maybe it doesn't bring in the protectionist stuff so much, but I think is definitely a critic of corporations, especially when they embrace woke politics. In the past two weeks, corporate America has rushed to consolidate its control over information and dissent in this country. We could give you countless examples of that. Here are a few.

The email delivery service MailChimp announced it is refusing to provide service, email, to the Northern Virginia Tea Party. Why? The company cites potential misinformation. Turns out the Tea Party had attempted to notify its members about a recount rally by email, but that's not allowed anymore. MailChimp banned them along with other conservative organizations. They're not allowed to use email. PayPal and Airbnb have done the same thing. They've taken out accounts belonging to conservatives because they don't like the message.

but the message they're sending is really simple. If you want to live a normal life here, send an email, transfer money, rent an apartment, you had better be on the right side. How is that different from what happens in China?

I think we see a lot of the ideas that you just laid out maybe most sharply in the candidacy and in the person of J.D. Vance. What we need in Washington is people who understand how the elites plunder this country and then blame us for it in the process.

We need people in Washington, D.C. who knows how the system works, who knows how to reform that system, and who can make this country better. And that's why I'm running to be your next U.S. Senator for the state of Ohio. Someone who, in 2016, author of Hillbilly Elegy, hugely best-selling book, you know, was slamming Trump. J.D. Vance, this is October 2016. He tweets right after the Access Hollywood incident, fellow Christians, everyone is watching us when we apologize for this man. Lord, help us.

And now is sort of more and more enthusiastically identified with the MAGA movement. Right. I mean, in 2016, J.D. Vance and Tucker Carlson were on opposite sides of the Trump question. And J.D. being a ferocious critic of Trump really through 2017, even after Donald Trump was elected president.

J.D. Vance is probably the most well-known political spokesman for this phenomenon where we are calling the new right. And if he wins the Senate seat in Ohio this November, which he's likely to do, I think he will be the new right's foremost champion in the Senate.

So J.D. Vance, of course, is someone whose background would suggest that he would be a Trump supporter. He grew up in dire circumstances of poverty and familial turbulence in Appalachia. He kind of rose through the ranks through hard work and joined the Marines. And he was at Yale Law School, wrote this bestseller. But he thought that Trump was offering basically what he called heroin or crack drugs.

solutions to the white working class from which Vance came. But he says he had a change of heart. And he says that he was pleased with the way that Donald Trump governed. That was the beginning of the change of heart. And then I think Vance looked at the pandemic year, the year 2020, in all of the various ways

social maladies that came out of that year. Not just the virus, but also the public health authorities' responses to the virus and their mixed messaging on the virus. Then, of course, the killing of George Floyd and the cultural revolution that came out of that. For all these reasons, Vance found himself in a position where he was very supportive of Trump. As he would say, he changed

And that led Trump to endorse him and I think made all the difference in his primary victory a few weeks ago. I'd love if we could kind of go issue by issue because if you really parse them out, you see distinct how different the consensus is among this sort of emergent group that we're calling the new right from what the conservative consensus was even a decade ago. So let's start with immigration. What's their view broadly speaking about immigration?

There's too much of it. The new right wants certainly to crack down on illegal immigration. Look, the illegal immigration problem is going to break this country if we allow it. It is devastating our economy. It's devastating our hospital and health care system. And it's devastating a lot of people here in Ohio who work with, who are affected by the drug problem.

build the wall on the southern border. We need to finish Trump's border wall. You said the eastern to the western part. Well, the eastern part should be the Gulf of Mexico and the western part should be San Diego. That's the border that we have with Mexico. That's where we have problems, especially in Arizona right now is where we have big, big problems with border security. But it's also drawn to revamping America's legal immigration system, first in America's approach to asylum and refugees.

And secondly, just America's approach to how we admit immigrants in general. For example, right now, America's immigration system runs on the basis of family reunification, right? So if you have a relative in, you kind of get to the head of the line. Many figures on the new right would like to not only switch to a skills-based immigration system, but also probably reduce the number of

entrance into the United States. So I say that the new right is extremely skeptical of immigration. How about the economy and trade? You know, I worked at the Wall Street Journal editorial page and

The motto of the editorial page, which was the standard bearer of the conservative intellectual movement, was free people, so very pro-immigration. And the second part of it was free market. But that's not really where the new right is. No, and of course the Wall Street Journal editorial page is one of their enemies. They get very angry at the Wall Street Journal editorial page. And many of their positions are the exact opposite of what the editorial page says.

So on trade, for example, this new right is interested in not only protecting American workers from competition, especially competition with China, but also the new right is interested in promoting what they call industrial policy. So that is a more expansive role for the state to

in subsidizing businesses, in subsidizing workers, in pouring money into research and development, kind of having what are called national champions, companies that have the blessings of government. And that speaks to a more general openness on the part of the new right to government-based solutions, which

as an American conservative from an earlier era, I would say is almost the antithesis of what the conservative movement stood for for much of the 20th century. I'm so sick of Republicans who say, well, we're just going to push back against the Biden agenda. Well, of course we're going to do that.

that. But what are we going to actually do for our voters? What are we going to do for the American people? There are a lot of problems out there, a lot of very serious problems. And we can't just sort of stick our flag in the mud and say we're against, we're against, we're against. We've got to be for stuff. We're for middle class people being able to raise a family and do it on a single income.

We're for the reindustrialization of this country. So we make more stuff in America. We build our own things. We don't have to rely on the communist Chinese to make our pharmaceutical products. We bring our fertilizer manufacturing back so the Russians can't cut off 10% of our fertilizer. Where do they fall on questions about gender and the family? Right. Well, this is where the social traditionalism of the new right really comes into view because

While there are some figures associated with the new right who are gay and lesbian, for the most part, this movement is very much concerned with preserving the traditional family, with upholding inherent codes of, you know, how we teach our children about sex and gender.

and just take a very traditional point of view towards all these questions. And you'll see that too in their embrace of, say, state laws that would prevent minors, for example, from engaging in a gender transition. So on sex and the family, the new right has a much more culturally traditionalist approach.

So, for example, the new state law in Florida that the left has framed as don't say gay, but the state, especially Ron DeSantis, the governor, is framing as protecting parental rights. That's something that the new right would champion. Oh, for sure. And the new right is very much supportive of Governor DeSantis. They see him as a potential inheritor.

of the Trump mantle. And they also very much like his combative approach to politics, his willingness to stand up against liberal... Disney, say. Disney or just the media or any kind of institution that in the new rights view has been captured by the cultural left.

Okay, I want to get later to the question of institutional capture because I think it's the thing that I'm most sympathetic to about their analysis and worldview. But just to stay on the issues for one last question, to me, it seems that foreign policy is where they depart most significantly from the old conservative consensus, right? For my entire upbringing...

Republicans were seen as the party of a strong, muscular foreign policy. So it was striking to me watching the debate stage in Ohio where J.D. Vance was arguing that not only should we not do a no-fly zone in Ukraine, which, okay, lots of Republicans believe that, but we should not be involved in Ukraine at all.

We should not be doing a no-fly zone. We should not be getting involved in Russia at all. It's not our problem. Doesn't mean you can't accept that there's great tragedy in Ukraine at a personal level. Doesn't mean you can't pray for Ukraine. We certainly have the last few weeks at church. But at the end of the day, it is not our job and it is not our business. Let's remember exactly what happened with Ukraine.

and compare that to what's happened in our own country. So congressional Republicans and Democrats refused to give Donald Trump $4 billion for a US border wall over four years, while fentanyl, illegal drugs, and tons of other problems poured into this country killing our citizens. They gave Joe Biden 14 billion for Ukraine in one week. That suggests some pretty messed up priorities.

Now, let's just also step back and recognize that Hunter Biden is a person who has gotten a ton of business relationships in that area of the world. Can you imagine the media howling if Don Jr. had made hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in Ukraine and then his father had started a war in that area of the country, at least it allowed his country to get more and more involved in a war in that area of the country at the

end of the day, we've got tons of problems here. The best thing that we can do to ensure the strength of our country is to focus on our own problems. You have to remember the same people who want to escalate in Ukraine are the same people who screwed up Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya. We should not be giving those people more power at the same time while our own country is suffering. How does this group view America's role on the world stage?

Well, in general, the new right is very skeptical of the idea that America should be the world's policeman, to put it lightly. Why is that? Well, part of it has to do with the new right's view of American decline. The sense that America is being run by idealist utopians who have no...

way of understanding that ends must be matched by means. So the new right would say that since the end of the Cold War, for example, American foreign policy has been driven by progressives who want to remake the world in the democratic image, but who have no

a clue how to do that or just what the costs would be. And so that makes them very skeptical to American intervention. And this is when I was saying that so much of the emergence of the new right is tied to the Trump phenomenon because

many of the figures on the new right, people who argued against the American war in Iraq in 2003, and of course Donald Trump when he was a candidate. Obviously the war in Iraq was a big fat mistake, all right? Told Jeb Bush at one of these debates that

Jeb's brother, George W., President Bush, had lied the country into war. You call it whatever you want. I want to tell you, they lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none, and they knew there were none. There were no weapons of mass destruction. Okay, all right. Governor Bush.

an anti-war trope typically associated with the left, but also very popular on the anti-war right. So this is a movement that was opposed to American intervention stemming from the 2003 Iraq conflict and that has kind of spread into other areas so that some of them, and this is where we get to an interesting split in the new right, but

Some of the new right is also, like J.D. Vance, extremely wary of American commitment to Ukraine and wants to basically not aid the Ukrainians and focus more on our own problems. Another group, though, the more nationalist group, they actually say, well, look, Ukraine is, after all, a sovereign nation, so maybe we should be against a big

a bigger nation invading a smaller one, right, if we're nationalists. And so that has led to actually a kind of split within this group, at least in the intellectual level. You don't really see that at the political level, but it is an interesting asterisk to it. I would say, too, that in the new right view, America has become so corrupted by liberals and liberalism

that it requires kind of a strongman to re-astert social traditionalism or to get the ship of state back on course. And so prior to the Ukraine invasion, you saw some elements of the new right

champion Vladimir Putin as a kind of global exemplar of nationalism and religious traditionalism as almost a model for how a state should be run. Right. I mean, just to put it crudely, I mean, the arguments seem to be, at least in Russia, they don't ask you about your pronouns. Yes. Many people like to say that, right? So for people who were really just disturbed at the direction the American culture was taking,

Putin represented a plausible alternative or the, you know, kind of more, say, democratic versions of Putin like Victor Orban or Marine Le Pen in France. But that talk has quieted down somewhat about Putin in the months since the invasion.

Fox News over the past few weeks has sort of been hammering the question, why are we giving $40 billion to Ukraine, a country thousands of miles away that has nothing to do with us, while in the meantime, you live in a country, Americans, where you can't even get baby formula. And to me, this is a microcosm of the broader message, which is your leaders, your elites, they don't care about you.

They care about other people, foreign immigrants, Ukrainians, themselves, the jet set, whatever, but they don't care about you. Right. I mean, and it's summed up in that slogan, America first, which has deep historical roots, but which was refurbished after the Cold War by Pat Buchanan. And then, of course, used as Donald Trump's slogan from 2015, even until today. Yeah.

The idea that America and American citizens need to come before all others is a very powerful one. Just on the $40 billion, I should say, it's a lot of money. And I remember during the Iraq War, the second Iraq War, as a reporter, when George W. Bush requested $87 billion to

for reconstruction and aid to Iraq in the fall of 2003. That was a huge controversy. And, of course, most of the opposition came from the Democrats at that time, showing you the role that partisanship plays in foreign policy, of course. But there are plenty of conservatives, too, who were skeptical, mainly because I think there's been a long-running debate

opposition to foreign aid in general on the part of the Republican Party and American conservatives. And we can clearly see that manifest itself in the opposition to what I believe is a very necessary infusion of $40 billion to Ukraine. So if we were to sum it up, this group is anti-elite,

They're anti-globalist in a lot of ways. They feel like they are giving voice and standing up for the people who have been left behind or even looked down on by people in power. They think the government should invest more in the lives of these people in a tangible way. And also because of the phenomenon of institutional capture, right?

That in the very same way that we shouldn't trust the New York Times, we also shouldn't trust the power of the American government because it's run by elites who are not really loyal, I think they would argue, to Trump.

regular Americans, but are in fact loyal to their own class, loyal to themselves, and really only care about enriching themselves and hoarding their power. Is that a sort of fair summary of their perspective? I think so. I think that's why the description national populism fits in pretty well. They're nationalists, that is, they are America first, and they're also anti-globalist in the sense that they are against

international institutions, against international economics, against international intervention. And they are populist, which is to say they are against the people in charge, the people running things. And in the minds of the new right, the people running things, even if they say they're Republicans or conservatives,

are in fact progressive and liberal and want to remake America into something that is antithetical to American traditions. This also gets to, I think, their view of the government. You know, it's interesting. You mentioned the decline of trust in institutions. It's absolutely the case that the new right is part of a

a majority in many cases of Americans who just don't have faith in any of our institutions from the media up through the government.

Yeah, I mean, I'm maybe not quite where they are. I don't think I am, but I'm one of those people. Right. Skeptical about our institutions. Right. And when it comes to government, you know, there's this idea that, well, the government could be used for good purposes, but this idea of the deep state or the unelected bureaucrats and judges are the obstacles to a America-first government, say. Right.

And so one of the priorities of the new right is to find ways of basically expunging many of the civil service or the bureaucrats or the judges who stand in the way of what they take to be a return to the idea of America first.

Okay. So Matt, you've spent your entire adult life, as far as I can tell, inside the conservative movement, inside some of the think tanks and the institutions and the magazines that really are the beating heart of what I always thought was conservatism. And you just wrote a book about the past hundred years of what we call the right. Right.

And what you argue in your book, among other things, is that many of the things that we've been talking about so far that we're calling the new right aren't actually new at all. So let's go back, if we can, to the 1920s, 100 years ago, which is where your book begins. What was the right then? And how did that movement contrast with...

what the left was then? Well, so I begin my book in the 1920s for a couple of reasons. And the first one was, it's in the 1920s when

progressivism, this idea that government should be run by experts, that the federal government should be involved in the economy in a regulatory capacity, that government programs were the way to improve the condition of everyday Americans. It was really in the 1920s that progressivism parted company with the Republican Party.

Up until the 1920s, this idea of progressivism, it kind of floated in and around both of our parties. And of course, a very famous Republican president, Theodore Roosevelt, was known as a progressive. But in the 1920s, the Republican Party basically said, no thanks to progressivism.

And that was because of the public reaction to the presidency of Woodrow Wilson. Woodrow Wilson, the original progressive in the White House, and whose policies had by the end of his second term led to an unpopular American involvement in the First World War, had led to hyperinflation at the end of that war, had led to

civil unrest because of the first Red Scare during and at the end of that war. The American people rejecting Wilson and progressivism in favor of Republican candidates who said that they were going to stand for

what President Warren Harding called normalcy, or what he and his successor, Calvin Coolidge, often called Americanism. So the right in the 1920s was basically the status quo. It stood for the way people had understood the American government to have worked, certainly since the Civil War, maybe even before that. It was nationalistic.

But it was also very wary of, say, entanglements like had led to America's entry into World War I. And so that's the second reason why I began my book in the 1920s, Barry, is that when you start there, you see that on issues such as war, immigration, and trade, the Republican Party of Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge resembles in some ways the Republican Party of Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis. Hmm.

I don't know if there's an answer to this, but I'm curious if back then there was such thing as an average Republican and an average Democrat. Who made up each of these parties? Because I think we have an incredibly potent stereotype for each today. Who were they then? Well, you know, in some ways, this is one of the differences between the two eras.

The Republican Party in the 1920s was a national party, but it was not strong at all in the South. And so it tended to be northern and midwestern bougie types, you know, the owners of the bank in your town, the country club Republicans. That idea stretches back to the 1920s. Whereas the Democrats, well, the Democrats were the party of the South. Right.

The Democrats were the party of the populists. They were the party of the great populist leader, William Jennings Bryan. And so in some ways, the parties have switched identities in terms of the person you might associate with the average partisan, even though at the kind of level of positions on some of these critical issues, the GOP then resembles the GOP now.

So if there's a war that's very clearly brewing in the right right now, when did that war begin and who were the sides of it at the start? So the subtitle of my book is The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism. And really what that means is a continuing struggle or competition and occasional cooperation between

between essentially the conservative intellectuals and the broader populist grassroots. And this has been going on, in my view, for a hundred years.

It's only been in the last, I'd say, 15 years or so that the battlefield has tilted decisively in favor of the populist grassroots. The men and women who are on the right, they are motivated by those issues of immigration, of war, of trade, their rejection of the idea that, you know, there should be like a go-slow approach to reforming some of our institutions. The suspicion of...

Republicans and Beltway conservatives as much as suspicion of Democrats and Beltway liberals. Just to give us a little perspective on where the right used to be and maybe where different factions inside it stood.

Just to go back to, you know, key moment in American history, where did the right stand on, say, entering World War II? Immigration. Like, what did it look like back then to be a Republican? Immigration was essentially closed off to the United States for about 40 years beginning in the 1920s in bills signed by Republican presidents. So the right had been skeptical of immigration for much of its history.

And when it came to World War II, the right was extremely skeptical of American entry. So I often think that when we talk about conservatives, we have to ask, you know, what are conservatives trying to defend? What are the institutions they're trying to conserve? Exactly. What are the institutions that they're trying to preserve?

And that's why I think in the 1920s, Harding and Coolidge didn't really think of themselves as conservative because, you know what, they were in charge of the institutions and they kind of had been since the post-Civil War era. The Republican Party had been the majority party. So there wasn't really anything to think about conserving. It just was. That's the way things were.

It's in 1932, with the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, that American government really changes in a way that the right disapproves of. And with the New Deal and with FDR's foreign policy, the right thinks of itself as attempting to conserve the pre-New Deal understandings of American government and American international involvement. So that the right really begins to think of itself as conservatively

during the 1930s and it's the conservatives who oppose roosevelt and oppose the new deal and it's the conservatives who oppose lend-lease who oppose american aid to great britain and the soviet union after the outbreak of world war ii now an institution like the america first committee

drew support from throughout the political spectrum. But there were many figures on the right who were associated with America First as well. So you could be a socialist and oppose American entry into World War II, but you could also be an American conservative and oppose entry into World War II. That was, in fact, the way that many Republicans at the time felt.

How does the Allies' victory in the war change the right's perspective on interventionism and foreign aid and foreign conflict? Well, you know, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941, America first basically closed up shop and the entire country mobilized, including people who had been skeptical of American involvement in the conflict.

It's after the war when the right's attitude toward the outside world begins to change. And it's not so much a result of America's victory in the war. It's the omnipresent threat of Soviet communism. The sense that America had fought in World War II and had not only emerged victorious, but the Soviet Union had emerged victorious too.

And that in fact the Soviet Union was growing in its power. And that the Soviet communist system had millions of sympathizers outside of its borders, including in intellectual circles in the United States or just members of the American Communist Party. The threat of communism and what it represented to the right, its materialism, its atheism, its totalitarianism,

really forced the American right to reconsider its approach to the outside world. And so...

You see a shift on the right from, say, Senator Robert Taft, who had been the leader of the Republicans, he was known as Mr. Republican, opposing the New Deal, opposing American entry into World War II, to someone like Barry Goldwater. I'll say so that all American people can hear that the only enemy of peace in the world is communism.

I don't care whether it's red Chinese communism or Russian communism or whose communism it is, it's communism. The Arizona senator, very critical of many New Deal programs.

but very anti-communist and a great believer that America had to be engaged overseas to defeat communism. We had to spend a lot of money. We needed to have a standing army. We needed to deploy our forces overseas. We needed to belong to the NATO alliance. We needed to have a trade system that would help enrich our allies in order to insulate them from the communist menace.

And that we would need to fight wars, perhaps even fight a nuclear war to ensure the success of America against the Soviet Union. So it's really communism, I think, that changed the American right and its approach to the world. That unified it. Absolutely. I mean, every single group on the right in the post-war era, whether you were libertarians, you know, believe in freedom.

as the ultimate political value, or you were traditionalists and you believed in order and culture and tradition, you still had a common foe in communism. And so while the extremes of those tendencies had minor critics of American foreign policy, the mainstream American conservative movement was united in its opposition to communism.

Matt, to me, one of the battles that you describe in your book, the kind of intramural fighting that maybe epitomizes the tension inside the conservative movement is the battle between the John Birch Society and the National Review founded by William F. Buckley.

Who is the John Birch Society? What do they stand for? And why was it and is it attractive to people? Well, John Birch was a Christian missionary who was killed by communist partisans in the Chinese Civil War from which emerged the People's Republic of China. And he became a martyr in the anti-communist pantheon.

John Birch commanded no armies, headed no government, converted no nation to his creed. But with his death and in his death, the battle lines were drawn in a struggle from which either humane civilization or godless communism must emerge, with one completely triumphant and the other completely destroyed. And the namesake of a society founded by a man named Robert Welch

The John Birch Society is a group of Americans who have voluntarily joined together

to combat more effectively the evil forces which now threaten our country, our lives, and our civilization. Who was a retired candy magnet when he founded the John Birch Society in the late 1950s. To prevail upon our fellow citizens to start pulling out of the deepening morass of collectivism and then climb up the mountain to higher levels

of individual freedom and responsibility than man has ever achieved before. The John Birch Society was a mass member organization. It drew millions of members, though it's hard to know how many members belonged to it because it was also a very secretive organization. It was also interesting in that it was a very top-down, compared with, say, the Tea Party, right, which was kind of a grassroots phenomenon.

There was obviously a grassroots component to the John Birch Society, but its message and its bylaws were all very much directed downward from Welch himself. And this is part of the problem because Welch, in addition to being an anti-communist, in addition to opposing the civil rights movement, he was a conspiracy theorist.

He believed that the reason the United States was losing ground to communism overseas was because, well, the communists were in charge. The communists in Washington planned it that way. He even went so far to say that President Eisenhower, Dwight Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces Europe, Supreme Commander NATO, President of the United States, popular, I like Ike, he was a communist.

So the John Birch Society presented a problem for the founders of the post-war American conservative movement, and it's a perennial problem in conservative politics. The problem is that many people who belonged to this mass membership organization were good people. They weren't crazy, and yet they still belonged to an organization that held these

conspiratorial, paranoid views. And so how do you disentangle conservatism from the reputational association with the John Birch Society that would allow conservatism to gain more adherence, who otherwise would just be alienated and repulsed by some of the things that the John Birch Society believed? This was a very difficult process that really occupied

the conservative movement for much of the late 1950s into the mid-1960s. So tell me about the showdown between the John Birch Society and the National Review specifically. Around the same time that the John Birch Society was founded, a few years earlier, a man named William F. Buckley Jr. had created a magazine called National Review. The European observer is entitled to believe on the basis of the evidence he reviews that

which, however much of it flows out of the submissive ghettos of many American universities. All America has come to terms with the 20th century of the determinists, but I suggest that his eyes are not properly focused... To serve as a platform for post-war conservative thought and eventually post-war conservative political involvement. In America, there are those who are dragging their feet, resisting, complaining...

hugging on tightly to the ancient moorings. What do they cling to? Among other things, the individual and the individual's role in history. They hope for the individual to survive the 20th century. They back their faith on the individual's resources guided by eternal light and venture to predict

In Conrad's words, that America will spit back at the gale, giving it howl for howl, and in the end will survive the convulsion and assert its mastery over the element. Buckley believed that in order for conservatism to enter the mainstream of American politics, it would have to be on guard against several things. The first thing was it would have to be opposed resolutely to anti-Semitism.

The second thing was it would have to be opposed resolutely to conspiracy theories. That any association with conspiracy theories would delegitimize conservatism in the eyes of the people to whom Buckley wanted to appeal. So you can see right there that the John Birch Society and its adherence to these conspiracy theories posed a threat to what Buckley was trying to achieve.

And so Buckley and other founders of the post-war conservative movement, including the writer Russell Kirk, met with Senator Barry Goldwater in the early 1960s to try to convince him that it was important to disassociate himself from the conservative movement.

from the John Birch Society. And it didn't go easily. Sometimes, you know, you would say, well, I'm not distancing myself from the membership of the society. I'm distancing myself from the leadership of the society.

Other times, people would end up defending the John Birch Society against what they thought were outrageous charges from the left. I think something that happens in politics today. This sounds deeply familiar. Yes, go ahead. And eventually the break is made when the John Birch Society turns against American involvement in Vietnam in 1965.

The Birchers basically said that America was on the wrong side of the war or that the American involvement in the war was part of the global communist conspiracy. That's when Buckley and National Review and...

conservative politicians, conservative movement politicians said, "Okay, it's enough, enough. You're not part of our movement anymore." So that was a long, that was several years. And I think the turn toward anti-Americanism on the part of the John Birch Society was critical because I think that turn may have delegitimized the organization's leadership, even among some of its own followers, right? People don't want to be anti-American at the end of the day.

I was feeling sad and kind of blue I didn't know what I was gonna do The communists was coming around They was in the air They was on the ground They was all over So I run down most hurriedly And joined the John Birch Society Got me a secret membership card Went back home to the yard Started looking on the sidewalk Under the hedges

Well, I got up in the morning, looked under my bed. I was looking every place for them gall darn reds. Looked behind the sink and under the floor. Looked in the glove compartment of my car. Couldn't find any. Looked behind the clothes, behind the chair, looking for them reds everywhere. Looked up my chimney hole, even deep down inside my toilet bowl. They got away. More with Matt Continetti on Reagan and why he thinks the new right is emerging right now. Stay with us.

So let's go to Reagan. How does he and his worldview come to dominate the right and the Republican Party so fully and so powerfully? Well, you know, Ronald Reagan was born in 1911. He lived a very long life. He didn't become a registered Republican until he was 51 years old. I have spent most of my life as a Democrat. I recently have seen fit to follow another course. I believe that the issues confronting us cross party lines.

Reagan becomes a Republican in the early 1960s. He has his debut nationwide in the televised address to Time for Choosing. We're at war with the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind in his long climb from the swamp to the stars. And it's been said if we lose that war and in so doing lose this way of freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment that those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening.

he is immediately recognized as a political powerhouse. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except the sovereign people, is still the newest and the most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. He himself had been a Roosevelt Truman Democrat.

And so he was able to speak the conservative language in a way that appealed to Democrats and independents as well. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves. Reagan was a firm believer in basically the power of the individual to shape his or her destiny.

And in his view, government had gone from a position of helping the individual achieve his or her destiny to a limitation, a constraint on individual flourishing. And communism was the greatest example of how the state could inhibit individual flourishing and development.

And so that was why Reagan had firmly been anti-communist while he was the president of the Screen Actors Guild. And his anti-communism, of course, stretched throughout his life into his presidency. Reagan also had a funny way of looking at politics. You know, he says famously in that 1964 speech, there is no left or right. You and I are told increasingly we have to choose between a left or right. Well, I'd like to suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There's only an up or down.

There's only up to the maximum of individual liberty consistent with law and order, or there's down to the antipetolitarianism and the squelching of the human spirit.

And this kind of gets at a different way of thinking about politics. He also, interestingly, said that he was the progressive, not the progressives. He thought that progressives or liberals were actually reactionaries. They were the ones who were so in love with these what he called 19th century ideas associated with Karl Marx and the democratic socialist tradition.

That it was someone like Reagan who truly wanted to liberate the individual and advance into what he called the creative society as opposed to LBJ's great society. So it wasn't just Reagan the person. It was also Reagan the communicator. And then it was the Reaganite ideas, I think, that made him different and unique and such an important figure in taking the conservative movement to the mountaintop, into Washington, D.C.,

Right. I mean, that is definitely how I grew up understanding Reagan, not just that he was the figurehead of the party, but that he was the man with the ideas that were the core of the American right. We are the leader of the free world, whether we want to be or not.

And therefore we are the only ones that can preserve the peace. I think about him lambasting Jimmy Carter for not spending enough on American defense, for not doing enough on the world stage. The extent to which this administration has eroded our margin of safety and allowed our defensive capability to decline in this country to the point that we are in danger and no longer can say we are second to none.

We are second to one, the Soviet Union. And I think he was really at his best when he talked about the pain that the average American worker was in. I stood in Youngstown, Ohio, in the great empty shell of what had been a steel mill not too long ago. 13,000 men unemployed. The steel mill is closed. This isn't a temporary layoff.

I found myself facing a middle-aged man. He said to me, and with such a longing in his voice, he said, "Can you tell me, do I have reason to hope? Can I hope that one day I can again provide for my family, take care of my children?" Wanting to give him an instant answer and say, "Yes, it can be solved immediately."

No, it can't be, but it can be solved. Yes, there is reason for hope in this country. This country has everything that it always had before, except the leadership in Washington that this country requires. And his solution was, you know, get government out of the way, of course. Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem. There isn't any problem we can't solve if government will give us the facts, tell us what needs to be done, and then get out of the way and let us have at it.

To me, that was the core of what I understood the right to be. But now I wonder if that actually is the right. Was the unity that I imagined around Reagan's ideas real? And if so, was it the result of

of him and his ideas, or was it the result of the fact of communism as the great unifying enemy? Well, some of it was just Reagan himself. He was such a masterful politician that basically every corner of the conservative movement and much of the grassroots populists

found something to like in him. And he was excellent at synthesizing all these strands of conservatism. So, you know, if you were a libertarian, of course, Reagan's anti-big government message appealed to you. If you were a defense hawk, you know, he was a very hawkish anti-communist.

If you were a populist, you know he famously opposed America's giving back the Panama Canal to Panama in the 1970s. So he had that issue for the populists. So he was a very ecumenical figure. There is no question, too, that the post-World War II American right saw big government as the enemy. So that big government not only squelched economic freedom...

but it also interfered with communities of faith. It also was hostile to social traditionalism. And after Reagan departs the stage, big government slowly recedes

as that common adversary and in its place is not big government, but the big guy. There's some big guy out there that is pressing you down, that is squelching your potential. And that, I think, speaks to this transition from when we're talking about big government to now we're talking about nationalist globalists, right? Who's the big

big guy out there, you know, that is keeping Americans down. It's not so much government we're arguing over anymore. It's culture. It's what does it mean to be an American? Who counts as an American? What should our view of American history be?

I want to talk about why the new right is so resonant with so many people I know right now. You know, one of the things I keep thinking about is Reagan promising hope to the workers struggling in Youngstown or in my hometown of Pittsburgh and promising that worker that things are going to get better. But let's be honest, like think about a lot of those towns, right?

things have gotten way worse, not better there. So yeah, the country got rich, but the factory worker in Youngstown, Ohio didn't. You used to be able to buy a home, raise children, even send them off to college working in a factory or as a truck driver, maybe even on a one family income. Now that's impossible. And so it's

Kind of easy, actually, for me to understand why that phrase, make America great again, or why the promise to sort of look out for the people in this country that have been left behind in these hollowed out towns and cities is so attractive. Why do you think this message is so resonant?

Well, I think the first thing that populists are good at is pointing to issues that other people are ignoring. So if you take the example of the opioid epidemic, it wasn't really until 2016 that many conservatives in the Beltway were even aware that this was happening. It had been happening in the country for some years, especially in rural America. But it really wasn't the case until some of these senators running for president on the Republican side

began visiting these communities affected by the opioid academic, that they really noticed it. And they would send back to their wonks in D.C. saying, what about this? So I think populists are good at identifying issues that other people aren't talking about, especially elites aren't talking about. The other thing that populists are good at is pointing out when elites are getting things wrong.

And here I would look at the immigration issue, which was that George W. Bush began trying to reform America's immigration laws in his second term, despite opposition from within his own party. And really from 2006 to today, there's been a large grassroots opinion saying the border is broken.

There's something wrong with the system that seems to reward illegal migration. What are you doing about it? And the truth is no one has really found a good way to deal with the issue of the border. Trump was able to bottle it up by the end of his presidency, but then Biden undid it.

all of the Trump reforms. And so we have this problem again. So I look at populism as valuable in that it directs us to issues that are being ignored. And it also points to issues that are getting things wrong. And, you know, the conduct of the war in Iraq is another one where the populists were really beginning to say, what is, what is, what are we doing here? What is the purpose?

And it took a lot of effort to get the situation in Iraq to where it was when George W. left office. And then, of course, it blew up again during the Obama era. And it took effort during the Trump era to get the situation back under control. So the populists all the time saying, well, hold it, what's going on here? You know, they're helpful in that regard. So much, though, depends, Barry, on the leadership of

Leaders define the alternatives, they set the agenda, and they also act as an example to others. And when Reagan was there in Youngstown, he set a different example than many of our populist leaders do today. And I worry about that. But in terms of what they get right, I do think that they often identify important issues that people are leaving behind.

or dismissing. And I think if you look at some of our debates over political correctness and wokeism, it's the same thing, right? That the grassroots populists or the new right are the ones raising this issue, even while many liberal elites are trying to ignore it or suppress dissent. Well, one part of the appeal that I see in the new right, and again, friends that are drawn to it, is that they are fine.

The question presented in this primary was, do we want to have a border that protects our citizens? Do we want to ship our jobs to China or keep them right here in America for American workers and the American people? Do we want a Republican Party that stands for the donors who write checks to the Club for Growth? Or do we want a Republican Party for the people right here in Ohio? Ladies and gentlemen,

We just answered the question. It's not just that they're openly anti-woke, which of course is them going against the left, which is predictable, but it's striking how hard they go after the Republican Party, the establishment. We just did battle with the establishment right that has shipped American jobs overseas and flooded America's borders with illegal aliens and fentanyl.

We are going to do battle against an establishment left that thinks that people's jobs, that think that people's values, that think that people's basic livelihoods and sense of dignity in their own country is not something worth protecting. That is the battle we're about to fight, ladies and gentlemen, and this is the team. J.D. Vance, during his victory speech in Ohio, said that the American right

has shipped American jobs overseas, and floods America's borders with illegal aliens and fentanyl. He went on Tucker the night of his primary, and he called Karl Rove, Bush's right hand, who also happens to be a Fox News contributor, a slimeball.

You know the slimeball Karl Rove who shipped a lot of American jobs overseas, got rich in the process, and also sent a lot of Americans to die in stupid conflicts. And it's kind of, I mean, to someone like me, it's shocking. But I think one of the things that draws people, and maybe especially younger people to it, is they're just willing to say it. Sure. I mean, I think that people on the right have always liked fighters. So the question then is, well, what is it a reaction to? I think it's a reaction to...

Mitt Romney's loss in 2012, in all honesty. I think that people came out of that election feeling that the reason that Mitt Romney lost the presidency against Barack Obama was that he wasn't a fighter, that he played by these rules. And the signal moment was during the debate

where Candy Crowley, the CNN moderator, took Obama's side in a factual dispute. It took the president 14 days before he called the attack in Benghazi an act of terror. Get the transcript. He did, in fact, sir. So let me call it an act of terror. Can you say that a little louder, Candy? He did call it an act of terror. It did as...

And she was wrong. Yet Romney didn't raise his voice. Romney didn't go after the moderator. Romney just submitted to the referee's decision. And after that loss, I think many people on the right said, that's it. We're done with the referees. We're done with operating within the system. We need to look outside the system. And the disruptor came in the form of Donald Trump.

Now, if you had asked the people who were very critical of Mitt Romney in 2012 for, you know, being too establishment and not being tough enough, they probably wouldn't have thought that Donald Trump would be their guy. But by 2016, he was. And as I said, the role of leaders and setting an example, I think we would all agree that Donald Trump is a fighter. That, in fact, that's really all he does most of the time is pick fights and engage in fights.

And that has set an example for other Republican leaders and figures on the new right, such as J.D. Vance. And so I think it's slightly a caricature to say that, you know, the right wasn't fighting prior to Donald Trump. But I do think there's something there in this idea that, you know, the reason Mitt Romney lost and the reason that some Republicans lose is that they're not willing to challenge the

These institutions which pose as neutral but which are in fact on the left's side. That's right. And so the new model I think for the right is to find candidates who go after those institutions, who aren't afraid to punch back. And I think it goes to –

how do you punch back, right? And do you do it so that people say, you know what, you're fighting and you're winning? Or do you do it that you end up still losing and you go so far as to alienate people who are in the middle, who aren't on the right? That's the real question, I think. And you yourself are covered in mud in the gutter. Yeah, well, you know, a little bit of mud, I think a lot of these new right people wouldn't mind. But it's, yeah, it's a question of, you know,

do you fall on your face into the mud and trying to fight back, right? The fighting back has to be effective, I think. And it also has to be done in a way that just, you know, and this is related to winning or losing, doesn't alienate the middle, you know, and that I clearly believe was Donald Trump's problem in 2020. Okay, one more quick break, and we'll be back to talk about the criticism leveled at the new right, including accusations of fascism, and what Matt hopes for the conservative movement going forward.

Stay with us. All right, Matt, let's talk about some of the criticism of the new right and what you make of it.

I got to start with the F word, fascism, obviously. Now, there are some people with blue check marks on Twitter who will look at Joe Rogan or lots of other completely reasonable people and say, ah, they're a fascist. That's not who I'm talking about. There are some serious people who point to aspects of this movement and see glimmers of things that have historical echoes. Strongman leaders calling the media the enemy of the people.

But even more so than that, denying the outcome of democratic elections, using supporters, zealous supporters of the movement to incite them to violence. What do you make of that?

Criticism, overblown, accurate, fair? I think it depends on who and what we're talking about. So look, I mean, there are people who share the same views of the new right on political correctness, on woke stuff. They're not fascists, they're not racists. Then there are people who share some of these views, but that's only the start and they can go much farther.

There, I think the criticism has real traction. You know, we've been talking about the Republican candidate from Ohio, J.D. Vance. You know, J.D. Vance accepted the endorsement of Marjorie Taylor Greene. I want to introduce the newest member of Team Vance, my good friend, the congresswoman from Georgia, a woman who is not despairing about this country, but is fighting for it every day, Marjorie Taylor Greene. So there are different aspects to this movement, some of which are mainstream, some of which are just kind of commonsensical.

but others of which I think go to places that are just bad. Perhaps the figure other than Trump that's gotten the most attention is Tucker Carlson, right? And

Lots of people say lots of things about Tucker Carlson. The Times just ran, I think, a 20,000-word piece saying that his show was deeply racist and yoking him to ideas that apparently drove the most recent mass shooter, the one in Buffalo, ideas like the Great Replacement Theory. Is that fair in your view? It is not fair to blame Tucker Carlson for anything.

what happened in Buffalo. No, not to blame him for what happened in Buffalo. Let me be more specific. Is it fair to blame him for mainstreaming

certain ideas that in your view should be kept outside of the mainstream? Tucker Carlson has had figures appear on his show who are part of the resurgent paranoid right. He's had positions on foreign policy that are reminiscent of the pre-World War II right that fit into this nationalist paradigm. It's a disturbing trend. And there's clearly, I don't agree with

many of Tucker's positions. There's a question, though, about, you know, just how big a factor is Tucker Carlson? And he's certainly, you know, he's a national figure. He's a spokesman.

At the same time, his audience is large on cable, but it's not even network. So sometimes I have trouble just judging the impact. Well, I think one of the things that's interesting to me about him is how much he's appealing to younger viewers and younger viewers who don't even necessarily identify as right-wing, conservative, or Republican. Well, there you have how the nationalist ideology is often opposed to

both parties and opposed to the mainstreams of both parties in the sense of, you know, movement conservatism or Joe Biden liberalism. And there's no question that these ideas are finding real purchase among young people who tend to spend a lot of time online. So they're very much part of the online conversation. My question is always, you know, how do they filter through reality?

And are major politicians picking them up? Now, there's no question that a figure like J.D. Vance shares Tucker Carlson's worldview and has appeared on his show many times. And if he's elected to the Senate this November, will carry those views into the United States Senate where he'll be, you know, 1% of the Senate. So the question is...

Is the Republican Party going in a Tucker Carlson direction? I guess I give more weight at the end of the day to what the elected officials are saying than to what the talkers are saying. I know that's against interest since I'm a journalist, but I guess that's how I, yeah. But I think about, for example, you know, Ted Cruz had called January 6th, I think, an act of terrorism. Then he goes on Tucker Carlson. You never use words like,

Carelessly. And yet you called this a terror attack when by no definition was it a terror attack. That's a lie. You told that lie on purpose and I'm wondering why you did. What I was referring to are the limited number of people who engaged in violent attacks against police officers. Now I think you and I both agree that if you assault a police officer, you should go to jail.

I wasn't saying that the thousands of peaceful protesters supporting Donald Trump are somehow terrorists. I wasn't saying the millions of patriots across the country supporting President Trump are terrorists. What you just said doesn't make sense. So if somebody assaults a cop, he should be charged and go to jail. I couldn't agree more. We have said that for years. But that person is still not a terrorist. And basically begs for Tucker's forgiveness as if Tucker has more power than him, way more power than him.

I have referred to people who violently assault police officers as terrorists. I've done so over and over and over again. If you look at all the assaults we've seen across the country, I've called that terrorism over and over again. That being said, Tucker, I agree with you. It was a mistake to say that yesterday and the reason...

So that tells me a lot about where power actually lies. It also tells you a lot about Ted Cruz. Sure. Because I don't think it worked. And I think that was kind of too clever by half. So you're right that there is a sense within conservative Republican legislators that, you know, you have to get right with Tucker Carlson. That's the way of getting right with the base. That's right. What does that mean for the future of the Republican Party is a question that

I can't answer. I just don't know how saleable that agenda is to the broader American public. My instinct tells me that it's not saleable at all, that Donald Trump never won the popular vote, that he lost both the popular and the electoral vote in 2020, that by the end of his presidency, Republicans had lost the House of Representatives, had lost the United States Senate.

Is that an effective political strategy? I would just say on the face of it, it's not. Well, one of the things that strikes me when you raise the John Birch Society is the fact that what ultimately sort of pushed them to the fringe was that other people inside the conservative movement successfully framed them as anti-American. When I hear some of the rhetoric coming out of the mouths of some of the key figures of the new right,

not just about how they talk about the decline of America, which, you know, I understand some of what they're saying there. But when I saw Trump, and I think this was probably the most infamous example, in that interview with Bill O'Reilly in 2017, where he said...

A lot of killers. We've got a lot of killers. Why, you think our country's so innocent? You think America's so innocent. I don't know of any government leaders that are killers in America. Well, take a look at what we've done, too. We've made a lot of mistakes. I've been against the war in Iraq from the beginning. Yeah, mistakes are different then. We've made a lot of mistakes, okay, but a lot of people were killed. The kind of criticism I used to hear from leftist professors at Columbia was all of a sudden coming out of the mouth of...

the president of the United States and the standard bearer of the Republican Party. Do you think that the new right risks falling into that same trap? That basically their message is so bearish on America, so sort of certain about American decline, that it actually risks coming off as sort of unpatriotic and fundamentally anti-American?

I do think that risk exists. I mean, if the pessimism is linked to a love for country, I think that's one thing. If you say, you know, things are getting pretty bad in America, but I love this country, and so here's my plan for how to fix it. I think voters will listen to you. If it's... The message is...

things are really bad at this country and there's nothing we can do about it. And, you know, except to make, to tear everything down and, you know, this country isn't really that good to begin with. And, you know, maybe we need to look at radically different systems of governance. I think the American voter will say, okay, you stay right there as I walk slowly away from you, you know, and make no sudden moves. So this is the question that faces all political movements is, you know,

Can they appeal to people outside their own limited circles? I think one danger for the new right is, as I've been saying, it's an extremely online tendency. It's a lot of people on Twitter. They retweet each other and they're talking to each other and they like posts by their friends and they all share the same enemies online. But eventually you have to look up from the keyboard or your phone

And American politics exists in the actual world, in the material world. And you have to make that transition. Now, look, J.D. Vance was able to do it in a Republican primary that he won actually pretty narrowly. And I'll be watching to see, you know, he hasn't really moderated his style at all in the weeks since winning that primary.

But will he feel that he needs to do it to win the seat in November? Maybe. I'll be watching that. Now, it's Ohio. Ohio's got him pretty red. So he might not have to moderate all that much. But I think if you're looking at the national scene, if you want to construct a national majority...

You're going to have to in order not to alienate the people who are independents or who don't consider themselves political, right? The question is, is that actually what the new right wants? Or does the new right just want to be just angry at America and what's happening? Or do they want to participate in a political coalition that is able to address the sources of this popular discontent? Okay, Matt, last question.

As a journalist, an author, and as a conservative yourself, maybe most importantly...

What are you hoping happens inside the right? I think that what I want for the right is a leader who is responsive to the populist energy coursing through this country and through the right, but who also recognizes that in order to achieve anything, he or she will have to find a way to modulate that energy, communicate in a way that does not alienate most of the country,

And also has actually an action plan that will tackle some of these huge issues. I guess I'm crossing my fingers that such a leader emerges because he or she hasn't shown up yet, in my view. And until that sort of leader does, who's able to be an ecumenical figure for all parts of the coalition, just as Reagan was...

I think that the right will have some rocky times ahead. It may still win elections. In fact, it looks on track to win a big election in November. But those elections will only result in frustration.

if the right doesn't have actually the ability to present an affirmative, proactive case for its worldview. It's funny, it strikes me as you say that, that those sentences could just as easily be coming out of the mouth of someone who identifies as a progressive or a liberal and wonders where their standard bearer is going to be. But that's a conversation for another day. Matthew Continetti, thank you so much. Thank you.

Thank you to Matt. And please go check out his new book. Again, it's called The Right, The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism. We have a link for you in the show notes. As always, thanks for listening. Please share with your friends and give us a rating on iTunes. See you next time.