Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - The Future of The Right - with Matthew Continetti

Episode Date: April 29, 2022

Should we be surprised that there seems to be a renewed by bi-partisan consensus in response to Putin’s war? Are we back in a Cold War posture, both in policy terms and in our politics? Speaking of today’s politics, what can the past few decades of Republican politics and conservative ideas tell us about 2022 and 2024? According to Matthew Continetti, quite a lot. Matt Continentti is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, founding editor of The Washington Free Beacon, and a columnist for Commentary Magazine. He’s also the author of several books. He has a new book just out called “The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism”. Order the book here: https://tinyurl.com/4wp6kdfw

Should we be surprised that there seems to be a renewed bipartisan consensus in response to aggression from Russia? Are we back in a Cold War posture both in policy terms and in our politics? And speaking of today's politics, what can the past few decades of Republican politics and conservative ideas tell us about 2022 and 2024? According to Matthew Continetti, quite a lot. These are two of some of the big questions we explore with Matt Continetti. Matt's a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He's founding editor of the Washington Free Beacon, and he's a columnist for Commentary Magazine. He's also the author of several books, and he's a new book just out called

The Right, The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism. This is Call Me Back. And I'm pleased to welcome back to the podcast my friend Matt Continetti from the American Enterprise Institute and the author of the just published, just released book, fabulous book called The Right, The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism, which I have been devouring. I am, if you have been shaped at all by conservative ideas and conservative politics, this book is like, it's a mixture of education, illumination, therapy. It serves as a good therapist. it's also kind of like candy because there's just a great color and great anecdotes in it, many of which I had forgotten about or had never heard of. So it's also, actually for a book like this, it's actually kind of like a fun read too. So I don't know if you've been hearing that from others too, Matt, but I want to jump into the book.

But thanks for joining the conversation again. Thanks for having me back, Dan. It's a pleasure to be here to talk about my book. All right. So before we talk about your book, and it actually is related to your book, I just want your reaction to the news and the sort of developing what I kind of see as trends in the news around the Russia-Ukraine war. Obviously, the human catastrophe is depressing and demoralizing. And I'm struck by the reaction back here in the United States. And what I mean by that is we have been being told for the last

number of years that America had entered this sort of isolationist moment or isolationist era, sort of a new version, a new bipartisan version of McGovern's America Come Home from 1972, and that America was really disengaged from the world. And then here you have a new land war in Europe, first one, at least on this scale, in some 70 years. And when you look at the public opinion research on the American reaction to Putin's invasion, there's kind of like a bipartisan consensus on being fully engaged in resisting Putin's aggression and rolling back this war. Now, to be clear, it's not public support for deploying U.S. troops and getting American forces directly, you know, in a kinetic situation with Russian forces. I'm not to suggest that.

But the degree to which if you look at polls in a number of these political Senate and House races, candidates on the ballot in 2022, support among Republicans, support among Democrats, support among independents. There's, again, varying degrees on what to do about it, but definitely a consensus that something must be done. And I feel like we're living through such polarized political times that we can't find the left and the right agreeing on anything, except maybe that the tough line on China and a tough line on big tech but that's it and then suddenly it kind of feels like we're back in cold war days where there's some kind of political consensus among the center left

and the center right on what to do about a threat from Moscow so you know you know, you have a whole chapter in the book about the role of the Cold War and American conservatism, and I want to get into that, but before we do, what is your reaction to this phenomenon? Should I be as surprised as I am, pleasantly surprised? I think you should be pleased. I think I would draw a line between the run-up to the invasion and the aftermath of the invasion. In the run-up to the invasion, many of the forces on the right that saw Vladimir Putin as a champion of traditional values, of religiosity against the cultural left were sympathetic to him. And you saw on the right arguments being made, justifying his belligerency, saying, well, you know, America is arming Ukraine. What is Putin supposed to do if you put missiles in Ukraine? If we had

missiles on Mexico, wouldn't America be concerned? You had rhetoric about Zelensky and the corrupt Ukrainian polity that didn't hardly mention the fact that Zelensky is a democratically elected leader and Putin is an autocrat. You had, I think, a widespread view that Putin wasn't going to invade, that all of this was brinkmanship, that he was simply trying to force a result, get Ukraine to pledge to never join NATO and the EU, maybe topple the Zelensky government without any actual military intervention. As soon as the invasion happened, those arguments faded away. And the right and the left in the main came around to the idea that Zelensky and Ukraine needed to be defended against this naked aggression.

So what's happening here? A few things. One is... Can I just jump in before? But you still had some provocateurs, at least on the extreme right, who even after the invasion were still, they were still trying to toe that line that, you know, what's our interest? It wasn't just a pre-invasion thing. For some, again, on the very extreme right, they were still playing that, like, why is this our, why should this be in our interest? You had, yeah, in the first weeks, you had some people saying, well, we should be more concerned about our border than the Ukrainian border. Right. But even that has died off. I don't really see that much in the discourse.

And I think it's because Americans' natural instinct is to defend the little guy against the bully. And anyone in their right mind can look at what happened here and say, this was an unprovoked assault. There's no reason that he invaded. The Ukrainians went out of their ways in the weeks before the invasion to downplay tensions, right? I think the second thing is that people are reminded of the importance of democracy. And if a democracy is facing an autocracy, Americans are going to side with freedom and democracy. That's still in our political tradition, thank God. And then there is, though, a reluctance, I think, to become more involved than we already are.

So yes, you're right. There are people on the right and the left saying we need to, I'm one of them, saying we need to send heavier weapons faster to help the Ukrainians. But there are very few voices calling for the establishment of a no-fly zone. Hardly anyone saying that America should commit ground troops, say, to enforce even a humanitarian safe harbor or corridor. So I am pleased with the reaction to this invasion and the realities of the world that the invasion highlights and reminds us of. But I would say that there is still a deep reluctance for America to become involved in a foreign conflict. Okay.

So I want to now segue to your book. And again, there's an entire chapter and elements in other chapters that deal with the role that global affairs and foreign policy and actually the Soviet threat played in the evolution of the conservative movement. But before we do that, I just want to set this conversation up for those of our listeners who aren't familiar with your book. Can you just top line, you know, take us to 1150 17th Street where the book opens in Washington, D.C.,

and why you wrote this book, what the impetus was, what the conceit of the book is, like, just summary what is this book about, and the conceit of the book is. Just summary what is this book about, and then I want to get into some specifics. Sure. I mean, so the book is called The Right, The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism. I've been researching and writing this book for about six years, from inception to publication.

And it is this history of the American right over the past century. And why did I write this book? Well, a couple reasons. One is I've been teaching this material to college students in various forums for about a decade. And I've never had a textbook that I could just work off of very easily. There are great books written about conservatism, but they either focus either on politics or on ideas, not both. And so what this book does is synthesize American politics and the intellectual life of the American right and put it all in one volume, told by someone who identifies as a conservative. The second thing I try to do in the book is most histories of the American conservative movement begin at the end of the Second World War. They carry on through the Goldwater nomination and defeat in 1964, and they culminate with

the rise of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and his presidency. I felt that that didn't tell the whole story, that I wanted to widen the scope of the narrative to include the prehistory of the American right, what the American right looked like prior to the onset of the Cold War in 1946, 1947, and then what the American right looked like after Reagan up till the present day. The book ends with Joe Biden's inauguration. So two years have elapsed since the conclusion of the narrative. When you do that, you see a very different picture of the American right, Dan. You see that in many ways, politically, the American right and the Republican party of today resembles pretty closely the American right and the Republican Party of today resembles pretty closely the American right

and the Republican Party of pre-New Deal America. And what you also find is that Reagan, Ronald Reagan, despite his historic importance and his consequential presidency, seems more like the exception in the history of the American right than the rule. And so one of the lessons of the book is that if we focus too much on Reagan, we may actually get a distorted picture of the American right. It's better to just view him as one character among many characters. And what is the—so you say today's right is a post-Reagan right that resembles the right of the early 30s, right? So can you describe what that right of the early 30s looked like?

Sure. So up through World War II, the American right was protectionist. It supported the tariff. And so we see today the Republican Party and the right think about industrial policy, think about decoupling our economy from China, supporting the Trump tariffs. The Republican Party and the right prior is wholeheartedly against illegal immigration and also seeks to have some reform of legal immigration as well. And then the Republican Party and the American right prior to World War II was non-interventionist, isolationist, didn't want to get involved

in Europe in particular, had a different attitude toward the Pacific. And that view was the dominant strain in Republican politics, Republican ideas. As a consequence of World War I and the fact that it was a Democratic president, Woodrow Wilson, who had plunged America into the great power competition in Europe. Presidents like Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, you know, defined themselves against that. And Republican leaders like Senator Robert Taft were very much against alliances, even NATO after the war, because they didn't want to become involved. And while, as we were just saying, Ukraine definitely shows that the right today, along with just the mainstream, is very supportive of a democracy under assault from a powerful autocracy, there's still, I think, this reluctance to become directly involved in that war or in any war on the American right today. So I like to say, even though Calvin Coolidge and Donald Trump are very different people, they have very different personalities,

they lead, I think, very similar parties. So now I want to talk about the role that the Cold War played in all of this because, I mean, you may say that Reagan was an outlier, but what led to Reagan was a multi-decade fight globally against communism that, as you write about, had a huge, that the right struggled with in terms of how to engage with it and then ultimately became definitional. Just speaking personally, this is the therapy part. So I was an intern on Capitol Hill in the early 90s.

It was 1990 or 91, yeah, for a Democratic congressman from Ohio, Ed Fian, from Ohio, 19th District. And when I was doing all this research to write legislative correspondence as an intern, it was like I was really grappling with a lot of issues around the Cold War and democratic resistance to policies that were held over, legacy policies of the Reagan administration from the Cold War. And I will say, as a—and I grew up in a democratic home, and you know i'm the son of a holocaust survivor and i'm i'm reading and studying about how much of the atrocities of the soviets you know the soviet union just the tens of millions of people that were killed in the soviet union not to mention those killed in eastern europe and china and cuba north korea and vietnam and cambodia a lot of by a lot of regimes created by the or supported by the Soviet Union,

according to Robert Conquest or Richard Pipe's total number of victims from communism was something like 100 million. So it made communism like the greatest catastrophe in human history on par, obviously, with Nazism. And that is what drew me to the Republican Party. And I'm sure I'm not the only one that was brought into Republican politics and conservative ideas via America in the world during the Cold War. So that's a little bit about how I first got involved.

But just how common was that kind of experience? I mean, obviously not being the child of a Holocaust survivor and how that makes you think about the world and totalitarianism may not be as common. But generally speaking, the idea that this was a bipolar world and America was on one side of it and we were at war and one party was shaping a war or Cold War strategy. Well, it was incredibly important. The threat of the Soviet Union caused a few major changes on the American right. The first is that the right switches its foreign policy from one of disengagement with the world to one of engagement. So the right, because it perceives

this threat of global communism in the Soviet Union, begins supporting alliances like NATO, begins supporting forward deployment of US forces, stationing them throughout the world as tripwires or as deterrents, supports military intervention in Korea, Vietnam, elsewhere, as well as support for proxy forces to fight communists, supports open trade in the belief that an open trading system will enrich our democratic allies, many of whose economies were devastated by the Second World War, and that when they grew rich, that would immunize them against communism, right? So there was an engagement in the world and an openness to trade that distinguished Cold War

American right. And the second thing that happened was anti-communism provided the glue for various factions on the right who normally wouldn't get along. And so you have, just to take the two major factions, you have libertarians who worry about individual freedom and the power of the state and economic freedom. And then you have traditionalists who worry about individual virtue, the stability of social institutions like the family, like the church, like the community, they dislike big government and communist government because it goes after those institutions. It tries to re-educate people to transform the family, to transform individuals. It clearly goes against the church. Soviet Union was an atheist society. Marxist-Leninism is an atheist philosophy.

So while normally libertarians and traditionalists wouldn't get together, they both now have a common enemy, which they oppose for different reasons, but those reasons are insignificant when compared with the larger threat. And the third thing that happens is anti-communism not only provides a bridge between the traditionalists and the libertarians, it provides a World War II, which ruined the idea of isolationism. But now with an engaged foreign policy that was anti-communist, the right could reconnect with the American public, which was also very anti-communist. So this really laid the foundations, as you say, for the American right for a good part of my narrative for about 60, 70 years. So William F. Buckley is an extremely large character in your decades in these debates and in terms of his influence on the right. And he's like, yeah, he's he's it's like you can't get enough of Buckley when you read your book. So can you, for listeners that aren't familiar beyond just a very, you know, surface

level knowledge of Buckley and, you know, and his affiliations, can you talk about a little bit about his history and why he played such an instrumental role? Sure. I could talk a lot about it, but I'll try to be pithy. William F. Buckley Jr. was born in 1925. He died in February in 1955, was its editor for 35 years, and then still a large part of the magazine up until his death. He was a syndicated columnist. In fact, he died at his desk working on his next column in 2008. And he was a television personality, which may have been the key to his appeal. He hosted one of the longest running shows on television, Firing Line, which was a debate slash interview show about politics and world affairs, which ironically, when you consider

Buckley's small government leanings, appeared on PBS, appeared on the public broadcasting system. And he wrote many books. He was a prolific author. He was an ecumenical figure on the American right. And he was both very free market and a devout Catholic. And he was a rock-ribbed anti-communist. So he exemplified all the various characteristics of this Cold War conservatism. And moreover, I call him an insider outsider, which is that Buckley came from a wealthy family. He went to Yale. He attended boarding school prior to that. Yeah, quintessential elite. Yeah, lived in his house on Wallach's Point in Stanford and then had his masonette on Park Avenue in Manhattan, a quintessential elite. And yet he

was an outsider. Why was he an outsider? Well, he was Catholic in a world that was still very much dominated by Protestants. And he had these beliefs, these conservative beliefs, which when he came of age in the 1950s were considered very out of the mainstream, very eccentric. And yet it was through his work and his charisma and his ability to charm and to use humor to poke holes in his opponents positions, that he brought those ideas into the center of American politics and help lay the groundwork, including the institutional groundwork for much of the American right in the 20th century. And in that sense, he also played this role of sort of adjudicator-in-chief on the right in terms of determining who should play an influential role, who shouldn't, what ideas should be encouraged, and what ideas were unacceptable or intolerable.

He, through these institutions and through his own voice and his public intellectualism and advocacy, set up guardrails around the conservative movement so it didn't go totally crazy. So I guess I have two questions. One, is your sense that he anticipated that the right needed that kind of role and he was going to fill it or create it? And then secondly, who plays that role today in American conservatism? Well, the second question is easy to answer. The answer is no one. Right. It was a T.O.

Yeah, that's a layup. The first question, a little bit more harder to discern the answer to. The thing about Buckley, even as a kid, he grew up in a very large family. He was homeschooled for much of his early education. He was kind of a dynamo even as a child. And then when he gets to Yale,

he gets to work in the debating team. He goes to the Yale Daily News, eventually becomes chairman. He's always at the center of things. That's just who he was, constantly in motion. One of his books, one of his memoirs is called Cruising Speed. He's always going. So he was probably going to end up in some It's an amazing book. I mean, it just captures the craziness of his life. I mean, just hour to hour, day to day. Oh, it's a great book. It's a book about being William F. Buckley Jr., which a lot of people wanted to be, right? So he was an aspirational figure and he kind of

knew this. People looked at him and they saw his style and he saw the way he carried his learning, and his manner, his eloquence, and a lot of young people wanted to be like him. And so he writes this book, actually one of two books that's about just being him. And it's quite good. So he was going to be at the center of things, I think. But then, really, the answer to your question is he also understood that at that period in the mid-20th century, he needed his ideas to be taken seriously and not be dismissed out of hand by Americans as kind of kooky or weird or just totally off the wall. So that's why he began building these fences around his definition of American conservatism, saying that you couldn't be a Buckleyite and be a conspiracy theorist.

You couldn't be a Buckleyite and be an anti-Semite. You couldn't be a Buckleyite and be a fanatic, whether that was a fanatical libertarian or a fanatical traditionalist. And you couldn't be a fanatic, whether that was a fanatical libertarian or a fanatical traditionalist. And you couldn't be a buccalier and just be an out-and-right racist, though I talk at length in the book about his position on civil rights and the problems that it caused the conservative movement. Nonetheless... And you're critical of him on that. I am, yeah. I think it was a big flaw at the origins of the conservative movement.

But it was this idea that in order to be taken seriously, we had to define ourselves against elements that were on the right. Yeah. And that would be necessary. So can we just provide a little case study, one that I followed closely, 1991. At the end of 1991, he pens an essay, a long essay for National Review

called In Search of Antisemitism, which was like, again, it's hard for conservatives these days. I feel like I sound old when I say this, but in the 80s and early 90s, there was like a debate. Are there rampant elements of anti-Semitism within the intellectual right? And you described why that essay was so important. He went about trying to find out if it were true and what to do about it. Right. I mean, and it was very personal to him because that essay is really about one of his protégés. And Buckley had many protégés. And this writer in particular was a man named Joseph Sobrin,

who really beginning in the 1980s, just begins penning articles that are anti-Semitic. And then he gets, he goes even further from there, attacking Israel, attacking the supporters of Israel in the United States, attacking Norman Podhoretz, the editor then of Commentary, and Norman's wife, Midge Dechter, a writer in her own right and esteem. And so it's actually, the essay is provoked by Norman Podhoretz telling Buckley, you know, what are you doing employing this guy, Joe Sobrin? And it's, this question is being raised at the same time as America is launching Operation Desert Shield and then Operation Desert Storm.

And figures like Pat Buchanan are basically saying that, he never says it directly, he's very clever in the way he says it, but basically saying that, he never says it directly, he's very clever in the way he says it, but basically saying that American intervention in Iraq is a Jewish plot. I mean, it's that Jews are pushing us to war in order to benefit Israel. And he goes after Buchanan in this essay. He does. So Buchanan becomes a second topic in the essay. And what he finds in this searching essay coming from and he talks about his own experiences being the son of an anti-semite and how in fact he had been raised in an anti-semitic tradition but it wasn't until his experiences in the military during World War II that he that he kind of began de radicalizingicalizing, basically, and recognizing Jews as his fellow human beings, fellow Americans.

And coming to the conclusion that he could not defend Pat Buchanan against the charge of anti-Semitism, based on what he said Buchanan's fixation with Jews and Israel in his portrait of American politics. And just to be clear, by this point, Buchanan is journalist, columnist, TV personality, public intellectual, worked for... And a candidate for president. Right.

Because he's entering... Worked for Richard Nixon, worked for Ronald Reagan. He was a major player in Republican politics. Yeah, and he figures quite heavily in my story, too, for all those reasons. Right. And so this begins a real fissure on the right, and it's an extremely controversial moment. But it is exactly, as you say, Dan, one of these examples of Buckley saying, I can't allow this to happen. You can't be part of my

movement if you hold this position. Okay, so want to come back to buchanan in a moment because you write a lot about him and he for all the obvious reasons he tells us a lot about the current republican politics but before we do in talking before we move off of buckley one of the great parts of buckley's biography is he was a candidate for mayor of New York City in 1965. So 1964, just describe what's going on there. So 1964, Goldwater has this like landslide loss as the Republican nominee for president. And a year later, Bill Buckley, this journalist and public personality, public intellectual, decides he's going to run for mayor of New York City. What was that about, and what was he trying to accomplish?

Well, I think it started almost as a lark. He gave a speech to an association of police officers, of NYPD officers who were Catholic. And in that speech, he defended policing. Sound familiar? And got a huge response. And so when they published the speech in the next issue of National Review, kind of as a joke, his sister, the managing editor, put on the cover a headline, Buckley for mayor? And usually when you see a question mark at the end of a headline, the answer is no. But in this case, Buckley was kind of thinking about it and saying, you know what, I'm going to do it. Why? Well, in the aftermath of the Goldwater defeat, Buckley wanted to demonstrate that conservatives had an actual governing vision,

that they had ideas that they could apply everywhere, including America's cities. The other reason he wanted to do it was the front runner for the mayoralty of New York that year was Congressman John Lindsay, who was a liberal Republican. He was a Republican, but he was a liberal in ideology. And in Buckley's mind, everything that was wrong with the Republican Party. Absolutely.

Buckley wanted to make the Republican Party a conservative party. And so he wanted to show, A, that there was an alternative to Lindsey, and B, maybe knock Lindsey out by splitting the Republican vote. That's not what happened. The irony is that the people most receptive to Buckley's message were not the Republicans in New York. It was working class Democrats in the outer boroughs who really responded to Buckley's attacks on the governing establishment in the city, his defense of the police, his defense of traditional values and of competition and choice and economics. And so Buckley wins 13% of the vote in 1965, but the 13% comes a lot from the Democratic base, the working class base.

And so he goes into the race trying to upset John Lizzie. He ends up defeating the Democrat Abeem. our listeners if you want to read a great book the unmaking of a mayor which is buckley's book about his run for mayor which which was even i think probably better than following the actual mayoral campaign day to day and uh and it it really it you and so many of the issues you read about in that book as you say matt are as like i say this is someone living in new york city now are some of the same issues we're dealing with today. I mean, it's like the great relearning, to quote Tom Wolfe. Okay, so that's 65. So 64, Goldwater gets decimated at the polls. 65, Buckley does this sort of quirky run for mayor. And then in 1966,

much to, I think, the political class' surprise, a young, not so young, I guess, an actor from California, Ronald Reagan, gets elected in 1966 as governor of California. Which was a surprise.

As a conservative, as someone who really had been trending toward the Republican Party for many years, finally switches in 1962, I think is when he switched his registration. When he was 50, but he didn't be 51 years old. Yeah, he was 51 years old. Then he makes his debut with his famous time for choosing speech in defense of Goldwater that was televised right before the election. And immediately people are like, well, Reagan, you have to go into politics. And he goes, well, I'm going to kind of look toward the state in 1965 and see if there's an audience for my ideas. And of course there was. So he wins in a landslide. And that, I think, marks a real wake-up call. That because now we're moving toward the conservative movement, not only having a set of ideas, not only standing for, you know, principles that are easily defined and easy to communicate.

But now we actually have political success in Ronald Reagan and the opportunity to govern, right? So he immediately becomes the most famous conservative in America, the leader of conservatives. And in fact, and it's interesting to consider some of these figures who have won elections recently, Reagan thinks about throwing his hat in the ring for the presidency in 1968. And Nixon is worried about that as Nixon plots his comeback from defeat in 1960. And defeat of 1960 and 62 when he ran for governor.

Right, exactly, yeah. So Reagan wins an office. Four years later, Reagan wins. An office that Nixon loses. Yeah, defeats the guy that beat Nixon, Pat Brown, Jerry Brown's dad. Nixon makes sure, heading into 1968, that he has what he calls the Buckleyites, Buckley and his crew, at least on his side, or at least not hostile to him. And so, yes, within a span of three years, as you point out, things change very quickly for the American right and the conservative movement. Another figure that obviously doesn't loom as large as certainly as Reagan and, you know,

Buchanan, Buckley, I mean, some of these names were Goldwater that were dropping, but again, back to the memory lane and therapy session, one figure that had a lot of influence on my own thinking was was jack camp right so former buffalo bills quarterback the fact that he was nfl quarterback is not the only reason i was fond of jack camp but 1970 he gets elected to congress uh from buffalo and can you describe the role what he he tried to do, before we get to supply-side economics, just his approach to conservative,

you know, he called himself a cold, a bleeding heart conservative, right. So what was he trying to do with conservative politics when he got in it? Jack Kemp wanted to make the American right forward-looking, optimistic, and inclusive. And that included the working class, union members from Buffalo, you know, industrial city. It also included racial and ethnic minorities, you know, coming from professional sports,

having many strong relationships with African Americans. Kemp was always interested in broadening the coalition. And he also had... But in the...sorry, but in the first group, in that first demographic, the working class, he wasn't...it wasn't a politics of resentment. It was a politics of ideas about opportunity and inclusion, not about, you know, you've been screwed. You know, you should be resentful and it wasn't politics of rage No, it was a it was a very hopeful populism So if it was populism in this but it was populism Directed toward as you say opportunity and openness the idea that actually having an open economy, having incentives in our

economy, that will help working class people. So it's not about closing off. It's not about shutting down. It's about opening up. And that was the argument he started making as a congressman and then he becomes an advocate of an across-the-board tax cut to fight stagflation And this idea is part of the philosophy that becomes known as supply-side economics And he was very entrepreneurial in terms of how he tried to to bring that into Republican politics obviously there was Jude Winninsky and Art Laffer and others in the academic and intellectual world who were working with him. So explain how that philosophy and set of prescriptions got attached to the Reagan agenda.

Sure. Well, so supply side is the idea that cuts in marginal tax rates are going to incentivize production and growth and jobs. But supply side is not just a economic idea. lends itself to populism, basically saying that if we leave individuals to make their own choices and give them as much of their hard-earned money as possible, that's going to help everybody in the end. And in fact, what Republicans can do, if Democrats are providing entitlements, what Republicans can do is provide growth and opportunity, right? So it's not just a negative message, which was associated with a lot of conservative economics, that we have to cut spending, we have to balance the budget, that's it. It's a much more positive message, which is, well, we're going to create opportunities for you

to flourish, right? And so this is a very powerful idea, especially at a time when you have people rebelling against high tax rates, against bracket creep, right? Inflation driving people into higher tax brackets. Property tax rates, you have the tax rebellion in California and Howard Jarvis. So there's a growing movement that is pushing against these punitive tax rates in our society. And the Kemp idea is gaining traction in the late 1970s. Ronald Reagan was not a supply-sider at this point. He actually kind of hewed more closely to the traditional Republican view, which we need to just control the spending and balance the budget and be fiscally prudent, and everything else will take care of itself.

But Reagan is also a savvy politician. He understands that 1980 will really be his last chance at the presidency because at this point you know he's in his 60s and that Jack Kemp is a potential threat. Sorry that seems like such a young age now. Yeah, yeah well so Reagan was the oldest president when he for his time when he was he was 70 when he became president and then Trump is 71 and then of course we have Biden right you know so yeah so Reagan is a spring chicken in comparison so he he basically has an

arrangement with Kemp that Kemp is going to become his chief economic surrogate, that Reagan will take on the Kemp economic program, the supply-side program, and Kemp will support him in the 1980 Republican primary. And so that's how Ronald Reagan became a supply-sider and carried those ideas into the White House. Okay, so now let's fast forward to this era, the Trump era. You write a lot about Papu Cannon. So can you talk a little bit about what we should have been learning about Papu Cannon to understand what we were about to head into in 2015 and 2016? Well, I think there was a sense within the Republican establishment

and within the conservative intellectual movement that Pat Buchanan's runs for the presidency in 92, 96, and 2000 showed that his worldview, which is that post-Cold War, the American right needed to return to its pre-World War II configuration, to be America first and unconcerned with foreign involvement, to close ourselves off, insulate ourselves from global economic competition as well as immigration. The idea was that his defeats throughout the 1990s meant that those ideas had a ceiling, that they wouldn't, they would never really become popular within the Republican Party.

But that was not true. And really what those races showed was that there will always be a large portion of the American right that believes in these Buchananite or pre-World War II American right ideas. And when you get to the Bush, the George W. Bush administration and the war in Iraq, the arguments over immigration reform, those Buchananite ideas start making a big comeback and they play into the developing antagonism

between Republican and conservative elites and the populist grassroots. So that's, I think, what we should have been paying attention to. And so then Trump comes on the scene. And where does that find us? Where does that find the conservative movement? By the way, were you shocked by what you learned about the conservative movement when Trump comes on the scene or not? No. I've been writing about American populism for a while now. My last book was about Sarah Palin and the reception of her by the media and by elites of all parties. It's ironic that that book came out 13 years ago, and now my new book

is out, and Sarah Palin is back and running for Congress. Of course, perfect timing. Yeah, we're always twin together, she and I. So I was not surprised by Trump. I was not surprised that he won the nomination. I think I was surprised when he ran the presidency like a lot of people, but it made a certain amount of sense in retrospect. Where are we now? I think the easiest way to put it, Dan, is that the people who were at the center of the American right between the years of just the most recent 30-year period, right? So if you go from 1992 to 2022,

they're now on the outside looking in. And the people who were on the outside for much of that period, people like Buchanan, right, they're now at the center of things. And so the people who are at the center of the right have changed. And what's interesting now about that Buchananite philosophy is for much of America first, for economic protection or industrial policy, and for immigration restriction. And so this battle that I talk about in my book is almost certainly to continue. And in actuality, right now has been decided in favor, I think, of the populist grassroots and the more nationalist forces in the party. But when you look at Trump's first

year, first two years in office, he was elected clearly in this populist wave that you describe, and yet the legislative agenda that passed was was led by you know senate majority leader mitch mcconnell house speaker paul ryan it was basically a federalist society agenda on the courts and judicial appointments and a and a mostly although not entirely free market tax cutting agenda in terms of fiscal policy that that paul ryan engineered and led in the house and it seemed that the white house had to some degree kind of outsourced uh policy making and legislative agenda setting to these two very uh pre pre-trump post buchanan pre-Trump, post-Buchanan, pre-Trump Republican leaders who you say were on the inside for a while and should have been on the outside, but they actually weren't on the outside.

They were on the inside, and they were implementing a policy agenda that Trump owned but was really the McConnell-Ryan agenda. Yeah. I mean, you're right. I mean, in a sense that Trump's lasting accomplishments will be the tax reform, which, you know, knock on wood, looks like it's safe. Yeah. And the court, the three justices he put on the Supreme Court.

And what he did at the lower courts, too. And all the judges in the lower courts. Right. Yeah. And those are longstanding conservative goals. I mean, even in the tax reform, one of its elements was opening up ANWR to drilling. I mean, conservatives have been for that for 30 years, 40 years. So why is that?

Well, Trump has to work within a coalition, especially at that part of his presidency, those first two years where you still have the remnants of that conservative governing class, right, in charge. And Trump understands the transactionalism. In order to get to where he was, he had to convince people who cared about judges that he was going to govern alongside the Federalist Society. To people who cared about tax cuts, he was bringing all the supply-siders in. Even on defense, remember, he plussed up defense, not as much as I would have liked, but he did increase it.

And he talked about rebuilding our military. So for defense ox, he had something there. It's when he loses the Congress, or he loses the House first in 2018, that he kind of moves toward the Trumpian side of things. And then you have tariff man. And then you have the declaration of an emergency so he can begin the wall construction. And then you have this kind of continual debate over, well, what does America first foreign policy mean in practice, right? It definitely means meeting up with Kim Jong-un and becoming besties with him. I'm not sure what the mixed results of that. It meant lowering our forces in Europe, redeploying them to Eastern Europe in some cases. You know, so it that that was kind of still unformed.

It meant it meant taking out Soleimani, which is something I quite welcomed. But it also meant that you wouldn't respond after the Iranian proxies attacked the Aramco and attacked these major shipping containers in the Persian Gulf. So I think in the second half of his presidency, he kind of moved away from the more establishment ideas and closer to the Trump one. But I will say that I think one of the lessons of my book is that for the right to be successful, it has to be a synthesis now of populism and of a constitutional conservatism. Both sides need each other. The constitutional conservatives won't get anywhere without the votes of the populists. And the populists, if they really want to achieve their goals, if they really want to solve some of the problems that are driving this discontent, they need ideas. They need policy ideas that the constitutional conservatives can provide them. So when the synthesis,

when it is a synthesis, it can be very successful. I think right now, though, it's more conflictual than it is cooperative between the two camps. And where does that leave you heading into 2022, the midterms in 2024, in terms of, I mean, obviously, the big question question does trump run or does he not i'm just struck by some of this polling we've seen where trump's approval rating

among republican primary voters is very high you know mid to high 80s and then when questions are asked of republican primary voters who best to continue on the Trump agenda or, you know, to lead going forward the Make America Great agenda? And, you know, should it be Trump or should room be made for new leaders? And the Trump number, like, drops, like, in half. So what's going on there? Well, a couple things. I mean, so just for 2022, I think things are shaping up for a massive Republican year. And so this question then becomes all the more important, which is, do the Republicans

know what they want to do when they're in power? And also when they're in power under divided government? Because the last time this happened during the Obama presidency, the grassroots right got very frustrated very quickly that a Congress could not enact an agenda over the president's veto power. And that frustration, I think, opened up room for a figure like Trump to come in from outside the system. So I think we have to be very wary of that. And Republican candidates ought to be prepared for what they would do once they're in power. Because I think otherwise, and maybe even if there is an agenda anyway, I think that the gravity pulling them toward impeaching Biden will be huge, will be powerful. Like that will be the agenda on next year,

which will be a loss for the country, I think, because we have big problems. And then just briefly on Trump, I think that polling you mentioned is dead on. There is no way that you are going to go anywhere in the Republican Party saying that you oppose Donald Trump. That's just the reality. But there is a way I think you can go forward in the Republican Party saying

you admire Donald Trump, you supported Donald Trump, you continue to support the agenda items that Trump stood for. However, you think it's time that the party move on and find a new champion who is in alignment with Trump, but is also talking about the issues people care about rather than looking back to the 2020 election. I do think there's space for that and I do think there's going to be several people who are going to run for president in 2024 no matter what Donald Trump chooses. So if he did decide, if he does decide and he definitely

gives every indication that he's leaning this way, if he does decide, and he definitely gives every indication that he's leaning this way, if he does decide to reenter the race in 2024, it won't be uncontested. You believe that? You believe there will be other candidates? I tend to agree with you. Yeah, I can think of a few names. Now, whether they'll pose a threat to him, who knows? But he'll have to go through debates, right? I think he would

prefer to just get a coronation and just go and see what happens up against Biden or Harris or whomever. But I think that people will go in and challenge him. And the question is, can he pull it off again? I think if he only has to offer his resentment over losing in 2020, I even think in a Republican primary, that won't be enough. I mean, I just see... Well, say what you want about him. In 2016, he ran on ideas. He had an agenda. Build the wall. Build the wall, confront China. America first. Right. Cut taxes, bomb ISIS. I mean, he had a lot of ideas.

Right now, he's mainly fixated on 2020. And I think that even Republicans want to focus on inflation, crime, and schools. And look, Trump's no dummy. He might get that. What happens in some of these primaries actually might communicate to him that it's time to start focusing on other things, if he really wants to become not only the nominee, but the next president. And for those who are demoralized by the degree to which the party seems to be still like in the grip of this you know the last four years of republican presidency you were you coming back to your book i mean 64 65

66 you know it just shows you to your point things can change very quickly right yeah yeah who knows what will happen i mean so even when we talk about a figure like Ron DeSantis, for example, who is really the star, the, you know, if Trump is the big son, you know, Ron DeSantis is just a smaller son. You know,

he's, he's also really exerting an influence over the party right now. His worry ought to be, is he peaking too soon? Right. Because, because these things happen to develop very suddenly. And even think about where we were in terms of the 16th cycle now.

We were all getting ready for Rubio and Cruz and Scott Walker. And then here comes Trump. So things can change very quickly, and they can change in unexpected ways. Yeah. I would just add with DeSantis, for what it's worth, I don't—I mean, he's an interesting—I don't think he's speaking too soon. First of all, the whole conservative story these days is about Ron DeSantis. Totally. If you follow conservative media, he is—talk about a protagonist.

He is the—it's not just him going on television providing commentary on news of the day he is he is he is the story everyone's going on to talk about yeah the commentary is about him right yeah right so he's the guy with the cape and the s on his absolutely you know what i mean and so and you know it gets under trump's skin of course and so and that is let's just assume that carries through this because he's running for re-election so it gets him to at least the fall of 2022 because he's going to continue over the next few months to be stoking these, you know, these very effectively, these, you know, these debates

and what someone called culture wars, whatnot, that'll keep him front and center in the news. And then you blink and it's early 2023 and the field starts to... People start making decisions. Right. Yeah. So... Yeah.

I mean, this is not an endorsement of him. I'm just saying, I actually think he's in decent shape. It's similar to the shape that Chris Christie was in in 2010 and 2011. And he, you know,

should have, you know, had he run for president, he would have been very competitive in a Republican primary. Yeah. I guess I just, we should hope that there are no traffic jams on any of the bridges in Florida in the coming months.

Fair enough. All right, Matt, we will leave it there. The book is called The Right, The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism. Basic Books is the publisher. You should order it. We will plug it again at the end of the podcast. And we only scratched the surface of this important book. And it is, like I said, chock full of good color and anecdotes and

analysis. And I would say like real dispassionate analysis for someone who sits so much in the center of the story. So that's no small feat. So Matt, thanks. Thanks for joining us. We'll have you back. Thank you, Dan. It was a pleasure to be here. That's our show for today. Be sure to order Matt's new book, The Right, The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism. You can order it at barnesandnoble.com, your favorite independent bookstore or that other e-commerce site. I think they're calling it Amazon. You can also follow him on Twitter at Continetti. That's at C-O-N-T-I-N-E-T-T-I. Call Me Back is produced by Ilan Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.