Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - The Political Fallout from Covid19 - with Matthew Continetti

Episode Date: November 6, 2021

The recent electoral outcomes in Virginia, New Jersey, New York City, Buffalo, Minneapolis and other areas across the country were as much to do with the pandemic -- and the economic and cultural shocks from the pandemic -- as anything. Was it a political blip or some kind of realignment? Where does the Democratic Party go from here? And what about the Republican Party? What does it mean for Joe Biden and Donald Trump? Is the Glenn Youngkin campaign a model for our future politics? Matthew Continetti 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 being released in April 2022, called “The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism”.

One lesson of this election is that Republicans over-performed Donald Trump. The House Republicans in 2020 over-performed Donald Trump. The Senate Republicans in 2016 over-performed Donald Trump. Donald Trump is a weight on the Republican Party. And I think if more evidence accumulates exposing that fact, history and the institutions will move on. Welcome to Post-Corona, where we try to understand COVID-19's lasting impact on the economy, culture, and geopolitics. I'm Dan Senor. Are we seeing the signs of the political fallout of COVID-19?

The recent electoral outcomes in Virginia, New Jersey, New York City, Buffalo, Minneapolis, and other areas from across the country were as much to do with the pandemic and the economic and cultural shocks from the pandemic as anything. Was it an electoral blip or some kind of realignment? Where does the Democratic Party go from here? And what about the Republican Party heading into 2022 and 2024? What does it mean for Joe Biden and Donald Trump? Is Glenn Youngkin the model for our future politics?

What does this all tell us about what may be one hell of a decade ahead of us in these 2020s? To help us make sense of all of this is Matthew Continetti. He's 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, including The K Street Gang, The Rise and Fall of the Republican Machine. And he has a new book being released in April of 2022 called The Right, The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism, which you can preorder. Matt's a sharp chronicler and teacher about the history of the conservative movement, so I'm really looking forward to this one. But before we bring on Matt, just a quick housekeeping note. Today's episode is the last

post-corona episode before we transition this feed into a new podcast called The Roaring 2020s. In this new podcast that will appear in your feed instead of this one starting next week, we'll focus on the coming decade. It strikes me that we'll look back at the 2020s as one of the most consequential decades in modern history. From unprecedented fiscal and monetary policies to the technological transformation driven by AI, blockchain, and life sciences to the rise of China in Cold War II and shrinking U.S. leadership in the Middle East, all against the backdrop of

culture wars, public safety breakdowns, and public health crackups. There's a lot that's been packed into this decade already, and so much of it feels like history from other seminal decades, rearing their heads again now. So watch this space next week and feel free to drop me a line with ideas for topics and guests. I'm all ears. You can email me at dan at unlocked.fm. That's dan at unlocked.f as in Frank, m as in Mary. But let's get on with today's show. Here's Matt Continetti. And I'm pleased to welcome my friend Matt Continetti. And I'm pleased to welcome my friend Matt Continetti to the podcast. Hi, Matt.

Hi, Dan. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. Great to have you. You are like one of the first fans of the Post-Corona Podcast. So it's fitting if you wind it down. We listen all the time in the Continetti household. Excellent. Children, too?

All right. We force them to, of course. It's kind of pathetic. Another consequence of lockdown. Matt, as I mentioned in the intro, is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He's a columnist for Commentary Magazine. He's a founding editor of the Washington Free Beacon. He's a serial author. We're going to talk about a book he's got coming out later this year, later in the podcast. But before we do, Matt, as I said in the intro, this very much felt to me this past week like a series of COVID elections, a political outcome where the stakes and the issues were directly in some cases and certainly

indirectly driven by the pandemic and and we'll talk about what this means in the future of the republican party in the future of the democratic party in light of all this but i want to begin by going back to a piece you wrote in late 2019 for Commentary Magazine, where you did an analysis on the decade, the 2010s, which I think is very relevant to us now, given the events of this past week, given the events of the past year and a half, given these 2020s that we're about to go into, or that we are into.

You wrote in December of 2019, history doesn't follow a schedule. The events that define an era often happen before or after the onset of a new decade. It's been said that the 60s didn't begin on January 1st, 1960, but on November 22nd, 1963, the day Kennedy was assassinated. And they didn't end on January 1st, 1970, but on August 9th, 1974, when Richard Nixon resigned as president. And then you go on to say, keep this in mind as you look at the retrospectives of the 2010s, the calendar decade may be drawing to a close, but the tendencies, ideas, movements, sentiments, and personalities associated with the past 10 years may not

be quite ready to leave the stage. The underlying causes of national populism have not disappeared. So here we are now in November of 2021, and has this populist era that you wrote about in the 2010s not only not left the stage, but actually only intensified? Well, I think it's transformed itself. I think the populism of 2021 is different than the populism that, say, propelled Donald Trump to office in 2016. And I think the critical factor here, Dan, was the pandemic. huge gulf between college-educated elites and non-college-educated voters were going to persist. What I didn't know, though I think I had been reading about it in the New York Times in the back pages at the time, was that these cities that were being closed and locked down

by China would not actually prevent the coronavirus pandemic from spreading worldwide, disrupting the global economy, disrupting American society, but also paradoxically actually eliminating some of the original causes of the populist movement. So for example, for much of 2020, immigration disappeared as an issue because the borders were closed, right? And also President Trump had reached a kind of a ad hoc series of compromises with Mexico and with Central American nations to kind of stanch the flow of illegal migration. All that before the pandemic, and then you're saying the pandemic just literally shut borders down. Right, yeah. And so immigration kind of receded. Islamic terrorism, too.

You know, right before, as I was writing that essay, is when the Trump administration ordered the mission against Baghdadi, the head of the caliphate in ISIS, kind of putting the capstone on the anti-ISIS effort. Meanwhile, also right before the pandemic, the Trump administration ordered the strike on Qasem Soleimani, showing kind of resolve against Iranian attempts to interfere in the greater Middle East. And so Islamic terrorism also faded as an issue in 2020. So going into the election year, the last driver of populism was the gulf between non-college educated voters and college educated elites and experts. That continued, but in the context of the pandemic, the way that populism expressed itself was through suspicion of what Dr. Fauci was saying, was in eventual resistance to vaccinations. And the downsides or negative aspects of populism, the tendency of populists to look for scapegoats,

the tendency of populists to adopt conspiracy theories as an explanation for why the public will is being thwarted. Those took to the fore. So I'd say that the populism of 2020 was very different than the populism of 2019. And now the populism of 2021 is like a mixture of both. Because thanks to President Biden, Islamic terrorism has reappeared on the world stage due to our withdrawal from Afghanistan. Thanks to President Biden, immigration has returned as an issue

because he tore up all of the Trump agreements and we've had the steady flow of illegal migration to the southern border. Meanwhile, the vaccine resistance, the opposition toward Fauci, the crusade against masks in schools, this is taking place as well. And we have this third bucket, which is the grassroots parent-led rebellion over school instruction and so-called critical race theory. So I'd say that the populism of 2021, of the present moment, is a much more complex and multifaceted, and I think in many ways more combustible phenomena than the populism I was describing in that essay for commentary. So let's let's because

I do want to compare the two so when you're describing what you were just the the populist phenomenon you were describing the commentary essay can you just spend a couple minutes just explaining summarizing how it happened right right? So to the extent that like the 2010s, the populism of the 2010s, to your point that history doesn't go on a clean, neat schedule, that it started, I mean, you go back to the financial crisis of 2008, you go through a series of events that happened well before the 2010s. Can you just summarize what happened in those years that you think led to this 2010s of populism? That idea that drove this essay was really a response to people who only give a material or economic explanation for populist movements in the United States. So there were friends of mine who, at the time that I wrote

this piece, were arguing that, well, the only reason we had Donald Trump and the Tea Party was the financial crisis of 2008 and the Great Recession. And once we've fully recovered from the Great Recession and the financial crisis, then Trump and populism will go away. I fundamentally disagree with that because, as I said, I think the causes of the populist era, the populist resurgence, because there's always a recurring populism in American history, but the causes of this populist resurgence preceded or were visible before the financial crisis and the Great Recession. And so in this piece, I mentioned how in 2005, the French and the Dutch rejected the European Constitution as a kind of a harbinger of the Brexit vote, right? Nationalist resistance to the European bureaucracy. In 2006, you saw mass rallies on behalf of illegal

immigrants who wanted to be legalized as part of the proposed immigration reform by the Bush administration. And the images from those rallies were many of the participants in the rallies were waving the flags of their country of origin, not American flags, but the flags of their country of origin, I think spawned a deep-seated backlash among Republican conservatives over the issue of Islamic terrorism has been a constant since 9-11. So you saw this mix. And then also 2006, you had the Dubai ports. Dubai ports, right. So the blowup about whether—so just explain the Dubai ports issue because people forget. In 2006, the Bush administration, as you well remember, caught in all these different crises. One of them was a proposed sale of American ports to a Chinese company or a Dubai port. Dubai, yeah.

A Dubai company, right, UAE company. But it got wrapped up into this debate about- Offshoring and foreign investment in the United States and globalization. They had a debate about... Finally, when I talk about that gulf between college-educated elites and the mass of non-college-educated Americans, this divide was starkly visible in the nomination of Sarah Palin to be John McCain's running mate in 2008. Again, actually one month before the crisis set in, almost to the day. She was nominated on August 28 28 2008 and layman collapsed on september 20th um and the reaction to palin uh both among her fans who adored her with an intensity that probably was only um matched by the intensity with which people adored obama at the outset of his candidacy, and then later,

the attachment of Donald Trump's base to his candidacy. But also, the negative reaction among most of the people that I live and work with in Washington, DC toward Palin at her inexperience, at her... Including professional Republicans. Including many Republicans. We're just remembering Colin Powell, who recently passed away. One of the factors in his decision to endorse Barack Obama in 2008 was the Palin nomination, very visible sign of how the Republican old guard was deeply discomfited by the working class, non-college educated. She had gone to college, but remember she'd gone to several colleges and kind of got together a college education over several years, base of the republican party and so so that too was visible even before donald

trump appeared on the scene and then obviously get into the you know 2010s there's actually the charlie hebdo and uh attack in france in 2015 there was a sand uh the san bernardino attack in 2015 there was the pulse attack was that in orlando There was the Pulse attack. Was that in Orlando in 2016? I mean, a series of terrorist attacks here and in Europe, 2015 and 2016, right? And one, that showed that the Obama administration foreign policy was in complete disarray. Two, if you recall, there was a aversion among the Obama administration to identifying the jihadist motivations behind a lot of these killings.

So San Bernardino was workplace violence. The Pulse attack was a, you know, it was a hate crime, right? They kind of, the administration purposely avoided the ideological underpinnings of these attacks. for radical disruption because things were going so poorly. But also Trump did something very original. He fused the immigration issue with the security issue and the counterterrorism issue. And so after San Bernardino, when he came out and called for his ban on Muslims entering the United States, everybody freaked out and said, you can't do that. That's ridiculous. And when you say everybody, you mean the media? The chattering class, yes.

Right. Everybody in the chattering class. You can't do that. That's ridiculous. It's counterproductive. It won't work. It's kind of bigoted. Well, it helped him win because the Republican voter base was just ready to

stop it. They just wanted to stop it. And they liked that sense from Trump that he was going to take drastic action to arrest this kind of spiraling out of control. So yeah, the terrorism issue in particular was very important, I think, in 2016 and undervalued in a way because so many people interpreted that election through the lens of trade, class, hillbilly elegy, and such. And you were early on Trump in the sense that I'm pretty sure you were traveling with Trump during the whole Obama birth certificate. Yes, I was with him, yeah. So what year was that?

That was 2011. 2011. So you were traveling. Okay, first, tell us in what world Matt Continetti was traveling with Donald Trump in 2011. So what was, what were you covering? Was this when he was contemplating getting in the 2012 race? and write about. And I wanted to go out and do more reporting on the trail. And so I saw that Donald Trump was going to visit New Hampshire. It's kind of a sign of whether or not he would enter the 2012 Republican primary. So very generous editors there. And they allowed me to travel to New Hampshire. And I basically spent the day with Donald Trump and, you know, 500 of my friends in the media. The circus aspect of the Trump phenomenon was plain to me even on that morning when we went to a private airstrip in New Hampshire, and we all assembled in an empty air

hangar, and we waited. We waited for news that the Trump copter was going to land, uh, on the field outside the hangar. And then very dramatically, of course, because he loves a dramatic entrance, Donald Trump had the, uh, hangar door raised, you know, so that we could see him and his team marched to the hangar. A few things stuck out from that day. One was Trump's just amazing ability to pivot and turn what seems like a defeat into a victory. So that was the day, quite purposefully, that the Obama administration released the President Obama's long form birth certificate, right? And they did it to embarrass Trump. And so we were with Trump at a diner. And he went into the back of the diner to meet with some constituents. I'm not even sure what what the connection was, while Robert Gibbs

was on the podium at the White House announcing this birth certificate. So he didn't see it. But all of us in the press were packed in the waiting room. And we're watching it on MSNBC because they had televisions in the diner. So as soon as Trump came out, we all said, did you see it? They finally released the birth certificate. And I'll never forget the way that he kind of, he looked at the TV to make sure we were right. And that the expression he has where, you know, the bottom lip kind of juts out and the eyes squint. And because he's thinking, you know, the wheels are turning. He assumed that expression. And then he turned to us in the press and he said, this would never have happened except for me.

So he took credit for what was supposed to be an embarrassing moment. The other thing that I remember from that day was, because the diner was so small and he was yet to be, he was still pre-2015 Donald Trump, you could get quite close to him. So I was literally next to him while he was going to some of the booze. And I just remember him seeing two guys drinking coffee. And they had long gray beards.

And then again, the look happened, you know, the eyes squint. And he clearly thinks seniors because he looks at them both and goes, I'm not touching Social Security or Medicare, okay? Like, he knew that for those voters, it's his intuition. He knew that entitlement reform would be something that would just drive them away. So that was visible to me there. But, you know, the piece that I wrote was essentially a comic piece, because, you know, like most people at that time in particular, I didn you know, the piece that I wrote was essentially a comic piece because, you know,

like most people at that time in particular, I didn't take him seriously. In 2015 though, in August of 2015, I began taking him very seriously. But even at that time, when you saw him engaging with those reporters, I mean, it's interesting. One of his legacies was that he's, he's basically, you know, sort of neutralized the entitlement reform issue on the right, which the campaigns I was involved with before, with Paul Ryan, with others, it was, this was a big issue for the right. And now suddenly he had just kind of tabled it. So he had a sense for some segment of the Republican electorate that they weren't on board, at least then, with real entitlement reform. Did you—so, I mean, in that sense, he was, like, forward-looking. I mean, he really kind of knew where the party was and where it was going.

Did you—at that time, did you have a sense—did you have your own sense? Like, wow, he's got it? Like, he kind of knows something's going on here that we're missing? No, because I was a big supporter of the Roadmap for America's Future, which Paul Ryan had released and which eventually became part of the Romney-Ryan agenda in 2012. So I disagreed with him on that. In retrospect, clearly, Trump knew that this was not the winner politically that perhaps I thought it was. Now, it's just it's hard to say because, you know, it's not as though the 2016 Republican primary was fought exclusively on the subject of entitlement reform. And also there's always, you know, eventually we're going to have to deal with entitlements because they clearly are unsustainable.

What Paul Ryan was trying to do was deal with them now so that the pain today would be less than the pain down the road. But clearly, in terms of the political situation, the electorate is not ready to accept that sort of pain. So now fast forwarding to these last couple of years. So if you're looking at the 2020s with your theory that these periods that define a decade often don't work on a clean schedule and a clock, do you think we'll look back at the 2020s as having started effectively in Hubei in ube province in china in

2019 when there was potentially possibly gain of function research being done in the lab that ultimately i mean if you think about what the 2020s could look like you know a cold war with china uh all the economic implications of that, intensified by a pandemic that started, the seeds of which potentially started long before 2020. Was that how we'll think about the timing, that this crazy period we're in all actually began well before the pandemic hit us as we knew it in 2020? I think there's something to that. I've been thinking about this a little bit and wrote about it recently for the Washington Free Beacon. I actually think that a lot of our present cultural fights are driven by events that happened in 2014, 2015. I go back and I look at two things from 2014.

One was the publication in The Atlantic of Ta-Nehisi Coates' Case for Reparations, which was published in the summer of 2014. And then- Case for Reparations for- Slavery and- Yeah, African-Americans. And discrimination, right?

Reparations to black America. And then as soon as that essay landed, you had the riots in Ferguson over Michael Brown. If you look at public polling on how people feel about America, it's fascinating. Democrats and liberals and young people all suddenly begin saying around that time that they are not very proud to be an American. They do not think American patriotism is the be all and end all. And the line just veers negative right around that time. At the same time, in the following year, this racial unrest continued in Baltimore, for example, and would obviously crescendo in 2020 with George Floyd. But in 2015, you had something interesting happen as well.

One was the Supreme Court found a constitutional right for same-sex marriage. And this, I think, sent a signal to many social and religious conservatives that the America they knew had ended, and therefore drastic measures might be necessary to maintain their position within American society. And then, even more unexpectedly from my point of view, instead of kind of moving on to reaching some accommodation between um you know religious liberty and the rights of um same-sex couples and gay and lesbian individuals the cultural war shifted toward transgenderism so the same month that we had same-sex marriage established by the Supreme Court nationwide, we, between the summer of 2014 and the summer of 2015, weirdly.

They're still resonating. With China, though, just to look at a foreign and geostrategic viewpoint, you're absolutely right. I mean, what was happening in terms of, you know, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but also more largely, it was clear by the end of the Obama administration that the project of integrating China into the global economy as a means toward eventual political liberalization in China had reached a dead end. If you recall, in Obama's final months as president, he visited China, and he landed, and he was kept waiting on the tarmac by the Chinese greeting party as a sign of clear disrespect. And that way that this would now, it was a new world now, you know, and the president was going to have to wait for China.

So you can, I often think that the issues that dominate one presidency are visible in the previous presidency. And so at that moment there in Obama's last months, you saw how big a role China would play in the Trump presidency. And then, of course, you know, the pandemic, which emerged in the final year of Trump worldwide, has really dominated the first year of Biden's presidency. So going to the elections of this past week, which again, I don't think people have fully comprehended what a big deal but what a watershed moment these elections were so i just i just just to summarize in virginia uh it looks like there was about a 12 and a half point you live in virginia 12 and a half point swing from uh 2017 in 2017 uh north from the Democratic governor, won by nine points. In 2020, Biden won Virginia by

10 points. And here, Glenn Youngkin, the Republican, won statewide by two, I think about two and a half points. So you're talking about about a 12 and a half point swing. In New Jersey, even though it appears that Governor Murphy, the Democrat, has been reelected. You're looking at a 16-point swing, right? Because Biden won by 16 points, Murphy won by 16 points, and then it was basically too close to call. What did the scale of these upsets— and by the way, this doesn't even capture some of the down-ballot outcomes around the country,

these referenda that were defeated, like in Minneapolis, to effectively defund the police and create a new police agency that has less emphasis on actual policing. That went down in Buffalo, New York. You had the Democratic nominee for mayor was a socialist who defeated the incumbent Democratic mayor for the nomination. That Democratic mayor, who was the anti-socialist, got elected on a write-in campaign, which is kind of extraordinary because it was very hard to organize. So I guess while we all, I think many of us thought that Republicans or those not running on the kind of progressive line, so to speak,

on the progressive agenda, were going to do poorly in 20, sorry, those not running on the progressive line would do well in these elections. I don't think folks appreciate the scale of it. And A, were you surprised by the scale? And B, what does it tell us? I was surprised by the scale. I was less surprised by Virginia. I've been following that race, I mean, since the beginning, since, as you say, I live in

Virginia. And I thought— And I remember getting very angry. I've seen very angry emails from you during the last year and a half about the school system, school situation. I'm not happy about the schools. Are you Fairfax County, right? I'm not happy about the school shutdowns at all. And impressed early on by Yunkin.

But for sure, I didn't see New Jersey happening. I don't live there. I didn't pay close attention to the race. I don't think anybody did. I think even if Cittarelli had more support, more resources, he would have won. He was constrained. Then again, Sweeney, the Democratic president of the state Senate, just lost to a truck driver who I think spent about $135 on his race. Half of which he spent on like Dunkin' Donuts, literally. Cruelers and coffee, you know, so it just goes to show. And Sweeney, just for our listeners to understand, is like an institution in New Jersey politics. I mean, he was like untouchable.

He basically ran this state. Some would say he was more powerful than the governor, and he always could say he was going to outlast the governor because he was going to be there forever. And now he's gone, as you it was a general rebuke to the direction of the country. And the public survey data we see shows that Americans are not happy with the direction of the country. They're certainly not happy with Biden. His approval rating has fallen with the greatest velocity in the Gallup poll of any post-war president, right? So not happy with Biden. They're also not happy with Biden's handling of the economy. And here I

actually think the role of the economy has been somewhat underplayed in the post-election coverage. We can say that, you know... So yeah, let's talk about that, because everyone is saying the big takeaway from analysts is education, education, education, school, school, schools. You wrote a piece saying it's the economy. I really think... Based on exit polling and other... Based on exit polling, but it's also slightly commonsensical. There aren't that many parents anymore, is the truth.

But everybody is a consumer in our consumer-based economy. Everyone has to eat. Everyone, or most people, has to fuel up their car. And so the inflation that really has taken hold, I think, is driving a lot of the discontent with the Biden administration. And it has seeped through a lot of these results. And we know that just, you know, one of the biggest determinants of how well the incumbent party is going to do is the president's approval rating. And the president

Biden's approval rating, since basically it started trending downward in the summer, when the inflation started appearing, when Delta began to spread, then it collapsed with the debacle in Afghanistan. And I think unexpectedly for many Democrats, it has continued to fall. It has not recovered. I think the Biden administration believed that once we had extricated ourselves from Afghanistan, once the crisis on the southern border with the Haitians showing up en masse, once that camp had been cleared, once Delta began to fade, Biden's approval rating would recover. It hasn't. And I think, I think what the summer did was, um, make a lot of people look at, uh, Biden, look at the Democrats and with, with new eyes. This was not the guy that we elected to dethrone Trump.

This was not the person who promised us, you know, competence, professionalism, and a return to normalcy and unity has provided incompetence, incompetence in government, and has allowed a lot of kind of bizarre cultural stuff kind of bubble up beneath him, in some cases, even from his administration. So this second look, I think, has been devastating for Biden and played a big role in the Democratic defeats of the past week. In terms of competence, a former colleague of mine who worked in the Bush White House, Bush 43, made the observation that things got really bad for W in the second term during Hurricane Katrina. And the impression of incompetence slash in over his head.

Now, that could have been fueled by that could have been the culmination of a lot of things. Obviously, Iraq had this was before the surge in Iraq had turned things around. So there could have been a number of factors. But Katrina Iraq had, this was before the surge, and Iraq had turned things around, so there could have been a number of factors. But Katrina was really where they saw their numbers tank. And that the reality is, they actually did, according to this official, White House official, senior White House, very senior White House official, they did get Katrina under control.

They did get New Orleans under control. They actually did do a pretty good job pretty quickly, but it was too late. It was too late in that he said, once the electorate decided George W. Bush had a competence issue, it's very hard to reassure the electorate that you're suddenly competent again, even if you're doing things right. And so the trends that are being set in place, I mean, even if the administration gets a handle on inflation, I'm skeptical that they will. Even if they get a handle on these supply chain issues, even if they get a handle, even if, you know, Afghanistan doesn't get worse. I mean, we could check off all the things that could kind of go the administration's way. To your point, this decline in approval rating,

I think between like, I guess, the second quarter and the third quarter, basically the summer of hell for Biden, it's very hard to kind of dig out of that and say, I'm back, I'm large and in charge, I'm back. And there's not to mention all the chaos in Washington about the bipartisan infrastructure bill and the social infrastructure bill and 3.5 trillion and 1.8 trillion and no one actually knowing what on earth is in these bills, just they're supposed to be moved by some number,

all just seem very chaotic. And there's a competence issue. And can you dig out of incompetence if you're a president, if you're chief executive? I think it's very hard. I think it would require some other huge outside event and crisis that you demonstrate leadership and statesmanship and are able to control and master. And I don't really want another crisis. We have enough already.

And I also don't know whether Biden would be up to that job. You know, it hasn't gotten much attention, Dan, but on the eve of the election, NPR-Marist released a poll and they asked Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents whether they wanted Biden or someone else at the top of the ticket in 2024. And according to this NPR-Marist poll, 44% of Democrats wanted someone else at the top of the Democratic ticket in 2024. And if you're Biden there, you were already, there's been a lot of speculation about whether you run again. You have all these voices within the Democratic elite here inside the Beltway questioning whether that's worthwhile, positioning Vice President Harris and Transportation Secretary Buttigieg, you know, it doesn't look very good for Biden

right now if the party apparatus decides it wants to move on. I mean, one reason I think that Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic former governor of Virginia who was running against Glenn Youngkin in this past week's election for the governorship, was aiming for a second non-consecutive term was he wanted to use it as a springboard for a 2024 White House bid. I've heard of other Democrats just stating openly their intention to run in 2024. So the fact that the party seems to already be thinking about the post-Biden era, it's not a good sign for President Biden. The Republican candidate for governor of New Jersey had this great line where he said

something like, we're going to bring Christopher Columbus back to the schools. And it's just like in that one line totally touched the nerve of this moment where people are debating. There's not as much CRT as the right is saying. They're overplaying their hand. And they're like missing the bigger point on these cultural trends that many Republican politicians, whether it was him or the guy running against Sweeney or obviously Glenn in a more organized way, had tapped into. Do you, I just want to be careful how I say this, but what a number of analysts and pundits have been pointing out, mostly on the left, was that there was an undertone of race in all of these

arguments being marshaled by Republican candidates. That what they really touched a nerve on was the issue of race. And I disagree with it, but I just want you to respond to that, to that post-mortem analysis. That these were dog whistles, that the woke, the anti-woke stuff and the anti-woke messaging were dog whistles for race. Right. The left has responded to the election result by saying that, one, the issue of critical race theory or anti-American curriculum

in the schools is myth. It's a myth, it doesn't exist. And that Republicans are using coded language to basically profit off anti-black animus. I disagree on both counts. It's obviously not a myth because these are parents who started this movement quite independently of any party apparatus and they show you the materials. They can point to actual documents. Children come home with assignments to write privilege, right? That is what parents are responding to. And the idea of the code for just racism, I always feel is a kind of a crutch for Democrats when they lose.

They said that Reagan's election in 1980 was code and white backlash. They said that George H.W. Bush's election in 1988 wasn't about any actual issue of crime, but it was just simply a racial appeal. I just don't believe that to be the case. And by the way, this supposedly racist electorate in Virginia elected the first black woman lieutenant governor in the history of the state and the first Latino state attorney general. So it's just, it's, to me, it's obviously false. Our friend John Podhortz has actually made this point that if Glenn Youngkin

got about, you know, 1.677 million votes in this election, so something like around 3 million people voted in Virginia. So Glenn got 1.677 million sears the lieutenant governor and then the and also the ag candidate the latino who's latino you point out they they got like you know 1.672 million and 1.66 million votes respectively so they were just only slightly off yunk's number. So at a minimum, the overwhelming majority of people who voted for the quote-unquote racist Youngkin also voted for a black lieutenant governor candidate and a Latino AG candidate. You know, I mean, McCullough was calling Youngkin a racist in the closing weeks, and the National Democratic Circuits were calling Youngkin a racist. But then voters are not dumb. They look at the candidate. And what is Youngkin saying? He's denouncing racism and quoting Martin Luther King Jr. about the content of our character, not the color of our skin. For most people, that is anti-racism. For the left, however, that quote from MLK is itself like a form of racism,

right? Because for the left now, you have to be color conscious. If you're for color blindness, according to today's left, you're racist. But I think most Americans reject that definition, and so do I. Yeah. You say in a piece you have coming out in the next issue of commentary in your column that the question is, is Donald Trump—I can't forget how you phrased it exactly, but basically raised the question, is Donald Trump the future or the past? And you basically say Glenn Youngkin's the future. Can you explain what you mean? Because this has big implications for Republicans running in 2022 and Republicans about running for president in 2024. Right. I mean, this is the big question of the role of Donald Trump in the next few years of American politics. I think that Trump would certainly like a role. I think a lot for Trump depends on him being perceived as having a role.

And I think that Republicans and also Democrats should operate under the assumption that Trump will continue to involve himself and insert himself and possibly even run for president once more. However, one lesson of this election is that time keeps on trucking forward. And the further away we get from the Trump presidency, the more new faces we have, the more new issues develop, the more that the willingness to seek out new faces and support them increases. And so I look at Trump as kind of being a figure of the past in some ways. He needs to be, you know... Already. Only eight, nine months since he left office, already. Think about Donald Trump.

You know, he and his supporters were part of the primary electorate in Virginia. He needed to be handled by Junkin. And Junkin did that. As one Republican senator has been saying, Donald Junkin figured out the way to hold, rather, Glenn Junkin. Yeah, sorry. Sorry, Glenn. That was a McAuliffe-ism. Glenn J Glenn Youngkin figured out the way to hold Donald Trump's hand under the table and in the dark. And if you do that and you still have – you don't confront Trump directly. You don't pick a – start a shouting match with him, well, you can be in a place where you actually overperform Trump everywhere in a state like Virginia, including in MAGA areas of southwestern Virginia. You overperform.

And it was a reminder that Republicans overperform Donald Trump. The House Republicans in 2020 overperformed Donald Trump. The Senate Republicans in 2016 overperformed Donald Trump. The House Republicans in 2020 overperformed Donald Trump. The Senate Republicans in 2016 overperformed Donald Trump. Donald Trump is a weight on the Republican Party. And I think if more evidence accumulates exposing that fact, the history and the institutions will move on. Now, is this what I want to happen? Yes. So maybe there's a lot of wishful thinking here. Yeah, wish casting. Wish casting, as the kids say.

On the other hand, I think Trump recognizes this too. And, you know, I'm on his mailing list. So I get the dozen or so emails he blasts out every day, which are basically kind of the new version of tweets. And he sent out, it must have been about five or six since election night in Virginia, reminding the world of how important a role he played. But the truth is he didn't really play an important role. He didn't go that.

And by the way, he played no role in New Jersey. None. No, yeah. None. He was totally invisible. So the fact that the Republicans could so overperform and Trump was invisible. Republican Party to retain some of the modifications of the Trump era, understand that the Trump base cannot be ignored and shouldn't be poked and prodded, but can also begin to craft an appeal to swing voters in the suburbs who determine the outcome of our elections.

It's that simple. I mean, it's like American politics is not that complicated. You have Democratic dominance in the cities and dense inner suburbs. You have Republican dominance basically, you know, 35 miles outside of those cities in the rural areas. And then the territory you're fighting over is in the outer suburbs and exurbs, right? That's the swing vote. And that's the vote that the Democrats captured in 2018. They retained it in 2020. But I think 2021 shows the way for Republicans to get those areas back in 2022

Before we let you go I want to spend a minute on your next book Which is coming out in April called the right the hundred-year war for American conservatism Which for our listeners in case they don't know you have been this longtime chronicler of the evolution of the conservative movement, oftentimes the Civil War, the intellectual Civil War within the conservative movement. And it feels to me, although I haven't read it yet, although our listeners should know they can preorder it, and we'll post the link to preorder the book,

this seems like the culmination of a lot of thinking and writing and teaching by you. So I'm excited for it. What's the gist of the book? I'd say the gist of the book is we often understand the American conservative movement in terms of Ronald Reagan as a process that leads up to Reagan. And we've only been living in Reagan's shadow ever since. What I try to do in the book is say, you know, Reagan is an important character, but he's just one character. And I want to show the fact that American conservatism far predates Reagan and also show that, you know, Reagan wasn't inevitable, that there have always been fights, that it's a complicated movement with different camps,

and that these camps have always been fighting, and that it's also continuously evolving. So the book is really a narrative of the last century of American politics and the way that conservative intellectuals involved themselves with politics, understood politics, became disillusioned with politics at various points. And my hope is that for young people in particular who just don't know, they're just not aware of a lot of American history as we've been fighting over in some of these elections,

this would serve as a, you know, kind of a primer, an introduction to how we got here as a conservative movement and also a potential road forward. And now is an especially good time to order the book because I think conservatives of all stripes are pretty upbeat, at least right now, given the past week about the future of the movement.

So this is a perfect time, the spirit of which to order the book. So how's that for time, the spirit of which, to order the book. So how's that for a plug? I love it, Dan. I love it. Yeah. Matt, thanks for coming on. Hope you'll come back.

Always interesting, illuminating. And many of these conversations we have are pretty depressing on this podcast, but this one gets me optimistic. I'm being cheerfully pessimist. Sure, sure, sure, sure. You know, Matt, a lot of these conversations on the post-corona podcast can be depressing. We're often talking about a pandemic, but this one, given events of the past week and given the sort of uncertainty of the future of American politics, but uncertainty, I think, in a good way, meaning that it's much more

wide open than people realize, gives me a sense of optimism. We may be headed for a crazy few years, perhaps crazier than the last few years. But I guess, as you've explained, the events of the past week shows you that you can, just when you think things are locked in, you can have these kind of upheavals that are healthy for our policy. Well, I appreciate that, Dan, and I seem to have talked myself into being more cheerful than cheerfully pessimist, and so I have to kind of find a way to crawl back into my, you know, conservative, pessimistic shell. Don't worry. Not yet. There will be plenty more. Plenty of time. Yeah, plenty of more reasons to do it.

Get past the next couple of years. We'll be all right. Matt, thanks for joining the conversation. Thank you. That's our show for today. To follow Matt Continetti, you can find him on Twitter. He's at Continetti, just his last name. C-O-N-T-I-N-E-T-T-I, at Continetti. Also look out for his work.

You can do that at the websites of the American Enterprise Institute, Commentary Magazine, and the Washington Free Beacon. And be sure to pre-order Matt's new book called The Right, The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism. You can pre-order it at barnesandnoble.com or from your favorite independent bookstore or that other e-commerce site, which I think they're calling it Amazon these days. Post Corona is produced by Ilan Benatar. Until next time, when you tune into The Roaring 2020s, our next series, I'm your host, Dan Senor.