Front Burner - What's Trump's place in conservative history?

Episode Date: December 23, 2024

People talk about Donald Trump as a singular figure. A one-of-a-kind politician who's made conservative history in the U.S. But where exactly does Trump fit in conservative history? In what eras does he stand on common ground? What are the big differences? Is he a revolutionary figure or a natural evolution of the movement?To work though that, we've got Sam Adler-Bell and Matt Sitman. They are the hosts of the Know Your Enemy podcast, which explores the underpinnings of contemporary conservatism.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, everyone. Jamie here. Today on the show, we've got a feature conversation that I found super interesting. People talk about Donald Trump as this singular figure, a one of a kind politician who's made conservative history in the U.S. Well, what we were curious about was where exactly does Trump fit in conservative history? In what eras does he stand on common

ground? What are the big differences? To work through that, we've got Sam Adler-Bell and Matt Sittman. They are the hosts of the Know Your Enemy podcast, which explores the underpinnings of contemporary conservatism. Sam, Matt, thank you so much for coming on to FrontBurner. It's such a pleasure to have you both. Thank you for having us. And greetings to all the Canadian Know Your Enemy listeners out there. Big time. There's quite a few, I think.

So for this discussion, I want to talk about three different eras of conservatism, the pre-war era before World War II, the Cold War era, and the current Trump or mega era. And maybe we could start in the middle, as one does, with the Cold War era and make our way towards the neoconservative movement that really capped it off. And maybe I'll start with you, Matt. What was the conservative project focused on during the Cold War era? And what was it shaped by? Well, I think one way of answering that is, I mean, in a lot of ways, anti-communism on the U.S. right post-1945, that was the glue that held it together. And it held together, you know, people from very different kind of strains of conservatism.

The free market libertarians, like Milton Friedman, they were anti-communists. In the only cases in which the masses have escaped from the kind of grinding poverty you're talking about, the only cases in recorded history where they have had capitalism and largely free trade, if you want to know where the masses are worse off, it's exactly in the kinds of societies that depart from that. A lot of religious right figures or kind of proto-religious right figures, conservative Christians, they were anti-communists too. right figures, conservative Christians, they were anti-communists too.

I'm sick and tired of hearing about all of the radicals and the perverts and the liberals and the leftists and the communists coming out of the closets. It's time for God's people to come out of the closets, out of the churches and change America. The neocons, ex-leftists, even ex-trotskyists who defected and moved right, they were driven by anti-communism. So it really can't be overstated how much anti-communism was kind of at the center of post-war American conservatism and kind of politics on the right. And when you look at the kind of conservatism that you could find in the pages of National Review, which was founded by William F. Buckley Jr. in 1955, the ideology that was developed in the pages of that magazine, which became kind of the operating philosophy of the Republican Party eventually, was what was called fusionism. A mix of free market economics, anti-communism and kind of muscular, supposedly, you know, foreign policy and defense, and kind of traditional values, right? The kind of moral conservatism. Something in the system that warns us, warns us that America had better strike out

on a different course rather than face another four years of asphyxiation by liberal damages. rather than face another four years of asphyxiation by liberal damages. And those tendencies jostled among each other. You know, we never tried to portray the conservative movement as too uniform or that it didn't contain all kinds of internal fissures and disagreements and arguments. But that was kind of what conservatism meant during the Cold War, or rather what it came to mean on the right in the U.S. after 1945. And Sam, I wonder if I could bring you in here, and perhaps you could just elaborate for me a little bit more on what Matt was talking about there, you know, when we talk about the

perspective, the conservative perspective at the time on foreign policy, on military intervention overseas, on conversations around racial integration and anti-Semitism, that kind of stuff. Yeah, National Review was really the place where that melding of individualist economics, Christian traditionalism, melded by the binding force of anti-communism, really took shape and took hold in conservative politics. What I will add is about more about the context of the Cold War, not just what those enmities, the sort of shared enmities against, you know, the godless communists around the world, and then

extending to sort of liberal fellow travelers within the United States who were seen as not sufficiently anti-communist. But what I want to add to that is the sort of positive project of conservatism in this era, and really of the entire American project of anti-communism, which was much more sympathetic to the idea that America ought to be a nation of immigrants, a nation founded on a set of ideas rather than shared ethnic heritage. So conservatism in the Cold War era had this much more pluralistic conception of itself, in particular because there was a sort of moral competition against the Soviet sphere. And they wanted to show, look, America is a place where we accept immigrants. We're not keeping people from leaving our country the way that some places in the communist bloc was.

We're accepting people from all over the world, and they can be a part of the American project as long as they agree with us about some basic sort of founding premises of what this country is about. We now have sort of conservatives seem so much more anxious about or suspicious of some of those ideas. But during the Cold War era, you know, this kind of conception of conservatism was very powerful. Before we move on to the end of the Cold War,

I wonder if you guys could just tell me a little bit more about the religious right and the role that they played in shifting the political landscape. I'm thinking here of organizations like Moral Majority and the role that they played in Reagan's rise to power. You know, when we say the religious right, and we start invoking groups like Moral Majority, as you did, or figures like Jerry Falwell, you know, we're talking about a kind of movement that really got going in the 70s, mid to late 70s, and then, you know, into the early 80s. Initially, it wasn't clear, you know, in a partisan sense, in terms of party, what the emergence of evangelicals in our national politics in a certain kind of way, which way they would break, or if they,

you know, it wasn't fated necessarily that they would be a kind of voting block of the Republican Party. Because you have to remember, Jimmy Carter, elected in 1976, he was an evangelical Christian himself. But I think it's time to tap the tremendous strength and vitality and idealism and hope and patriotism and a sense of brotherhood and sisterhood in this country to unify our nation to make it great once again. And so I think that shows there was something, you know, kind of broad-based going on here. But in terms of the issues, the religious right, some of it developed as, you know, resistance to desegregation and kind of private religious academies that could, shall we say, you know, keep the right demographics in those schools. That was an issue.

It wasn't just abortion. It wasn't just Roe v. Wade catalyzing it. That's kind of a myth the religious right tells about themselves. To some degree, you can see the religious right as a backlash against the rise of feminism, post-Stonewall visibility for gay people. There was a number of issues that were seen as, you know, threatening to traditional religious ways of life and values. You know, so those were, there's a lot in the mix. But I just want to kind of take us forward a little bit because they did break for the Republican Party eventually, right? And I think, you know, Ronald Reagan's win in 1980 and then even more, perhaps in 1984, when he won 49 states, the religious right became some of the foot soldiers for the Republican Party.

The nomination and subsequent election of Ronald Reagan and the election of a conservative Congress brought the new Christian right into the forefront of the American political scene. National organizations like Moral Majority and dozens of smaller groups urged voters to consider moral and biblical issues in choosing a candidate. They're most dedicated kind of base loyalists, party activists, in part because religious people are already kind of organized. They go to churches, right? And as someone who was a young conservative, I'm an ex-conservative now, but I remember being in college, right, and going around Sunday mornings to churches and putting pro-life, anti-abortion flyers under the windshield wipers of cars and church parking lots. I've often said that there really are only two things the liberals don't understand. The things that change and the things that don't change.

The economy, technology, these things change. But America's basic moral and spiritual values, they don't change. What happens to conservatism at the start of the 90s, right? After the Cold War ends? What kind of fractures do we see? Yeah, Reagan himself, you know, had brought a lot of neoconservatives into his administration,

although there was a sort of war between the neoconservatives and sort of what came to be called the paleoconservatives for control over the Reagan administration. But the important thing about neoconservatives was that they tended to be ex-liberals or even ex-communists. They had seen that liberalism and progressivism was a sort of threat to the moral order in the country, and so they moved towards the right. But they tended to be,

they were much more likely to be Jewish intellectuals, for one thing. And they were really strong believers in that sort of Cold War consensus idea of the American project. And those neoconservatives, because they were so good at articulating that version of the American project and that version of conservatism, which was useful to the conservative movement during the Cold War, let's say in the Reagan 80s when Reagan was ramping up the Cold War, they really drafted off of that momentum and it became really prominent in the conservative movement. If fascism ever comes to America, it'll come in the name of liberalism. And what is fascism?

If fascism ever comes to America, it'll come in the name of liberalism. And what is fascism? Fascism is private ownership, of power, but the version of conservatism that they had articulated was no longer entirely necessary to the movement anymore. Right. Because there were no longer at war with communists. There was no longer an ideological contest for the hearts and minds of the people of the world. And so at that moment, these kinds of discontents from that version of conservatism, who had always been around, they started calling themselves paleo-conservatives eventually, but who had more affinity to a kind of much earlier,

pre-Cold War notion of conservatism, started to come to the fore. Because they said, we don't need these guys anymore. What is the American project? Does it have to be about welcoming immigrants from all over the world? Does it have to be about this kind of let's all get together and hold hands multiracialism thing? Because actually now, shouldn't America be going its own way? Can't America go back to what we thought America was even before the Cold War? Shouldn't it be, once again, about who we are much more specifically as a distinct ethnic project, as people who have lived together with certain traditions in a certain place in a certain time, and not all this America is a nation of ideas. What if it's not a nation of ideas?

What if it's a nation of particular people? You could style the Cold War, a kind of clash between two universalisms, right? Like two systems competing for part of the plausibility and effectiveness of the kind of, well, more welcoming version of conservatism that I think especially marked neoconservative thought, but really the question of, well, what's the remaining superpower to do? Right? Early 90s, Cold War ends. What happens? Immediately, Pat Buchanan pops up, runs for president. And among his messages was, come home, America.

The right place for us to be now in this presidential campaign is right beside George Bush. And this presidential campaign is right beside George Bush. This party is my home. This party is our home. And we've got to come home to it. And don't let anyone tell you different. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem.

Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization. Empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people, and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to,

50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo, 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. Where do people like Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney fit into this conversation? When people think about neocons, that is maybe who they're thinking about, right? Right. Here's what I'll say. Neoconservatism maybe seemed to be kind of exhausted as a

political project in certain parts of the conservative movement in the 1990s. But then, then, after 9-11, there is a new reason to be a neoconservative. There's a new reason to be a universalist of a sort and to kind of embrace a notion of America's, you know, God-given necessary role in organizing the countries of the world against a new common existential enemy in the form of a radical Islam. Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated. The neoconservatives in the Bush administration, these are sort of like, you know, friends of Bush's father and aides of his from that era, from the Reagan era and from his father's presidency.

They all know that. They see it, you know. They see, here we go, we've got a new Cold War. And we're going to milk it. We're going to, for everything it's worth, we're going to try to reorganize the world around American supremacy again via the project of the war on terror. Every nation in every region now has a decision to make. Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.

Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. And what we know now is it didn't work. It did not. It was a disaster, right? And so neoconservatism really, it was maybe exhausted from a certain perspective in the 90s. It got its groove back after 9-11, and then it massively overplayed its hand with what was handed to it by the perceived crisis of global terrorism. So if we think about the long arc of conservatism in the United States,

is this era that we have been talking about, the Cold War era, is it the norm or is it the exception? Well, I would argue it's something of an exception precisely because conservatism traditionally has been a philosophy and politics of particularity. of universalism we've been describing of the Cold War. Like that was something of an unusual move to make for politics on the right and for conservative thinkers to make. This has been one of the realizations that I think slowly has come to us, is that the Cold War was something of an aberration on the right, and it led to conservatives making their peace with liberal democracy and

internationalism and engagement abroad rather than isolationism or, if you want to call it, restraint and not seeking monsters abroad. Right. Yeah. I mean, and not to put too fine a point on it, but what we can kind of see now with hindsight is that there were aspects of the old right, which was to say the pre-war right, which had to be put on ice, had to be marginalized during the Cold War, which I think we started to see a version of it in the 1990s with Pat Buchanan and the paleo conservatives. and we've seen it come back with a vengeance in the form of Donald Trump's ascendancy. And what that is, is this kind of suite of policies. It's foreign policy isolation. America doesn't need to be the world's police. It doesn't need to solve the problems of the world. It doesn't need to spread democracy.

Donald Trump's plan to pull American troops out of Syria is drawing fire from both sides of the aisle in Washington. Really, the plan is to get out of endless wars, to bring our soldiers back home, to not be policing agents all over the world. If other parts of the world, other peoples are not, you know, capable of democracy, forget about them. We don't need to solve their problems for them. It's immigration restriction. We don't need to solve their problems for them. It's immigration restriction.

I mean, that was the other really, really one of the, to the extent there was a coherent conservative movement before the Cold War, a lot of it was people who were opposed to the hordes of immigrants from their perspective coming into the country. They wanted to preserve some kind of purity of of the american people that's come back too we're gonna have to seal up those borders he made immigration the centerpiece of his campaign we're like a garbage can for the world and when he's back in the white house president-elect trump has promised to immediately crack down with mass deportations of people in the country illegally. And then there's also the sort of trade which is related to the foreign policy. But but it's but it's instead of free trade, right? neoliberalism, spreading markets, spreading democracy by spreading markets, right? The pre war right was much more this kind of protectionist,

tariff oriented, kind of economic vision, which was about like, let's just make our own stuff. Let's make jobs for our people. We don't need to have this kind of international interdependence with the world market, which you can see why that would be useful during the Cold War, but both before the Cold War and after now, there are parts of the conservative project. They don't want that. They want us to be self-sufficient, protect the interests of America. And, you know, as the term that connects these two eras puts it, America first, America first. From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land. From this day forward, it's going to be only

America first. America first. How would you compare some of the characters, the figures that we saw back then to some of the figures that we see today? Donald Trump, of course, but anyone around him as well. There are some interesting parallels, actually, between some of the pre-war right figures and some of the people active now that we see around Trump, intellectuals on the right. A while back, we had a guest on Know Your Enemy, Jacob Heilbrunn, who wrote a book called America Last about kind of the US rights, some fascination and often fondness for strong men and foreign dictators abroad. like strongmen and foreign dictators abroad. And you see this with someone like H.L. Mencken, for example, right, would be a writer we might put in this category. And so that kind of fondness reminds me of the adoration of Viktor Orban in Hungary that you see on the American right some

today. Viktor Orban has done a tremendous job in so many different ways, highly respected, respected all over Europe. Probably, like me, a little bit controversial, but that's okay. That's okay. You've done a good job. So almost like looking abroad for more authoritarian models of leadership in some ways. But also with that, I think kind of related in some ways is a kind of suspicion of democracy. It's a little different this time around because Trump actually won the popular vote in November's election. But I think just kind of the willingness to kind of toss aside, you know, legitimate democratic outcomes like we saw in January 6th,

even kind of echoes of this when you see Republicans and figures on the right say, we're a republic, not a democracy. Right. Right. I think those are two strains of the pre-war right that kind of echo today as well, even if it's not identical. Now, I would point to just a couple more similarities that just occurred to me now. One is conspiratorial thinking was extremely important to the pre-war right, as opposed you know, bankers and political operators out in the world who were organizing the global order in a way that didn't serve American interests. And Americans had to be, you know, sensitized to resisting that dangerous sort of entanglement. And of course,

in the pre-war right, that was very, that was often very, very much conflated with anti-Semitism. That's, I think, less the case now. But there is once again back this idea that there are dangerous sort of powerful elites who are controlling the world, you know, according to their own interests and in a way that the American project, that are properly America first, conservatism has to resist. Here's my plan to dismantle the deep state and reclaim our democracy from Washington

corruption once and for all. And corruption it is. First, I will immediately... I see all these similarities that you're making between the interwar conservative period and today. But do you see any differences? Yeah. I mean, I would say there's a lot of differences. It's just a profoundly different context.

And I mentioned already, anti-Semitism is a very different proposition on the right in particular, and for good reason after the Holocaust. in particular, and for good reason after the Holocaust. Also, I mean, we can't really understate how much more interrelated the American economy is in the global economy now. Look, I mean, even the kind of Trumpian push for tariffs, which is maybe the single thing that makes him the most like a much, much earlier era

of conservative politician. You politician, you know, as many economists are pointing out, if Trump did anything close to what he's promising to do, uh, with tariffs, uh, it would cause a huge rise in prices domestically, uh, which would cause undoubtedly a very, a very negative reaction, uh, amongst the American people. And the kind of embeddedness of the American economy in global supply chains is not something you can really roll back, probably ever, but certainly not in a few years with a second term in the White House. So that's not going away. How much of the popularity of this iteration of conservatism in the U.S. right now, do you think, is the appeal of it kind of going back to its roots?

Or how much of it is Trump? American right among US conservatives, there's always been a bit of a jostling for supremacy within conservatism to kind of have your line win the day and become part of the operating consensus of American conservatism. You know, neoconservatives and paleoconservatives, they fought with each other. There were fierce debates in the pages of various conservative publications. And that's just to say the Buchananite, paleocon elements on the US right, they were always there. They might have been kind of submerged or quieted down a little bit for the sake of Cold War consensus, but it's always been there. And I think that just shows that what Trump is tapping into, what he has tapped into, has been a longstanding strain of politics in our country. So, you know, Trump not only has appealed to that kind of existing political tradition, but I would say, especially then after the failures of the George W. Bush administration, maybe the most neoconservative administration ever, not just the disaster that was the Iraq War, but the financial

crisis, that really discredited in a lot of ways that wing of the conservative movement. And people were looking for alternatives, not just on the right, but nevertheless, there is the contingent question of why now, right? Part of it was, again, a reaction to the disaster of the Bush administration and even the failings of Obama to fully redress some of those problems fairly and equitably. But still, even if the prime was pumped, you know, why in 2016? Why now in 2024? And I think it does have something to do with Trump himself, who I think his kind of fame, the fact that he was well known already, that he'd been in the public eye for a long time. You know, he had a big microphone and money and that mattered. But also, I have to say, the strange, like Trump is actually pretty funny. Like he can be funny. He does odd things. And I think that kind of hedge he gives people like, well, he just said something deranged and possibly evil. Did he really mean it or not? Like, is he really going to follow through? I think there is, Trump has certain qualities that,

you know, allowed him to introduce subjects that have been third rails kind of in American politics for a while to, to kind of talk about immigration a certain way to talk about building the wall. You know, just Trump's rhetoric, it's nasty, it can be crude, it can be dehumanizing, but it can also leave you thinking, does he even know what he's talking about? What's he actually going to do, right?

Like, there is that hedge you have with Trump. And I just think, like, he's become almost an object of worship for a lot of people on the right. The cult of Trump is remarkable. And I do think not everyone views him that way. Some people hold their nose and vote for him. A lot of people voted for him because he wasn't the incumbent. But that all being said, I think Trump the man has held things together. And I don't think anyone else would have been able to do what he did. It's this weird thing when you talk about Trump where it's like he's indispensable for holding this new-ish but maybe retro version of conservatism together. You could imagine a much more kind of off-putting ideological figure who tried to effectuate this kind of return to

a much kind of more vicious and paleo-conservative, maybe racist, white nationalist politics who just wouldn't be able to do it because because of the sort of plausible deniability that matt's talking about but also because people didn't already have a relationship with this person as a sort of celebrity figure um and then on the other hand also you know trump is really unpopular it's very hard for us to look at him clearly because it seems clear that there's something there's something special about him that another conservative politician probably wouldn't be able to do. But it's not so special that he's able to, like, pull the whole country along with him.

anti-immigrant against the wars and talking about kind of concern for the American worker was a sort of a winning proposition in American politics at the time that he came to prominence. But also he's a man for the moment in his sort of accumulated experiences of the changes in American communication. You can see Trump is a natural sort of product of the right-wing talk radio world. He's also sort of a natural product of Fox News, vitriolic, partisan cable. But then he's also really clearly a product of, and someone who's very effective at mobilizing this kind of mob, swarm-like discontent that is a signal feature of the internet era, of the social media era. So there's a whole kind of story about networks and modes of communication that we haven't talked about, but that they coincide with the sort of ideological, political story we're describing.

And Trump, you know, in his person kind of brings those threads together. Guys, I want to thank you so much for this. This was great. You gave me so much to think about. I really, really appreciate you both coming by. Thank you so much for having us. Yeah, this was great. All right, that's all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening.

Talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.