Here's Where It Gets Interesting - The Right: The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism with Matthew Continetti, Part 1

Episode Date: April 11, 2022

In this episode, Sharon speaks with journalist and author Matthew Continetti about the evolving history of conservatism over the past one hundred years. Continetti has spent the past few years researching and writing about the American Right. History is the study of change, and Continetti’s book leads readers through the changing landscape of America as it has shaped conservative politics since 1920. Sharon and Matthew talk about Abraham Lincoln, the public embracement of Republican leadership after World War I, immigration, the constitution as an anchor for the Republican Party, and more in this first part of a two-part conversation. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Buy from dysoncanada.ca. With ANC on, performance may vary based on environmental conditions and usage. Accessories sold separately. Hello, friends. Welcome. Always delighted to have you along. And today we are going to dive into a fascinating conversation with Matthew Continetti, who is the author of a new book called The Right, The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism. And if you love presidents, if you love history, government, politics, fun facts, gosh, there is so much to glean from this conversation. So let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon, and welcome to the Sharon Says So podcast. I am super excited to have Matthew Connetti with me today. There is so much material here that I know everybody is going to just have a bunch of

little brain tangle, mind blown moments. Thank you so much for doing this. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. I would love for you to start with an introduction and tell people who you are and more about the book that you've written that we're going to use as a jumping off point to talk about the American right. Sure.

Well, I've been a journalist in Washington, DC for 20 years covering politics and policy. But over the years, I developed an interest in history. I was a history major in college at the American Enterprise Institute, where I'm a senior fellow. I've spent the past few years writing this book, The Right, The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism, which is really telling the story of American conservatism since the 1920s up to today. And that's become my passion is telling the story and teaching it where I can and writing about it whenever I have the opportunity. So there's so much to talk about

because when, you know, colloquially these, you know, the notions of what makes somebody right-leaning is very intertwined with the modern Republican Party. And in some cases, that has been the case in the past. And in some cases, it hasn't. And the Republican Party has not represented the views of conservatives or all of the conservatives. But I'd really like to start at the beginning sort of where your book picks up. Before we do that, though, I want to talk about something that a lot of people bring up, which is that the Republican Party is the party of Lincoln. I would love to hear your thoughts on the party of Lincoln and whether you think Lincoln would recognize himself in the modern Republican Party. Would he find a place in the American right? What is your view on that?

Well, that's such a great question, Sharon. Of course, the Republican Party was founded as a result of the territorial crisis over slavery in the run-up to the Civil War. It was Lincoln's election in 1860 as the first Republican president, which was the inciting event of that war, which led to the secession of the Southern states. And Lincoln is the primary figure in the history of the Republican Party. And indeed, I begin my book with an epigraph of Lincoln. How would he view today's Republican Party? I think he'd recognize elements of it. And I think he would not recognize other parts of it. What would he recognize? Well, in the epigraph to

my book, The Right, I have a passage from Lincoln where he talks about how Lincoln represented, in his view, a continuation of the principles of the American founding. And emancipation and equality were, in his view, the principles of the Declaration of Independence. And the Constitution was kind of the continuation of those principles, but it was flawed and had to be fixed, right? And that was what Lincoln was setting out to do. I think he'd see in Republicans today a similar attitude, a reverential attitude toward the American founding and kind of using the founding as an anchor for most conservatives and Republicans. I think that's the case. I think Lincoln would also see similar attitudes in the party's embrace of equality of opportunity.

Now, Lincoln was someone who believed that you could set people free, and as long as you didn't prevent them from enjoying the fruit of their labor, they would go far in life. And I think a similar spirit kind of im using government to provide people the tools that they could advance in that race of life. And so when you think of things like the Homestead Act, right, or you think of things like the Land-Grant Colleges Act, right, these are big government programs. They were different from many of the programs we have today in the way that they were constructed, but they were still the federal government doing what it could to help people realize their full potential. I would think that Lincoln would side with many people on the right today in viewing the American founding as one of the most consequential and positive developments in the history of humanity and trying to hold on and build the best from that moment of the Declaration and then a decade later of the Constitution, trying to bind the country together under those principles. How do we build on that? That's what I think Lincoln would be looking at and what conservatives should be looking at today. I would like to ask you one question, which is something that I have seen

debated in certain circles. Obviously, the modern Republican Democratic parties don't represent the same viewpoints that they did at their inception. To me, that is obvious. Is that obvious to you? It's pretty obvious. Yes. There are thoughts in some circles that there was never, there's never been a difference. There's this pushback against the idea that Republicans believe different things now than they used to, that the Democratic Party has always been the party of white slave owners and racism, and that there has never been any change in the platforms of any of the parties. And guess what? There's problematic ideas in all political parties throughout history, 100% problematic people in all political parties throughout history. No party has a lock on like

we have had all the good ideas throughout time. But do you agree with the assessment that there has been a drift over time between who tended to vote with which party that the Democratic Party has become something different, especially towards the end of the 1960s, Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, but that has changed who votes Republican and who votes Democrat. Oh, I absolutely agree with that idea. And, you know, why do we study history? History is change. So history is the study of change. And when we look at the history of American political parties in the 20th century, we see continuity in some regards, as we were discussing, but we also see great change and

disruption. In particular, you look at the Democratic Party and what you see in the late 1960s, and I get into this in the right, how the Democratic Party that had given Franklin Delano Roosevelt his four terms in office, that had given Harry Truman his surprise victory, that had elected Kennedy in 60 and then elects Lyndon Johnson in one of the biggest landslides in American history in 1964. Well, because of the cultural disruptions of the 1960s, that Democratic Party came apart. It came apart. And a lot of the voters who had traditionally been associated with the Democratic Party began shifting into the Republican column. And when those voters started moving and voting for Republicans like Richard Nixon, Republicans like Ronald Reagan, that changed the Republican Party too. I think it made the Republican Party more

interested in cultural issues. It made the Republican Party more populist in the way that it viewed elites and experts. And so this shift, which starts in the late 1960s as a result of the pressures of Vietnam, the pressures of crime, arguments over civil rights, the inflation of that period. It's ongoing, but it definitely changed the basis of the two parties. The Republican Party subsumed a lot of those working class, mainly Catholic voters who had been part of the New Deal coalition. And the Democratic Party became more of the party of professionals, people with graduate degrees, people who are lawyers or professors or doctors. They started becoming more and more the base of the Democratic Party and shifting the party's

views on cultural matters in the opposite direction of the Republicans. Okay. Let's go back to the progressive era and give everybody, if people are a little rusty on their history, what was happening during that time period that gives rise to sort of really where you begin to trace the modern American right, the last hundred years of the American right, what was happening in the 1920s? Sure. Well, at the turn of the 20th century, America was just filled to bursting with energy, with economic energy, with social energy, a huge influx of immigrants. There was a great also intellectual confidence that America could really improve its condition by using the tools of government, by using policy expertise

to improve the lives of everyday people. And this came to be called progressivism, the progressive movement. And in the beginning decades of the 20th century in the United States, it wasn't clear which party would be the progressive party. Theodore Roosevelt, another very famous Republican president, he was in many ways a progressive. He thought that you needed to use government to bust the trusts and also to improve the condition of everyday Americans. But it really came to be that the progressive impulse found itself located in the Democratic Party under Woodrow Wilson, President Wilson. And Wilson has an extraordinary presidency, but like a lot of presidents, actually, his second term did not go well for him. And his second term, you know, he ran for reelection, Wilson did in 1916, promising to keep America out of the Great War, out of World War I.

to his second term, events came to pass that he involved America in our first European war. And we sent an expeditionary force and participated in the First World War. Well, America was in many ways a big winner of the Great War, but the American people did not like our involvement in it. And indeed, our involvement in the Great War was accompanied by repression at home. The influenza pandemic of the era was a consequence of this war. There was also, again, that the I word, inflation, appears as a result of the war economy that the Wilson administration started. And so by the end of the experience in World War I, Americans were ready for change. And they embraced the Republican administration of Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, who promised them normalcy.

A return to normalcy. A return to normalcy, something we've been hearing a lot of lately, right? Return to normalcy. Return to normalcy, something we've been hearing a lot of lately, right? And that's where I begin my story in the right, is here we have a situation where we have the progressive Democratic Party really coming into its own, but we also have the Republican Party viewed as a conservative party. Now, it's interesting, they didn't call themselves conservative, because in their minds, they were just standing for what had always been the case, right? This is how they viewed Americanism is what Harding and Coolidge called it. That's what they were. In retrospect, we see that they were really the first real conservative administration

there in the 1920s. So that's where I start my story. Warren Harding is such an interesting figure to me. So interesting. I could spend a whole podcast talking about Warren Harding, his many, many things that make him an interesting historic figure. But he is also interesting because he does represent sort of that birth of these new conservative ideas, a return to normalcy. That has always struck me as a little bit of a unique campaign proposition. Right. Yeah. He wasn't the last Republican president to have trouble with language. And so normalcy was kind of his own term,

but that it kind of took on. And when you look at Harding and especially Coolidge, who assumes office in 1923, you really see kind of the matrix of what the American right stood for. And that was, again, this reverence for the Constitution and the Declaration. But also, you see an embrace of free enterprise, low taxes, no regulation. low taxes, no regulation. But what's different and unique about these conservatives in the 1920s is they were also very non-interventionist. They did not like the experience in World War I. They did not think America should become involved overseas. They were very restrictionist when it came to immigration that Congress and the Republican president signed these two restriction acts in the 1920s that basically ended immigration to the United States for about 40 years.

And they were protectionist. They believed in the tariff and they wanted to insulate American industry from competition. And so that made them unique from some of the conservatives who came later. But at the same time, I think when you look at the American right today, you actually see a strong resemblance between the right today and the right of the 1920s in all those respects. Absolutely. I totally, this is one of those topics where you can be like, oh, literally 100 years later, here we are back again. It's a nice symmetry, right? The echoes are so loud. It makes

it seem like the music is actually playing in real time. What is it that you think your estimation brought about that very anti-immigrant sentiment that grew in the 1920s because America had always been a country of immigrants. Immigrants were what made America. What do you think was the genesis of that thought? Well, there were a lot of negative racial attitudes at the time. I mean, there was what we would call racism directed primarily toward immigrants from East Asia, but also directed toward European immigrants from the South and East of Europe. They were viewed as other and different, and there were plenty of bigoted attitudes toward them. So I think that was responsible for a lot of it. Every previous

generation of immigrants wants to keep out the next generation of immigrants. And when you study American history, this is a very common pattern. And so this was prevalent in the 1920s. I talk about in the book, a speech that Coolidge gives, where he's actually saying, you know, we are a nation of immigrants. And he says, whether you trace your ancestry to the Mayflower or to the steerage, right, the cheapest compartments in those boats that came from Europe, you're still American as long as you believe in American principles. But of course, as far as he was concerned, there was no more room for passengers, right? So he wanted to close that door. So I think that's the main reason.

There were other economic reasons. There was, you know, kind of, again, suspicion of the outside world, which was very common. And we don't want America to become involved in the outside world. And the corollary of that is we don't want to let outsiders into our country. But this was a widespread view in the 1920s. And it persisted, as I say, until the 1960s when immigration law was liberalized. I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends. And together we have the podcast Office Ladies, where we rewatched every single episode of The Office with insane behind the scenes stories, hilarious guests and lots of laughs. Guess who's sitting next to me? Steve!

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podcasts. Let's move ahead to the beginning of the Great Depression. to the beginning of the Great Depression. And when things began to really not go well for a large majority of Americans, and they began to want a significant change in their government, and they found that change in FDR, and they found that change in a lot of the promises that he made, in the promises to pull them out of this dire, dire situation that they found themselves in, when perhaps the Republican Party was not offering them similar promises, was not offering them a solution to the fact that you're unemployed, you can't feed your children. But FDR did have promises that he wanted to make or that he did make. What made FDR so wildly popular? Yeah, popular for most,

not popular for my conservatives, but we'll talk about that in a second. I think FDR, as I researched and wrote the right, comes across as just a giant. And you can't really ignore him and his talents. There are a few things I would say in response to your question. The first is just personal charisma. Now, the 1932 election pitted FDR, the governor of New York, against the incumbent Republican president, Herbert Hoover. And Hoover's personality was not as vivacious, say, as FDR. FDR had a way of including you in this adventure and making you feel as that he is speaking to you and together we're going to go through this. And many people responded positively to that. Now, there is also, though, this idea that because of the circumstances of the Great Depression, the way that America had conducted itself was no longer appropriate.

That we needed to change the country in response to these changed circumstances. And this was the birth of FDR's New Deal. changed circumstances. And this was the birth of FDR's New Deal. And it's not as though he went in with a five-bullet-point agenda, this is how I'm going to remake American government. But it was more, as he said in one speech during that campaign, he wanted to launch on a campaign of bold, pragmatic experimentation. He wanted to experiment. And if something doesn't work, we're going to try again. And the difference though, is it would be the federal government that would be launching these experiments. And so when I look at FDR among his many qualities, among the many, many ways in which he changed America. And one of the primary ones is he really expanded the role of the federal government

in people's lives. And the size of the government and its reach into our lives became dramatically larger under FDR. And for the people who believed in the principles of Harding and Coolidge, that was a no-no. And so this is where you begin to see the beginnings of the conservative movement in the United States in opposition to FDR's revolution. Who were those people? Who were the people who were like, I don't like all this spending. I don't like all these plans to get out of my life.

Right. Well, a lot of business people didn't like it. They opposed the taxes and the regulations and the controls that came with the New Deal. A lot of Southern Democrats didn't like it. They were part of FDR's party, but they always were leery of anything that expanded the reach of the federal government, because if the federal government could reach in one area, it could also reach in the area of civil rights. But then there were conservative thinkers who kind of thought that FDR was treading on liberties by expanding the scope of government, by trying to create a baseline of material equality, he was restricting freedom in the United States. And so this became the real kind of fulcrum on whether you were a conservative or a liberal. Many liberals would say, well, it increased freedom by giving people more resources and allowing them to make better choices. Many conservatives thought that the New Deal limited freedom, not only by

high taxes and regulations, but really by changing the nature of the Constitution. And so again, you see the importance of the Constitution with American conservatives as an anchor, as something you always have to preserve. And so they really opposed FDR when he went beyond those enumerated powers in the Constitution, and especially when he tried to change the nature of the Supreme Court and really go against this idea that the Constitution was a fixed document and the court had a role of just simply enforcing the principles of that document. His bid to pack the court did not play well in Peoria. And that's the real that's one of the real moments where FDR starts losing some of his popularity. And it happens in 1937. And it was a moment of overreach. Every president has these moments. And this was FDR's. And it was one of the issues that contributed to a pretty good election for Republicans in 1938. Relatively speaking, this is at a time because of the Great Depression that the Republican Party was not a significant force in American politics. But in 1938, they had a pretty good

election and they elected the man who would become their standard bearer for many of the next 10 years. I would love to hear from your research, What was the rhetoric like between the two parties at the time? Because right now the party who's not in power views it as their job to 24 seven denigrate the party that is in power. Literally let's's have a 24-hour cable channel or multiple of them. And this happens on both the right and the left, talking about what idiots these people in power are in. Was that the case in the 1930s? Yes, there are just fewer ways in which you could express your hatred of the other party, right? But when you look at some of the pamphlets and some of the literature that Republicans were circulating about FDR, he was described as a

tyrant, as demagogue, he was ending American liberty. There were comparisons between the New Deal and the rise of fascism in Europe, and certainly with the rise of Bolshevism in the Soviet Union during this time. I think heated, exaggerated, hyperbolic rhetoric is nothing new. We just have so many more ways of being obnoxious today than we did in the 1930s. I will say this, though, Sharon, as it became clear that America was going to somehow intervene in the Second World War, the upper echelons of the Republican Party, the leadership of the Republican Party, they kind of dialed it back. And so you see in 1940 and 1944, the Republicans put up nominees running against FDR, who basically don't disagree with his foreign policy in general and kind of don't want to get involved there. And that I think may be one difference between the late 1930s,

at least at the presidential level. And today it was kind of a reluctance to really attack FDR's foreign policy and war policy straight on. Yep. And you can see that in other conflicts the United States has been involved in. We'll argue amongst ourselves inside our own walls all day long, all night, all day. But when we are putting American lives on the line overseas, there's more of a hesitance to publicly criticize because it's viewed as criticizing the actual members of the military when you're criticizing a president's foreign policy involvement in conflict. And that doesn't mean there has never, that there wasn't a lot of opposition to things like Vietnam, but that has been true for many people throughout US history.

I'm sure you are familiar with the Little House of the Prairie books or the TV show. Laura Ingalls Wilder was a very well-known libertarian. And her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, who helped her write a lot of her books, was an activist libertarian who hated FDR and who wrote about her fantasies of assassinating him. There were a bunch of libertarian women at this time. Rose Wilder Lane was one of them. Another was named Isabel Patterson. Of course, the most famous is Ayn Rand. But again, you kind of see this, the role of women in the American right is one of the themes I try to draw out or remind readers of continually in the book. The way that people viewed FDR, I mean,

he was an extremely polarizing figure, but at the same time, he was also an immensely popular one. And it shows you, though, kind of where the American right was during this period is because figures like Rose Wilder Lane, she didn't really represent a lot of people. No, she I mean, her books were popular in the especially the Little House books, but her political views were not mainstream. And so this is the difference. This is because it took a lot of work to make these arguments mainstream, to put them into the place where they could be at the center of public debate. And we're not there yet when we talk about the 1930s and 1940s. debate. And we're not there yet when we talk about the 1930s and 1940s. Great point that it took decades to move some of the rights ideas into being viable political forces because we elected

Democrat after Democrat after Democrat, the exception of a pretty liberal Republican in there when it came in the case of Eisenhower. But let's move into the 1950s. Not that there's nothing to discuss about World War II, there's plenty, but it's an aberration in time, right? It disrupts, as you just mentioned, disrupts a little bit of the development of political parties because we're dealing with an incredible world war that galvanized people behind this notion of defeating Hitler, defeating Japan. So moving into the time period after the war, after the development of the Truman Doctrine, and into the idea that we're going to elect a Republican president again, what does the American right look like at that point?

a Republican president again. What does the American right look like at that point? Well, it's interesting to think about because we often look back at the 1950s as a very small C conservative decade, right? We look at the baby boom is taking place. We think of the beginning of suburbanization, but we look at kind of the religiosity of the 1950s. There's a huge spike in church attendance. In God We Trust, it starts going on the coinage. We have the Pledge of Allegiance under God being inserted into it during Eisenhower's presidency. And of course, we have a two-term fairly successful Republican president in Dwight Eisenhower. But you know, successful Republican president in Dwight Eisenhower. But you know, it's so funny is that the conservatives of the time really felt that they were under attack. They didn't like Eisenhower for two reasons. The first is that Eisenhower didn't touch the New Deal.

All these great changes that we were just discussing that FDR made, All these great changes that we were just discussing that FDR made, Eisenhower did not roll them back. And the conservatives didn't like that because they thought that violated the Constitution, among other things. And on foreign policy, Eisenhower was for containment of the Soviet Union. He was for trying to limit the reach of communism, whereas the conservatives of the era were for rollback of communism. They wanted America to push communism back into the Soviet Union and then do whatever it could to topple the Soviet regime. And so for those two reasons, many of the conservatives of the 1950s were critical of Eisenhower. Now, like I say, just like Rose Wilder Lane, these were not

mainstream ideas. This idea that you want to overturn FDR and you want to risk a war with the Soviet Union, that was not mainstream popular ideas. But when you look at the main thinkers of the right during this time, that's really what they believed and why they didn't really like Eisenhower. What was the switch from isolationism to we got to get out there and snuff out the communism, even if it means inciting conflict with large countries like the Soviet Union. What was the switch between isolationism and an aggressive foreign policy against communism? It really happens on the right in those years after World War II. And it really, I think, has to do with the way that a lot of these conservatives viewed communism as something that is just an extraordinary, exceptional threat to everything that they

cherished. Many of these conservative thinkers were religious. And so communism, Marxist doctrine is atheistic. So they viewed that as a challenge to it. For the libertarians, as you mentioned, the people who believe in economic freedom, of course, communism means the abolition of economic freedom and central planning. So they hated communism for that. And then there was just the security threat posed by the Soviet Union, which really emerged from World War II as one of the big winners. The Soviet forces are throughout Europe. They're in East Germany. They're in East Berlin. Communism very soon after the war takes over China, right? The world's most populous country. There was a sense after World War II that communism was on the march, and that could possibly mean the extinction of freedom or a nuclear war, which could mean the end of civilization. So this really motivated many thinkers on the right to change their views on foreign policy. And so rather than being opposed to, say, alliances like NATO, rather than

being opposed to what we call forward defense, which is stationing our troops overseas on a pretty much permanent basis in order to make sure that the conflicts are over there and not where we are, whether it meant free trade as a way to encourage the growth of our allies so that they wouldn't be tempted by communism. All of these positions shift on the right in the years after World War II. And the right by the end of the 1950s, for sure, is much more hawkish than it was, say, in the 1920s, much more internationalist in its views, and not the isolationist views of many conservatives during the 20s, 30s, 40s, and even early 50s. I don't think we can talk about conservatism in the United States in the 1950s without talking

about Joseph McCarthy. Yeah, sure. Right? And his fake lists of like, I got a list in this folder. No, you don't. You know what I mean? But the Red Scare and the fear of communism, as you mentioned, pervades the American right for decades, decades, well into even the 2010s. So tell me more about your view on McCarthy. Sure. Well, in my book, The Right, I talk about how there's often a temptation within conservatism between mainstream acceptance or the political fringe. And so in my story, McCarthy is one of the figures who pulls the right toward the fringe with his conspiratorial views about communist infiltration into the U.S. government. I want to start by saying, though, originally, this fear of communist subversion was bipartisan. It was President Truman, a Democrat who started first loyalty programs in order to get rid of communist party members or communist sympathizers within the federal government. But McCarthy was

one of the things that ended that bipartisan tradition because Joseph McCarthy's claims, beginning in 1950, were so outlandish and so outrageous. He really delegitimized the idea of counter-subversion, going after communists at home, among many people on the political left. McCarthy was, in my view, a demagogue. He made some claims that were accurate, but most of the claims he made were false. He also continually kind of upped the stakes going after high-level figures like George Marshall, right, or Dean Acheson, high-level government figures. Eventually, he becomes a political problem for Eisenhower after Eisenhower wins in 52. You have this situation where McCarthy is really kind of undermining not just Eisenhower's status as the most important

Republican in the country, but in Eisenhower's view, really undermining the power of the executive branch of government. And so Eisenhower very subtly begins a campaign of turning the tables on McCarthy and diminishing McCarthy. And one of the figures he uses in this campaign to kind of push McCarthy out of the limelight is his vice president, Richard Nixon, who had been known as a cold warrior and a red hunter, an anti-communist during his rise to power. And Nixon goes on television and delivers a speech where he insinuates that McCarthy is doing damage to anti-communism. And this is kind of the beginning of the break between the Republicans and McCarthy. And it ends for McCarthy in 1954, when he's censured by the United States Senate. And his last few years after that

were just a downward spiral. He dies in 1957. But someone like William F. Buckley Jr., who in my view is the founder of the modern conservative movement, he supported McCarthy at the time. He wrote an entire book defending McCarthy. But later in his life, Buckley would say that McCarthy did immense damage to the cause of anti-communism. But that was not the position Buckley held at the time, nor many conservatives. There is a real temptation sometimes to just defend somebody who you think is on your side against unfair attacks or what you think to be unfair attacks. And that happened a lot with the conservatives in McCarthy.

There is so much more to talk about when it comes to this topic. I could not just leave it here and be like, well, that was good up through the 1950s. We've got to continue to talk more about modern American conservatism. So I hope you'll join me for the next episode where we pick up where we left off. Thank you so much for listening to the Sharon Says So podcast. I am truly grateful for you. And I'm wondering if you could do me a quick favor. Would you be willing to follow or subscribe to this podcast or maybe leave me a rating or a review, or if you're feeling extra generous, would you share this episode on your Instagram stories or with a friend? All of those things help podcasters out so much. This podcast was written and researched

by Sharon McMahon and Heather Jackson. It was produced by Heather Jackson, edited and mixed by our audio producer, Jenny Snyder, and hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. I'll see you next time.