Here's Where It Gets Interesting - The Right: The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism with Matthew Continetti, Part 2

Episode Date: April 13, 2022

In the second part of a two-part conversation, Sharon continues her talk with journalist and author Matthew Continetti about the evolving history of conservatism over the past one hundred years. They pick up with some of the most important conservative thinkers in the second half of the 20th century, like founder of The National Review, William F. Buckley, the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, and American economist Milton Friedman. They also touch on the inner turmoil of the Democratic Party and how it helped usher in a “law and order” Nixon presidency, as well as topics like race, movement conservatism, and abortion. 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

Visa and OpenTable are dishing up something new. Get access to primetime dining reservations by adding your Visa Infinite Privilege Card to your OpenTable account. From there, you'll unlock first-come, first-served spots at select top restaurants when booking through OpenTable. Learn more at OpenTable.ca forward slash Visa Dining. This episode is brought to you by Dyson OnTrack. That's ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca.ca. Dyson OnTrack. Headphones remastered. Buy from DysonCanada.ca. With ANC on, performance may vary based on environmental conditions and usage. Accessories sold separately.

Hello, friends. Welcome. Welcome back to a fascinating conversation with author Matthew Continetti. Last time we talked about his new book, The Right, The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism. And I just could not fit it all into one episode. There's so much good stuff for all Americans to learn about in this book. So we're going to pick up from about the 1960s and move forward into today. So let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon, and welcome to the Sharon Says So podcast. Thank you so much for coming back for a second episode. I'm chatting today with

Matthew Continetti, who is the author of a book called The Right, which is tracing the history of American conservatism throughout the last 100 years. This is the second episode. We're discussing this topic with him because there is so much material and I know people are very interested in it. If you are fascinated by this topic, you can listen to our previous episode, which really traces the growth of conservatism in America from the 1920s through the end of the 1950s. Thank you so much for doing this. Thanks for humoring me and coming back for a second episode. I'm happy to be here, Sharon. Thank you for having me anytime. So let's pick up with a couple of characters that I feel like Americans really need to know more about. We focus a lot on some famous senators. We focus a lot on

presidents and rightfully so, they're very impactful, but you can't really talk about modern conservatism without talking about some of the giants of conservative thought. And they did things like begin think tanks and journals and magazines and things that were big thinkers of conservative that could come together and exchange ideas. So can you talk a little bit more about who you view as some of the pioneers of modern conservatism? Sure. I'll give you a few names and some short descriptions. The first is, I think, William F. Buckley Jr. Buckley, as in my view, the founder of the modern conservative movement, he was a writer and an editor, and he founded the magazine National Review in 1955,

which for most of the history that I discuss in The Right is the main platform for conservative ideas and arguments. And Buckley had another important role in the right, which is that he strove to make the right intellectually serious. And so he tried to push out as best as he could, racists, anti-Semites, and conspiracy mongers from the movement. And that was a very significant role he played. I'll mention a couple of other names of thinkers that people should be familiar with. One is Friedrich Hayek. Friedrich Hayek was an Austrian economist who moved to England and then spent many years in the United States. And he published a very famous book in 1944 called The Road to

Serfdom. And Hayek's argument was that once governments begin involving themselves in economic decision-making, in particular in centralized economic planning, real control of the economy, they set themselves down a slippery slope toward totalitarianism, toward total government control. And Hayek's book was a sensation. And he was kind of this tiny little man with a very large brain, and he had ideas about everything. But for him, and in his book that comes out in 1962 called Capitalism and Freedom, he says that political freedom and economic freedom are intimately connected. You can't lose economic freedom and maintain political freedom and economic freedom are intimately connected. You can't lose economic freedom and maintain political freedom for long. But more importantly, Friedman had a lot of policy ideas. He was always willing to suggest things that primarily Republicans, though he wouldn't

mind if Democrats pick them up too, could use to increase freedom and choice and competition in our society. Things like school vouchers, things like the negative income tax, all of these ideas came out of Milton Friedman's head. Zooming head to the election of John F. Kennedy Jr. You alluded in our last episode, you cannot extricate ideas from the person delivering the ideas. Americans, nobody, frankly, votes just on a checklist of ideas, right? You're voting for a person. And when you are pitting good looking JFK against Richard Nixon, who doesn't goes on TV during the debates, having been ill and he looks ill and JFK is all like toothy grin and beautiful wife. You know what I mean? Like there's just no it's it's real hard for people to not vote for JFK. He just there was something about his personality. He was an inspiring speaker.

He just, there was something about his personality. He was an inspiring speaker. He appealed to some elements of tradition that people appreciated, you know, like ask not what you can do. Your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Like this, this appeal to patriotism that perhaps maybe Nixon was not as good good at getting his arms around. Can you point to anything else that was happening during that time period that, again, throughout the 1960s, made the left more successful at getting voters? Well, you know, there's a few things there. I mean, the first is that the 1960s was a very close election. It was. Actually, not dissimilar to more recent close elections. And in fact, many people, including Pat Nixon, Richard Nixon's wife, was encouraging Nixon, who was then the vice president, to challenge the result. But he didn't because he put his country first. And I think that's important to remember.

That's important to remember. He gave a beautiful, I'm sorry to interrupt you. He gave a beautiful speech to Congress about why he was not going to do that. That's right, because he oversaw the electoral vote count in another thing that echoes today. So it was a close election. To what you were saying, Sharon, is that Kennedy actually hit Nixon from the right in some of these discussions, talking about the so-called missile gap, saying that we hadn't been aggressive enough in the Caribbean and Central and South America. So that kind of what I call anti-communist liberalism was still very strong in the Democratic Party in the 1960s.

And that connected, I think, with anti-communist sentiment in the electorate more broadly. The economy was starting to do pretty well in the 1960s and grew quite well by the end of the 1960s. And then when we think about JFK's presidency, of course, it was interrupted by his assassination. And one of the things that really propelled democratic success in 1964 was the assassination of John F. Kennedy in November, 1963. The vice president elevated to president Lyndon Johnson benefited from that sense of just sadness and outrage that accompanied the assassination of JFK. And he used it to really push through a very ambitious liberal domestic agenda, which was modeled after FDR's New Deal. So with LBJ, you have a second great wave of liberal reform, but this time, it did not go as well as it had in the 1930s. And so by the end

of the 1960s, America is in a state of political crisis because of the war in Vietnam, because of turmoil over race in the United States and the disruptions and riots and uprisings in American cities, which became known as the long hot summers, especially after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1968. All the guns and butter budgets of Lyndon Johnson ramping up spending on both the war as well as benefits for Americans, that eventually produced an inflation beginning in the late 1960s. And so what began as a very promising decade for the Democrats and for the left ended in a state of real chaos in this country that is hard for us to get a sense of if you didn't live through it.

I did not live through it. But reading about it, immersing yourself in this history, you say, man, as much as we have problems today, I don't think they compare to what was going on in the United States in the late 60s and then really through the 1970s. Even just looking at the 1968 Democratic Convention, just the amount of turmoil surrounding that with journalists getting punched on live TV on the floor of the convention, just the amount of protests and just everything that was happening even outside of that one little event that just lasted a couple of days, obviously the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, just continued to fuel a lot of this sentiment. But I would love to know what was the American right saying about all of these issues that then they were able to ride to a Nixon victory? Sure. Well, it's in this era of turmoil and disruption, as you say, and also internal

fights within the Democratic Party when all of a sudden a lot of conservative ideas start making sense to people. And all of a sudden in 1966, you have Ronald Reagan, elected governor of California. And so the conservative movement's primary political spokesman is there on the stage. What is Reagan calling for? Well, he's calling for law and order. That was a phrase that he tended to use quite a bit in response to crime and also in response to a lot of the violent protests on America's college campuses. in response to a lot of the violent protests on America's college campuses. The right was calling for cuts in spending in order to stop the inflation. So the kind of the small government argument was gaining traction as a potential response to inflation. And the right was also saying, look, Johnson is not conducting the war in Vietnam effectively. He's limiting the war to the South. He's conducting the bombing campaign in such a way as to produce results at the negotiating table and not produce the deterrence in Vietnam. They were critiquing the strategy in Vietnam, not so much our involvement there. These were all the responses. Nixon, though, of course,

he didn't have the best relationship with the people like William F. Buckley Jr. in the National Review. He was trying to fit them in into this coalition. And he did that by taking some of their ideas, really this law and order idea, which he made a focus of his campaign, but also by promising that his foreign policy experience could get the United States out of Vietnam with honor. That was his phrase, peace with honor. One of the things that is interesting to me is the question that a lot of people have, which is, and I'd love your response on this, isn't this law and order movement of the conservative coalition, doesn't it have a racist undertone? That the protests that are taking place in many cases are in response to overt racism that people had experienced, had been experiencing for hundreds and hundreds of years in the United States and legal racism that was perpetuated throughout Jim Crow era, et cetera. What would your response be to that, that the law and order movement was really just cloaked racism? Well, I think for some pro-segregation politicians in the South, the racism wasn't cloaked when they said that. That's kind of what they meant. But that was not the case for everyone. Nixon, for example, was a supporter of civil rights, supported the civil rights bills in the 50s, supported the Civil Rights Act in the 60s, attended Martin Luther King's funeral after the assassination in 1968. In fact, as president,

it really launched and expanded the programs that we know as affirmative action in government hiring. Law and order was more general. And also, remember, we have to remember that the primary victims of civil disorder are minorities themselves. To simply say that bringing that issue up is racist is not an effective political tactic because people of all races are concerned for their personal safety and the safety of their children and think it's actually government's primary duty to protect you from harm. And so crime became a huge issue in American politics beginning in the 1960s. And it became an issue that really helped a lot of Republicans who made this case that we needed to be tough on crime. who made this case that we needed to be tough on crime, you needed to sympathize with the victims,

not the perpetrators of crime, and that you needed to maintain law and order so that people could go about their lives and pursue their own individual flourishing. So I recognize the race argument. What I'm always trying to do is try to broaden our perspective a little bit and say race is certainly a factor in American history. But there are other factors too, and we need to look at all of them. 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!

It is my girl in the studio! Every Wednesday, we'll be sharing even more exclusive stories from The Office and our friendship with brand-new guests, and we'll be digging into our mailbag to answer your questions and comments. So join us for brand new Office Ladies 6.0 episodes every Wednesday. Plus, on Mondays, we are taking a second drink.

You can revisit all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. We really see the birth of something that a lot of political scientists and people who study these issues refer to, but maybe is not part of the general American lexicon. So I'd love to hear you talk about it, which is the term movement conservative. We really see movement conservatism

begin in the seventies and flourish dramatically in the 1980s. Can you tell us a little bit more about what movement conservatism is? Sure. We've been talking about all these different figures or thinkers on the right. And for most of American history, these thinkers were operated in isolation. They didn't think of themselves as part of a coherent and organized movement that had specific goals and an agenda to pursue. And it's really only in the post-war era, post-World War II era, post-1950s even, that conservatives begin thinking of themselves as not as individual critics of liberals, but as part of a broader movement that wants to change the world, has specific goals. And I'll just name a few of them. The first is taking over the Republican Party and converting the Republican Party into a vehicle for conservative ideas. And so the only way that you're going to make your

ideas a reality in this view is if you have a political instrument, and that's the Republican Party. That's goal number one. Goal number two is defeating communism. How do we defeat the Soviet Union and world communism? Well, we do it by winning political power, but then implementing a policy of what Ronald Reagan called peace through strength, building up American deterrence. And then finally, final goal was how do we reorient the Supreme Court toward the Constitution and the original ideas of the Constitution and the text of the Constitution? How do we do that? Well, we do that by creating a conservative legal movement whose primary idea is that American judges need to view themselves not as policymakers, but as people who wake up in the morning and spend their days figuring out whether cases or laws conform to the

original meaning of the constitution. So I think when we talk about the conservative movement or movement conservatism, it's all of those things in one package directed toward political victory. And then do you feel like movement conservatism, like that repackaging of the ideas is eventually the catalyst for moving a lot of these conservative ideals into the mainstream in a way that it had not seen before with that level of success? You know, I think that's a great question. I would put it this way. I would say events moved conservative ideas into the mainstream. So the fact that America felt humiliated by Vietnam and by the Iranian hostage crisis, the fact that people had gas lines and that their purchasing power was eroding because of stagflation.

The fact that we discussed a rising violent crime. What am I worried? What is going on? I can't walk down the streets and feel safe. These facts made conservative ideas legitimate all of a sudden because they seem to be the only ideas that were responding to the realities of the moment. What the conservative movement did was provide ways to take those ideas and to put them, make them actual, right? Actualize them.

And you did that through think tanks. You did that through philanthropy. And then you did that by winning elections. through philanthropy. And then you did that by winning elections. And the key figure here is Ronald Reagan, because he was able to make the ideas simple and appealing to a lot of people. And unlike most spokesmen for conservatism, he didn't scare anybody. This is a big deal in American politics. You don't want to scare people. And Ronald Reagan didn't scare people. People liked Ronald Reagan. And so he brought conservatives into power in Washington. And that's when this conservative movement could begin actually trying to put its ideas into

practice, which is what it's been doing for the last 40 years. which is what it's been doing for the last 40 years. That's such an interesting point that that is perhaps one of Reagan's enduring impacts. His enduring popularity is that he did not operate from a position of rhetoric that was terrifying to people. It had a more inspirational quality to it of, you know, if you look back at some of his speeches, like where he's giving a speech with Nancy by his side at the foot of the statue of Liberty, you know, he's inciting this feeling in many people of possibility. I would love to hear more about the impact of the topic of abortion from your perspective on conservative thinking? Well, I mean, when you begin to think about what actually motivates people to participate in our political process, there are a few big things, right? I mean, there are a few big issues. Abortion and opposition to abortion is, I think, maybe one of the central key catalysts for political change in America,

beginning with the Supreme Court's decision, Roe v. Wade in 1973. And that's when it becomes an issue because what Roe v. Wade did was basically strike down all the state laws restricting abortion and to varying degrees, and then imposing a new system on the nation, which basically allowed abortion up to the moment of delivery. This immediately brings into existence the pro-life movement. The first march for life in the United States occurs very shortly after the Roe decision. The Republican Party, not clear where it stood on abortion. And in fact, Gerald Ford against Jimmy Carter in 1976, you know, it's not clear which of those candidates was more pro-life than the other, in fact. By the time you get to Reagan,

however, Reagan's presidency, he is definitely standing for the pro-life cause. He writes a short book in 1984 called Abortion and Conscience of a Nation, where he says one of his major regrets in political life was a bill he signed as governor of California that liberalized abortion law. And this trend of Republican politicians standing against abortion increases during and then after Reagan's presidency. And what it's tied to is the introduction into the Republican coalition of the Christian right and changing the nature of how Republican politicians view some of these social issues. Now, what's interesting is that evangelical Christianity had not really agreed with Catholics, say, on contraceptives and abortion until the late 1970s. But by the time you have Reagan as president, you have what's essentially a coalition of religious conservatives, Protestant and Catholic, that are for kind of the traditional

views on some of these hot button issues. And that remains, of course, the case up till today. What do you think that is? Why do you think that that has become such a central point around which conservatives have gathered? Well, it gets to some of the most personal views on theology, on human nature, on personal decision making. on human nature, on personal decision making. And it also gets to a broader idea of who decides, who actually decides. And I think one strength that the conservatives and the Republican Party have had over the years is that they are standing for legislatures to decide these most personal and controversial issues, whereas liberals and Democrats tend to stand with judges and policy experts to make the decisions.

And so one of the key points of the conservative legal movement and the pro-life movement has always been that abortion is a matter that should be decided by the states or decided by the elected Congress. Why? Because you have accountability there. If you don't like the law that your state legislature or that your congressman passes, you can vote them out. You cannot vote out judges. You cannot vote out bureaucrats. And so when you see in the last 40 years, 50 years, the Republican Party become more populist is a word that we hear a lot about it. It's exactly this. It's this idea that it should not be unelected and unaccountable officials making some of these decisions that really go to the most personal values, issues about where your kids go to school or what they're taught. It's

the same thing. Who should be making those decisions? Should it be the parents? Should it be the people that the parents elect? Or should it be bureaucrats, judges, HR officials, what have you? That's really the dividing line. And so I think that's why you see kind of the rise of the so-called single issue voter, whether it's on abortion or whether it's on guns, that's been an important element. All right. We can't leave out the Bush presidencies. Sure. What do you think the Bushes did well? Well, it's somewhat hard to lump them together. They're not the same.

So just quickly on what H.W. did well, I think H.W. will be looked upon as actually a very successful foreign policy president. as actually a very successful foreign policy president. When you look at how he handled the breakup of the Soviet Union, the end of communism that the conservatives had been dreaming of and fighting for for decades, when you look at his intervention in Iraq in 1991 and the coalition he assembled, I think some of his achievements in the realm of foreign policy will be discussed for centuries, actually. George W. Bush is a very complex presidency to discuss launching his wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, really kind of reconceptualized where the conservatives and the Republican Party stood on the issue of democracy and democracy promotion. It's a second term that's actually one of the worst terms of any president that I can think of. And I did live through this and I was covering it as a journalist. And it's what happened in the second term, whether it's the disaster that befell Iraq before Bush changed things in those last two years, or whether it was the flawed plan to introduce personal accounts into social security, Hurricane Katrina, all of the arguments in the Republican Party over immigration and Bush's attempts to reform immigration law. Then it ends with the financial crisis in 2008. It was one blow after another. So you have to disentangle.

The first term, I think Bush did many things well, especially rallying the country after 9-11. The second term, it's very hard to think of a single thing that went well. This is part of the problem. And in the right, I tell the story of how I really think things began to go south for the conservative movement during George W. Bush's second term. Let's start moving into the election of Donald Trump. Perhaps one of the most controversial figures that has ever existed in American politics.

And for some conservatives, the hero, the champion that they have been waiting for, and for some, an embarrassment to the conservative movement. I would love to hear more about what you think were the forces that brought Trump to power. What was happening that allowed him to get elected? Well, a couple of things. The first thing is, just as Bush, W's first term was more successful than his second, Barack Obama's first term was much more successful than his second. And people tend to downplay what was happening in America and the world in the final two years of Barack Obama's term as president. And when I go through and I list in the right all of the various things were happening in the world, whether it's the rise of ISIS, whether it's Russia's annexation of Crimea, terror attacks in Europe, terror attacks in the United States. When you look at

what's happening at home during Obama's final years with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and kind of civil disruptions and violence there. And when you look also at certain promises Obama made about how he didn't have the authority to expand his DACA program, which he then reversed after he had lost the 2014 midterm election, you got this general sense among a lot of conservatives that the system was not working, that nothing was stopping these potentially disruptive trends. And so you had been building throughout Obama's presidency a sense that conservatives and Republicans needed to go outside the normal system of politics to find a way to arrest the decline of the United States. And this led them, in my view, led many, not all, to Trump. And then you get to that other

Democratic president, which is Trump's candidate that he ran against in 2016 was Hillary Clinton, Trump's candidate that he ran against in 2016 was Hillary Clinton, first lady, United States Senator, Secretary of State. She is the establishment. And people often say, you know, Trump was the most unpopular major party candidate in the history of Gallup polling in 2016. But they forget that the second most unpopular candidate in the history of Gallup polling in 2016 was Hillary Clinton. And she was the known quantity. And I think in 2016, there was enough of disappointment with the way that the Obama administration was ending in a few key states that people were willing to say, I'm going

to go with the risk rather than the person I know. And that was enough to get Trump his electoral college victory in 2016. Obviously, he represented an anti-establishment viewpoint, but he also had different ideas about the direction the Republican Party should go in than any of his predecessors, particularly the more traditional views, or I guess maybe you could argue the neoconservative views of especially like George W. He took the Republican Party in a very different direction, one that was far more populist, one that was far more isolationist. And I would love to hear more about if those ideas are something that you think are going to continue into, let's say, the 24 election? Obviously, nobody knows exactly who the candidates will be. But do you see this as a trend that will continue in the Republican Party in the near term? Well, let's just look at a few ways that I think Trump changed his party. One

is on immigration. So as I said, George W. was always trying to reform our immigration laws in a way that would have legalized a large proportion of the illegal immigrants in the United States. Trump, of course, opposes that. It's very hard to find a Republican these days who will openly say that they support a George W. type immigration policy. So he changed it on immigration. On China, the big way that Trump changed, I think actually both parties. People around 2016 were still believed in the idea that economic integration between the United States and China would eventually lead to Chinese democratization, right? And Trump made China a big part of his campaign. His administration believed that China was a great threat to the United States and that we had to engage in more protectionist policies

vis-a-vis China. I think that is continuing as well. Another way, Trump changed the party by not bringing up entitlements, not bringing up Social Security or Medicare. And that was a real difference because, as I had mentioned, George W. tried to reform Social Security. And during the Obama administration, many Republicans wanted to reform Medicare. Trump said, I'm not doing either. Those problems, I'm just going to ignore. It's not a winner. You don't see many Republicans talking about social security and Medicare these days. They want to talk about other things. So these modifications that Trump made to the GOP, I do think are going to remain. And in a way, it's because it's kind of a return to that earlier GOP of the 1920s and 1930s, because he combines these changes with more typically conservative ideas on,

say, tax cuts and deregulation, on the place of judges and the role of the Constitution, right, on spending more money on defense, right? Those types of things satisfy the more typical conservatives. And then he adds these modifications, which satisfy the more populist conservatives who are within that GOP coalition. So even if it's not Trump, who's the standard bearer for the Republicans in 2024, I think the candidate will have Trump's views on a lot of issues. Those views are obviously well liked by many and are kind of, as you mentioned, a proven winner. These are ideas that will take me far. And they certainly, I think, contrast with some of the ideas of the present administration. And so just as it's always, I've always looked at every election as a reaction to whatever is going on in the world,

you know, and right in 2020, Trump couldn't convince people that he was going to change as a person. And so that meant that the voters wanted to change in the president. But on the, some of these ideas, I think when people look at the current conditions in the country, they say, well, maybe the ideas were right. They just had the wrong person in charge. And that might explain what will happen in our politics over the next several years. That's a great way to put it, that we like the ideas. We had the wrong person to execute them. That's the view of some people. What do you think about this idea on the part of the left that the Republican Party conservatives are full of conspiracy theorists, election deniers, capital attackers? Just this idea that those notions have infiltrated the party. What would you say to that?

There's no denying that all of those characteristics are present in parts of the Republican Party and conservative movement. I think one of the lessons of the right in my book is that they've always been present. It's just a question of whether the authorities within the party make them mainstream or not. And the change that happened under Trump is as long as you supported Trump, he didn't care what you thought. And even he, of course, indulges in conspiracy theories, right. And so he kind of brought these things in into the mainstream of the party. This is a problem. This is a problem for the Republican Party, because when you look at the American voter, I don't think that they like the extremes. When I read American history, that is not what I see the American voter doing. That's right.

And they are going to eventually end with a person as a president who they feel is the least threatening to them. And if they look at the Republican Party and all they think is January 6, 2021, or all they think is ravings about how the 2020 election was stolen, they're not going to elect a Republican. But if they look at, if they see discussions about some of the things that are going wrong in this country, and here are the solutions that we had in place just a few years ago, where things seem to be going right, I mean, with the big asterisk of the pandemic, of course, then maybe they'll take a second look because they also, if they see things like defund the police, right. Or they think that, you know, you hear that parents shouldn't have any role in what teachers teach. They think that's a little bit too much for them too. So it's finding this, it's finding this center that I think is just the most important political project of our

time. What party can most appeal to just everyday Americans? And we're out there. It's hard to see us sometimes with our celebrity culture and everything, but we're out there. And all we do is just want to get up in the morning, go to work, raise our kids, go home, and probably collapse in bed after a long day. We don't want to be bothered by the, by crazies of either the right or the left. I feel like I have, I could talk to you for another hour and a half, about a million other questions that I have, but this has been incredibly interesting, incredibly enlightening. I'm really grateful that you were willing to sit with me for two episodes of picking your brain

about the American right, where it came from and where it's headed. And Matthew's book is called the right. And I think you'll find it very interesting, regardless of if you're on the left, it's always interesting to know where other people are coming from. I think understanding the core motivations of somebody that even if you don't hold those same viewpoints, understanding the core motivations of somebody that even if you don't hold those same viewpoints, understanding the core motivations of somebody else is extraordinarily useful. And if you are on the right, I think it will be interesting for you to see, to understand

more about how you likely got to believe what you do believe. Maybe you don't even realize it, but it will be very informative. So tell everybody where they can follow you. Are you on Twitter? Are you on, where can they follow you? I am on Twitter. I'm at Continetti. So that's C-O-N-T-I-N-E-T-T-I. And then that has links to my page at the American Enterprise Institute and the page for my book, The Right, The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism. And I hope everybody gets a chance to read it. Thank you so much for having me on your show. Oh, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much. 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.