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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now a 100-year lens on American conservatism through the eyes of Matthew Continetti, founding editor of the Conservative Washington Free Beacon. Now with the American Enterprise Institute think tank and the Conservative Publication National Review.

Matthew has a new book that traces different strands of American Conservatism and right-wing populism, and how they have competed with each other through the century from President Warren G Harding to President Donald J. Trump. The book is called The Right: The Hundred-Year War For American Conservatism. Matthew, thanks for coming on. Welcome to WNYC.

Matthew Continetti: Thank you for having me, Brian. It's a pleasure to be here.

Brian Lehrer: We'll have to squash a lot of history into one little radio segment as best we can. Let me start with this sentence of yours from National Review that's a take on part of your book. First, the Great Depression robbed the right of its claim to prosperity. Then World War II discredited the right's noninterventionist foreign policy. What were the pillars of Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover conservatism of the 1920s that were brought down by those historical events?

Matthew Continetti: Well, the funny thing is that when you look at the American right in the 1920s, it comes to resemble the American right of the 2020s. If you think about the Republican party's position on immigration, the GOP in the 1920s, of course, very anti-immigration, responsible for some of the laws essentially banning immigration to this country for 40 years.

If you look at protectionism industrial policy, global economic trade, the GOP in the 1920s supported the tariff, believed that the American economy should be insulated from global competition. Then if you look at the issue of interventionism whether America should be engaged with the world, whether it should belong to permanent alliances, the GOP of the '20s and '30s, very non-interventionist, very reluctant to be engaged at overseas, especially in Europe. Again, we see some similar echoes of that in the GOP today.

Brian Lehrer: As just kind of a footnote. I don't think this is in your book. If it was, I didn't see it, but I was surprised to hear President Biden make a Calvin Coolidge joke at the White House Correspondents' Dinner over the weekend. It was a Biden age joke on himself that, "Coolidge was the first president to attend a White House Correspondents' Association Dinner. I was a freshman Senator at the time, ha ha ha," something like that.

Maybe there's some history there too, about the White House and the press or conservative presidents and the press. Do you know anything about the context in which Calvin Coolidge became the first president to attend a White House Correspondents' Association Dinner?

Matthew Continetti: That's not something that came up in my research, Brian. Of course, Calvin Coolidge was famously reticent and had kind of a stern visage personality, did not like to engage much at all in conversation, whether it's the press or even some of his associates. Of course, contrast that to the most recent Republican president, Donald Trump, who could not be more dissimilar than Coolidge. However, they both seem to me to be leading parties that, on a series of policies, are quite similar.

Brian Lehrer: Another sentence of yours as we jump ahead to the Cold War era. "For most of the men and women who made the conservative movement, there was no greater threat than a communist world. That danger required compromises and it could lead to extremes." What compromises, what extremes, what era?

Matthew Continetti: Well, the essential compromise was with the standing military establishment entering the Cold War. As I was saying, the right prior to World War II was very non-interventionist and did not believe in a standing army or major defense expenditure. Coming out of the war, however, facing the challenge of the Soviet Union, the right changed its foreign policy to one that is much more engaged overseas and believed in the Pentagon major defense budgets as the price to be paid to rolling back communism, which is what the right stood for at that time.

In terms of extremes, I point to in the book the record of Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, who, during his anti-communist crusade, the second red scare, attracted the support of many of the founders of the post-war conservative movement in the United States, a history that tends to be under-emphasized at least in accounts of the history of the American right written by conservatives.

Then, of course, I also detail the rise and subsequent fall of the John Birch Society, a secretive top-down anti-communist organization whose founder was an extreme conservative theorist.

Brian Lehrer: We could almost tell 100 years of American politics through Bennie McCarthy, Joe McCarthy, Eugene McCarthy, Kevin McCarthy and it would kind of tell the story. Then you say the Iraq War fractured the Republican coalition like Vietnam had fractured the Democrats and the financial crisis of 2008 made it worse. Honestly, I'm not sure I see it personally, but do you want to lay it out?

Matthew Continetti: Sure. You left out one other issue at play there in the final years of the George W. Bush administration, and that is immigration. I think when George W. Bush attempted to enact a comprehensive immigration reform that included legalization, the grassroots populist right began to rebel against him. This is in 2005, 2006, 2007. You saw the distance between the Republican politicians in Washington, DC, many of the conservative intellectuals who inhabit the institutions here in the nation's capital, and the grassroots right, which was extremely anti-immigration, anti-illegal immigration, but also wanted to cut legal immigration in many cases.

You also saw, I think, simmering discontent with the conduct of the Iraq War in the gadfly candidacies of Ron Paul for the Republican nomination in 2008 and 2012. Even though Ron Paul was not successful in either of those efforts, he attracted a large grassroots following, they call it the Liberty Movement. It was made up primarily of young people and it was really a resurgence of the antiwar, non-interventionist republicanism that we saw prior to World War II.

Brian Lehrer: For people who don't know, who weren't around yet then, or following politics yet then, Ron Paul, the father of Rand Paul.

Matthew Continetti: Correct. Yes. Rand Paul's carrying on that tradition today in the United States Senate. When you get to the financial crisis, not only do you have economic calamity, but you also have the Bush administration's response to the crisis, which was the TARP, the bailouts. Remember, of course, the Republicans in the House of Representatives actually voted down the initial bailout and had to be whipped into supporting it just enough for it to pass in 2008.

There too, the grassroots discontent and anger over bailouts to the banks that had helped get us into this mess was apparent. By the end of the George W. Bush administration, the conservative governing class that I trace through the Reagan and Bush presidencies had become de-legitimized, in my view, in the eyes of grassroots Republicans across the country. That gave us the Tea Party and Donald Trump.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. Interesting. I guess the part that I was questioning there had to do with the Iraq War turning off a lot of Republicans. I mean, liberals opposed the Iraq War because they saw it as a war for oil, war of being willing to kill many thousands of people for only a hypothetical that Saddam Husein might possibly, maybe, one day share weapons of mass destruction if he even had them with Al-Qaeda.

The left opposed the war because they thought US military actions after World War II have usually made things worse, not better for the most people. I think that's the view on the left. I think the right was, except for the Ron Paul dissidents, was massively for the Iraq War and only denounced it later when they saw it as a failure. Do you disagree with that analysis?

Matthew Continetti: I do slightly. One of the lessons in my book I think is that these dissidents and, of course, we haven't mentioned the other major one, Pat Buchanan, have always been there. Prior to the war being launched in 2003, you saw Buchanan who had always, again, represented that old right, a strain on the American right, closing off America to immigration and trade, withdrawing back our forces from the world, looking inside America first, of course. He launched a magazine, The American Conservative.

He represented a view that was prevalent in many quarters of the conservative movement and even in the GOP that the war was not the right decision. Once the war begins, however, you were absolutely correct to see consolidation among the ranks of Republicans and much of the Republican governing class.

I would say, though, even by '08, there was a mini-debate in the Republican primary that year between John McCain, who was a strong supporter of the surge strategy in Iraq that happened in the final years of the Bush presidency, and Mitt Romney, who was a slightly skeptical, he was wavering on the strategy. McCain won in 2008, but I think that that too was a sign that at that point, by the end of George W. Bush, many Republicans had become war-weary and thought that the war had been, in retrospect, a mistake.

Brian: Listeners, if you identify yourself as conservative, what does the word mean to you today? 212-433-WNYC. Has your conservatism or maybe that of your parents shifted over time from maybe Ronald Reagan conservatism to Donald Trump conservatism, if those are distinct to you? Or maybe you're somebody who voted for both, Reagan and Trump, how would you describe the consistency between the two iconic Republicans? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or anyone with a question for Matthew Continetti, author of The Right: The Hundred-Year War For American Conservatism. 212-433-WNYC, 433-9692, or tweet your question @BrianLehrer.

The backlash as we continue this thumbnail 100-year history of Warren G Hading to Donald J. Trump, the backlash against both trade and immigration was huge in turning Republicans toward Trump. Can you talk about each of those as competing conservative interests or principles within the movement?

Matthew Continetti: Well, I think with immigration, there's always been a skepticism toward immigration present on the right, illegal immigration in particular. In the aftermath of Mitt Romney's loss in 2012, the Republican establishment felt that the way to broaden the Republican coalition would be to revive George W. Bush's comprehensive immigration reform. You saw an attempt in 2013 among some Senate Republicans, including Marco Rubio to work with the Obama administration to enact a comprehensive immigration reform that included legalization.

That was, again, met with an even more furious reaction by the populace grassroots right. It was truly the issue I think that animated Donald Trump's candidacy in 2015, 2016. On trade, it's a little bit more complicated. I do think that while the Republican Party during the Cold War was a supporter of open trade as a way not only to grow the American economy, but also to grow the economies of our allies vis-a-vis the Soviet Union, there, again, were dissidents throughout arguing for protection and arguing against the integration of China into the global economy in particular.

Interestingly enough, the magazine where I worked, the Weekly Standard, which no longer exists, was a vehemently anti-Chinese accession into the World Trade Organization circa 2000. That skepticism toward trade and trade with China, in particular, was always present.

What I think Trump did, very effectively in 2015 and 2016, for the Republican base was basically say the reason that white America was in the middle of a profound social crisis with deaths and despair, opioid addiction, alcoholism, a declining life expectancy, was trade.

Now, I don't necessarily think that's true but politically, I think it was a very effective argument. He was able to link the two in a way that I think has become very powerful in the Republican Party subsequently. Now we see, again, especially with regard to trade with China, a return to the old right themes of insulation, protection, and with a twist, even some industrial policy to support the strategic industry and strategic resources in the United States.

Brian: On immigration, how do you see Ronald Reagan in this 100-year history? I tend to think he was an aberration for Republicans like after Woodrow Wilson, Democratic president in the 19 teens, Harding came in and basically closed the doors to Ellis Island, and then the doors didn't open much again until Lyndon Johnson was president in the 1960s. Being anti-immigration is a long conservative tradition. Would you put it that way?

Matthew Continetti: Yes. It is true that when I wrote this book and looked at the past 100 years, rather than say the past 60 years of the history of the American right, Ronald Reagan does stand out as something as an exception. I think it's a mistake to consider Ronald Reagan the standard of American conservatism over this long time span. He is more unique, and not only in his personal characteristics and his political talents, but also in his view of the world.

Reagan was very pro-immigration. He, in fact, signed the Immigration Control Act of 1986 which said that there would be workplace enforcement and border security along with the legalization of illegal immigrants in the United States at that time.

He actually was skeptical about the enforcement side. He was fine with the legalization side, he welcomed immigration. He, of course, proposed a North American free trade bloc in his 1980 campaign that eventually becomes NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, which then, of course, in 2016, Donald Trump campaigns against and pledges to replace, which he did with the US, Mexico, Canada Trade Agreement.

Reagan's attitudes on immigration and trade and on democracy, promotion, and importance of human rights and foreign policy, they are more of the exception than the rule in the history of the American right.

Brian: With Matthew Continetti from the American Enterprise Institute and National Review, and now author of The Right: The Hundred-Year War For American Conservatism. TJ in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, TJ, thanks for calling in.

Tj: I love you. It's great to be on and speak with an author of a book I intend to read soon. I'm a conservative but everything that's been going on within the Republican Party over the last five, six years is anything but conservatism. Can you explain how the definition of conservatism is so fluid that people that are not traditional conservatives are now characterized as conservatives?

Matthew Continetti: Yes, and thank you for that question, it's a very good one. This is one reason why I called my book 'The Right' as opposed to conservatism, because I think 'The Right' is a much broader category. Basically, it's composed of all the ideas and figures and politicians who are opposed to the left, whatever the left is standing for at a given moment.

When I hear the word conservative, I think particularly of the post-war American Conservative Movement which had a very defined set of principles especially when it came to constitutionalism, limitive government, and the role of markets in economic life. That conservatism, I think, is under fire now. From forces that are dissenting from some of its principles, in particular, the principle of having a free market economy and a competitive economy and an economy that is enmeshed in the global economy, but who are nonetheless still on the right.

I think the terrain of our politics has shifted in the last decade or so, where we're no longer arguing about the size and scope of government like the American conservatives argued with American liberals for much of the 20th century. We're now arguing over a different set of issues, really, regarding who gets to be an American? What does it mean to be an American? What does American history mean, and whose values should be ascendant?

That has put, I think, American conservatives like myself in a different position because most energized forces now combating these issues are from the right in a way that not necessarily the conservatism that was prevalent for the last 50 years.

Brian: David in Westchester, you're on WNYC. Hi, David.

David: Hi. Good afternoon. Thank you for answering my call. Gentlemen, I'm a lifetime Republican, and my first president I ever voted for was Ronald Reagan, but as time shifted so did Republican values shifted because I refused to vote for Donald Trump. I remember the Trump since the '70s and it went from political values to hate. I just don't understand how my entire life I was able to have wonderful conversations with my right, left, liberal, conservative friends, but now it's just nothing but hate, [unintelligible 00:20:29], and Trump supported Hillary Clinton in her New York State Senate campaign and has been a lifelong Democrat which I am appalled by even people saying January 6th was Antifa. Gentlemen, help me out here. What happened to the Republicans we're believing such deplorable lies?

Brian Lehrer: Well, that's the hundred-year history that Matthew tells in the book and what led up to it because I don't think you disagree even as a self-identified conservative, Matthew, just to be very clear about where you fall on this spectrum. You say Trump lies about the 2020 election, and you're not in the Trump wing of the party I think it's fair to say.

Matthew Continetti: It is fair to say that, Brian. I try to be as dispassionate as I can in my history to try to show how this movement has changed over time and how it's always been a very complex movement. We have this vision of American conservatism, it's always Reagan, or it's always William Buckley Jr. That's not quite true. Again, Reagan and Buckley are just two characters in a pageant of over a hundred years that is just stocked with various varieties of conservatism and also people who are on the right yet nonetheless reject the main principles of the postwar conservative movement.

This has always been a dynamic relationship in particular between the elites in the conservative movement, the intellectuals, the spokesmen, the elected officials, and the grassroots who tend to be much more populist and also desire more unmediated expression of their desires and wishes.

I think what's happened in the last five years, in particular, six years, is that the grassroots rights found that the conservative elites were no longer necessary to achieving their aims. Donald Trump was the way to displace this conservative governing class that had been built up over the Reagan and Bush years through the Romney election. That the populist right was now in charge under Donald Trump, and so we're beginning now to see a new establishment emerge that is much more Trumpy than previous iterations of the American right. I think the question remains, however, how big a role Trump himself will play in this emerging new right?

Brian Lehrer: Yes. You see a bright future for conservatism and we'll get to that, but I want to ask you a long-winded question now based in how I think liberals or progressives would view a lot of this hundred-year history, and I'll give you plenty of time to reply, but bear with me while I lay this out.

In the view of liberals, I would say they probably see a huge blind spot in all of these strands of the right which I would call the mix of power and inequality, too little concern for the mix of power and inequality, and it manifests that way in whatever era we're in. It includes both mainstream conservatives, as well as populists. I know you refute this in the book, but I'm going to lay out what the liberal view of this is, or a version of it that during both slavery and Jim Crow, it was liberal to be abolitionist or, for civil rights, conservative and even KKK populist, then conservative and George Wallace populist to uphold the racist status quo.

Then came affirmative action, and it was liberal to embrace giving structural advantages to people with hundreds of years of structural disadvantages and conservatives who suddenly decided structural advantages were reverse racism, suddenly racial preferences were unacceptable when they were applied in the name of equality rather than inequality, that's all in race.

On other economics, it's been conservatives who believe that the free market naturally produces fair outcomes as if workers had equal bargaining power with owners when that's almost never been the case and the same with money and politics. We have a Twitter question about money and politics. Conservatives think unlimited campaign donations are free speech and ignore the outside power that that gives wealthier people. I should say outsize power that that gives wealthier people or corporations.

Liberals would say an unregulated market is not some kind of natural law, those are decisions about rules of the game that human beings with the power to make the rules apply. Then almost any attempt to set the rules of the game that force more equal outcomes get to ride it as leaning toward totalitarianism. Then most inequality gets labeled the lack of personal responsibility rather than structural responsibility.

Finally, on social issues, conservative religious beliefs tend to come from the majority with power who try to enshrine them in the laws of the state. Again, inequality enforced by power as I think liberals see the conservative project across all these eras, across all these factions, and then as a coda, Donald Trump looks to liberals like a continuation of the main conservative project not a departure from it on all these major lines of conservative thought.

The argument of the big distinction between mainstream conservatism and right-wing populism in a lot of liberals' view is not very big. Fundamentally, it's all majoritarian, racial, and religious advantage and the advantage of capital over labor is somehow patriotic and necessary for survival of the culture that they see is theirs.

I know that's a lot, Matthew, but in a broad sweep of history frame, how much of that would you accept, if any, as an enduring and massively consequential blind spot of the right inequality upheld by those with power as a lot of liberals are calling in to try to articulate some piece of?

Matthew Continetti: Well, I think that's definitely the liberal view of conservatism, and I would say that your emphasis on equality is essential, Brian. I do think that historically the left has been the champion of equality or egalitarianism whereas the right in America, at least, has put liberty ahead of equality so that individual liberty would be essential even if it resulted in economic inequality.

Another element that has been important to the hundred-year history of the right is a reference to the constitution and to the American founding, an idea that the constitution, as written, should apply at all times, amendments included. The various subcategories of your question are all dealt with at length in the book. I would say the biggest blind spot, of course, on the American right over the last a hundred years has been on the issue of race.

This is not always so, especially with the Republican party being party of Lincoln and the party of Eisenhower who supported civil rights acts in his presidency, but the American conservative movement took its cues in opposition to the 1964 civil rights act mainly for a variety of reasons, some constitutional, others racial. I think that's always been to the movement's discredit, and I also think it put a ceiling on the movement.

I think that many Americans were reluctant to take conservatism seriously because of the way in which it got civil rights wrong. I think I'll just leave those two main responses to your question.

Brian Lehrer: Last question. You do write that you think conservatism has a bright future. Which of the many conservatisms that you report on in the book do you think that is?

Matthew Continetti: Well, I do think that there is the possibility for renewal of constitutional conservatism. I don't know when that's going to happen [chuckles] and I would say that, right now, the populist right, the Trump right, is in the driver's seat of American politics in many ways. What I believe is a dynamic process of competition and cooperation will continue to play out. For the moment, I think that conservatives like myself who don't believe Trump is the right answer to the nation's problems have a lot of work to do and have our work cut out for us.

Brian Lehrer: Matthew Continetti from the American Enterprise Institute and National Review these days. He was a founding editor of the Washington Free Beacon. His new book is called The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism. Thanks so much for coming on with us, Matthew. I hope you can come back during the midterm election campaigns and give us your view of how some of these things are playing out.

Matthew Continetti: Thank you, Brian. I'd be happy to.

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC.

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