In Matt Continetti’s telling (highlights below), there’s always been a populist strain in on the right. But it took Donald Trump to embrace that populism and then make it central to the Republican Party. But is that populism — what Barack Obama called “nation building here at home” (lest you think only the GOP has a nativist streak) — conservatism? Matt joined the pod to wrestle with this and other questions.
For most boomers, the Republican Party was all about smaller government, individual freedom, a stalwart national defense… yeah, that’s it. But that’s not today’s GOP, and it wasn’t the GOP of the 1920s and 30s. Matt says that the party of Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge didn’t think of itself as conservative; it thought of itself as American… the establishment. No one can argue that the establishment is anything but a playground for the left these days. But the Harding/Coolidge GOP seems to be back. Was the era of the Cold War an aberration? Are conservatives now leftist-fighting counter-revolutionaries?
It’s not simple to sort, but one thing is absolutely clear. A counter-revolutionary party that stands only for what it’s against ain’t much. And a group of conservatives that believe that their creed is big government, isolationism and a wall around the country are confused about what conservatism is, or should be. Indeed, the party and the movement do best when there are clear principles and a leader with a mission. So who’s going to bring morning back to America?
Read the book, buy it here. It’s a tour de force. We’d love to read as searing and thoughtful a take called The Left.
HIGHLIGHTS
Continetti: I found that the Republican Party of the 1920s resembles, in many ways, the Republican Party of the 2020s on some of the issues that you mentioned. When I tell the full story of the American right, what I found is that the Republican Party and conservative movement in which I came of age may have been something of an exception, in some of its attitudes toward the outside world in particular.
Continetti: But the proximate cause was the 2012 election. After Mitt Romney lost to Barack Obama, I felt that a lot of Republicans and conservatives had been surprised by that result, and especially the swiftness with which the election was called for Barack Obama on election night 2012. I was also struck by the divide between Republicans in Washington, D.C., and the grassroots conservatives throughout the nation, in particular in how they analyzed the reasons for Romney's defeat. If you recall, that was the GOP autopsy report that came out in 2013. The reason Romney lost was he wasn't pro-amnesty for illegal immigration. He wasn't pro-same-sex marriage and more pro-choice on abortion. [DP: He wasn't a Democrat.] :
Continetti: Basically, that was what the Republicans in D.C. concluded, whereas among the grassroots conservatives, they thought the reason Romney lost was he didn't fight enough. He didn't challenge the media enough. He didn't challenge the institutions that had been, in the views of many conservatives, captured by the liberal ethos.
Continetti: I found is that when you begin the American right in the 1920s, you find that the right was popular. This is the presidencies of Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge. But even while the Republican Party was very popular in the 1920s and benefited from landslide election victories, some of the intellectuals on the right, the libertarian intellectuals, people like Henry Louis Mencken or Albert Jay Nock, they were elitists and disdainful of the public. You had this weird relationship where even though the Republican Party was enjoying its incredible strength, historic strength in the 1920s, a lot of the intellectuals associated with the right were contemptuous of mass democracy and popular politics.
Continetti: Well, then the Great Depression happens, and the Republican Party is basically delegitimized. It's thrown out of power. It's basically a rump in Congress and in the states. Conservatism is not popular at all. On top of that, the right during the 1930s tends to have an isolationist foreign policy, does not want to become involved in the war in Europe in 1939, and so Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 delegitimizes the foreign policy of the right.
Continetti: You have this period coming out of the Cold War where the right, conservatism, they're basically on the fringes of American politics. William F. Buckley starts this process of moving it toward the mainstream again, and he does it in a funny way. As you suggest, Marc, he does it by making arguments which are really coming from an intellectual position of high abstraction, free market economics, of tough anticommunist foreign policy, and a social conservatism emphasizing law and order and traditional values. What he finds is that the target audience of that is not people from his social class but from the working class, the grassroots, people who had not been associated with the Republican Party and its elite before.
Continetti: The audience for conservatism were the people outside of the institutions. That gives it populist flare beginning in the 1950s. What you also find, though, is that each wave of populism tends to dislike the populists who came before. By the time you have a second populist wave in the 1970s, William F. Buckley is considered by them to be too elitist.
Continetti: I love [Marc] your phrase "elite anti-elitism," but that phrase only applies when the rest of the elites are liberals, which was not the case at the beginning of my story. That's one reason I wanted to begin in the 1920s, was Presidents Harding and Coolidge did not think of themselves as conservatives. They represented what they called Americanism, which was the mainstream philosophy of the time. It rejected progressivism as represented by Woodrow Wilson, but they didn't think of themselves as conservatives.
Continetti: Roosevelt and his New Deal changes the nature of American government, so that now conservatives, who are usually the people on the inside defending the institutions, they're on the outside having to change or reclaim them from the liberals who came to power with FDR, and really stayed in power, certainly through the late 1960s, and in many ways they're still in control of many of our institutions. In today's Washington, all of them, political and cultural.
Continetti: [Re retro-Republicanism] I'm also not sure whether going back to what once was is going to work. I think this is something Republicans should be aware of as they go retro and they think about protectionism, they think about non-interventionism or neo-isolationism, and they think about restrictionism on immigration. The Republican presidencies of the 1920s enjoyed tremendous success, but then they were shut out of power for a long time.
Continetti: There is some sign, I think, with the war in Ukraine that you mentioned, Dany, that maybe the new right is a little bit worried that, oh, the American public did not sign up to cheerlead Vladimir Putin. Now, I'm not sure that the conservatives or Republican voters are quite at the point where they want to send American troops overseas to intervene in the war, but they're certainly for more support for Zelensky and the Ukrainians than I think a lot of the people on the Trumpy right, the nationalist right expected when the war in Ukraine broke out. It's another potential mugging by reality playing out before us right now.
Continetti: Once the external threat of the Soviet Union was removed, that's when I think we begin to see the divergence between parts of the conservative grassroots and then parts of the Republican and conservative establishment here in Washington. You see it in 1992 with Pat Buchanan's first presidential campaign, also Ross Perot, a slightly different version of the same issue set, running as an independent in 1992. That recurs throughout the 30 years since.
Continetti: It really took a figure like Donald Trump to decide that he wasn't going to run as an outsider, but he was actually going to move from the periphery to the center, he was going to take over the Republican Party and thus shape it to conform with his views on some of these questions, that this process of retrofitting the GOP really begins.
Continetti: I do think that the Republicans have benefited the most when the Democrats overreach and when the Democrats go to the extremes, and are also identified in the eyes of the public with the most extreme elements of their coalition. The periods of the late 1960s and the rise of Richard Nixon was a time when the Democratic Party was in internal disarray because of the anti-war movement, because of the student revolt, because of the black power movement and more radical feminist expressions taking place. That tore the party apart, and the public reacted against that extreme by putting in Richard Nixon, and then reelecting him in 1972.
Continetti: The same way in the late 1970s. If you look at Carter on paper, was an evangelical Christian, a small-C conservative Democrat, but that's not the way he governed. He ended up alienating the religious right and basically forcing them into the Republican camp. Then on stagflation, the public just soured very quickly, understandably, on that. You had the sense that Soviet power was rising with the invasion of Afghanistan, the Sandinistas in Central America, Angola, and Africa. On top of all of this, you have the Iranian Revolution and the hostages there. A sense that liberalism and power was leading to social and cultural and economic calamity, so you go and you have the Reagan Revolution.
Continetti: You see this periodically, where the Democrats overreach and the response is to put Republicans into power. Two things. First is, do the Republicans actually have an agenda that successfully addresses the awful conditions which put them in power in the first place? That is a mixed bag. I think if you look at the 1980s and in the 1990s, cases where the Republicans really did have an agenda that addressed the problems in society that had led to the Republican victories.
Continetti: Recently, and perhaps not coincidentally, as the party has become more populist, I don't think they've had an agenda that they're able to put into place. Now, they've been constrained during the Obama years. But even with Trump, if you think about it, during the two years where the Republicans had the full control of the Congress, their most successful initiative was a tax reform, a good tax reform, but that was it. There were a whole lot of other things that needed to be done that weren't accomplished.
Continetti: Secondly, every party can fall victim to its own extremes. Every party can overreach. I think that the Republican Party is no exception to that, and that the danger is if public comes to see the Republican Party as out of the mainstream, the Republican Party being captured by its most fringe elements. I think we saw the risk of that happening in the past two election cycles. I think it's a danger for the Republican Party today.
Continetti: There was what I call the psycho-political warfare that Reagan conducted against the Soviet Union from the very beginning, his idea of the Cold War, "We win, they lose. They're the evil empire. They're destined for the dustbin of history, not capitalism," just this relentless ideological assault on the underpinnings of communism. That is not present as much as I would like it to be today, that confidence in our system, in democracy and all of its benefits. That's the missing element. You didn't see that with Trump.
Continetti: So one of the lessons of my book, I think, is that this type of internal fight does have to take place and it takes a lot of work. It takes the efforts of a William F. Buckley Jr. to say, "This is what conservatism is," and set limits for what an American conservative believes. It takes political leaders like a Barry Goldwater or like a Ronald Reagan, even like a Newt Gingrich in the '80s and '90s to represent a more optimistic, forward-looking, agenda-driven conservatism. Without those elements, then the American right, I think, can easily succumb to the type of negatively-charged populism represented by Buchanan.
Find the whole transcript here.
SHOWNOTES
About the book: https://www.aei.org/research-products/book/the-right/
Reminding the Right | 04/14/2022 | Ben Sasse | National Review
Grumbles Left and Right: Two Books on the Past and Future of Conservatism | Barton Swaim | 04/08/2022 | WSJ
How insiders and true believers frame political history| Carlos Lozada | 04/08/2022 | Washington Post
The Return of the Old American Right Wall Street Journal | April 8, 2022
Is There a Right Left? An account of three decades of conservative crack-up Commentary magazine |May 2022 edition
The Reddening Commentary magazine | December 2021
Will Trump ruin a red wave in 2022? The New York Times | December 20, 2021
A uniquely American conservatism - The past triumphs and present challenges of the movement Buckley started National Review | December 4, 2020
The coronavirus accelerates a generational and ideological transition on the right The Washington Free Beacon | March 27, 2020
‘National conservatism’ is having an identity crisis The Wall Street Journal | November 16, 2021