The Shaping of Modern American Conservatism with Matthew Continetti | BRI Scholar Talks

0:01 [Music] for this episode of scholar talks The Guiding question is what were the political and intellectual forces that shaped modern American conservativism at the conetti Our Guest is the director of domestic policy studies and the Patrick and Charlene Neil chair in American Prosperity at the American Enterprise

0:23 Institute he has been an editor of the Weekly Standard in the Washington Free Beacon and is the author of three books including today’s topic on his book The Right the 100-year war for American conservatism I am Tony Williams the senior fellow at the Bill of Rights Institute and I want to welcome you to another episode of scholar talks in our

0:43 series topics in American history Matt I want to thank you very much for joining us thank you Tony it’s a pleasure to be here great and really love the book really uh an expansive uh provides an expansive understanding and look at modern American conservatism uh all the different strains were really fascinating and and how they were

1:04 sometimes uh worked in tandem but then also at other times showed some divisions um and some tensions uh and honestly just an extremely readable and very very interesting book so congratulations on that well thank you very much great well let’s get started then um my first question is kind of General so you know what’s the definition of conservatism that you’re

1:25 using in the book or are there many definitions of conservatism depending on who you ask well I think that’s it I think there are many different forms of conservatism in the world the great political scientist Sam Huntington once said that conservatism is a situational ideology it really depends on what you are trying to conserve and so in my book

1:48 the definition I use is that American conservatives are attempting to defend the American founding the principles the ideas and the institutions that that were set up beginning with the revolution in 1776 but then culminating in the constitution in 1787 and then following through the

2:09 American political tradition from Lincoln through Martin Luther King Jr through Ronald Reagan that American experience that particular form of American experience which includes Democratic politics an emphasis on individual liberty religious freedom individual rights constitutional government that is what American

2:30 conservatives have been trying to conserve throughout the 20th and 21st centuries great yeah and and in general as I was saying there you describe a lot of the different kind of parts of conservatism um it’s relationship to the Republican party for example the conservative intellectual movement all these populace strains the think tanks

2:52 and the media other institutions how did these parts of the movement you know help build conservatism over time but then also at other times lead to some tensions within the movement right well it’s a very large movement it’s one of the most important social movements and political movements in the history of

3:13 America in the 20th century you could rank it with the environmentalist movement for example or the women’s movement or even the Civil Rights Movement not quite as powerful of course as a civil rights movement but still up there and so like any of these movements it has different factions it’s really a coalition of different Persuasions the two main ones have been

3:35 more libertarian minded thinkers and activists people who really want to constrain the federal government who believe that the constitution is a document of restraint over the federal government Libertarians who want to increase the power of the marketplace and choice and competition in our daily lives so you have them on one hand on

3:57 the other hand you have the more traditionalist conservatives conservatives who really want to preserve not just the Constitutional order but institutions like religion the family the neighborhood the locality and even though these two branches of conservatism in America can

4:17 go in different directions and often do they have historically shared an animosity toward the central government in Washington DC because not only can government limit econom IC Freedom it also can intrude upon those intermediary institutions that lie between the individual and federal government places

4:39 like the family or the neighborhood or the church and so Libertarians and traditionalists have worked together in the past the name for this Coalition was coined as fusionism back in the mid 20th century and I think in their hearts many American conservatives are still still fusionists today uh they

5:02 still believe in a large degree of individual freedom but they also want to preserve those important attachments that one finds in the home in the area around you in your voluntary associations the issue I think today on the right is that there’s a large Force

5:22 pushing for fism and people trying to break apart that that partnership which has worked together in my view been successful uh for many decades reach its maybe uh greatest successes uh especially after being maybe in the wilderness the political Wilderness um thinking of the days sort of of the the

5:43 early Cold War William F Buckley and and starting naal review of course in 64 Goldwater uh has that massive Landslide defeat and yet they go from the political Wilderness conservatives do to this great ascendancy with Ronald Reagan who launches this Reagan Revolution and conservatism seems to sort of really be

6:05 on the ascendency or sort of one at that point um especially sort of towards the end of the Cold War so so how did that happen well the American public uh moved to embrace conservatism uh not because it suddenly read Russell Kirk and Milton fredman and thought that those ideas were right on the on the merits

6:28 necessarily but the American elector was kind of pushed into conservatism by the overreach of uh liberal Democrats in the 1960s and some of the excesses of the Democrats in Congress uh in the 1970s and in the white house with Jimmy Carter what I find again and again is that

6:48 conservatism’s biggest electoral triumphs usually through the Republican Party in the 20th century have been a backlash against liberal overreach when Democrats are in power and so right after that Landslide defeat in 1964 Barry Goldwater loses very badly to

7:11 Lyndon Johnson Lyndon Johnson thinks that he is The Reincarnation of Frankl Franklin Delano Roosevelt he’s going to expand the welfare state he launches the Great Society he also um increases the tempo of our involvement in Vietnam very soon the American public began tiring of

7:33 LBJ uh they began tiring of the anti-war movement uh the student Rebellion civil unrest in America cities Rising crime welfare addiction then later once Jimmy Carter is President the American people are also growing very tired of

7:54 inflation uh they are tired of national humiliation coincidentally in Afghanistan and in Iran and from all of this the American people look to Alternatives and suddenly figures who had been on the margin figures like Frederick Von hyek the Austrian Economist like Milton Friedman

8:16 the Chicago Economist like uh sa Bellow the novelist uh from Chicago who had a kind of a conservative B all of them are being awarded Nobel prizes conservatism has a strange new intellectual Vogue in the late 1970s and then this culminates in Reagan’s landslide in 1980 and that

8:37 allows conservatives finally to have some influence over the levers of power in Washington DC and they begin to pursue the agenda that they had been working out during those Wilderness years an agenda of economic reform an agenda of really taking the fight to the Soviet Union in order to pressure the Communist system uh and

8:58 then social reforms which took uh a little bit longer to manifest themselves uh mainly in the welfare reform uh passed by the Republican Congress and signed into law by a Democratic president in 1996 right and and it’s really interesting because you’re talking about a lot of these sort of great successes sort of economic recovery after the stagflation of the 70s and you know sort

9:21 of winning the Cold War um some of these other great successes of the 80s uh and into the 90s and and yet at the very time of its greatest Triumph we have this sort of fracturing of of the conservative movement as well and so what what caused this this fracture in the in the 1990s 2000s you talk about it

9:42 you know leading to the rise of of this populist moment if you will especially with the rise of the tea party for example with the Great Recession of 2009 and and then of course perhaps culminating in in Donald Trump I think the place to start would be the departure of Reagan from the scene Reagan leaves office in

10:02 1989 his chosen successor his Vice President George H W bush knew that he had to get along with conservatives but was not a movement conservative himself and very quickly begins too disappoint conservatives um most spectacularly in his budget deal uh that raised taxes despite his pledge to the American

10:23 public that he would not do so and so the conservative crackup begins during HW years and it is magnified uh when the Americans win the Cold War against the Soviet Union when the Soviet Union begins to collapse and eventually anuls

10:44 itself in December of 1991 conservatives had long defined themselves in opposition to Communism and specifically the communism promoted by Moscow and the USSR and so that big bad that enemy just disappears overnight which leads to many questions among

11:04 conservatives about what are we for now what is America’s purpose in the world what is the purpose of our foreign policy what is our relationship to the Republican party if HW Bush is raising taxes he’s not really social conservative he’s kind of a realist and foreign policy not quite

11:26 where we were in the Cold War how do we relate and so the Republican Party begins a series of internal debates and I think this debate is really exemplified by the contests between Jack Kemp the congressman from Buffalo New York who was a supply Sider an optimist

11:47 a believer in big coalitions in consensus and economic growth versus uh Patrick Buchanan who in the 1990s begins to to adopt a economic nationalist strategy uh begins to double down on social conservatism uh who be uh Embraces an

12:10 non-interventionist foreign policy the policy of America first he was the first person to revive that slogan from the 1940s long before Trump and who also likes the politics of Confrontation rather than the politics of consensus and so these two wings of conservatism and of the GOP one represented by Kemp

12:32 the other by banan kind of go back and forth in the 1990s I think we can say in the 2000s the Kemp side predominated in the figure of George HW George W bush even though Kemp disagreed with the Iraq War that’s kind of another story but in general attitude of wanting to embrace

12:53 immigration and wanting to reach out to minority populations in order to promote remote economic growth W was Campion whereas the bananito and now Kemp figures like say

13:13 the former house Speaker Paul Ryan who was an employee of Kemp in the 1990s he is now on the margins of the Republican party and it’s Buchanan ites or people who resemble Patrick Buchanan in the Cent and most famously most importantly of course Donald Trump who ironically ran against Patrick

13:34 Buchanan for the Reform Party nomination in the year 2000 but ended up in 2016 and throughout his presidency and today really reflecting Buchanan’s views on immigration on foreign policy on trade and on the idea that the only way that the right is going to win is not by

13:56 working with the left but by steamrolling the left so as a followup you know in the book you talk I think a lot about the force of of globalism right what and how it impacted our economy and immigration and and a number of other issues but particularly sort of causing this divide perhaps um between you sort of the sense that they’re

14:17 Elites and sort of you know the Common Man sort of Left Behind so how do how did that play into all this populism as well well I think beginning around the year 2001 uh there were great changes in uh in America and the world um one was a

14:38 migration began from Mexico uh and illegal immigration really came to the four in many people’s minds just as the George W Bush Administration was trying to liberalize our immigration laws and to legalize the status of many people who had been here illegally for many years while that’s taking place

14:59 you have the introduction of China into the World Trading System the so-called China shock and just the overwhelming size of China really does change the nature of American production it leads to offshoring of jobs it leads to increased Automation and so manufacturing

15:20 employment is hit pretty hard by the rise of China more broadly you have uh a change in who who gets what in the global economy uh workers with college degrees begin to be rewarded more and more for their educational attainment

15:42 whereas voters who have no college degrees uh begin falling behind it’s hard to put a word on this but basically I like to call it with the politics of knowledge that is or the the politics of educational attainment the higher education level you have the better better off you’re doing also the more likely in the first two decades of

16:02 the 21st century you are to be a Democrat and so these three big changes kind of unsettle the party coalitions and it’s made the Republican Party much more reliant on voters without college degrees and as a consequence the Republican party has become much more populist as a result Republican voter today is not quite the

16:24 same as the Republican voter who upheld the Reagan coalitions in the 1980s um they’re probably more concerned with economic security than they are Economic Opportunity um they’re more distrustful of Elites and expertise they’re less likely to think that America is uh

16:45 involved in a grand ideological crusade to promote democracy overseas and so is the nature of the Coalition changes so does the party policies as well as the leaders of that Coalition and I think we can see that uh on View today and maybe thinking about where we are where we’re

17:05 going um my final question is you know what seems to be the present direction for the the future of this divided conservative movement or maybe just this populist conservative movement what that what might that mean for for American politics American society maybe in the you know in the next few years next decade what are your thoughts on that my

17:27 basic view is that it means American politics is going to get a lot rowdier there are going to be a lot more confrontations and fights uh there’s going to be some political violence we have lived through this uh in the past few years already and I think it means that um we’re going to have to work very hard to

17:48 form new coalitions um new ways of addressing our public policy challenges uh new alignments both within and between the parties I note recently uh a lot of interest in the problem solvers caucus on Capital Hill as potentially offering a way to keep the government funded uh

18:12 so that we can work on our longer term budget issues um there’s great interest in independent candidacies or even a No Labels uh effort in 2024 the general negative attitude toward the direction of the country and the kind of low opinion most Americans

18:33 have of our politics is depressing and um not reassuring but it also potentially offers an opportunity I do think we’ll work it out it just might take a while and the road might be very bumpy from here to there right well I think the good news is I

18:54 think some of your colleagues you all 11an uh and Jay cost and I know you are s looking for maybe ways to build great try to build greater consensus in the middle of all this turbulence and try to seek ways to to compromise and and to talk to each other a little bit more and I guess we can only hope for that right absolutely we’re we’re trying our best

19:14 good good we’re we’re alling This Together As Americans all right well Matt I want to thank you very much for joining us congratulations on the book and uh we appreciate it thank you so much and thank you all for joining us on this episode of scholar talks please check out our other interviews in this series topics in American history on our

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