The American Right is at a crossroads. Donald Trump’s presidency continues to divide and challenge the conservative movement both intellectually and politically. What is the future of a principles-first movement in the era of America-First populism? Issues like immigration, the international rules-based order, partisan media, and rising military threats place countervailing pressures on a conservative movement struggling to define its future.

Matt Continetti joined Dany and Marc to discuss his new book, “The Right: The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism” (Basic Books, 2022). The book examines a century of the history of the American Right, Warren Harding to Donald Trump. Matt, Dany and Marc analyze historic ties between the conservative movement and populism and the tension between grassroots conservatives and elites. They also talk about implications for foreign policy and the isolationist streak among conservatives.

Matt Continetti is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where his work is focused on American political thought and history, with a particular focus on the development of the Republican Party and the American conservative movement in the 20th century. He is also a contributing editor at National Review and a columnist for Commentary Magazine. He has been published in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post, among other outlets. He also appears frequently on Fox News Channel’s “Special Report” with Bret Baier and MSNBC’s “Meet the Press Daily” with Chuck Todd.

You can learn more about his book here.

Read the transcript here.

Danielle Pletka:

Hi, I'm Danielle Pletka.

Marc Thiessen:

I'm Marc Thiessen.

Danielle Pletka:

Welcome to our podcast, What the Hell Is Going On? Marc, what the hell is going on?

Marc Thiessen:

We're talking about the future of the American right and Matt Continetti, our colleague here at the American Enterprise Institute has a fantastic new book out called The Right: The Hundred‑Year War for American Conservatism. It's appropriate timing because there's a big battle over what we used to call the conservative movement, we can even just call it the movement, really is about, what it represents, what it should. He actually had a great piece in The Wall Street Journal based on the book where he talks about what he calls retro-republicanism, that we're aware that the Republican party is moving, and the conservative movement, back to the republicanism of the Coolidge and Harding era, the reverting to a pre-World War II identity of lower taxes, economic protection, restricted immigration, wariness of foreign intervention, and religious piety. What do you think?

Danielle Pletka:

I don't know. It's an awesome book and a truly scholarly dive into the conservative movement and the history of it. My dad used to say, there's nothing new under the sun, and that struck forcibly in the book, is that no, these aren't new bad ideas. These are old bad ideas that have merely found some fresh oxygen.

Marc Thiessen:

Those are all bad ideas.

Danielle Pletka:

Marc Thiessen:

Danielle Pletka:

Yeah. Not all of them are bad. No, that's absolutely true, but unfortunately-

Marc Thiessen:

Nothing wrong with the low taxes. There's nothing wrong with religious piety. There's nothing wrong with being a reluctant internationalist, which is what I think where the American people are.

Danielle Pletka:

Right, but it shouldn't go along with all of the other yucky things I just mentioned.

Marc Thiessen:

Well, it's interesting because I think some of these things are different. For example, protectionism. We've always been the party of free enterprise and free trade.

Danielle Pletka:

Not then.

Marc Thiessen:

No. In our lifetimes, the Republican party has been the party of free trade and free enterprise. I think we've all done something of a reassessment of that in the wake of COVID, in the wake of discovering that maybe it's not a great idea to have unpure globalization and where all our supply chains become enmeshed in China and we become dependent on the Chinese Communist Party for critical minerals and critical supplies. We've found that Europe made a big mistake by making itself dependent on Russia for energy. There's a reassessment of whether or not a free trade is necessarily a good thing. Maybe we should scale it back a little bit and have a more strategic approach to trade. Similarly with immigration. Back then, Coolidge and Harding, they supported having no more immigration for 40 years.

Danielle Pletka:

Right.

Marc Thiessen:

We're looking at the border today and we're talking about illegal immigration. You can be against illegal immigration and for opening more legal immigration, but our border has become an absolute disaster. We had two million encounters at the border last year. That is an all-time record. If we get rid of Title 42, it's going to be a completely open border. There's nothing wrong with addressing those issues.

Danielle Pletka:

I agree with you Marc wholeheartedly and everybody who listens to this podcast knows that we agree that rule of law is hugely important. There's a quote that somebody uses and I think it's in Matt's book about the vital importance of rule of law and speech by, I think, Harding talking about really, the pillar of America is rule of law. There's another unbelievable quote from Abraham Lincoln talking about this fielty to rule of law. I think we both believe in rule of law. It's the asterisks that are the problem. Yes, we should be for more legal immigration and we should be very much against illegal immigration. The problem is that a lot of the people who are on this side with us are in fact just against immigration or are against immigration by certain people.

Marc Thiessen:

I don't think the polls bear that out. I think in the activists, the very vocal activists far right, that's true, but I think most Americans are super concerned about the border and want people to be able to come here. There's strong support for allowing Ukrainians to come over here. There's strong public support, the poll show, for allowing Afghans to come over here.

Danielle Pletka:

Poor Ukrainians who now have to sneak over the border because the Biden administration isn't able to keep their commitment. Look, I think we're disagreeing about nothing here at the end of the day because you're right. Well, no, but this is actually an important point to make. There's a huge difference between what the people think and what their self-appointed spokesman-

Marc Thiessen:

Danielle Pletka:

... utter. I think that that is really something that comes out and it comes out in our discussion with Matt, which we're going to share with you in just a second, but that is that there's a very, very vocal, self-appointed group of flag carriers for conservatism who suggests that all immigration is bad, who makes snidely, vaguely racist, vaguely anti-Semitic remarks. But the people who actually believe in these policies should not be tarred with those same feathers. They don't believe those things. They don't hate Jews. They don't hate Hispanics. They don't hate brown people. They don't like critical race theory and they don't like illegal immigration, but they're not actually isolationist. We really see that in response to Ukraine, so I think it's an important distinction to make.

Marc Thiessen:

It's the same thing with foreign policy, right?

Danielle Pletka:

Yeah.

Marc Thiessen:

There's a neo-isolationist movement on the right. I think that they are a very tiny faction of the right and they've been highly discredited in the last few years by what we've seen-

Danielle Pletka:

By being wrong all the time.

Marc Thiessen:

... by being wrong in the Afghan withdrawal, by being wrong on Ukraine. Americans are not isolationists. Even the most conservative Americans are not isolationists. They're reluctant internationalists. They don't want to send their sons to die in foreign wars one, for losing foreign wars and two, for something that's not in the American interest, but also, they want to provide weapons to the Ukrainians. They were disgusted by the withdrawal and in the abandonment of our allies in Afghanistan. My old boss, Don Rumsfeld, who I like to quote here,-

Danielle Pletka:

Always.

Marc Thiessen:

... used to say,-

Danielle Pletka:

Every time.

Marc Thiessen:

... had a phrase. He had a phrase. I learned a lot from him. Americans have a pretty good inner gyroscope, that most Americans have pretty good common sense and we need to find a way to isolate the fringes and promote a conservative internationalism, which I think is broadly popular in this country.

Danielle Pletka:

Fair enough. We do need to and we don't do a great job of it. Funnily enough, we never have and that really comes out in this book. I will tell you, sitting down and listening to these ideas, pondering what it is to be a conservative, pondering the fight between the wings of people who like to call themselves conservatives is disconcerting to say the least. I think I'm a less happy warrior than you. It left me nervous and worried. But hey, decide for yourselves. We've got Matt Continetti with us. He's a journalist. I'm sure all of you know who he is. He's an intellectual historian of the right. He's, of course, a fellow at the place you need to be when you are an intellectual historian, the American Enterprise Institute. He's the founding editor of The Washington Free Beacon. He's a columnist for Commentary magazine. He's also just a terrific guy and a wonderful and thoughtful colleague. We're so happy to have him day before his book comes out.

Marc Thiessen:

Here's our interview.

Marc Thiessen:

Matt, welcome to the podcast.

Matt Continetti:

Thanks for having me.

Marc Thiessen:

First of all, it's great all of us to be in the studio together, which in the post-COVID era is so rare.

Matt Continetti:

It has been two years since I've been in this studio.

Marc Thiessen:

Wow.

Matt Continetti:

It's wonderful to be back.

Danielle Pletka:

They haven't cleaned it since you were here last.

Matt Continetti:

No. I still see-

Danielle Pletka:

I apologize.

Matt Continetti:

... Jonah's junk over there in the corner. Yeah.

Danielle Pletka:

Exactly.

Marc Thiessen:

Exactly. Well, the great thing is it's a great occasion for you to come back because you've got a new book out, which we're all very excited about. And you had a great piece in the Wall Street Journal the other day based on the book, talking about retro-Republicanism. You said that today the GOP is reverting to its pre-World War II identity as the party of low taxes, economic protection, restricted immigration, you'll have to edit that, and wariness of foreign intervention, and religious piety. So what is retro-Republicanism, and what's the evidence that we're going there?

Matt Continetti:

Marc Thiessen:

All very important.

Matt Continetti:

Matt Continetti:

Danielle Pletka:

First of all, congratulations on the book, Matt, and thank you, really, for joining us in our somewhat dusty studio. I wanted to ask you a little bit about the general question. First of all, how did you end up writing this book? For everybody, we're going to...

Danielle Pletka:

Let me start that again. I was about to say something about the intro, and that, of course, sounds stupid.

Danielle Pletka:

So tell us a little bit about the provenance of the book. Why did you even want to write a 100-year history about the conservative movement?

Matt Continetti:

Well, I've always loved old magazines. It's a hobby of mine. In the 20 years I've been in Washington, I've gone through a lot of old magazines. Having read the collected Weekly Standard and the collected National Review, I guess I had to put that knowledge to some use, right?

Danielle Pletka:

Fair.

Matt Continetti:

Matt Continetti:

Danielle Pletka:

He wasn't a Democrat.

Matt 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.

Matt Continetti:

Marc Thiessen:

The conservative movement has always been a populist movement, hasn't it? If you think back, William F. Buckley, who was probably the most elite person you could possibly be, skiing in Gstaad, drove in a limousine everywhere he went, manor in Connecticut, sailing, all the rest of it, he famously said that, "I'd rather be governed by the first 500 names in the Boston telephone directory than the faculty of Harvard College." The fact is, for many of the years before Buckley came along, conservatism was considered this outlier movement of the people in the heartland, but civilized people in Washington and policymakers wouldn't dare consider, even Republicans. John Lindsay was the epitome of what a Republican was. William F. Buckley was not. So hasn't it always been a populist movement?

Matt Continetti:

Matt Continetti:

Matt Continetti:

You have this period coming out of the Cold War where the right, conservatism, they're basically on the fringes of American politics. 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.

Matt Continetti:

Marc Thiessen:

Wasn't his unfinished book Revolt Against the Masses?

Matt Continetti:

Marc Thiessen:

Conservatism, really, you could say conservatism is an ideology of elite anti-elitism. It was led by a conservative intellectual elite, but the idea was to trust the people. During the whole post-Cold War... During the post-war and Cold War era, where conservatism came into the mainstream, it was against collectivism. It was against the Soviet Union, where we had five-year plans planned by the intellectual elites who told this. Our philosophy was let a million people... The collective wisdom of the American people making millions of economic decisions every day was better than the wisdom of the intellectual elites, and liberalism was a less totalitarian way of doing that here at home. It was always an argument for free enterprise, the free enterprise system. It was always an argument for populism and for popular wisdom.

Matt Continetti:

Marc Thiessen:

How is that different from today?

Matt Continetti:

Danielle Pletka:

You wrote that the conservatism of Coolidge and Harding was delegitimized by the crises of the 20th century. When I read that line, it leapt out at me because it reminded me so forcibly of one of Irving Kristol's most famous lines, which is that a neoconservative is a liberal who's been mugged by reality. It does seem striking that Republicanism, or at least during the Cold War, Republican conservatism really was not the conservatism of Harding and of Coolidge, but of people who were nationals...

Danielle Pletka:

Let me say this again. I'm sorry, I'm having a hard time speaking today. Can you tell?

Danielle Pletka:

Not the conservatism necessarily of Harding and Coolidge, but the conservatism of people like them who had been smacked by reality, the reality being World War II, the reality being the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the reality being the rise of the Soviet Union. But those are always realities. This is the thing that's so striking, is, okay, you had that constant presence of the Soviet Union from the '40s until the early '90s. That's a great unifying force, and you have that real impact on Republicans and conservatives, who are very anti-Soviet. Once that disappears, you are able to revert back to the Coolidges and the Hardings because you don't have that deus ex machina, but we're always going to be smacked. There's going to be a 9/11. There's going to be a war in Ukraine. I'm a little bit confused by the question of whether going back to what once was is ever going to work. Sorry, that was a really long, complex question because I'm a kind of-

Marc Thiessen:

A long and complex question.

Danielle Pletka:

I have no good excuse here.

Matt Continetti:

Danielle Pletka:

Right. You win and then you're out for 40 years. That's a high price to pay.

Matt Continetti:

That's a high price to pay. There is some signs, 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.

Danielle Pletka:

What you remind me of again, and I'm sorry, one of the things, when you talk about the arc of history like this, is you are often reminded of past lessons. Charles Lindbergh and the America First movement, which there's a lot of resonance, not just that Donald Trump chose that phrase, but also, frankly, the antisemitism, the anti-foreigners, some of the eugenics that are embraced, some of those ideas have reared their ugly heads again. But, of course, what happened right after Pearl Harbor? Even Charles Lindbergh writes in his diary, "We should definitely go to war, definitely do that." Of course, this is what we're seeing.

Danielle Pletka:

Why is the right, the retro right, if you want to call it that, why is the retro right so uninformed by the realities that are going to come and smack them? This is a mystery to me. Why is this a surprise?

Matt Continetti:

Well, I think it's very easy to be complacent until you get smacked over the head. That is another lesson of history, is that we can really convince ourselves that things will always work out, until they really don't. We're still in a period, it seems like, where the consequences haven't really shown up fully formed on America's shores.

Matt Continetti:

Matt 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.

Marc Thiessen:

I tend to think that the neo-isolationist wing of the Republican Party is a lot louder than it is popular. If you just look at the response to the twin events that have really put the neo-isolationists on their heels, the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan and now the war in Ukraine, there was a poll out the other day that 70% of Americans, including majorities of both Democrats and Republicans, wanted to set up a no-fly zone in Ukraine. I don't think people have thought through what that meant in terms of military intervention, and maybe it's just muscle memory from the Cold War. "The Russians have invaded. We've seen this rodeo before." But the reflexive response of the American people, including the majority of Republicans and conservatives out there, has been very pro-Ukraine, very angry at the betrayal in Afghanistan. Is this a death blow for the neo-isolationist right?

Matt Continetti:

I do think it's interesting that the group you discuss held an emergency meeting in Washington the other week, and the emergency wasn't over the invasion of Ukraine. It was over how the public might reject their foreign policy because of the invasion of Ukraine.

Marc Thiessen:

Well, Rand Paul went off Twitter for the entire withdrawal from... I kept looking for Rand Paul to say something, and he just decided, "I'm going to stay low. I'm just going to... I'm on vacation."

Matt Continetti:

The most important response to all this is Trump's, and I've found it very interesting that he's moved from saying Putin is a tough guy-

Danielle Pletka:

Shrewd.

Matt Continetti:

... and a strongman. Shrewd. Right.

Danielle Pletka:

Shrewd was the word.

Matt Continetti:

Right. He's said, "Oh, well, building up the forces on the border, that was a shrewd negotiation tactic, but I didn't think he'd go through with it." Now Trump has even moved from that, and he's given quotes saying Zelensky is courageous, to saying that "I told him you can't do it. You can't take Ukraine. I hit Moscow if you do it." Now he's decided he's going to move back into the more assertive parts of his foreign policy. I think that's because he recognizes the political peril of being seen as on Putin's side in the midst of this war crime that's taking place in Ukraine.

Danielle Pletka:

One of the things that I found interesting, and another theme that it's worth pulling the thread on, is this division within the conservative movement, or whatever we want to call it, these divisions inside conservatism.

Danielle Pletka:

Do you want to go ahead and blow your nose?

Marc Thiessen:

Okay.

Danielle Pletka:

Take that part out.

Danielle Pletka:

I don't think you say it directly, but certainly many have inferred that it really is not... The conservatives have done well in particular elections as Republicans, for whatever reasons, but in large part they've done well because of the failings of the left, because of the overreach of the left, and because the left has in large part now become the establishment, in other words, that conservatism is a counterrevolutionary movement, but there has to be a revolution for them to actually succeed. Is that right?

Matt Continetti:

Matt Continetti:

Matt Continetti:

Matt 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.

Matt 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.

Matt Continetti:

Even as the public is drawn once again to the Republicans because of liberal overreach, because liberalism and power is leading to awful results for everyday Americans, from inflation to education to safe cities to the deteriorating global security picture, if that family that doesn't pay much attention to politics but just wants to send their kids to a good school, afford their grocery bill, and walk on safe streets, looks up and all thinks of Marjorie Taylor Greene when they think of the Republican Party, they're probably not going to go for the Republican Party. Both parties, I think, can fall victim to overreach and extremism, and that is one of the themes of my history as well.

Marc Thiessen:

Let's talk a little bit more about the anti-interventionist right. It's interesting, because if you look back in the post-Cold War era, literally every president who's been elected since the end of the Cold War has campaigned on anti-interventionism. George H.W. Bush went into the Persian Gulf War, and then Bill Clinton won on "it's the economy, stupid." Then Clinton went into Kosovo and all the rest of it, and did all the nation-building in Somalia and the rest, and George W. Bush campaigned on a humble foreign policy. Then Barack Obama campaigned after Iraq and Afghanistan on-

Danielle Pletka:

Nation-building here at home.

Marc Thiessen:

... nation-building here at home. Exactly. Trump came in, and he basically... The innovation he had was that he excoriated the nation-builders and interventionists on both the right and the left. He attacked Bush as well as Clinton and Obama and everyone else. But his main critique was not foreign intervention is bad, though he did say that Iraq and Afghanistan were mistakes, but that we never win anymore. We're sick of losing.

Marc Thiessen:

I think that's where he really tapped into the American public, because Americans aren't anti-interventionists; they're reluctant internationalists. They want to know that we have a big... There's a big stake involved for us, and when we go in, we want to win. And we weren't winning, both the conservative and the liberal internationalists. Libya was a disaster. Iraq, in its execution, was a disaster. Afghanistan, it came to a point where we were winning the goal of not allowing it to be a safe haven for terrorism, but it didn't look very good either. Trump said, "We want to start winning again." Is that where the American people are, is that they want to win, as opposed to getting involved in all sorts of foreign conflicts where we lose?

Matt Continetti:

I think when I study history, I see the American public being very receptive to responding to affronts to their dignity or attacks on the homeland. My story begins right in the aftermath of World War I. There's another president who ran for reelection, Woodrow Wilson, saying he kept us out of war; and then in his second term, we get into the war, partly because of the attacks on merchant shipping by German submarines.

Matt Continetti:

Same thing with World War II. When FDR goes for a third term, we haven't entered the war yet. There's a suspicion that we probably would, and so it'd be helpful to have FDR still in power during that. Then the attack happens, and there's no discussion. As we mentioned earlier, even America First folds up basically overnight after Pearl Harbor.

Matt Continetti:

W, like you say, a humble foreign policy, and then 9/11 happens. Then it's the Freedom Agenda.

Matt Continetti:

I think Americans respond when they're hit. I think if they see the little guy being picked on, they all also want to help the little guy, if the little guy is on the side of liberty and freedom.

Matt Continetti:

Trump's foreign policy, it's very complicated. I agree, it begins with this idea of strength and of winning. One novelty, though, that Trump represented was an attack on the alliance system, which in itself is recalling the earlier right that I talk about. It's not the Arthur Vandenberg right; it's the right of Bob Taft, who was the opponent of American entry into NATO. Here we have Trump on the campaign, and even as president, leaving that Article 5 up in the air, threatening sometimes, "What's our future with NATO?" when he's not just bullying the NATO allies to pay up more, which he was successful at doing. That was new.

Matt Continetti:

Trump's foreign policy, I think, was a return to an older form of conservative foreign policy in that it was definitely based on tit for tat. And it was the policy of the retaliatory strike. It did not involve what had become associated with conservative foreign policy under George W. Bush, which was combined arms invasions often based on a preemptive idea that we had to strike before the threat fully emerged. Trump wasn't going to do anything like that.

Marc Thiessen:

Are we maybe merging back to a more Reaganite foreign policy through, not Trump per se, but that transition? For example, as you say, he took out Qasem Soleimani, which was very similar to what Reagan did in Libya after the Pan Am bombing. We're now in a period where, after the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan, there's not an appetite for massive intervention, but we're falling into a Reagan Doctrine policy in Ukraine, where we're providing arms, we're providing training, we're providing intelligence to people who want to fight their own wars of liberation against the Russian bear. It's very similar to what we did in Nicaragua, what we did in Angola, what we did in Afghanistan. Is this the cycle where something happens, we go in and we intervene, we overstretch a little bit, Americans don't want to go that far, and so we retreat back into this more "hit back but don't invade" kind of approach, but actually help the forces of freedom?

Matt Continetti:

It was striking to me that Reagan really only committed U.S. ground troops twice, once to Lebanon, which ended in the awful-

Marc Thiessen:

Disaster. Yeah.

Matt Continetti:

Matt Continetti:

Then, of course, 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. Then, of course-

Danielle Pletka:

No. Good God, what was his inauguration, carnage?

Matt Continetti:

American carnage.

Danielle Pletka:

American carnage.

Matt Continetti:

Right. Somehow we need to combine... I do think it's important to actually look at Reagan's foreign policy, which had this vision of America and American exceptionalism, and then wasn't afraid to take bold moves, a huge defense buildup. I talk about the Strategic Defense Initiative, this cockamamie idea, which comes out of a lot of conservative think tanks, of space-based missile defense. Reagan, he had this vision of it working, and thus really overthrowing the idea of mutual assured destruction. And the Soviets were spooked by it. They knew that their economy was a shambles. They could not compete with American technology. All of these elements, I think, need to be harnessed. I don't think we're there yet.

Danielle Pletka:

We're not. Marc and I have really taken this in the direction of foreign policy, which is natural since that's what we-

Marc Thiessen:

We're both foreign policy nerds.

Danielle Pletka:

Right, since that's what we love and care about. But one of the things that sticks in my craw, it's funny, I hadn't thought of Sam Francis in decades, but of course I worked at a Washington Times-owned magazine, Insight magazine, in the '80s, two years after Sam was hired by the Washington Times. I followed him so little that I didn't realize he was dead, so I will break that ironclad rule about not saying bad things about dead people. Man, that guy was a creep. But it was the heyday of Pat Buchanan, absolutely loathsome man who denied that the Holocaust had taken place in the way that it had taken place.

Danielle Pletka:

They bothered me because I think of myself as a conservative, and they were besmirching my brand. I think that's the fight that's going on today, and I can't quite figure out, not just from a foreign policy standpoint, how we harness those brilliant aspects of Reaganism, but how conservatives who have values, who love our country, who love civic education, who believe in small government, who believe in winning, but not in winning by dragging other people down, as Trump epitomized-

Danielle Pletka:

As Trump epitomized all of those things, how is that fight even happening, that battle over the brand? Well, that's my exit question.

Matt Continetti:

I don't think it's happening much. I think one of the dangers of focusing on Reagan is that you begin to think he's the be-all and end-all. In my book, what I wanted to do, unlike a lot of histories of the right, was feature Reagan. There's no way you can ignore him. He's one of most consequential president easily the last 50 years, but situate him as one character among many. When you do that, you see that the types of the right represented by figures like Patrick Buchanan, who was another big part of my book, and like Sam Francis, who I do discuss in my book, they actually are more typical in history than maybe a lot of the people within the conservative movement like to think.

Matt 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.

Marc Thiessen:

The problem is we don't have a Buckley today. And Buckley, we talked about, he brought conservatism out of the fever swamps into the mainstream, but as you say, he also set limits. The reason he was able to do that is because he founded a magazine, National Review, which was where if you wanted to be taken seriously as a conservative intellectual, you had to write for National Review. If you didn't write for National Review, then you were sending up mimeographs in direct mail. When he-

Danielle Pletka:

I don't think anybody who's listening here remembers what a mimeograph is.

Matt Continetti:

I especially like Marc's gesture.

Marc Thiessen:

Matt Continetti:

He was literally cranking the mimeograph machine as he mentioned it.

Marc Thiessen:

... mimeographs in the school. Mimeograph was a machine where you literally had to crank it out and print it out-

Danielle Pletka:

On a giant wheel.

Marc Thiessen:

... and put it into an envelope and send it to your list. But where was I going? Can't remember.

Danielle Pletka:

We don't have a Buckley.

Marc Thiessen:

No, but today, you don't need a mimeograph. You can get your ideas out anywhere. All you need to do is go on Twitter and get a following. We've got all this proliferation of all these different networks and all these different magazines and all these different ways of communicating and podcast and all the rest of it. So there's no gatekeeper anymore. That's both as a double-edged sword because it's both good in the sense that I remember people complain about the media bias. It was, what was it, accuracy in media in the Reagan years where they put out their mimeographs complaining about CBS News and Dan Rather and all the rest of it. There's no gatekeeper and that's good because conservatives can bypass CNN and they can bypass the networks and get their word out, but it's also bad because there's no sifting between the crank right and the real right.

Matt Continetti:

Yeah. It's real issue for those of us who want to separate American conservatism from some of the worst elements of the American right. Either way, I approach it as that even if it's impossible to police everybody because of the nature of communications media in the 21st century, you can still set standards for the institutions you run and make sure that those institutions are molding a certain type of conservative. I think a lot of institutions have decided that let us go a little bit on the wild side. Then it comes down to a contest of political leadership and candidate quality and finding political figures who actually do represent the type of conservatism you and I might believe in and finding them in ways that they're likable, they are fluent, and they can also stand up for themselves. I think that's important too.

Marc Thiessen:

So exit question.

Danielle Pletka:

Still.

Marc Thiessen:

Danielle Pletka:

I could answer that. No.

Marc Thiessen:

What's our hope of having, not a Reagan clone, but someone who steps up like Reagan did and provides that kind of leadership?

Matt Continetti:

Matt Continetti:

Marc Thiessen:

I think our current president is getting distracted a lot.

Matt Continetti:

I don't think our current-

Danielle Pletka:

Matt Continetti:

Our current president, yeah.

Danielle Pletka:

Yeah. But Matt, okay, and we're going to wrap up, what you're talking about is a party and a movement that has ideas and has principles and lives by them consistently. Political parties no longer are the carrier of ideas. They are the carriers of plans for vengeance. When we get power, what have we heard from the minority leader in the house? When we get power, we're going to investigate Hunter's laptop. Okay, I'd like to know more about Hunter's laptop, but at the end of the day, it has to be about we're going to roll back taxes. We're going to roll back inflation. We're going to bring back jobs. We're going to make schools more accountable. We're going to stop institutions from teaching garbage to your kids. We don't hear that and-

Marc Thiessen:

Why can't we walk and chew them at the same time?

Danielle Pletka:

Well, as you know all too well-

Marc Thiessen:

Danielle Pletka:

As you know all too well, Marc, we are increasingly incapable of it and part of it is because we don't have leaders that can hold a thought consistently for any period of time because they're being lead around by the nose by people who are throwing things at them every 10 seconds. This is a great buck for everybody. We've only really touched the tip of the-

Marc Thiessen:

Scratched the surface.

Danielle Pletka:

Well, we've only scratched the surface, but it's a fantastic read, The Right: The Hundred‑Year War for American Conservatism. Buy one, buy two, by them for your family. Matt, thank you.

Matt Continetti:

Thank you.

Marc Thiessen:

Anything we should have asked you?

Matt Continetti:

Danielle Pletka:

Should have been more coherent.

Matt Continetti:

I like the foreign policies. Good. We didn't really talk much about that in other interviews, so that's good.

Danielle Pletka:

No, that's true.

Marc Thiessen:

Yeah.

Matt Continetti:

Yeah, that's a good way. Cool.

Marc Thiessen:

All right. Thank you.

Matt Continetti:

Thank you.

Danielle Pletka:

Thank you. You were great.

Marc Thiessen:

Good luck. I know you're going into the vortex now.

Matt Continetti:

Danielle Pletka:

Sell it, baby. Sell it.

Matt Continetti:

Always be selling.

Marc Thiessen:

All right.

Danielle Pletka:

Take care.

Marc Thiessen:

Danielle Pletka:

Well, from your mouth to God's ears. I'm not entirely sure that that's right. I think we rely a lot on our enemy. I wrote a piece about this for foreign policy probably more than a year ago at this point about how we tend to rely on these external factors in order to get us into a right place. We've been ignoring the effective dissolution of NATO for years now. We've been ignoring the fact that our military is increasingly weak and not ready for conflict for years now. The first time these words will be uttered. Thank goodness. Vladimir Putin helped wake us up, right?

Marc Thiessen:

Yeah.

Danielle Pletka:

But it needed Vladimir Putin to wake us up. The notion that we were incapable as the richest nation in the world, as the most power nation in the world, as the longest existing democracy in the world, sorry, India, we are, and that we cannot anticipate the rise of the Putins, that we're surprised that Xi Jinping has malign plans for us and that we have to react to everything. It always takes a Jimmy Carter for us, an Iranian Revolution, a 9/11, a Pearl Harbor, and this is really what troubles me especially because I believe in the power of our ideas and they haven't been enough.

Marc Thiessen:

But you know what? That's the history of the world, is events come up and-

Danielle Pletka:

Is being surprised.

Marc Thiessen:

... being surprised. As you said, we were surprised by Pearl Harbor. We were surprised by 9/11.

Danielle Pletka:

It's the CIA motto. We're always surprised.

Marc Thiessen:

Danielle Pletka:

I don't know. I don't know what you're trying to say.

Marc Thiessen:

Yeah, that civilization hasn't overcome evil and that we are not now on the edge of perpetual peace. Evil still exists in the world and guess what? When Putin is gone and Xi Jinping is gone, something else is going to come up because evil is real and exists and we have to confront it. The Democrats have done us a huge favor in reminding Americans what crazy big government looks like. Bill Buckley famously said, and this is a key role of the conservative movement, "National Review's purpose was to stand athwart history, yelling stop."

Danielle Pletka:

Marc Thiessen:

Danielle Pletka:

It's not Donald Trump.

Marc Thiessen:

If you had told me even a year ago that it would be Zelenskyy, I wouldn't have believed you. These leaders emerge in response to crises.

Danielle Pletka:

Except when they don't.

Marc Thiessen:

Except when they don't, that's true. But Zelenskyy has emerged and has captured the hearts and the minds and the imaginations of the world. We need an American Zelenskyy. We need-

Danielle Pletka:

An actor.

Marc Thiessen:

Yeah.

Danielle Pletka:

An actor.

Marc Thiessen:

An actor, a comedian.

Danielle Pletka:

A comedian. Not just someone who people laugh at, someone who people laugh with.

Marc Thiessen:

Absolutely.

Danielle Pletka:

No, that's so true.

Marc Thiessen:

Danielle Pletka:

Amen. Him or her. Thanks folks for listening. Go buy the book. Don't hesitate to send us suggestions and take care.