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>> sparklight, along with these television copies come support c-span2 as a public service. >> hello, everybody. welcome. i'm yuval levin of the american enterprise institute and it is my pleasure to welcome you to this conversation about this excellent new book "the right: the hundred-year war for american conservatism." this book is both an intellectual and political history of the american right over the past century. it takes of the ideas behind the right, the electoral coalition that has composed it, the ways that coalition has sought power and use power and a politics the way it is thought about the country in its future. the book explores some important tensions between populism and conservatism, between libertarians and traditions, between pragmatists and purists. so give us a lot to talk about and that is what we were doing this morning. we will do it through a conversation between the books author matthew continetti and

you might save one of its subjects, former house speaker paul ryan. a practitioner and to think about politics on the modern right. a word about each of them as if they need it. matthew continetti a senior fellow here at aei where his work has focused on american politics and political thought in history. he's a prominent journalist, analyst and author. he was the founding editor of the washington free beacon picky with spider that the opinion editor of "the weekly standard" pic is also contribute editor at "national review" and a columnist for "commentary" magazine. this is his third book in one way or another altima felt with the evolution of the modern right. paul ryan is of course a former speaker of the house of representatives turkey civic congress for 20 years from 1999-2019 representing the first district of wisconsin. in the time he rose very quickly to serve as chairman of the budget committee of the chairman of the ways and means committee and ultimately served as speaker for about three and half years.

i'm sure it like a lot longer, paul. he is now among other things a nonresident fellow with us here at aei as well as serving on a number of boards teaching at notre dame and other important work. our format would be straightforward and conversational. no formal remarks come no opening statements. we will discuss the book on its core ideas, put questions to matt and after some back and forth between matt and paul which i will moderate we will open things up for questions, questions of all of you in the room and also questions from those of you were watching live online. if you are watching us a line there are ways you can ask questions of matt, , by e-mail r if you must come on twitter. [laughing] by email e-mail you can sa question to john roach. if you're on twitter you can use the hashtag aei the right. and with that we can just jump in. matt, for so congratulations on

really an important and super book. maybe the way to get us started and help folks get a sense of the book is by telling us will get about you wrote it and why you wrote it in the way that you did. by the book as the particular character and from that you've given. >> great. thank you, yuval. thank you all for coming to think of all for attending a thank you to aei for providing me a home where i could write this book, which has been many years in the making. and finally when yuval came to me and said you have to write the book. he was able to help me come to aei where i could write it. i think the book began in a few ways. first is that i have an unusual habit. i love reading old journalism. and when i started as a political writer in washington 20 years ago, my hobby was reading through the archives of the magazine where i worked at the time, "the weekly standard," and then moving from there to

the archives of "national review", the "american spectator", "commentary" magazine, all these little magazines on the american right. from that it was an education out of an history of the right but also broader education in history of american politics and culture. really for the last half-century. that's something i've been doing in my spare time two decades now. however, after 2012 in particular i began a more intensive look and investigation into the history of the american right. because the 2012 election, which you played a pretty the mayor part in, you're familiar with, example fight to me some of the emerging strains and tensions within the right, between the republican party establishment based in washington and the grassroots conservatism throughout the country, between various factions within the conservative movement and the different ideas and principles a stood for. and also carrying through the

2012, it seemed to me that the populist moment which i believe began the most recent populist moment anyway which i really begin and the second bush administration, around 2005, 2006 was only gaining steam. i wanted to investigate why was this happening, what was driving this energy. and when donald trump can done it as clear in 2015 eventually won the republican nominee and in the presidency the next year, i thought the history of the american right was all the more necessary to figure out how we reached this impasse. another reason why i wrote the book that i should mention is i've been teaching this material in some form over the years, and some of my students are here and i'm happy to see that come at a found that there was no real one volume textbook i could just have a young person and say well, this is the history. there are some great works.

that book really focuses heavily on the post-world war ii conservative movement and it kind of ends its main body of the text anyway in around the late 1970s pics i felt it was necessary to broaden the story and tell it in a narrative format in a way that synthesizes both intellectual develop its along with political developments. so this way i could then just handed to my students, say forget about the class can just read this book, or preferably by a couple copies for you and your family. paul, may be by way of offering some starting thoughts of your own about the book, maybe help us think about the question of the history of the right for conservatives hereby should consider this care about the history of american conservatives? >> will it save the country not? were coming to an affliction point why we always like all great courtesy and i think if it

is a country to the left and we lose with the country is all about. from me at the country, the constitution an actual law and the principles that flow from that should be carried through in our policies to make sure our country realizes its true potential. and if we lose that, then we lose the left and we become like other countries. other democracies. so i think it's extremely important but we are not anywhere close to where we need to be as a movement to realize these things. my background is more fiscal based and away about inflection point in the future with the social contract and the dollars reserve currency and how much time do we have before we really put in place some important reforms will have to win a lot of arguments in the country before we can do that. so why is it important? it's important so that we can make sure that the 21st century is a great american century, that democracy

democracy and self-determination and markets and the rest, and human flourishing is advanced which is what we work on her aei. i want to aei forgive me home so i could read -- [laughing] but we're talking at this the second go there when i came to age i went to college the 88-92 so that kind of time. i became a political agent in the reagan moment and i ae into the conservative movement as a young person, as a think tanker, event as a member inside a fight for the soul of the publican party which was alive and will. bill clinton had just one, and you had a big churn within the conservative movement and different factions fighting one another. this is not new. this is happened from time come from the beginning on. your book is a perfect example of that. so for new young people who are shocked at this infighting so to speak of the conservative movement this is what happens in movements. and until you have a big

standardbearer, a reagan type person you're going to have that kind of fighting. so we are where we have been before, where we go we don't yet know but it's important that the conservative movement in my opinion becomes a majority movement in the country with respect to winning elections we can effectuate policy so that we can solve these big problems that are in front of us. >> matt, it must be a challenge to decide where to start in a book like this. and you mentioned george nash wonderful book really looks at american conservatism as a kind of post-world war ii phenomena. you don't do that and to put a lot of emphasis on the prewar rights, the pre-new deal rights that began in 1920s. why? what is it to learn now from the right before the new deal? >> i think for a historian the two hargis questions are where to begin, i didn't want to leave out. and, of course, those are the two things that i don't want to talk about and criticize a book

for once it is written. why did i begin with warren harding inauguration the spring of 1921? i thought it was important to show the institutions that american conservatives saw themselves defending. if conservatism is the defense of inherited institutions, american conservatives are in an unusual place. the institutions we are meant to defend our the institution created by the american founding, the constitution, the principles of the declaration of independence. the political theory of the federalists. but in 1932 many people in the right believe that a revolution have taken place in the nature of the american experiment, , ad the nature of the american government, and that they, the people on the right, were defending the inherited institutions of the constitution against fdr and the new deal.

so i thought it was important to show where, how the conservatives came to define themselves in opposition to the new deal, and prior to 1932 where progressivism would settle in the american political continuum, which was still very much up for grabs. teddy roosevelt aligned with the progressives and, of course, he was a very successful republican president. woodrow wilson aligned with progressive. he was a not so successful, successful in some ways, not in other ways, democratic president. it wasn't until the 1920s with the republican party of harding and coolidge that you saw the jupiter aligned itself against progressivism and say that we are going to define ourselves as the party of americanism, or is harding famously put it, of normalcy. gop of an aching twins was for the successful.

but events, the great depression, delegitimize the gop's claim to providing prosperity for the average american. world war ii delegitimized the rights foreign policy of non-intervention in the of the mainstream american electorate. and so conservatism there had to be kind of we figure, reconfigure itself for the post-world war ii cold war era. that part of the story hadn't really been told. it had been told in some places, figures like justin ray mondo who is considered himself a traditionally -- wrote a very good book on the subject but a want to incorporate that story into the story of postwar conservative movement and then carry it to reagan and the most recent presidency including donald trump. >> paul, in some ways the kind of work you are most engaged in, the efforts to reform our entitlement system and to think about the role of government are often depicted by the left as

attempts to restore pre-new deal america. is there some truth to that is the american right still seeking some way to recover from an error made by fdr? >> you could make that thet maybe 20 years ago. i don't think that's the case anymore. i think everyone has reconciled themselves with this with what i would call the social contract. i think the country, look, the country, the founders give a system that was designed to reach local consensus and when you do that you do make sense. that's when the reasons why were all in end with a filibuster even when the issue cuts against us. so i don't think that's the case anymore. let's take a social contract which is health and retirement security for the old age, for low income. you have consensus on the right and the left that this is something that government has an important role to play in. so then the question, if we

agree with that, i would argue most do agree on the right. if you agree with that then the question is, , let's move on wih making sure that's the case. and then you have a fight about left and right about whether markets come with a choice come with individualism is involved in this, or if you're a progressive you see it as a way of extending governments reach in people's lives, extending regresses them. in. i think the right has records of the soap with the social contract which is basically erected in that. neck between new deal and great society and out it's a question this what our budget all about which is that to repeal these things but to rework these programs so that they were actually, so that they worked in 20 for since you, didn't create a debt, didn't bankrupt the country and used markets and choice and competition as a means of delivering on these goals without hamstring the country come strolling down growth, creating a reserve currency run in bankrupting the

country. i think we are there. i populism. look, trump and i thought about medicare and entitlement reform all the time. it became clear to me that there was no way he wanted to embrace that, other than making good on a promise on repeal and replace, which really for me was an intolerant reform episode and we were one vote shy of getting that done in the senate. it wasn't popular and his mind and, therefore, it wasn't going to be pursued. that was always really frustrating to me but that gives you an example of where the right is now, which is either we don't touch it, or we reform it. but repealing it is not in the cards. i think that answer your question. >> it's always a dilemma for the right and of right of contexts, which left its responding to. and so the right in america has always kind of felt on the defensive because first it has to do with the progressives and then has to do with fdr, and tht

has to do with lbj or holder, now we're in the obama era, dealing with that left come in with a great of opening as we do today, another left. each time these leftists trance from the cells and take on new guises come the right offer s to do as well. i was struck whenever i teach of the founding document of "national review" when the magazine was launched in 1955, william f. buckley jr. who's in many ways the central protagonists of my story, says that conservatives who are against the new deal and in parentheses, where not sure if there can be any of a kind -- [laughing] all aligned with national reviews principles. now for an american on the right today to read that or to hear what paul just said, say, clearly things have changed. what has changed? passage of time and the small c

conservative, well, we don't want to rock the boat and also the left has changed, too. the left has moved on into new territory. in many ways we are not fighting over the new deal as much as the cultural agenda of the left which will he comes out i think of the antiwar and countercultural movements of the late 1960s and has ebbed and flowed -- waxed and waned over the ensuing decades. >> i want to pick up what you said about bill buckley being the central character. that certainly seems to me to be the case inbreeding picture publisher put ronald reagan on the cover. you can see why. i think it'll up to you you would but put bill buckley e cover. .. mind to create if you think about national review and the rest of the massive buckley project starting in the 1950s. what was his ambition? i think his ambition as he put

it at that young age when he comes out on the scene in 1951 is about 26 years old. his ambition was and he said this to mike wallace in an early interview he said i'm a counterrevolutionary. and the revolution he ngwanted to overturn was fdr, the revolution of 1932. the change in the nature of the american social contract the new deal launched how did he go about doing this? there are many different avenues he pursued. the first was institution building. in addition to national review he was also responsible for the creation of sor played a part in the creation of the interdisciplinary studies institute, it's a college arm of the collegiate network of american freedom, all ofwhich still continue to this day . he also launched a magazine

quarterly which stood for many decades as a place for pro-life work. he did it in terms of trying to build up to the counter establishment. to recruit people who would inhabit these institutions, make conservative arguments but he would be treated seriously by everyday americans watching the four channels they hadaccess to in the 1960s . he also wanted to build consensus around conservatism . the big problem with the american right in the aftermath of world war ii in the post-mccarthy period carrying through the 1960s was that it was considered a fringe ideology. america was thought to be a liberal country is not

necessarily a p progressive one but a a liberal country, the constitution and the bill of rights is a liberal document. who after a likely was a harsh critic of the popular republican presidentdwight eisenhower . he's conservatives just eseemed a little bit odd. intellectual ties are all in the area of expansion and regulation. figures like red, milk and friedman, fringe in the 1950s and 60s. he was very concerned in making conservatism a spectacle. and so he began drawing fences around his version of american conservatism . and going after anti-semitism , going after these saying that iran couldn't be part of his movement the cause of her atheism. saying that the libertarian austrian economist couldn't

be part of his movement because he was an atarco capitalist . he was of f privatized everything. national security also played a big part, buckley's conservatism was one as engaged nationalism. america should be strong, america should be powerful and defend itself but it also had to be engaged in the world to rollback the unions, meant a large military establishment, standing army, that meant forward defense and forward deployment of our troops. it meant alliances like nato, it meant intervention like vietnam all of which the earlier right would have been skeptical d if not outright opposed to so this is the version of american conservatism buckley created. the last part of his legacy was political. working within the republican party, the traditional vehicle of american conservatism to turn it away i

from the moderate republicans , the so-called me to. and towards conservatism so he played a big role in this in the early draft goldwater campaign that only needed in 1954 in barry goldwater's nomination, conservative nomination for president on the republican ticket. ironically than the goldwater campaign which was managed by one of the most prominent presidents of this institution locked buckley out of the campaign so he was afraid old water would be associated with national review and ssbuild buckley but that political energy also expressed itself in his early friendship with ronald reagan and even got to the point later in his life where he was willing to intervene, buckley that is in the democratic primaries. or support democratic candidates including one to lieberman in connecticut in order to get rid of the

original me-tooer i came of age and is studied friedman in college and grew up reading bob bartley's papers and i had a conservative econ professor who gave me this issue of national review. i didn't know whatit was . it was in the late 80s in college and he said i think you should take this and i'll just give you my copy when i'm done with it. and then i just consumed it and really took it to the national review so if you're a young budding conservative in the late 80s, early 90s this is the path you took and this is the movement you came into . so we have different movements like this in different times when people are coming of age in a certain movement and i think very ey of all people much dominated for two or

three decades the conservative ecosystem and nevertheless we still had a bunch of people. john birchers and others that there was a big fight but he was the center of gravity and i think if he didn't put reagan on the cover of this he should have put buckley >> i would say and all the debates were having at the moment over the new american right which is if you go by my book the third new right we had overthe last hundred years , i think there's great energy being devoted to building an infrastructure that can compete with the conservative infrastructure that build buckley began creating in the 50s and 60s and then the early neoconservative build throughout the 70s and 1980s and 90s, 1980 and 1990 so that had been missing for this new right for many years but now in the final years of the trump presidency and in the years subsequent to that i think they're building their own infrastructure and

it just shows you you'll appreciate this point the importance of institutions. because without these institutions, without the spaces for work and for organization, it's just people writing in their basements. >> so buckley created this kind of conservative mainstream for all these institutions, in a way it was built around ideas that would have been controversial in the old right but presented itself as a consensus, as a mainstream of the right. within that mainstream, within those institutions there was also a dividing line, a dividing line between traditionalists and libertarians . the tween freedom and d institutions and that dividing line came to define the internal debate of the buckley conservative movement and overtime the attempt to

overcome those divisions became known as fugitives, the sort of defining project of the buckley right at least in the1960s beginning of the 1960s , tell us about what fusions is and was and what it was meant to be, when it wasn't , did it make sense the way to try to solve the problem with that buckley confronted was in his own camp ? >> one of the underappreciated figures in the american right was a man named frank meyer was an x communist, who converted to the right through his reading of the road serfdom, he began a contributor to many of the right-leaning journals like friedman and like the american mercury. then he became associated with national review. eventually in your editor of national review. and frank meyer was, he had been trained in communist dialectic and polemic and he thought very dogmatically.

this is what conservatism is. and so these are the parameters in wwhich we are going to operate as american conservatives. buckley used to call him air traffic control becausehe was making sure all the planes were going in the right direction and landing and taking off on time . in the 1960s meyer who again as a libertarian strained to him because of his love and appreciation of hayek. actually begins to dispute with other libertarians on the right over the nature of the american defense establishment whether aa standing army weapons programs, and what the conservatives desired a policy of rollback of communism including libertarian intervention was necessary. the libertarians, the born

quote that everybody knows, libertarians are not interventionist but will grow the state and reduce individual freedom so it's in the course of the debate with libertarians that meyer says look, i'm going to describe to you what american conservatism is and what american conservatism is tracing back to the american founding is a synthesis of individual liberty and traditional values, what we call traditional values but moral order and because the american founding took place before the great ruptures of the 19th century before the french revolution in 1789, americans had been able to synthesize these two principles, freedom and virtue, liberty and horror so you write this essay about the tree of liberty and his best friend roosevelt junior

who is bill buckley's brother-in-law and another senior editor at national review and who's moving towards a very about traditional catholicism at this time. rthe was became more and more devout as he went on, he read frank's essay and said this is ridiculous. freedom is not the end of politics. what you're trying to do frank is some type of fusion and so fusion is and is one of those words that begins as en an insult but ends up being appropriated or in neoconservatism. and this is where the debate begins really within the american right. unify individual liberty andtraditional morality ? the buckyites said you could and even if it didn't work out intheory it was revealed in practice . it revealed the lives of many conservatives that these two

things can coexist even if it doesn't vequite work in. and by the way as conservatives we shouldn't worry about whether it works in theory, we should only be concerned about whether it works in private but that wasn't enough for ms. l on more religious right and he eventually broke off of buckley's american conservatism and it wasn't enough libertarians like murray rothbard who continued to critique his conservatism as to status because of its belief that you needed a powerful military and engagement with the world in order to defeat communism. so i see a lot of debate today about the future of fusion is him and i continue to think that it doesn't always work in theory. in fact the closer you look at might break down but it does no work in practice when you look at how people on the right in the main actually live their lives. >> for people who aren't used to the term fusion is him the

reagan coalition is a good example but when you go to affect waiting policy meeting going into politics, absolutely fusion is him works so try working in congress and building a coalition, a majority, a working majority in congress. it requires fusion is him to come together and members were on the ballot running for election accept this. they know that in a diverse country to have a working majority they have to coexist in a coalition of people who come from different regions, different backgrounds, different philosophies fwithin the conservative movement or for democrats say the progressives where you had to fuse these things together so it's fusion is him is absolutely essential to have practical working majorities to pass laws so in the think tank it's hard to justify. it's hard to rationalize, hard to stitched together but when you're actually

affecting politics and practicing politics it becomes essential. >> the coalition that began to be built around this notion took shape through the 1960s and in the 70s when the united states experienced a disciplined decade in a lot of ways the story you tell in this book is the story of extraordinary vibrant system. the 1970s seemed like the most important decade of the 10 decades you describe. in the development of the right. what happened to the right in the 70s, how was it different coming out of the 1970s and why? >> i think the simplest answer to that question you pose is that new groups came to become associated with the right, with the american conservative movement during the 70s and a lot of that played out as a result of the overreach of liberalism .

and the radical left during the vietnam era during the student rebellion and the social turbulence of the late 1960s early 70s. people who would not have identified as being on the eiright and up coming into an alliance with the american conservatives and so it became a question of how american conservatism would deal with these new entrances and i'll give you two examples. the first are bill gavin who speechwriter for richardnixon and a very good writer calls three corner conservatives . these are conservatives who were not familiar with the great traditionalist author. but they in fact often were democrats. they were part of fdr's majority coalition and yet in the late 1960s and early is

1970s they work on their television screens and read the newspapers and said what is happening in the country? rising crime, rising drug abuse, dissolving families, democratic party wracked by an argument over vietnam and the new rights revolutions taking place. so they begin moving intothe republican column . and they come to be known as hardhats because they tend to be blue-collar. they tend to be not having obtained a college degree. so the hardhats enter this republican coalition and their critical to richard nixon's landslide win in 1972 . they become part of the right over the years, they are the reagan democrats. they are swerved towards perot in 1922 but newt gingrich brings them back in. there defendants anyway are

the trump silent majority. there's another group as well that comes into the right in the 1970s and those are the neoconservatives. these were liberal anti-communist, they were democrats who for the same reasons as the hardhats found themselves out of sync with their allies on the left within the democratic party. not all of them make the migration to the republican party in the 70s when irving kristol and georges richard nixon in 1972 is it's a scandal and many of his fellow neoconservatives don't make the job until well into the 1980s. but these neoconservative intellectuals who often well-positioned within the liberal establishment now are migrating to the right. so the national conservatives have to decide how do these

neocons fit into the picture and i always remember the moment i read during my research and editorial in the national review responding to essays in commentary magazine that are indicative of the e editor commentary at that time moving to the right and the title of this editorial was come on in, the waterslide. so welcoming them in. bringing the neocons in and finally the last group that enters the picture in the american right in the 1970s is the religious right. the religious right have been dormant in many ways at least at the national political level since the scopes trial at the beginning of my story but it's because of judicial rulings and also because of disappointment and the present day of jimmy carter that you see the evangelical

christians move on from the democratic party into the republican moral majority in the 1990s so it's different once you have the reagan revolution because it now has the hardhats and now has the on neoconservatives and the religious right because it inside the party. it was the supply-side which from green i say to so bob mundell and bob bartley and the crowd of the wall street journal editorial pages really reinvigorated and reagan was not a supply-sideor when he was governor .

but that was my entrance into the movement but that reinvigorated an economic message. that was the key sticking this together. >> what would the supply-siders say. >> it was frankly there was a big of the chicago guys, uncle emelting which was people like bob mondello who was also a chicago guy. there was a fight inside chicago, university of chicago which was sound money because nixon took us off and you had a big monetary policy by which we never really had before during the gold standard so you had supply-siders bringing answers to the problem of inflation, bringing answers to tax reform, to achieve economic growth and to really show how you could have growth and opportunity.

and to bring an agenda which bill steiger, a wisconsin guy and jack kemp in 1978 and then in 1981, 82 past after having passed the steiger caffeine tax cuts and visual showed what real growth looks like and they said proved supply-side economics, actually jackie kennedy got started in his day but they proved the idea. it's one of thethings , we wanted to have evidence of our ideas because we were all coasting on the fumes of the reagan revolution and the reagan movements and tax cuts which was achieving higher income mobility, lower wage workers were getting past the wage of growth, opportunity occurring becauseof supply-side economics . we were running on twenty-year old ideas so we put it back in place and got fresh evidence k.that it was actually work, covid for a

curveball but i would say the supply-side movements, the debate was in the m establishment of the s republican party or the conservative movement where the supply-siders prevailed, passed their ideas and that helps hold this coalition together in my opinion. >> all these strands of the 70s which when you look at them in the way you describe them or a strange commendation of ideas and a peculiar evolution for the right that brought together ultimately by ronaldreagan . the striking thing about your book that is it doesn't really culminate in reagan. a lot of centuries of the right build up to ronald reagan and then down from ronald reagan to see how far we've come down. that's not the argument you make. and in a way the book struggles with something every book about the right has to struggle with is how do you explain ronald reagan?

who was this person and what really did he do? >> he drove his biographer g crazy. >> the book is an example of what it means to be driven crazy by your biographer . >> the great biographer of ted roosevelt grcommissioned by reagan himself to write reagan's biography and a wonderful book. parts of it. it depends where you open it up but there are other parts where morris found he had no idea what was going on behind that smile so he had to create himself as a fictional character in ronald reagan's biography to try to bring up this person. i don't think anyone penetrated that smile. people like to say nancy reagan did but i'm not so sure about that a. i think ronald reagan was absolutely self-contained and it's very unusual for someone like that. he was always on stage.

he has had other qualities as well which i think making important and consequential. one was that his beliefs were very consistent over the decades. reagan shows up in my story in 1947 testifying to hudak and hedda hopper interviews him and what he's talking about all about freedom and democracy and american exceptionalism in 1947 is almost word for word what he says in his farewell address to the nation in january 1989. very little changes. i think part of that has to do briefly with the fact that he was very old. born in 1911. he doesn't become an republican until he's 51 years old. he votes for fdr four times

but he had in his head picture of what america was like for the new deal. again it's about the practice rather than the theory. for him dicks in illinois was america as it should be and that life he lived by the rock river was how americans should live. everythingthere . that was in his bones. a few other things. he was always very much oriented towards the future and i think this is something he picked up from fdr. if you look at fdr speeches and you look at reagan's speeches including reagan's famous address in support of barry goldwater in the last week of the campaign in 1954 time for choosing, reagan is repicking up fdr's tips, rendezvous with destiny.y. you and i, fdr loved that reagan does the same thing. it's you and me having a conversation and that orientation towards the future is unusual suffice to

say for a conservative. as a conservative i'm looking to the past. here's ronald reagan thinking about the future. and then there's finally some personal characteristics that make reagan stand out in the kind of the pantheon of the american right . a person who i enjoyed learning about and writing about is senator robert taft who was mister republican, a representative of that pre-world war ii right, opposed american entry into the nato. but robert taft who ran unsuccessfully for the republican nomination several times, he would be first to tell you it was not the most charismatic person on the right and conservatives do have this tendency to the dour, kind of very h. pessimistic and gosh, the world is going to hell in a hand basket. but that wasn't ronald reagan. nothing phased him. so this too made him unusual and it also made him i think appealing tto parts of the electorate typically when

they hear the word conservative or american right is lynch. >> they think over, neanderthal, caveman but your comes ronald reagan and with a quick and a smile with the movie star hair and that bears down and people are like that's not what i think of when i think conservatives. and all these qualities went in such an instructor in figure who however may have been the exception in the history of the american right and not the rule. >> i live about 80 miles upstream from dixon now. and the reason i mention that is because for us where i came from, this guy downriver who became president of the united states, this is amazing and it brought people into looking at i come from a

irish catholic family that was a jack kennedy family it was the e entrce into let's see whatthis is all about . that's where a lot of people from my family where i came from in wisconsin, he was an entry into the conservative movement and because he had such a great space, he had such a great way about him that he was inviting people who never looked at it before to actually look at it so that's why he was such an amazing intersection in time and that's why the fusionthat occurred , the reagan coalition really came together because of the unique personality so that is extremely rare e. >> you have that in berkeley too. with reagan's departure in 1989 and of course the post-presidency was cut short because of his alzheimer's diagnosis in 1994 and then with buckley kind ofhis lengthy retirement, buckley really stretched out his retirement . first he retired from public speaking and then retired from the board of the national review and he was a

significant syndicated columnist. >> writing till the day he died.>> with the departure of reagan and buckley you you lose these economical figures. who almost every part of the right and certainly every faction within american conservatism and the conservative movement saw as unifying. with without itfigures like that and the righteousness and conflictual nature of the american right comes to the four. >> you entered political world, got to washington right after reagan. where did the right think it was headed after reagan? >> i was at a think tank on power america founded by jean kirkpatrick. and jackkemp, there's the fusion right there. they were the titular heads of the three different movements working with people and

projects for american future . all products of urban coastal and so i never really thought of myself as a neocon, i thought of myself as a supply-side or. i didn't spend a lot of time on policy these days and eawe were fighting the polio account at this time which was pat buchanan, a little bit of pero and it was funny. i read from college on the national review but it was sullivan and guys like that over at the national review fighting it wasn't the weekly standard yet but it was, that's what it was called. so you had what were the neocons fighting the polio cons and some other cons in there, point being when the reagan era ended with the defeat of hw bush by clinton, a ton of soul-searching was going on. and theconservative movement turned inward and shot at each other . and not until a standardbearer emerged meeting the nominee in this

case w who one. and then he worked on the compassionate conservatism. that never really took cold i would say, never really coalesced. a solid fusion because of circumstances, you know, wars and arrests, i won't get into it all but in the post reagan era in 92 when clinton won, we were in an internal struggle in the conservative movement for the future of the conservative movement and i think we still are frankly . i think we have had pauses, we've won some white houses but we've never settled into a posture of a majoritarian center-right movement that is capable of racking up consistent majorities, presidencies and putting in place and governing an agenda of the 21st century and that is on the way and right now dominated by trump is not, it's just pure untended populism.

i call it personality populism which is not an agenda. it's a person . so i think we're still in this turn and i think underneath that is the kind of fight we had in the early 90s. it's the kind of fightwhere having right now but with digital . >> matt, in a way your book describes the post reagan right as similar and contiguous with the free reagan right and reagan have this kind of exception but where, there's a way in which that populism rose to the forefront in the 1990s. we don't think of the 90s that way now but it was the time when a populism that has been held in the bank in some ways really became the face of theright in response to the clinton , how do you think about the post reagan years. >> one of the big things themes of my book is this relationship between conservatism and populism and the irony that often times

the only way conservatives get into poweris through populist politics . which conservatives like buckley and myers wife mentioned were often ambivalent and conflicted about. but this is clearly evidenced in the reagan election. tthe populism being one of the driving forces that reagan thrives with reagan able to synthesize populism with the supply-side agenda. with the interest of the religiousright . with taxcutting, defense buildup, all the various factions of the american right as well. it's his departure from the scene, this argument begins a new. and there, i always thought it was interesting. the 1988 gop primary was in many ways the missed opportunity. because you had a moment there where the republican party could have been forced to choose between jack kemp, and buchanan.

pat doesn't run for president in 1988, he waits until 1992 because he recognizes that reagan's successor is probably going to be george hw bush who is not a reaganite. who is an established republican there we get the fight between the establishment republicans and represented by bush . you can 1992 representing a populist wing, representing the resurgence of the old right and its attitudes towards war and its attitudes towards immigration and then beginning with buchanan's am campaign picking up the trade issue as well and becoming more protectionist. so that debate is had but you can never be successful in 2000 of course he leaves the republican party y and he runs for president of the reform party where one of his rivals is a man named donaldtrump .

and i think buchanan is the first to recognize the irony of that 16 years later trump would ascend to the presidency on many of the ideas that he was lambasting you can about. in the 2000 cycle. but so at the time, at the moment i do think the argument is has been settled in favor of the forces of populism. and the conservative governing class that came to power with ronald reagan blasted through the first george bush was kind of moved up to capitol hill during the onrepublican evolution and newt gingrich and then came back down pennsylvania avenue with george w. bush. that conservative governing class which existed for about 30 years has been displaced. >> what i saw, i had to look at my time in congress as to period, with the majority and then lost it .

and when obama came in and then we got it back. saw this book years out there, a young times. i was out 2 to 3 on that name. but our goal with that plan was to go out and recruit members of congress who were jowilling to take tough votes because what had happened to our majority was we got fat and lazy. they ended up recruiting the local county executive port state senator who was the next guy in line who just wanted to earmark their way to staying in. so our movement that intellectually lazy. we got fat and happy. we did earmark send it was kind of ugly. those of us who were young upstart in the house were really did not like that. we lose our majority, many of us argued we deserve to lose our majority and weresafe . then we went and recruited people we thought and it proved we thought would be

willing to take tough votes and we were excited about the tea party movement so i remember talking to the koch's and the tea party movement was our chance to get supply-side 2.0 and 1.0 was agnostic, 2.0 is not so supply-side 2.0 was progrowth economics, limited government, get entitlements under control and a robust foreign policy. and on the issue of creating immigration there was a fight but we pushed back to the side and then we really passed the tea party movement, we've got the majority back but it was in al divided governments . we couldn't effectuate much. >> is that what the tea party movement really was?t >> in the beginning it was but there was a bit of a fight. this is back to the neocon side versus the palio cons.th trade and immigration versus the other issues . and hindsight, this is me

looking back we didn't understand i think and this is where i think we made mistakes, didn't understand the potency of those issues, the power of those issues and bellwether wrote a good book back in the 80s. where we could see signs of this, where i think the establishment republicans, people like me included missed was this is the effects of the issues like trade and immigration on the hblack man and how that really played into not just policy but people perception. and we were more focused on just the tea party movement re-limiting government, kind of a limitary supply-side field print all of us more or less agreeing on strong national defense so the isolationism hadn't crept in yet like it is now at that time. and what ended up happening was i othink the trade and immigration issue sort of overtook the movement. and the tea party morphed into something like what it is today. so there was a moment in time where we thought we had a shot. when we did get finally are

majorities and the republicans which we lost in 12, people freaked out after we lost. i was on the ticket, it wasn't fun losing in 12 when we lost in 12 i think people really kind of freaked out and then what happened from my asperspective was enough to have half of these nice guys on the ticket, no more nice guys, let's send a lot a velociraptor, let's send an apex predator on the ticket to just throw hand grenades. so the entertainment wing g of our party with the digital age with cable rose at the same time and so i think the entertainers sort of replaced the think tank type people, replaced the intellectual berkeley heights. and the country in a reactionary movement against barack obama through the best entertainer, the best bomb thrower you could. he was the inside entertainer of congress, the greatest

bomb thrower you can find and they threw donald trump added anyone. >> the number ben carson. >> he was leading for about a month or so. >> he was in the lead was all outsiders. >> all outsiders in this i think testifies to the importance of the 2012 election. i think we would be in the beginning of your first term as president if he had that on a different way. so the world would be a very different place but i totally agree with paul saying that 2012 was a hinge in the sense ns that many people on the right had internalized the idea that because of the american exceptionalism barack obama had to be up had a court to say, barack obama had to be jimmy carter and he can only be one term because he was so interested in moving america in a direction where it had not gone for many years.

as he said, his ambition was to be the progressive reagan, to be just as consequential, to change politics in the similar way so the right i think really believed that this was as senator didn't put it going to be waterloo, this is the battle. and when the election is called for obama on election night 2012, so early in the evening, by the 11:00 news i think many people on the right were just stunned. >> driving on the ticket. >> i can imagine. >> i can imagine. and that made them say all right, if we're reaching this point where the input, the electoral input, we elect scott brown nyin massachusetts but obama edoes obama care anyway. we have the tea party

congress but they're not able to do anything. then in 14, we get a republican way again and it captures the senate. after the election in 2014 obama says yeah, i heard the people who voted the republicans in congress but i also hear all the people who voted for democrats and the people who didn't vote at all and i'm going to govern for those people . it's infuriating . so the elections should matter and yet they didn't so i think that a lot of people on the right to say we need an outsider. we need an external force to come in and shake up the system and that's the only way we're going to be able to achieve any of our goals and they got . >> i want to open things up for questions so please? one follow-up, you mentioned three issues. immigration, war, trade. those were the issues where

things broke open after that moment when some voters on the right but this is working. why was it those issues and does that mean really the seeming consensus on those was an illusion, that the right was wrong about what voters wanted and were voting for? >> if it was an illusion, it should have been apparent even at the time. and as a reporter i was covering the immigration debate during george w's second term. i worked for a magazine where the editors were very supportive of the comprehensive immigration reform that would have included amnesty for illegal immigrants but my reporting was saying there was no way that was going to happen l because even if it passed the senate the republicans would not allow it . that's when you begin to see a real break between the grassroots right and the conservatives and republican establishment inwashington over the issue of immigration .

the war is a little bit more complicated because for a while republican voters really stood behind their republican president who was, who had launched the wars in afghanistan and iraq but beginning in 2007 with the rise of ron paul and the liberty movement you see their there is discontent on the right with the george w. bush or in policy. now protectionism is a little bit more complicated. i think what trump did in coming out against the transpacific partnership or tpp yas he always said throughout the campaign was basically provided a concrete symbol for the depths of despair that were ravaging america. and the your crisis, for the rise in alcoholism. for this.

>> hollowing out of the rustbelt. >> unimaginable social crisis , he said it's the deindustrialization, it's china's entry into the world trade organization and the china shock, that's what giving you this. whether that's true i believe is an empirical question that is complicated but politically it's brilliant. and it speaks to his shrewdness. he did a similar thing with immigration . immigration a complicated issue. clearly the legal immigration is something republicans and conservatives oppose but what happened with the rise of crisis and the jv team in the second half of obama's second term, after the shootings at san bernardino, trump proposes the muslim band and he's able to take immigration and combine it with national security. and all of a sudden we need

to close the borders not just to prevent people from coming in who might be searching for jobs but we need to make america safe. you see how he's able to read these issues together in 2016 just as a postscript i would say is something he was not able to do in 2020. >> let's open things up for questions. i would only ask that you do ask a question rather than make a statement.>> fraser statement in the form of a question. >> if you can come to an interrogative and also please wait for a microphone and tell us who you are. i let's start there in the back. >>. >> analyzer, i work at third way. so one reason we're having all of these discussions about the new right is because it's become apparent that a lot of the tenants of

small government conservatism are not thatpopular with voters . social security and medicare is owned by the eca are politically toxic now what does that mean for the future of the american right small government conservatism. >> i'm working on a big book project here answering that question. andthere are about 18 of us working on this project . i think you have to reconcile our life with these programs. like we said, the new deal. these are settled issues i would d argue. then the question is how do you go about achieving those and the best possible way to maximize upward mobility, economic growth, limited governance in your economy so once you get over the fact that these programs exist and we have a social construct that we all agree should exist, then let's get on to the task of repairing them

from bankruptcy and making them perform the best. where you then go in the issue is the left once government to run it all. they want no private sector, there wascommand of resources , means of production. they want to use it as an extension of their ideology. we want to use the power of choice and competition to deliver these services that we all of the country have reached consensus on. that may sound like me to, it's just radical pragmatism. we are where weare , we do agree that these things are here and should stay so let's get on with business as actually performing these tasks the right way so we don't lose our reserve currencies and don't have a debt crisis because if that happens imagine what happens ito this social contrast and the polarization of the country if we go down the

path in 10 or 20 years we lose reserve currency, these things explode. and then you have a total debt crisis where you are doing real-time surgery takingbenefits away from people inreal life . that's what would happen if we basically do nothing . so i thinkconservatives , conserving onthese things you get to step i have this but you have to win the arguments , when the majority and you have to have a president willing to stick his or her neck out to get this done. i think that's the key task of the'conservative movement. >> right here please. >> i think that you made a passing reference to the iraq war. does your book or could you address now where the republican voters soured on that conflict.

i asked that because i saw the very power powerful moment in the 16 campaign was when donald trump really had a moment in one of his debates early on where he just eviscerated that in a very passionate way. i thought it was a cheap shot but i think his history or post history was actually pretty spot on and i thought that was resonant and i wonder if you could identify paul when you felt that was really soured on byrepublican voters ? >> it's a: a question because i think public opinion really began turning against the war after the bombing of the mosque in samarra in february 2006 and the onset of civil war iniraq . and where the war really began spinning out of control . and public opinion was also very ambivalent about the surge policy in iraq, changing our strategy there and yet mccain and romney engaged in many debates over

the surge in the run-up to the primaries in 2008 and it's a debate that mccain a strong supporter of the surge one. even then with the mccain candidacy you could still see that winning in iraq or achieving stability there that would allow us to lead, exit most of our forces from the country was stillpowerful among republicans . however i think what's been going on when trump attacked jeb bush over the war, when he said w has lied, there was part of it but it was also much more, it was more about ending the bush era. turning the page on the bush era. you think about the condition of america in 2016, 2015, clearly we were ending a very polarized presidency in barack obama. the situation oversees that point, the situation

domestically was not good. and yet who do the two parties offer?jeb bush and hillary clinton so another sign on to the bush dynasty and if you can't get more establishment and hillary clinton on the left . so trump their, he's basically saying bush is over because there is redisappointment in the iraq war, there's still huge discontent and opposition to, rented immigration reform which of course jeb bush had written a book about prior to his run. and the economic legacy of the bush presidency which ended with the global financial crisis and the great recession also in the back of voters heads. so i think that played a part. i would also say that the important moment is not trump's victory in the republican primary.

donald trump won about 45 percent of the total vote in the republican primary in 2016. had he lost the general election, i think the anti-trump forces would still have had a very good position. and that debate which is the debate that goes on between populism and conservatism for 100 years as i outlined in my book will be more evenly next to the decisive moment was trump winning the presidency and winning it on kind of a fluke . 30,000 votes i think in three states gibson and electoral college victory, a substantial electoral college victory. once he becomes president you are the most famous person in the world, the most important person in the world. maybe next to the fed chair but one or the other . but you're definitely the most important person in your party. you define the alternative , set the agenda you set an

example so it's not trump winning the nomination that has such consequence, it's in winning the presidency and being president for four years that transformed the public and republican party and the conservative movement . >> our time is drawing to a close and there's more tobe said . i wonder if we could and each of you thinking about the ndfuture of the right. this book ends at the end of the trump era, it ends now. we will see where we are. where are we? where are you based on your thinking about the views of the american right how do you think about where the right is added, where the new generation is looking, what's the futurelook like right now ? >> it's very important that american conservatism remember that it's american. and that what makes american conservatism distinct is its reference to the american founding and to the american

political institutions at american political condition which has always made liberty and freedom. and i worry sometimes that the right today is drawn to models found in continental europe which is a different right, it's not the american right and even though i think the terrain of our politics has shifted from argument over the size and scope of government to an argument over the size and scope of the less cultural power and public policy may be leveraged to diminish the less cultural power but we forget the american conservatism then the right will be something very different than it's been or the hundred years i write about but also i would add it will not be able to sustain a political coalition that will attract nonpolitical everyday

americans from living there lives with substantive answers i didn't become a radical institutionalist toy became a speaker of the house becausei didn't put into the institution because i was busy leading policies . when i ran the legislative branch became a strong institutionalist from what you just said basically which is we have to have a conservative movement tethered to principles, that is uniquely american. i think the blood and soil nationalist which is this european flavor of populism here in the right disregards the uniqueness of the american idea, of a country based on natural law and the reasons for that orwhich i won't get into but to me it's extremely important the conservative movement rededicate itself to these critical institutions that are dedicated to these

finding principles so that you have core standard on which you operate. and then it's a movement that can have great debates on policy matters within the sphere of these principles. and we won't get to that point until you have a party or a movement that is capable of having a strong vibrant debate not dominated by just one personality. so this kind of populism is one not tethered toprinciples . we can get to populism and it's a vibrant debate and the way i look at it just economics and a number of standpoints is great power competition with china and technology on and on. we don't have a whole lot of time to get it right but i do believe the country is yearning for this. it is still a center right country.

so the question is can we put together a movement that can move and can accommodate and can accept different fashions in a new fusion that is a center right fusion that has men and women capable of carrying that standard, multiple not just one so we can win elections, effectuate change, dodge bullets and meeting accidental problems and get us back on track and have a great century, i think we can. but we're not there now and we got to go with some cycles together i think. >> that is a note to end on and we will end their threat the book is the right:the hundred year war for american conservatism . [applause] >> american history tv saturday on c-span2 exploring

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