here and thank you for writing the book, it was amazing i recommend everyone getting it from the local store the link that has been provided. it's a great lead. >> sounds good. >> i want to thank you both. what a wide ranging connecting the dots mind blowing set of things you are able to talk about, i would think you and i want to thank all of you for being here tonight the program was recorded in is recorded and will post it tomorrow on the center for brooklyn history youtube channel. i'm really hoping will explore the otherhello everybody welco'm

uvalde fan of the american enterprise institute and it is my pleasure to welcome you to this conversation about matthew continent is important and excellent new book the right the hundred year war for american conservatism. this book is both an intellectual and a political history of the american right over the past century. it takes up the ideas behind the right the electoral coalition that has composed it the ways that their coalition has sought power and used power and our

politics the way that it's thought about the country and its future the book explores some important tensions between populism and conservatism between libertarians and traditionalists between pragmatists and purists. so it gives us a lot to talk about and that is what we will be doing this morning. we'll do it through a conversation between the book's author matt cottonetti and you might say one of its subjects former house speaker paul, ryan. a practitioner and a thinker about politics on the modern, right? a word about each of them as if they need it. matt continenti is senior fellow here at ai where his work is focused on american politics and political thought and history. he's a prominent journalist and analyst and author. he was the founding editor of the washington free beacon. he was prior to that the opinion editor of the weekly standard. he's also a contributing editor of national review and a columnist for commentary magazine. this is matt's third book and in one way or another all of them

have dealt with the evolution of the modern, right? paul ryan is of course the former speaker of the house of representatives. he served in congress for 20 years from 1999 through 2019 representing the first district of wisconsin in that time. he rose very quickly to serve as chairman of the budget committee and then chairman of the ways and means committee and ultimately served as speaker for about three and a half years. i'm sure it felt like a lot longer paul. he's now among other things a non-resident fellow with us here at ai as well as serving on a number of boards teaching in notre dame and other important work. our format will be straightforward in conversational. no formal remarks. no opening statements. we will we will discuss the book. it's core ideas put questions to matt and after some back and forth between matt and paul. which i will moderate will open things up for questions questions from all of you in the room and also questions from those of you who are watching live online if you are watching

us online, there are two ways that you can ask questions of matt by email or if you must on twitter, but by email you can send a question to john roach. that's john dot roach at aei.org if you're on twitter, you can use the hashtag aei the right. and with that we can just jump in matt first of all, congratulations on really an important and superb book. maybe the way to get us started and help folks get a sense of the book is by telling us a little bit about why you wrote it and why you wrote it in the way that you did why the book has the particular character and form that you've given it. great. thank you all thank you paul for coming and thank you all for attending and thank you to aei for providing me a home where i could write this book, which is been many years in the making. and finally when you've all came to me and said you have to write the book he was able to help me

come to ai where i could write it. so 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 and from that it was an education not only in the history of the right but also broader education in the history of american politics and culture. really for the last half century. so that's something i've been doing really in my spare time for two decades now. however, after 2012 in particular i began a more intensive. um look and investigation into the history of the american right because the 2012 election. which she played a pretty big

part in you're familiar with? exemplified 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 they 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 believe began in the second bush administration. around 2005-2006 was only gaining steam. and so i wanted to investigate why was this happening? what was driving this energy and one donald trump came down that escalator in 2015. really won the republican nomination and then the presidency the next year. i thought a history of the american right? with 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 for over over the years and some of my students are here and happy to see that. and i found that there was no real one volume textbook. i could just hand a young person and say well this is this is the history there, of course some great works george nash's book the conservative intellectual movement in america since 1945. is that kind of the key text of my field? but that book really focuses heavily on the post world war two conservative movement, and it kind of ends its main body of the text anyway ends around the late 1970s and so i felt it was necessary to broaden the story and tell it in a narrative format in a way that synthesizes both intellectual developments along with political developments. and so this way i could then just hand it to my students say forget about the class. just read this book or preferably buy a couple copies

for you and your family. paul maybe 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. why should conservatives care about the history of american conservatives? well, we'll save the country or not. i think we're coming to an inflection point like we always like all great countries do and and i think if we lose the country to the left then we lose what the country is is all about. from me it's a country, you know the constitutional declaration rooted in natural law. and the principles that flow from that should be carried through in our policies to make sure that our country realizes it's it's it's true potential. and if and if we lose that then we lose the left and then we become like other countries. in other democracies so, i think it's extremely important, but we're not anywhere close to where we need to be as a movement to be able to realize these things. you know, my background is more

fiscal based and i worry about inflection points in the future with the social contract and the dollars reserve currency and how much time do we have before we can really put in place some important reforms, but we 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 and self-determination and markets in the rest are in human flourishing is advanced, which is what we work on here at aei. i too want to thank aei for giving me a home so that i could read here, but we were talking about this over here a second ago when i came to age, you know, i was i went to college from 88 to 92 so that that kind of time i came of political age in the reagan moment. and i came into the conservative movement as a young person as a think tanker and then as a member inside a fight for this all the republican party, which was alive and well bill clinton had just won.

and you had a big churn within the conservative movement and different factions fighting one another. this is not new this has happened from time from from the beginning on your book is a perfect example of that. so for new young people who are who are shocked at this infighting so to speak of the conservative movement. this is what happens in movements and until you actually have a big standard bearer a reagan type person you're gonna have that kind of fighting so we are where we've been before where we go. we don't yet know but it's important that the conservative movement in my opinion becomes the majority movement in the country with respect to winning elections so that we can effectuate policy. so that we can we can we can solve these big problems that are in front of us. matt you it must be a challenge to decide where to start in a book like this and you mentioned that george nash was a wonderful book. really looks at american conservatism as a kind of post-world war two phenomena.

you don't do that and you put a lot of emphasis on the pre-war rights the pre-new deal right and begin in the 1920s. why what is there to learn now from the right before the new deal? yeah, i think for a historian the two hardest questions are where to begin and then what to leave out. and of course, those are the two things that everyone wants to talk about and criticize your book for once it's written why did i begin in with warren harding's inauguration in the spring of 1921? well, i thought that 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're meant to defend are the institutions created by the american founding the constitution the principles of the declaration of independence.

a political theory of the federalists but in 1932 many people in the right believe that a revolution had taken place in the nature of the american experiment in 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 progressiveism would settle? in the american political continuum was still very much up for grabs. teddy roosevelt aligned with the progressives but of course, he was a very successful republican president woodrow wilson aligned with progressives. he was a not so successful successful in some ways not in others democratic president.

it wasn't until the 1920s with the republican party of harding and coolidge that you saw the gop align itself against progressivism. and say that we're going to define ourselves as the party of americanism. or is harding famously put it of normalcy. and their gop of the 1920s was extraordinarily successful. but events your boy events. the great depression delegitimize the gop's claim to providing prosperity for the average american. world war two delegitimized the rights foreign policy of non-intervention in the eyes of the mainstream american electorate. and so conservatism there had to be kind of refigure its reconfigure itself for the post-world war two cold war era that part of the story hadn't really been told it had been told in some places. um figures like justin raymondo who was considered himself in the traditionally. alright, what wrote a very good book on this subject?

but i wanted to incorporate that story into the story of the post-war conservative movement and then carry it through reagan and the most recent presidencies including donald trump's. paul you know in some ways the the kind of work that you were most engaged in the the efforts to reform are 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 or you could make that argument maybe 20 years ago. i don't think that that's the case anymore. i think i think everyone is reconciled themselves with this. with what? i guess i'd call the social contract. i think the country and look the country the founders gave us a system that was designed to reach political consensus and when you do that you do big things. one of the reasons why we're all

an amber with the filibuster even when you know, it's the issue cuts against us. so i don't think that that's the case anymore. let's just take the social contract which is health and retirement security. for the old age for 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 let's move on with making sure that that's the case. and then you have a fight about left and right about whether markets whether choice whether individualism is involved in this or if you're a progressive you see it as a way of extending government's reaching to people's lives extending progressivism. so i do think the right has reconciled itself with the social contract, which was basically erected in that period between new deal and great society. and now it's a question. this is what our budgets were all about, which was not to reduce repeal these things.

but to rework these programs so that they were actually so that they work in the 21st century didn't create a debt crisis didn't bankrupt the country and used markets and choice and competition as a means of delivering on these on these goals without hamstring the country slowing down growth creating a reserve currency run in bankrupting the country. so i think we're there in populism. look, i think he wrote about this one. he and i thought about medicare and internal reform all the time and 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 incredible reform episode and we were one vote shy of getting that done in the senate. it wasn't popular in 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. so i think that answers your question, it's some it's always a dilemma for the right in a variety of contexts. which left its responding to? and so the right in america is always kind of felt on the defensive because well first it has to deal with the progresses then it has to deal with fdr. but then it has to deal with lbj. well, i hold it now. we're in the obama era and we're dealing with that left. we're dealing with the great awakening as we meet here today another left and each time these lefts. transform themselves and take on new guises. the right often has to do it as well. i was struck, you know whenever i teach the founding documents of national review when the magazine was launched in 1955 william buckley jr. who's in many ways the central protagonist of my story. says that you know conservatives

who are against the new deal and then parentheses, and we're not sure if there can be any other kind. all are line with national reviews principles now for an american on the right today to read that. or to hear what paul just said and say oh, it's clearly things have changed. well what has changed? passage of time and that small c conservative instinct of just well, we don't want to rock the boat. but also the left has changed too and the left is moved on into new territory. so many ways we've got we were not fighting over the new deal as so much as the cultural agenda of the left which really comes out. i think of the anti-war and counterculture movements of the late 1960s and has has ebbed waxed and waned? yeah over the ensuing decades. i want to pick up on what you said about bill buckley being the central character book that's certainly seems to me to be the case in reading about

your publisher put ronald reagan on the cover. you probably should put ronald reagan on the cover. you can see why. if it were up to you to put bill buckley on the cover, what was william f buckley doing? what was his purpose? what was the movement he had in 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? >> his ambition as he put it at that young age when he came to the scene in 1951, 26 years old, he said this to mike wallace in an early interview, i am a counterrevolutionary. the revolution he wanted to overturn was fdr's revolution of 1932 changing the nature of the american social contract. 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 -- played a part in the intercollegiate studies institute, the collegiate network, the young americans for freedom all of which continue to this day and he launched magazines quarterly the human life review which for many decades was a place for pro-life intellectual work. he did it in terms of trying to build up the counter establishment, to recruit people who would inhabit these institutions, make conservative arguments but would be treated seriously by every day americans watching the four channels they had access to in

the mid-1960s. also wanted to build fences around conservatism. the problem of the american right in the aftermath of world war ii in the post-mccarthy period, the mid-1950s carrying through the 1960s, it was considered a fringe ideology. america was thought to be a liberal country, if not a progressive one, the constitution and the bill of rights are liberal documents and conservatives who after all, buckley was a harsh critic of the popular republican president dwight eisenhower. conservative seemed a little bit odd. intellectual tides were all in the area of government expansion and regulation. milton friedman, fringe in the 60s. buckley was very concerned in

making conservatism respectable. so he began drying fences around his version of american conservatism and going after anti-semitism, going after conspiracy theories, things that ayn rand couldn't be part of the movement, saying the libertarian -- couldn't be part of his movement because he was a narco capitalist, get rid of the state totally. national security office played a big part in that. buckley's conservatism was one of engaged nationalism. america should be strong, powerful and defend itself but also engaged in the world to rollback the soviet union. that meant a large military establishment, standing army, forward defense, forward deployment of our troops,

alliances like nato, intervention like vietnam all of which the earlier right would have been skeptical if not opposed to. so this was the version of american conservatism bill buckley created. the last part was political. working within the republican party, the traditional vehicle of american conservatism to turn it away from the moderate republicanism, me tooers toward conservatism so he played a role in the early goldwater campaign that culminated in 1964. mr. conservative's nomination for president on the republican ticket. the goldwater campaign which was managed by one of the most prominent presidents of this

institution locked buckley out of the campaign. he was afraid goldwater would be associated with "national review" but that political energy expressed itself in early friendship with ronald reagan and even got to the point later in life where he was willing to intervene, buckley, that is, in democrat primaries, support democratic candidates including joe lieberman to get rid of the original me tooer. >> i came of age at the tail end of this. and grew up reading bob bartley's pages and i had a conservative economy professor who gave me his issue of "national review". i didn't know what it was, in the late 80s, he said you should take this and i will give you my copy when i am done

with it and i consumed it and took to "national review" so if you are young budding conservative in the late 80s this is the path you took and the movement you came into and so we have different movements like this when people are coming of age and i think buckley of all people dominated for 2 or 3 decades. the conservative ecosystem and we still had a bunch of people that -- there was a big fight but he was the center of gravity and if he didn't do this, you shouldn't put buckley. >> and all the debates we are having at the moment over the new american right, which if you go my book the third new right we've had in the last hundred years, there is great energy being devoted to

building up an infrastructure to compete with the conservative infrastructure that bill buckley began creating in the 1950s and 60s and the early neoconservatives throughout the 70s and 80s into the 90s so that had been missing for this new right for many years but now in the final years of the trump presidency and subsequent to that they are building their own infrastructure and it shows you, you will appreciate the importance of institutions because without these institutions, without these spaces to work and for organizations it is just people writing in their basements. >> buckley created this sort of mainstream through all these institutions, in a way it was built around ideas that would have been very controversial in

the old right but presented itself as a consensus, a mainstream of far right. within that mainstream, within those institutions there was also a divide between traditionalists and libertarians, between freedom and tradition. that dividing line came to define the internal debate of the buckley conservative movement and over time the attempt to overcome those divisions became known as fusion, the defining project of the buckley right at least in the 1960s, tell us what fusion was, what was meant to be and what wasn't, did it make sense as a way to solve the problem buckley confronted in his own camp? >> one of the underappreciated figures was frank meyer, an ex-communist who converted to the right on reading serfdom,

became a contributor to many of the right-leaning journals like the freeman monthly american mercury and then he became associated with "national review". eventually the senior editor of "national review" and he had been trained in communist dialectic and polymeric so he thought very dogmatically. this is where we operate as american conservatives. buckley called them air-traffic control because he was making sure all the planes were going in the right direction and taking off on time. so meyer has libertarians terrain to him, love and

appreciate higher actually disputes other libertarians on the right over the nature of the american defense establishment, whether a standing army weapons programs, and what conservatives desired, a policy of rollback of communism, the randolph bourne quote everyone knows, libertarians are noninterventionist, war will grow the state and reduce individual freedom. in the course of the debate with libertarians myers says i will describe what american conservatism is and what american conservatism is tracing back to the american founding is a synthesis of individual liberty and traditional values, moral order

and because the american founding took place before the great ruptures of the nineteenth century, before the french revolution in 1789, americans are able to synthesize freedom and virtue, liberty and order. this essay called the twisted tree of liberty, a great essay and brent bozell junior who is bill buckley's brother-in-law and another senior editor at "national review" moving toward a very devout traditional policy at this time, and became more and more devout, he read frank's essay. freedom is not the end of politics, virtue is. what you are trying to do is some type of fusion. fusion begins with an insult

but ends up being appropriated or neoconservatism. this is where the debate begins. can you unify individual liberty and traditional morality? the buckley people with "national review" said you could even if it didn't work out in theory it was revealed in practice, the lives of many american conservatives themselves but these two things can coexist even if it doesn't work in theory and as conservatives we shouldn't worry about that, we should only be concerned whether it works in practice. that wasn't enough for bozell on the more religious right and he eventually broke off from buckley's american conservatism and wasn't enough for libertarians who continue to critique buckley's conservatism as too status because of its belief that you needed a powerful military and engagement with the world to

defeat communism so i see a lot of debates today about the future of fusionism and i continue to think it doesn't always work in theory. the closer you look it might break down but it does still work in practice when you look at how people on the right actually live their lives. >> let me put it this way. for people who aren't used to week the term, the reagan coalition. when you go to effectuating policy, the politics, absolutely it works so try working in congress and building a coalition, a working majority in congress, requires fusionism to come together and measures of congress who are on the ballot running for election accept this. in a diverse country that had a working majority they have to coexist in a coalition of people from different regions,

backgrounds and philosophies in the conservative movement, where you had to fuse these things together. fusionism is essential to have practical working majority use to enact laws. in the think tank it is hard to justify or rationalize or stitched together but when you're 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 difficult decade in a lot of ways, the story you tell in this book is the story of extraordinary vibrancy, stepping back from the book the 1970s seemed like

the most important decade of the 10 decades you describe in the developed of the right. what happened to the right in the 70s, how was it different coming out of the 1970s? >> the simplest answer is new groups came to become associated with the right and the american conservative movement in the 1970s and a lot of that played out as a result of the overreach of liberalism and the radical left during the vietnam era, the student rebellions, during the social turbulence of the ninth 1960s and early 1970s. people who would not have identified as being on the right and it upcoming into an alliance with the american conservative so it became a question of how american conservatism would deal with these new entrants and i will give you two examples.

at the first are what bill gavin, a speechwriter for richard nixon called streetcorner conservatives. these were conservatives who were not familiar with hayek, not from a your with russell kirk, traditionalist author but they were often democrats. part of if they are's majority coalition and in the late 1960s and early 1970s they read their newspapers and said what is happening to my country? rising crime, rising drug abuse, dissolving families, democratic party wracked by an argument over vietnam and the revolution taking place so they begin moving into the republican column and they come to be known as hardhats because they tend to be blue-collar,

they tend to not having attained a college degree so the hardhats entered the republican coalition and are critical to richard nixon's landslide when in the 1972 and become part of the right over the years, the reagan democrats. they swerve toward ross perot in 1992 but newt gingrich brings them back in 1994. they are defendants anyway, the trump silent majority, the forgotten man. another group as well comes into the right in the 1970s, the neoconservatives. these were liberal anti-communists, democrats who for the same reasons as the hardhats found themselves out of sync with their allies on the left and the democratic party, not all of them make the migration to the republican party in the 1970s when irving

kristol endorses richard nixon in 1972, it is a scandal, many of his fellow neoconservatives don't make the jump into the well into the 1980s. but these neoconservative intellectuals who are often well positioned within the liberal establishment now are moving, migrating to the right and so the "national review" conservatives have to decide how do these neocons fit into the picture. i've always remembered the moment i read during research and editorial in spring of 1971 and "national review" responding to essays and commentary magazine clearly indicative of the editor commentary at the time moving to the right, title of this editorial was come on in, the water is fine. welcoming them in. and finally the last group that

enters the picture in the 1970s is the religious right. the religious right has been dormant in many ways at the national political level since the scopes trial but it is because of federal decisions and judicial rulings in the 1970s and the disappointment in the presidency of jimmy carter, you see evangelical and fundamentalist christians move en masse from the democratic party into the republican column, the vehicle being the moral majority in 1980. the american right looks very different once you have the reagan revolution. not only does it have buckley but the hardhats, the neoconservatives and the religious right. >> i would add one thing, inside the party, when i came of age, the supply-side movement which reinvigorated

economics in the conservative movement from austerity, pain and suffering to growth opportunity and bob bartley and wall street journal editorial pages they really reinvigorated and reagan became a convert with jack kemp and some californians but that really got people -- my entrance into the movement, the supply-side crowd, that reinvigorated an economic message to unify people. >> that stitched the coalition together. >> what to supply ciders say? >> it was frankly a chicago guy, the 3% rule, people like bob mundell, also a chicago guy, there was a fight inside chicago in the conservative

movement which was sound money because nixon took us off the gold standard and you had a big monetary policy fight which we never had before so you had supply ciders bringing answers to the problem of inflation, tax reform, to achieve economic growth and show how you could have growth and opportunity and to bring an agenda which bill steiger, wisconsin guy and jack kemp 1978 and then in 1981-82 passed the kemp roth act after the tax cuts and they showed what real gold looks like and proved supply-side economics, jack kennedy got it started because of marginal tax rates in his day but they proved the idea, this is one of the things we did with tax reform, we wanted fresh evidence of our

ideas because we are all coasting on the fumes of the reagan revolution and reagan movement and achieving higher income mobility, lower wage workers were getting faster wage growth, opportunity was occurring because of supply-side economics, we are running on 20-year-old evidence so we put it back in place and got fresh evidence that this does actually work. covid through a curveball but i would say the supply-side movement was a debate within the establishment of the republican party, the conservative movement, the supply-side prevailed, past their ideas and that really helped stitch the fusion coalition together. >> all these strands of the 70s the way you describe them are a strange combination of ideas and peculiar evolution for the right brought together by ronald reagan.

the striking thing about your book is it doesn't culminate in reagan. a lot of histories of the right build up to ronald reagan and then down from ronald reagan. that is not the argument you make. in a way, the book, every book about the right in the last 50 years has struggled with how do you explain ronald reagan? who was this person? >> he drove his biographer crazy. i don't think i will be able to -- >> an example of what it means to be driven crazy. >> if you are familiar with the book dutch, the great biographer commissioned by reagan himself to write reagan's biography. it depends where you open it up. there are other parts, he had no idea what was going on behind that smile. he had to create a fictional

character to try to bring out this person. i don't think anyone traded that smile. people say nancy reagan did but i am not sure about that. ronald reagan was self-contained and very unusual for someone like that. he was always on stage but he had other qualities as well which make him important and consequential. one was his beliefs were very consistent over the decades. reagan shows up in my story in 1947 in the capacity of president of the screen actors guild and had a hopper, a hollywood gossip columnist to interview him about ron and what he thinks and he talks about freedom and democracy in american exceptionalism in 1947

almost word for word what he says in his farewell address to the nation in january 1989, very little in his basic belief system changes. part of that has to do with the fact that he was very old. he was born in 1911, doesn't become a republican until he's 51 years old. he votes for fdr four times, but he had in his head a picture of what america was like before the new deal. the practice rather than for theory. for him dixon, illinois was america as it should be, the life he lived by the rock river was how americans should live. everything there. that was in his bones. a few other things. he was always very much oriented toward the future and this is something he picked up from fdr. if you look at fdr's speeches

and reagan's speeches and his famous address in support of barry goldwater in the last weeks of the campaign in 1964 reagan is picking up fdr's tips, rendezvous with destiny, you and i, and reagan does the same thing. you and me are having a conversation and that orientation for the future is unusual for conservatives. as a conservative i'm looking to the past and here's ronald reagan thinking about the future and then there's some personal characteristics that make reagan stand out in the pantheon of the american right. a person i really enjoyed learning about and writing about is senator robert taft who is mister republican. representative of the pre-world war ii right, opposed american entry into the nato, robert

taft who ran unsuccessfully for the republican nomination several times would be the first to tell you he was not the most charismatic person and conservatives have a tendency to be dour, pessimistic and the world is going to hell in a hand basket. that wasn't ronald reagan. nothing fazed him. so this too made him unusual and also made him i think appealing to parts of the electorate that typically when they hear the word conservative or american right flinch. they and at all, caveman. then here comes ronald reagan with this quip and smile and the movie star hair and that baritone and people are like that is not what i think of when i think conservative. and all these qualities made him such an extraordinary figure and consequential presence who, however may have

been the exception in the history of the american right and not the rule. >> i live 80 miles upstream from dixon right now. the reason i mentioned that is for us where i came from, this guy down river just became president of the united states, this is amazing and it brought people into looking at from an irish catholic family, it was the entrée into let's see what this was all about. that is where a lot of people from my family, wisconsin, he was an entry into conservatism and because he had such a great face, such a great way about him that he was inviting people who never looked at it before to look at it. that is why he was an amazing intersection in time and the fusion that occurred, the reagan coalition came to gather because of a unique personality

and that is extremely rare. >> you had that in buckley too. with reagan's departure in 1989 and the post-presidency was cut short because of his alzheimer's diagnosis in 1984 and with buckley's lengthy retirement, buckley really stretched out his retirement, first he retired from public speaking, then he retired from "national review" and one thing he never retired from was syndicated column. with the departure of reagan and buckley you lose these ecumenical figures who almost every part of the right and certainly every faction within american conservatism and the conservative movement saw as unifying. without figures like that, the fractious nurse of the american right comes to the 4. >> you entered the political

world, got to washington right after reagan. where did the right think it was headed after reagan? >> we were in a big fight. i was at a think tank column power america by jean kirkpatrick and jack kemp, the titular heads of three different movements. working with people at project for american future, all products of urban crystal. i never thought of myself as a neocon as much as a supply-side, spent a lot of time on foreign policy in those days and we were fighting the payroll account, pat buchanan, a little bit of ross perot. i read from college on the "national review," guys fighting, wasn't the weekly

standard yet, the project for american future, is that what it was called? you had the neocons fighting paley okon's and other groups, point being when the reagan era end with the defeat of h w bush by clinton, a ton of soul-searching was going on and the conservative movement turned inward and shot at each other and not until the standardbearer emerged a nominee, it was w, who won and he worked on compassionate conservatism but that never took hold, never really replaced a solid fusion because of circumstances, wars and arrested 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. we have had pauses, we won some white houses but never settled into a posture of a majoritarian civil rights movement capable of racking up consistent majorities, presidencies, putting in place and governing agenda for the 20 first century and that is still underway and it is dominated by trump, populism, a cult of personality populism which is not an agenda or theory, it is a person. we are still in this turn and underneath that is the kind of fight we had a nearly 90s and the kind of fight we are having now but with digital. >> how do you think about that? your book describes the best describes the post-reagan right as continuous and reagan is a kind of exception but there is

a way the cult of populism rose to the forefront in the 1990s, we don't think of it that way now but there was a time when the populism that held in abeyance in some ways really became the face of the right, clinton and otherwise. how do you think of the post-reagan years? >> one of the big themes of my book is the relationship between conservatism and populism and the irony that oftentimes the only way conservatives get into power is through populist politics, conservatives like buckley were often ambivalent and conflicted about but this is clearly evident in the reagan election, populism being one of the driving forces, reagan able to synthesize populism with the supply-side agenda, the interests of the religious right, the taxcutting, defense

buildup, the various factions of the american right as well. 's departure from the scene this argument begins a new and i always thought it was interesting, the 1988 gop primary in many ways a missed opportunity because you had a moment 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 going to be george hw bush who is not a reaganit, he is an establishment republican. so we get the fight between the establishment republicans represented by bush and buchanan in 1982 but the populist wing representing the resurgence of the old right and

its attitude towards war, immigration, and beginning in buchanan's 96 campaign picking up the trade issue as well, becoming more protectionist. so that debate is had, but buchanan never is successful. in 2000 he leaves the republican party and runs for president on the reform where one of his rivals is a businessman named donald trump and buchanan is the first to recognize the irony that 16 years later trump will ascend to the presidency on many of the ideas he was lambasting buchanan about in the 2000 cycle. at the moment, you think the argument, the forces of populism. the conservative governing class that came to power with ronald reagan lasted through

the first george bush, was moved up to capitol hill and newt gingrich and came back down pennsylvania avenue with george w. bush, that conservative and governing class existed for 40 years has been displaced. >> i had to look at my time in congress as two periods, the majority, and lost it, when obama comes in and young guns. 2 to 3 and that name. our goal was that plan, to recruit members of congress, what happened to our majority is we got fat and lazy. they ended up recruiting the local county executive or state senator who was the next guy in

line, our movements got intellectually lazy. we got fat and happy with earmarks. those of us who were young upstarts in the house, did not like that. we lose our majority, many argued we deserved to lose our majority and then we recruited people that we thought -- we were excited about the tea party movement, talking to a bunch of people, the tea party movement to get supply-side 2.0 and debt deficit side of government, 2.0 is not. it was pro growth economics, limited government, get entitlements under control, with trade and immigration there was a fight but we push

that side. we packed the tea party movement and got the majority back, we couldn't effectuate that. >> is that what the tea party movement was? >> there was a bit of a fight and this is back to the old neocon supply side back in those days. in hindsight, this is where we made some mistakes. a book about populism in the 80s, where the establishment republicans, the effects of issues like trade and immigration played into not just policy but people thinking, we were focused on

the tea party movement, the supply-side field, all of us agreeing on strong national defense, the isolationism happened crept in and what ended up happening, trade and immigration issue over took and the tea party morphed into something like what it is today. there was a moment in time we thought we had a shot but when we did get our majorities we lost in 12, people freaked out after we lost in 12, but when we lost in 12 i think people kind of freaked out and what happened from my perspective, not having these nice guys on the ticket. let's send a velociraptor, apex predator to throw hand grenades. the entertainment wing of the party in the digital age with cable rose at the same time and

the entertainers replaced the think tank type people, the intellectual buckleyites in the country in a reactionary movement vote barack obama, through the best entertainer, the best bomb thrower you could. ted finished second in the race, donald trump was the greatest bomb thrower he could find and he won. >> remember ben carson. >> leading for a month or so. >> all outside. >> this testifies to the importance of the 2012 election in the beginning of your first term for president had that gone a different way. the world would be a different

place but i agree that 2012, in the sense that many on the right internalized the idea that because of american exceptionalism barack obama had to be jimmy carter reborn, he could only be one term because he was so interested in moving america in a direction where it had not gone for many years. it was to be the progressive reagan, just as consequential in a similar way. the right really believed, this is the battle, the election was called for obama election night 2012 so early in the evening by the 11:00 news, many on the

right were stunned. >> try being on the ticket. >> i can imagine and that made them say if we are reaching this point where the electoral input, obama does obamacare, we have the tea party congress but they are not able to do anything, then in 14 we get a republican wave again that captures the senate and after the election obama says i heard the people who voted republicans in congress and all the people who voted for democrats and people who didn't vote at all and govern for those people, it is infuriating. the election should matter and they didn't so that drove a lot of people on the right to say

we need an external force to come in and shake up the system. that the only way to achieve many goals and they got it. >> please think of your questions. one follow-up, you mention 3 issues, immigration, war, trade. where the issues where things broke after that moment, voters on the right thought this isn't working. why was it those issues and the seeming consensus on those in the bush years was an illusion, the right was wrong about what it's voters wanted. >> if it was an illusion it should have been apparent even at the time. as a reporter i was covering the immigration debates during george w's second term and worked for a magazine where the

editors were supportive of comprehensive immigration reform including amnesty for illegal immigrants but my reporting was saying there's no way that was going to happen because even if it passes republicans in the house would not allow it because they were hearing from their constituents and you see a break between the grassroots right and the conservative and republican establishment in washington over immigration. the war is more complicated. for a while republican voters stood behind their republican president who launched the wars in afghanistan and iraqi but beginning in 2007 with the rise of ron paul uc there is discontent on the right with george w. bush's foreign-policy. protectionism is more complicated. what trump did in coming out

against the transpacific partnership or ppp as he said throughout the campaign, was provide a concrete symbol of the depths of despair ravaging america. the opioid crisis for the rise and alcoholism, unimaginable social crisis. he said china's entry into the world trade organization, whether that is true i believe is an empirical question that is complicated but politically it is brilliant and speaks to his shrewdness. he did a similar thing with

immigration, complicated issue that republicans, conservatives oppose but what happened with the rise of isis, the jv team in the second half of obama's second term after the shootings in san bernardino, trump proposes the muslim band and is 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 and you see how this is in 2016, which as a postscript, something he was not able to do in 2020. >> let's open up your questions. i only ask that you ask a question rather than make a

statement. >> phrase your statement in the form of a question. tell us who you are. we will call on you for a question. let's start in the back. >> one reason we are having these discussions, it is apparent, they are not popular with voters, going back to the aca, politically toxic now. >> a big project on answering that question, 18 of us working on this project. and life with these programs,

like we said. how do they go about achieving those in the best possible way, limited governments and economy. these programs exist and we have a social contract we all agree should exist, get to the task of repairing them from bankruptcy and make them perform the best, the left wants government to run it all, they want no private sector, command of resources, means of production and use it as an extension of their ideology, they want to use choice and competition, to reach consensus.

it is radical pragmatism. we are where we are, these things are here, let's get on with business of performing these tasks the right way so we don't lose reserve currency or have a debt crisis because if that happens, imagine what happens with chaos and polarization if we lose reserve currency, boomers are retiring, these things explode and we have a debt crisis, benefits away from people in real-life, real-time. conservatives conserving these things, step away from this thing and when the arguments, sticking her neck out to get this done. that is the key task of the

conservative movement. >> investment education, the rack war, does your book that you address now, where you sour on the conflict, a powerful moment in the 16 campaign, donald trump really had a debate early on, eviscerated that in a passionate way, i thought it was a cheap shot, post history was pretty spot on, when you thought that was soured upon by republicans. >> public opinion began turning

against the war after the bombing in february 2006. with ethnic cleansing, start spinning out of control. public opinion is ambivalent about the policy and erect, changing the strategy, mccain and romney engaged in a many debate over the surge in the run-up to the primaries in 2008 and mccain won. even with mccain candidates you could see winning in a rack or achieving stability that would allow us to exit most of our forces from the country was still powerful among republicans. what was going on when trump attacked jeb bush over the war,

he said w lied us into war in iraq was part of it and also much more. it was more about ending the bush era, turning the page on the bush era. think about the condition of america in 2016, 2015, clearly we are ending a very polarized 2-term presidency, barack obama, the situation overseas at that point, situation domestically is not good. and yet. of the two parties offer? jeb bush and hillary clinton. another psion of the bush dynasty and you can't get more establishment than hillary clinton. trump is basically saying bushes over. there was disappointment in

iraq, still huge discontent and opposition to immigration reform which jeb bush had written a book about prior to his run and the economic legacy of the bush presidency which ended with global financial crisis and the great recession, also in the back of voters heads. that played a part. the important moment is not trump's victory in the republican primary, donald trump won 45% 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 been in a good position, that debate which the debate goes on between populism and conservatism for 100 years would be more evenly matched. the decisive moment, trump winning, and winning on kind of a fluke.

30,000 votes gave him the electoral college victory, once you become president, the most important person in the world, one or the other, definitely the most important person in your party. you define the alternatives and set the agenda and set an example. and him winning the presidency, and transform the conservative movement. >> there is much more to be said. i wonder if we could talk about the future of the right. at the end of the trump era, it ends now. we will see where we are. where are we? how do you think based on your

thinking of the last hundred years, where the right is headed, is looking, what does the future look like? >> i would say it is important american conservative remember that it is america and what makes american conservatism distinct is deference to the american founding and political institution and political tradition which has always made great faces of liberty and freedom. i worry sometimes, it is being modeled on continental europe which is a different right. not an american right. even though i think the terrain of politics has shifted from the size and scope of government, to the size and

scope of power and how policy may be leveraged to diminish, if we forget the americans of american conservatism the right will be something very different than it has been for the hundred years i write about. i would ask, would not be able to sustain a political coalition that will attract everyday americans living their lives looking for substantive answers to policy challenges. >> i didn't become a radical institutionalist, i didn't put a lot of thought into the institutions because i was formulating policies. than when i ran the legislative branch i became a strong institutional, what you just said, which is we have to have a conservative movement that is tethered to principles, that is

uniquely american. the blood and soil nationalists, this european flavor of populism on the right disregards the uniqueness of an american idea based on natural law. there are reasons i will get into but to me it is extremely important that the conservative movement rededicate itself to political institutions that are dedicated to these founding principles so you have a core standard on which you operate and then it is 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 movement capable of having a strong vibrant debate not dominated by just one personality. this kind of populism is not tethered to principles.

we can get to a populism and i think we will that is tethered to principles that have a vibrant debate. the way i look at it, economics and a number standpoint, trajectory of things and competition with china, technology, on and on, we don't have a lot of time to get it right. i do believe the country is yearning for this. it is a center-right country. the question is can we put together a movement that can move and accommodate and can accept different factions in a new fusion that is a center-right fusion that has men and women capable of carrying the standard, multiple, not just one so we can win elections, effectuate change, dodge bullets, meaning x essential problems in this country and get back on track and have a great 20 first century american century, and i

think we can, but we are not there now and we have to go through a few cycles. >> that is a note to end on and we will end her. the book is "the right: the hundred-year war for american conservatism". let's thank matthew continetti and paul ryan. [applause] >> thanks for writing it. >> booktv every sunday on c-span2 teat features the -- artist with their latest nonfiction books. at noon eastern at the texas ok festival, "in depth" with historian and author mark undergrowth, his books inclu the last republican and the incomparable grace, jfk and the presiden. at 2:00 p.m. :00 pm easte watch live coverage of the xtbook stival with douglas brindley with his book silent spring revolution, elibeth alexander and her book the trayvon generation and undocumented