On Friday afternoon, the Karsh Institute of Democracy welcomed Matthew Continetti, author of “The Right: The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism,” for its first “Touchstones of Democracy” discussion of the semester. The event was co-hosted by The Blue Ridge Center and moderated by its president, Professor Gerard Alexander.
To kick off the conversation, Melody Barnes, executive director of the Karsh Institute, welcomed audience members and highlighted the important work done by Alexander, politics professor at UVA, and Continetti, director of domestic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, both on and beyond college campuses. For the next hour, Continetti fielded questions from Alexander and audience members.
Alexander’s first question was succinct: why was there a need for “The Right”? Continetti explained that much of the history of the American Right has been written from the perspective of the American Left. As a conservative, Continetti felt he had something valuable to add to the story. Furthermore, most of the existing books focus on the intellectuals, the party platform, the superstructure, or the anthropology of the conservative movement. Continetti homed in on a question many political stories often miss: what ideas inspire someone to be interested in politics? The result is a book that integrates big-picture thinking and philosophy with the real-world conditions on the ground. “The Right” connects conservative politics with conservative ideas from the past 100 years, beginning with the 1921 inauguration of President Warren Harding.
While the book’s cover features former President Ronald Reagan, Continetti made sure to distinguish himself from the field of historians who are in the “Reagan distortion field.” To understand the American Right, Continetti said, one must understand how Reagan differed from other conservatives and Republicans. Reagan had an exceptional personality, spent most of his life voting for Democrats, and was a completely future-oriented political figure, in stark contrast to many of the Republican leaders who came before and after him–at least, until the Trump era. By fixating on Reagan’s unique presidency, one can miss the other consistencies in American conservatism.
Continetti then described the arc of the conservative story, beginning in the 1920s and culminating in the present day with President Trump. He traced the American Right’s anti-communist and anti-socialist perspective back to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and explained changes in the movement that resulted from World War II and the Cold War. While Trump did not bring populism to America for the first time, he did change the meaning of “conservative.”
In the 1920s, the American Right focused on the importance of character, self-restraint, and limitation. Audience members laughed as Continetti said, “That’s not Trump!” More specifically, William F. Buckley, Jr., a co-founder (alongside Barry Goldwater) of the modern conservative movement, promoted freedom as a central value. According to Continetti, today’s American conservatives, particularly young conservatives, do not privilege political freedom and individualism in the same ways Buckley’s movement did. There has been a shift on the right to say there is too much freedom in our society, with concerns that people use that freedom to make the wrong choices. Now, those on the right have reconnected with the traditional institutions that provide meaning and purpose to our lives: family, religion, and the nation.
Diving deeper into the recent changes in the conservative movement, Continetti highlighted that Trump has created a coalition where Hispanic Americans (for the first time ever) and young males (for the first time since 2014) feel welcomed in the mainstream. Continetti believes that Washington is only now beginning to understand why young people are so responsive to Trump, and what that could mean for the future of the country.
For all of the new Republican voters, however, there are older voters who have left the party in the face of Trump. And even after evaluating all of the ebbs and flows of American conservatism over the past 100 years, Continetti is doubtful they will ever return.
Readers may be interested in an upcoming Blue Ridge Center event titled “American Conservatism and the Two-Party System” with Dan McLaughlin, a prominent writer at National Review. For more information on the February 24th discussion, click here.
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