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 can see why i think if it were up to you would have put bill buckley on the cover. what was william f buckley doing what was his 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? i think his ambition as he put it at that young age when he comes out on the scene in 1951 with god a man at yale. he's about 26 years old. his ambition was and he said this to mike wallace in an early interview. he said i'm a counter-revolutionary. and the revolution he wanted to overturn was fdrs revolution the revolution of 1932 the change in the nature of the american social contract that the new deal launched. so how did he go about doing this? well, there are many different avenues he pursued. the first was institution building so in addition to national review, he was also responsible for the creation of or played a part in the creation of the intercollegiate studies institute isi. it's college arm the collegiate network the young american for freedom all of which still continue to this day. he also launched magazines a quarterly the human life review which existed for many decades as a place for pro-life intellectual work. he did it in terms of trying to build up a counter establishment. to recruit people who would inhabit these institutions who would make conservative arguments, but who would be treated seriously? by everyday americans watching, you know, the four channels that they had access to in the mid 1960s, right? the also wanted to build fences around conservatism. the big problem of the american right in the aftermath of world war two in the post-macarthy period so the mid-1950s carrying through the early 1960s mid-1960s was that it was considered a fringe ideology. america was thought to be a liberal country. if not necessarily a capital p progressive one, but a liberal country. the constitution and the bill of rights of liberal document and these conservatives who after all buckley was a harsh critic of the popular republican president white eisenhower, right? these conservatives just seemed a little bit odd, right? the intellectual tides were all in the area of government expansion and regulation. figures like frederick hayek, ludwig romney's friedman fringe in the 1950s and 60s buckley was very concerned in making conservatism respectable. and so he began drawing fences around his version of american conservatism. and going after anti-semitism. going after conspiracy theories. saying that ayn rand couldn't be part of his movement because of her atheism. saying that the libertarian austrian economist murray rothbard couldn't be part of his movement because he was in anarcho capitalist, right? he would privatize everything get rid of the state totally. national security also played a big part in this buckley's conservatism was one of engaged nationalism. america should be strong america should be powerful and defend itself. but it also had to be engaged in the world to defeat to roll back the soviet union and that meant a large military establishment a standing army. that meant forward defense and forward deployment of our troops. it meant alliances like nato it meant interventions like vietnam all of which the earlier right? would have been extremely skeptical if not outright opposed to so this was the version of american conservatism that bill buckley created the last part of because legacy was political. working within the republican party the traditional vehicle of american conservatism to turn it away. from the moderate republicanism. yeah, the so-called meteors, right? and toward conservatism and so he played a big role in the early draft goldwater campaigns that culminated in 1964 in barry gold waters nomination, mr. conservatives nomination for president. on the republican ticket, ironically then 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 he was afraid goldwater would be associated with national review in bill buckley. but that kind of political energy also expre