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 expressed itself in his early. friendship with with ronald reagan and even you know got to the point later in his life where he was willing to intervene buckley that is in democratic primaries. or support democratic candidates including one joe lieberman for senate in connecticut in order to get rid of me too were yeah the original me tours little biker republicans. yeah. yeah. i came of age at the tail end of this. so i studied the austrians in college and friedman and grew up reading the bob bartley's pages and and my i had a conservative econ profit who gave me his issue of of national review. i didn't know what it was and i never know it existed. it was in the late 80s in college. he said i think you should you should you should take this and you should and i'll just give you my copy when i'm done with it every week or and and then i just consumed it and really took to the national view. and 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 and so we have we have different movements like this in different times when people are coming of age in the conservative movement, and i think buckley of all people pretty much dominated it for about two or three decades. the the conservative ecosystem and nevertheless. we still had you still had a bunch of people, you know, john burchers and others that were there was a big fight, but he was the center of gravity and i think i think if he didn't put reagan on the cover of this exactly he shouldn't put buckley. i would say too and all the debates we're having at the moment over the new american right? which is if you go by my book the third new right we've had over the last hundred years. i think there's great energy being devoted to building up an infrastructure. that can compete with the conservative infrastructure that bill buckley began creating in the 1950s and 60s and then the early neo conservatives helped build throughout the 70s and 1980s and 1980s 1990s. so that 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 are building their own infrastructure and it just shows you you'll appreciate this point. you've all the importance of institution. right because without these institutions without these spaces for work and for organization. is just people writing in in their basements? so you buckley created this kind of conservative 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 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. between freedom and tradition and that dividing line came to kind of define the internal debates of the buckley-eyed conservative movement and over time the the attempt to overcome those divisions became known as fusionism the sort of defining project of the of the buckley wright at least in the 1960s beginning in the 1960s. tell us a little bit about what fusionism was what was meant to be what it wasn't did it make sense as a way to try to solve the problem that buckley confronted within his own camp. i think one of the under-appreciated figures in the history of the american right was a man named frank meyer. was an ex-communist who converted to the right through his reading of the road to serfdom. he became a contributor to many of the right-leaning journals like the freeman and like the american mercury and then he became associated with national review. eventually a senior editor at national review in the books and arts editor. and frankmeier what he had been trained in communist dialectic and polemic and he so he thought very dogmatically. this is what conservatism is. and so this is these are the parameters in which we are going to operate as america american conservatives buckley used to call him air traffic control because he was making sure all the planes were going in the right direction and landing and taking off on time. so in the 1960s meyer who again has a libertarian strain to him because of his just love and appreciation of hayek actually begins disputes with other libertarians on the right over the nature of the american defense establishment whether a standing army weapons programs and and what the right desire or what the conservatives desired? a policy of rollback of communism including military intervention was necessary libertarians, of course the randolph-born quote that everybody knows war is the health of the state. so libertarians are non-interventionist because war will grow the state and reduce individual freedom. so it's in the course of a debate with libertarians that myers 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 value 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 have been able to synthesize these two principles. freedom and virtue liberty and order well, so he writes this essay. it's called the twisted tree of liberty. it's a great essay and his best friend. brent bozell jr. who is bill buckley's brother-in-law and another senior editor at national review? and who is moving toward a very devout traditionalist catholicism at this time. he was a convert to catholicism and became more and more. devout as the years went on he read frank's essay and said, well that's this is ridiculous. freedom is not the end of politics virtuous. what you're trying to do frank is? some type of fusion and so fusionism is one of those words that begins as an insult but ends up being appropriated by the it's a capital targets. yeah or or neoconservatism. and this is where the debate begins really within the american right? can you unify individual liberty and traditional morality? and the buckleyites the people associated national review said you could even if it didn't necessarily work out in theory. it was revealed in practice. it was revealed in lives of many american conservatives themselves that these two worked these two things can coexist even if it doesn't quite work in theory, and by the way as conservatives we shouldn't worry about whether it works in theory or not. we should only be concerned about whether it works in practice. that wasn't enough for brazil. on the more religious right and he eventually broke off from buckley's american conservatism and it wasn't enough for libertarians like mary rothbard who continued to critique buckley's conservatism as two statists 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 debates today about the future of fusionism. i continue to think that yes, it doesn't always work in theory. in fact the closer you look it might break down. but it does still work in practice. absolutely when you look at a mirror how people on the right in the main actually live their lives. let me put it this way. for people who aren't used the term fusionism the reagan coalition is, you know a good example of it. but when you go to effectuating policy meaning going to politics absolutely fusionism works. so try, you know working in congress and building a coalition a majority are working majority in congress you it requires fusionism to come together and members of congress people who are up on the ballot running for election, except this they know that in a big 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 with inside the tent of the conservative movement or for the democrats sake the progressives. where you had to fuse these things together, so it's just fusionism is absolutely essential. to to have practical working majorities to pass laws and so in the think tank, it's harder to justify its harder to rationalize. it's harder to stitch it together, but when you're actually affecting politics when you're actually practicing politics, it becomes essential. so the coalition that was that began to be built around this notion. took shape through the 1960s and in the 70s when the united states experienced what we'd have to say is an extremely difficult decade in a lot of ways the story you tell in this book is a story of extraordinary vibrancy. i think i would say stepping back from the book the 1970s seemed like the most important decade of the 10 decades that you describe in the development of the right what happened to the right in the 70s. how how was it different coming out of the 1970s than going into them? why? i think the simplest answer that question. you've always that new groups came to become associated with the right and with the american conservative movement during 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. during the student rebellion. during the social turbulence of the late 1960s early 1970s. people who would not have identified as being on the right i ended up coming into an alliance with the american conservatives and so it became a question of how american conservatism would deal with these new entrants and i'll give you two examples. the first or what bill gavin who was a speech writer for richard nixon and a very good writer called street corner conservatives. these were conservatives who were not familiar with hayek who are not familiar with russell kirk the great traditionalist author. but they in fact often were democrats. right. they were part of fdr's majority coalition and yet in the late 1960s and early 1970s. they looked on their television screens and read their newspapers and said what is happening to my country? right rise and crime rising drug abuse. dissolution dissolving families a democratic party racked by an argument over vietnam and the new rights revolutions that are taking place. and so they begin moving into the republican column. and they come to be known as the hard hats. because they tend to be blue collar. they tend to be not having attained a college degree. so the hard hats enter this republican coalition and they're critical to richard nixon's landslide win in 1972, and they become part of the right. over the years they're the reagan democrats. they are they swerve toward perot in 1992, but newt gingrich brings them back in in 94. there there descendants. anyway are the the trump silent majority or forgotten man, right? there's another group as well that comes into. the right in the 1970s, and those are the neoconservatives. these were liberal anti-communists. they were democrats. who for the same reasons as the hard hats found themselves out of sync? with their allies on the left and with the democratic party not all of them make the migration to the republican party in the 1970s when irving crystal. endorses richard nixon in 1972. it's a scandal. and many of his fellow neo conservatives don't actually make the jump to the republican party well into the 1980s. but these neoconservative intellectuals who are often well positioned within the liberal establishment. now we're moving migrating to the right and so the national review conservatives have to decide how do these neocons fit into the picture? and i've always remember the moment i read during my research and editorial in the spring night of 1971 and national review responding to a essays and commentary magazine. there were clearly indicative of the editor of commentary at that time norman pot hort's moving to the right and the title of this editorial was come on in the waters fine. so the welcoming them in bringing the neocons and then finally the last group that enters the picture on the american right in the 1970s is the religious, right? so the religious right had been dormant in many ways at least at the national political level since the scope trial since the beginning of my story. but it's because of federal decisions. and judicial rulings in the 1970s and also because of disappointment. in the presidency of jimmy carter that you see evangelical and fundamentalist christians move en masse from the democratic party into the republican column the vehicle for that being the moral majority in 1980. and so the american right looks very different once you have the reagan revolution because not only does it have the buckley ice, but it now has the hard hats and now has the neoconservatives and it now has the religious right as well. i would add one thing there was there was inside the party. this is when i came of age was the supply side movement which really reinvigorated economics within the conservative movement from green eye shade austerity economics pain and suffering to hope growth opportunity. and so bob mundell and art laugher and jude winisky and and bob bartley and and the crowd at the wall street journal editorial pages. they really reinvigorated and reagan was not a supply-sider when he was governor. he became a convert to it with jack kemp and laughter and some californians, but that really that's what got people. i've came in the supply side crowd. that was my entrance into the movement. but that really reinvigorated in economic message that unified people and so that's easy. that was that was a key stitching that stitched this coalition together. what did the supply ciders say to the party in the country? well, it was it was frankly with there was a big fight with the monitorists which was the chicago guys, which was uncle milty on the 3% rule, which was people like bob mandel who was also a chicago guy. there was a bit of fight inside chicago university of chicago and served which was sound money because nixon took us off the gold standard. and you had a big monetary policy fight which we never really had before during the gold standard. so you had supply-siders bringing answers to to the problem of inflation bringing answers to tax reform to achieve economic growth and to really, you know, show how you could have growth and opportunity. and to bring an agenda which bill steiger old wisconsin guy and jack kemp in 1978, and then in 1981-82 passed kemproth tax cuts after having passed the steiger cap gaines tax cuts, and they showed what real growth looks like and they basically proved supplies that economics actually jack kennedy's got it started because of 92% top marginal tax rate in his day. but they proved the idea is one of the things we did with tax reform which is we wanted to have fresh evidence of our ideas. because we're all coasting on the fumes of the reagan revolution and the reagan movements and the kemperol tax cuts, which was achieving higher income mobility lower wage workers were getting faster wage growth opportunity was occurring because it supplies that economics. we were running on 20 year old evidence. so we actually put it back in place in 15 and actually got fresh evidence that yes, it does actually work. covid clearly through a curveball. but i would say that the supply side movement was a debate within the establishment of the republican party of the conservative movement where the supply side is prevailed. past their ideas, and that really helped stitch this fusion coalition together in my opinion. so all these threads these strands of the 70s which when you look at them in the way that you describe them are a strange combination of ideas in a peculiar evolution for the right really a brought together ultimately by ronald reagan the striking thing about your bookmat is that it doesn't really culminate in reagan a lot of histories of the right sort of build up to ronald reagan and then down from ronald reagan and we say look how far we've come down. that's not the argument you make and in a way the book struggles with something that every book about the right in the last 50 years has had to struggle with which is how you explain ronald reagan? who was this person and what really did he do? well, he drove his biographer edmond morris crazy little i don't think i'm going to be able to explain that example of what it means to be driven crazy by yourself you familiar with the book dutch with edmond morris the biographer the great biographer of teddy roosevelt is commissioned by reagan himself to write reagan's biography and and more wonderful book. yeah parts of it are yeah. it depends where you open it up and they can be excellent, but there are other parts where morris found that he could no idea what was going on behind that smile. and so he had to create himself as a fictional character and ronald reagan's biography in order to try to bring out this person. i don't think anyone penetrated that smile people like to say nancy reagan did but i'm actually not so sure about that either. yeah, i think i think ronald reagan was absolutely self-contained. and it's very unusual. for someone like that. he was always on stage. but he had other qualities as well, which i think making important and consequential. one was that he was? his beliefs were very consistent over the decades reagan shows up in my story in 1947. he's testifying to whoack in his capacity as president of the screen actors guild. and had a hopper who was a hollywood gossip columnist she interviewed him about ron and what he thinks and what he's talking about about freedom and democracy and american exceptionalism in 1947 is almost word for word what he says in his farewell address to the nation and january of 1989 very little in his basic belief system. changes i think part of that has to do just briefly the fact that he was he was very old he very old. he was born in 1911. he doesn't become a republican until he's 51 years old. right he votes for fdr four times. but he had in his head a picture of what america was like before the new deal. again, it's about the the practice rather than the theory for him. dixon, illinois was america as it should be and that life. he lived by the rock river was how should live everything there. and that was it that was in his bones. few other things he had he was always very much oriented toward the future and i think this is something he picked up from fdr. if you look at fdr speeches and then you look at reagan speeches including reagan's famous address in support of very cold water in the last week of the campaign in 1964 time for choosing. reagan is picking up fdr's ticks rendezvous with destiny. you and i fdr loved that on radio you and i and reagan does the same thing. it's it's not it's you and me we're talking we're having a conversation. and that kind of orientation toward the future is unusual suffice it to say for a conservative. yes as a conservative. i'm looking to the past but here's ronald reagan who's 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? you know a person who i really enjoyed learning about and writing about in my history is senator robert taft. who was mr. republican right representative of that pre-world war two right opposed american? entry into the north atlantic treaty organization after the war but you know robert taft who ran unsuccessfully for the republican nomination several times would be the first to tell you that. he was not the most charismatic person around. and conservatives do have this tendency to kind of be, you know dower. yeah kind of very pessimistic in kind of gosh. the world is going to hell in a handbasket, you know. but that wasn't ronald reagan. nothing faced him. and so this too was made him unusual and it also made him i think appealing to parts of the electorate that typically when they hear the word conservative or american, right? flinch i think ogre. yeah neanderthal caveman. yeah, then here comes ronald reagan and with this quip and a smile and that you know with the movie star hair and that baritone. and people are like, oh, that's not what i think. of when i think conservative and this all these qualities made him such an extraordinary figure and consequential president who however may have been the exception in the history of the american, right? and not the rule. yeah. i live on the rock river about 80 miles upstream from dixon now. and oh, the reason i mentioned that is because for us where i came from this guy downriver just became president united states. what is this is amazing and it and it brought people into looking at, you know, i come from an irish catholic family. that was a jack kennedy, you know family it was the entree into. oh, let's see what this is all about. that's that's where a lot of people from from my family where i came from in, janesville, wisconsin. he was an entry into conservatism and because he had such a great face. 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 fusion that occurred the reagan coalition really came together because of a unique personality and that is extremely rare you had that in buckley too. so with with reagan's departure in 1989, then of course his post-presidency has cut short because of his alzheimer's diagnosis in 1994. and then with buckley's kind of lengthy retirement buckley, but buckley really stretched out his retirement first. he he retired from public speaking and then he retired from the board of national review and the one thing you never retired from was his syndicated column. yeah. he's writing it today. yeah. with the departure of reagan and buckley 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 you as unifying without figures like that. then the the fractiousness and conflictual nature of the american right comes to the four. paul you entered a political world you got to washington right after reagan. where did the right think it was headed after reagan? we were in a big fight. it was that i was i was at a think tank called empower america founded by jinkerpatrick. bill bennett and jack kemp. there's the fusion right there. there's they were basically the titular heads of the three different movements working with people at project for american future, you know, castel crystal and those guys all products of irving crystal and so we were i'd never really thought of myself as a neocon as much as i thought of myself as a supply cider frankly didn't spend a lot of time foreign policy in those days and we were fighting the paleo accounts at the time, which was pappy cannon a little bit of perot and it was funny i grew up. all right, i read from college on the nash review, but it was brimlo's sullivan and guys like that over the national review fighting wasn't weekly standard yet, but it was it was i think it was project for american future was that what it was called? so you had what were the neocons fighting the paleo cons and then some other groups in there point being? when the reagan year ended with the defeat of hw 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 a standard bearer emerged meaning a nominee in this case. it was w who won and then and he he worked on the compassionate conservatism that never really took hold. i would say it never really replaced a solid fusion because of circumstances, you know wars and the rest i won't get into it all but but in the post reagan era in 92 when clinton won. we were in a internal struggle in the conservative movement for the future of the conservative moment. and i think we still are frankly. i think we we've 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 a governing an agenda for the 21st century and that churn is still underway. and right now it's dominated by trump, you know, which is not it's populism just pure rank untethered the principal populism personally cult of personality populism, which is really not an agenda. it's a theory it's a person so i think when we're still in this turn and i think underneath that is the kind of fight we had in the early 90s is the kind of fight. we're having right now but with digital matt, how do you think about that churn in a way your book describes the post-regn right as very similar and continuous with the pre reagan, right? and reagan is a kind of exception. but what where there's a way in which as paul says populism rose to the forefront in the 1990s on the road. we don't think of the 90s that way now, but it was a time when the populism that had been held in a band since some ways really became the face of the right and response to clinton and otherwise, how do you think about the post reagan years? well, one of the big themes of my book is this relationship between conservatism and populism. and the irony that often times the only way conservatives get into power is through populist politics. which conservatives like buckley and meyer who i've mentioned were often ambivalent and kind of conflicted about. but this is clearly evident in the reagan election. populism being one of the driving forces of reagan's rise, but reagan able to synthesize populism with the supply side agenda with the interests of the religious right with the tax cutting defense buildup all the various factions of the american right as well. with his departure from the scene this argument begins anew and there i always thought it was very interesting the 1988. gop primary, it was in many ways a missed opportunity. because you had a moment there where the republican party could have been forced to choose. between jack kemp your old boss. and buchanan pat doesn't run for president in 1988. he waits until 1992. because he recognizes smartly that reagan's successor is probably going to be george hw bush who is not a reaganite. no. who was establishment republican? and so then we get the fight between the establishment republicanism represented by bush. and buchanan in 1992 representing the populist wayne. representing the resurgence of the old right in its attitudes toward war and its attitudes toward immigration and then really beginning in the in buchanan's 96 campaign picking up the trade issue becoming more protectionist. so that debate is had. but buchanan never is successful. and in 2000, of course, he leaves the republican party. and he runs for president on the reform ticket. where one of his rivals is a businessman named donald trump? and i think you canon is the first to recognize the irony 16 years later. trump would ascend to the presidency? on many of the ideas that he was lambasting buchanan about just in the 2000 cycle, but so at the time at the moment, i do think the argument has been settled in the favor of the forces of populism. and the conservative governing class that came to power with ronald reagan. lasted through the first george bush. was kind of moved up to capitol hill during the republican revolution. yeah in newt gingrich and then came back down, pennsylvania avenue with george w bush that that conservative governing class which existed for really about 30 years has been displaced. yeah what i saw, you know, i did i look at my time in congress as sort of two periods when we had the majority then lost it. you know when obama came in and then we got it back and i saw this book. i haven't seen in years out there young guns. when when i was uploaded two to three on that name, but our goal with that plan. was to go out and recruit members of congress who are willing to take tough votes because what had happened to our majority was we got fat and lazy we got we they ended up recruiting, you know, the local county executive or state center. who was the next guy in line who just wanted to earmark their way to staying in office and so our movement got intellectually lazy. we got fat and happy we did earmarks and it was kind of ugly and those of us were sort of young upstarts in those the house. we're just really, you know, did not like that. we lose our majority many of us argued. we deserved to lose our majority. this is six. and then we went out and recruited people that we thought. in it through true. we thought would be want to take tough votes and we were excited about the tea party movement. so i remember talking with the coax in about a bunch of people in the movement in those days, which is the tea party movement. was our chance to get supply-side 2.0 and 1.0 was agnostic on debt deficit side of government 2.0 is not so it supply side 2.0 was pro-growth economics limited government get to get the debt and you know entitlements under control and a robust foreign policy and on the issues of trade and immigration there was a fight but we sort of pushed that to the side and then we we really tap the tea party movement. we got the majority back. but it was in divided government. so we really couldn't effectuate much in retrospect call. is that what the tea party movement really was in the beginning it was but there was a bit of a fight and this is back to the old neo-con supply side versus the paleo-cons. that's what we call the back in those days. traded immigration versus the other issues and and hindsight. this is me looking back. we didn't understand i think and this is where i think we made some mistakes. we didn't understand the potency of those issues the power of those issues and where i'm chuck bailrite a really good book about populism back in the 80s. where you could see signs of this where i think the establishment republicans people like me included missed was just the effects of issues like trade and immigration on the forgotten man, and and how that really played into not just policy, but people's thinking in perception and we were more focused on just the tea party movement re-limiting government kind of a libertarian supply side feel of it 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 think the trade in immigration issue sort of overtook overtook the movement and the tea party morphed into something like what it is today. and so there was a moment in time where we really really thought we had a shot. when we did get finally our majorities and the republican which we lost in 12. people freaked out after we lost in 12 it wasn't i was on the ticket. it wasn't fun losing at 12, but when we lost in 12, i think i think people really kind of freaked out and then what happened from my perspective was enough having these nice guys on the ticket no more. nice guys. let's just send a velociraptor. let's just send an apex predator on the ticket to just throw hand grenades. and and so the entertainment wing of our party with the digital age with cable rose that same time and so i think the entertainers sort of replaced the think tank type people replaced sort of the intellectual buckleyites and and the country in a reactionary movement movement against a progressive reactionary barack obama. through the best entertainer the best bomb thrower you could ted finished second in the race, and he was you know, he was the inside entertainer in congress. donald trump was that was was the greatest bomb threw you could find and they threw donald trump at it and he won. and remember ben carson was kind of yeah, he wanted he was leaving for about a month or so. yeah. it was a rotating lady lead and it was all outsiders all outsiders and and 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 had that gone a different way. and so the world would be a very different place, but i totally agree with what paul saying is that 2012 was a hinge in the sense that i think are many on the right. had internalized the idea that because of american exceptionalism barack obama had to be a parenthesis. barack obama had to be jimmy carter reborn and he could only be one term because he would 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. yeah to be just as consequential to change politics and in just a similar way. and so the the right i think really believed that this was as senator dimit put it i think going to be waterloo. this is the battle right? and when the election is called for obama on election night 2012 so early in the evening right by the eleven o'clock news. i think many people on the right were just stunned try being on the ticket i can imagine i can imagine. and and that made them say, all right. if we're reaching this point where the input the electoral inputs, you know we elect scott brown in massachusetts, but obama does obamacare anyway, right? we have the tea party congress, but they're not able to do anything. then in 14 we get a republican wave again and that captures the senate and after the election in 2014. obama says, oh, yeah. i heard the people who voted the republicans in congress, but you know what? i also voted. i also hear all the people who voted for democrats and i hear the people who didn't vote at all and i'm going to govern for those people, right? it's infuriating. yeah, the election should matter and yet they didn't and so i think that drove a lot of people on the right to say we need an outsetter. that's right. we need to we need an external force to come in and shake up the system and that's the only way that we're going to be able to achieve any of our goals. and they got it. well, i do want to open things up for questions. so please think of your questions, but one follow-up on this meant you mentioned three issues immigration war trade. those were the issues where things really broke open after that moment. when as you say some some voters on the right thought this isn't working. why was it those issues and does that mean really that the the seeming consensus on those in the bush years was a an illusion? yeah that the right was wrong about what its voters actually wanted and were voting for. oh, i mean the 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 second term. and i worked for magazine where the editors were very supportive of a comprehensive immigration reform that would have included an amnesty for illegal immigrants. but my reporting is saying there was no way that was going to happen. because even if it passed the senate. the republicans in the house would not allow it because they were hearing from their constituents and that's when you begin to see a real break between the grassroots right and the conservative and republican establishment here in washington 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 there too that that there is discontent on the right with the george w bush foreign policy. now protectionism is a little bit more complicated. um, i think what what trump did in coming out against the trans-pacific? partnership or tpp as you always said throughout the campaign was basically provide a a concrete symbol for the deaths of despair that were ravaging america. for the opioid crisis for the rise and alcoholism. for this on howling out of the russell unimaginable. social crisis. he said it's the de-industrialization. it's china's entry into the world trade organization and the china shock. that's what's giving you this. whether that's true, i believe is an empirical question. that is very complicated, right? but politically it's brilliant. and in this speaks to his shrewdness, he did a similar thing with immigration. immigration complicated issue clearly illegal immigration is something republicans conservatives opposed? but what what happened with the rise of isis in the you know, the jv team in the second half obama's second term. after the shootings in san bernardino trump proposes the muslim ban and he 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 that's what we need to do it. you see how he's able to. thread these issues together in 2016, which just as an as a postscript. i would say it's 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 or phrase your statement in the form of a question if you can come to an interrogative and also please wait for microphone and tell us who you are when we call on you for a question. let's start there in the back. hi, i'm eliza astro. i work at third way. so one reason that we're having all of these discussions about the new right is because it's become apparent that a lot of sort of the tenets of small government conservatism are not that popular with voters like, you know, appealing social security and medicare going back the aca our politically toxic now, so what does that mean for the future of the american right and for small government conservatism? well, i'm working on a big book project here on answering that question at aei and they're about 18 of us working on this project. i think i think you have to reconcile. our our life with these programs like we said no deal that these are settled issues. i would argue consensus health retirement security then the question is, how do you go about achieving those and the best possible way to maximize upper mobility economic growth limited governments, you know in your economy and so once we get over the fact that these programs exist and we have a social contract that we all agree. should exist then let's get on to the to the task of repairing them from bankruptcy and making them perform the best where you then go into the issue is the left wants government to run it all they want no private sector they want command of resources means of production. they want to use it as an extension of their audiology. we want to use the power of markets and choice in competition and in to to deliver these services that we all have a country as a country have reached consensus on that that may sound like me too isn't it's just radical pragmatism. we are where we are. we do agree that these things are here and should stay and so let's get on with the business of actually performing these tasks the right way so that we don't lose our reserve currencies so that we don't have a debt crisis. because if that happens imagine what happens to the social contract and the chaos and the polarization in the country if we go down the path in 10 20 years. we lose reserve currency boomers are retiring these things explode and then you have a total debt crisis where you're doing real-time surgery taking benefits away from people in real life real time that's what would happen if we basically do nothing. so i think conservatives, you know conserving these things you have to step ahead of this thing, but you have to win the arguments you have to win majorities 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 for the moment right now. you're just good. um right here, please. i am peter murphy with invest in education. i think matt you made it passing reference to the iraq. war does your book or could you address now where the republican voters soured on that conflict? and i asked that because i thought a very powerful moment in the 16 campaign. was when donald trump? really had a moment in one of the 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 would really resonate and i weren't if you could identify or paul when you felt that that was really sourd upon by republican voters. yeah, it's a complicated question because i think public opinion really began turning against the war after the bombing of the mosque and samara and february of 2006 and kind of the onset of civil war in iraq and ethnic cleansing. and with the war really begins spinning out of control. and republic and public opinion was also very ambivalent about the surge policy in iraq sending more troops and changing our strategy there. and yet mccain and romney engaged in a mini debate over the surge in the run-up to the primaries in 2008, and it's a debate that mccain the strong support of the surge won. so even then with the mccain candidacy we could still see that winning in iraq or achieving stability there. that would allow us to leave most exit most of our forces from the country with still powerful among republicans. however, i think what was going on when trump attacked jeb bush over the war when he said that w had lied us into war. iraq was part of it. it was also much more. it was more about ending the bush era turning the page on the bush era. so you think about the condition of america in 2016-2015? clearly we're ending a very polarizing two-term presidency in barack obama. the situation overseas at that point the situation domestically is not good and yet who do the two parties offer? jeb bush and hillary clinton so another styon of the bush dynasty. and you can't get more establishment than hillary clinton on the left, right? so trump, there is kind of he's basically saying it bushes over because it there is disappointment and in iraq war there is still a huge discontent and opposition to comprehensive immigration reform which of course jeb bush had written a book about when it prior to his run. and the economic legacy of the bush presidency which ended with the global financial crisis and the great recession the also in the back of voters heads republican primary voters heads. so i think that played a part i've say that we the important moment is not trump's victory in the republican primary. donald trump won about 45% of the total vote in the republican primaries and caucuses in 2016. had he lost the general election. i think the anti-trump forces would still have had a be in a very good position and that debate which is a debate that goes on between populism and conservatism for 100 years as i outlined in my book would be more evenly matched the decisive moment was trump winning the presidency. and winning it. on kind of a fluke 10 about 30,000 votes i think in three states gives him an electoral college victory a substantial electology court college victory once you become president. you were the most famous person in the world. you're the most important in the world. maybe next to the fed chair, but you know one of the other but you're definitely the most important person in your party. you define the alternatives you set the agenda and you set an example. and so talent, it's not donald trump winning the nomination that is of such consequence. it's him winning the presidency and being president for four years that transforms republican party transforms a conservative movement. so our time is drawing to a closer is much more to be said, i wonder if we can end with each of you thinking a little bit about the future of the right. this book ends at the end of the trump era. maybe the end of the trump era it ends now, we'll see where we are. so, where are we? well, how do you think based on your thinking about the past hundred years of the american right? how do you think about where the right is headed? where the rising generation on the right is looking to what is the future look like man? well, i would say this that it's very important that american conservatism remember that it's american. and that what makes american conservatism distinct as its reference to the american founding and to the american political institutions and american political tradition. which is always made great space for liberty and freedom. and i i worry sometimes that the right today is being drawn to models found in continental europe. yeah, which is a different right? that's right. an american, right? and even though i think that the terrain of our politics is shifted from an argument over the size and scope of government to an argument over the size and scope of the left cultural power. and public policy may be leveraged to diminish. the left cultural power if we forget the americanness of american conservatism than the right will be something very different than it's been for the 100 years. i write about it's also i would add it will not be able to sustain a political coalition that will attract. non-political everyday americans in the middle in living their lives who are looking for substantive answers to some of these concrete policy challenges i didn't become a radical institutionalist until i had become speaker of the house because i just didn't put a lot of thought into the institutions because i was busy formulating policies as committee chairs. then when i ran, you know, the the legislator branch, i became a strong institutionalist. for what you just said basically which is we had to have a conservative movement that is tethered to principles. that is uniquely american. i think the blood and soil nationalists, which is this european flavor of populism that's here in the right. disregards the uniqueness of the american idea of a country based on natural law. and that's their reasons for that with i won't get into all of that, but it's to me it's extremely important that the conservative movement. rededicated itself to these critical institutions that are dedicated to these founding principles so that you have a course standard on what 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. and so this kind of populism is one that's not tethered to principles. we can get to a populism. i think we will that is to the principles that has a vibrant debate and the way i look at it just from frankly an economics in a number standpoint a trajectory of things in great power competition with china and technology and 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 that can move and can accommodate and can accept different factions in a new fusion that is a center right fusion. that has men and women capable of carrying that torsion standard multiple. not just one. so that we can win elections effectuate change dodged bullets in meaning, you know existential problems in this country and get us back on track and have a great 21st century american century. i think we can but we are not there now and we've got to go through some cycles to get there. i think. well, that is a note to end on and we will end there. the book is the right the 100 year war for american conservatism. let's thank matthew continent and paul ryan. thank you. thanks for writing. my name is erwin shimmerinsky. i'm the dean of the law school the university of california berkeley school of law as my great pleasure to be here today with russia rick kasson. who's the chancellor's first of law and political science the university of california irvine school of law. we're here because rick is written a terrific new book cheap speech how disinformation poisons are politics and how to cure it. you want to ask rick number of questions about the book and talk with them about it. and