Albert Mohler:
This is Thinking in Public, a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about frontline theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them. I’m Albert Mohler, your host and President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.
Matthew Continetti is a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He’s the founding editor of the Washington Free Beacon. A graduate in history from Columbia University, Mr. Continetti has enjoyed a career in the front lines of American journalism, political thought, and history. He has served in places like the Weekly Standard and as a contributing editor for National Review. He’s the author of three books, but his most recent book, The Right: The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism is the topic of our conversation today.
Matthew Continetti, welcome to Thinking in Public.
Matthew Continetti:
Thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Albert Mohler:
I have been looking forward to your book. I knew it was in the works and have followed your writings through the years. As a political conservative from the time I was first politically self-conscious, I’ve been fascinated with the history of the conservative movement in the United States. The title for your book of course, is The Right: The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism. It could have been similarly titled The Hundred Year War Within American Conservatism.
Matthew Continetti:
Yes. One of the reasons I wrote the book was to show that conservatism is not just one thing; it’s not monolithic. There are many different people who place themselves on the right of the political spectrum and who call themselves conservatives. They have different views, some more traditionalist, some more libertarian, some more religious, some more secular. In this book, I trace their relationships over the course of the last century. And you’re right, it’s a fight for what conservatism means in America, but it’s also a fight within this broader American right.
Albert Mohler:
You have to begin this story somewhere and I could imagine many places you might have begun it. You could have begun it, frankly in Aquinas, in one sense, or Augustine going back to the fourth century. You could certainly have begun it in the 18th century, but you really begin this work in the 1920s. Which, so far as I know, is the first time I’ve seen a major history of conservatism begin at that point. It gives you a neat 100 year history, but there’s actually more to your decision to begin there.
Matthew Continetti:
Yes, there is. I began the book in the 1920s for a few reasons. The first is when I look at the history of America over the last century, it’s in the 1920s where the GOP really defines itself as being the party that would be skeptical of “capital P” progressivism. Prior to the 1920s, the Progressive idea was that the federal government would be the agency of social uplift and would insert itself into local communities and into marketplaces in order to equalize outcomes or empower individuals against tradition. That Progressive idea floated between the two parties, but it was in the 1920s, with the election of Warren Harding and then his successor, Calvin Coolidge, that the Republican party really decides, it’s not going to stand for progressivism. It will stand for what many called Americanism or what Harding called normalcy.
Then, as a consequence of beginning my story with Harding and Coolidge, I also found that the Republican party of today in many ways resembles the Republican party of a hundred years ago. I think in its growing skepticism of foreign intervention and foreign entitlements, its opposition to immigration, illegal immigration particularly these days, and also in its idea that the American economy needs to be insulated from global competition, especially the Chinese market. You can see parallels between today’s right and the American right of a century ago.
Albert Mohler:
I think it’s important to, and you acknowledge this in your opening chapter, to recognize that a lionized, Republican figure such as Theodore Roosevelt, actually in one sense, had more in common, in terms of his philosophy of the role of the federal government, with the progressivist Woodrow Wilson than with either Harding or Coolidge who would follow. So you’re arguing that this was, and I think you’re absolutely right, a reset of the Republican party in the 20th century.
Matthew Continetti:
It was. It didn’t mean that the battle within the Republican party was over. I think it’s important to distinguish between the Republican party as a political institution and the American right, as a political tendency or set of political principles.
What we find, especially after the 1932 revolution of FDR and his New Deal, is that many Republicans were afraid of embracing the ideas of Harding and Coolidge. There were great battles within the Republican party over the then known as conservatives, the opponents of FDR and what the forces that the conservatives called, the “me-tooers”. These were the more progressive Republicans who agreed with a lot of FDR’s aims, they just wanted to go more slowly.
Albert Mohler:
An interesting figure in the midst of all that is Herbert Hoover, because Hoover was in so many ways a technocrat and clearly believed in the power of government. Frankly, in the last year of his administration, he really started a lot of the governmental activism that Roosevelt just picked up and expanded. So, even Hoover was quite different than Harding and Coolidge.
Matthew Continetti:
Yes, though, we tend to understand Hoover through the lens of his post presidency when he became much more of a conservative: much more opposed to the New Deal, a firm advocate of limited constitutional government, a critic of centralizing power in the executive and expanding the bureaucracy’s role in the economy. That is not necessarily the Hoover who was president, who, as you say, between 1929 and 1933 believed that government did have a role in combating this Great Depression. He rose taxes, increased spending, and even created some government lending facilities that were clearly quite novel at that period in history.
Albert Mohler:
It’s interesting. I wrote my honors thesis for my undergraduate degree on a Quaker theologian named Elton Trueblood. Trueblood was a very close friend and confidant to Herbert Hoover. I was able to get to know Elton Trueblood, which gave me kind of a connection to President Hoover. Dr. Trueblood was just really clear about the fact that the Hoover of the Hoover Institution was a different Hoover than the Hoover of the European recovery effort.
Matthew Continetti:
Absolutely. Though, Hoover’s involvement in the European recovery effort after the first world war, I do think shaped a lot of Republican attitudes on the right toward entanglement in the conflicts of other great powers. Among Hoover’s aides, when he was helping Europe recover from the great war, was Senator Robert Taft. He is another figure in my story who really represents, I think, the pre-World War II, pre-Cold War American right: being very much for small government, being very critical of the presidential power, and being very reluctant to get America involved overseas.
Albert Mohler:
As you follow the story, we simply have to get to the giant political mountain range known as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, where everything really does change. I think you acknowledge that the first great challenge to what became known as American conservatism was the Progressivism of Wilson in particular, but you really reach a quantum advance with Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Matthew Continetti:
Yes, absolutely. I think many people on the right, and many Americans, may have viewed Wilson almost as an aberration. As someone whose policies, particularly in his second term, and his involvement of America in the Great War really had discredited themselves, so we weren’t going to go back to that. Because of the economic dislocation of the Great Depression and because of his personal charm and political skills, FDR was elected president and re-elected three times, all with considerable margins. He became the main figure of opposition for the American right during the 1930s, who began to find themselves known as conservatives, really, for the first time.
And why were they conservatives? Well, a conservative, in my view, defends inherited institutions against revolutionary or radical challenges. For European conservatives, that means they’re tending to defend the inherited institutions of monarchy, established church, and the nobility against challenges from below. In the American context, it’s more difficult because we don’t have a king, we don’t have an established church, and we don’t have titled nobility. We have no lords and ladies. So what are American conservatives defending? They saw themselves as defending the principles and institutions of the American founding against the revolutionary challenge of the New Deal. This is really where we begin to see the American right as we understood it for a very long time.
Albert Mohler:
That’s really when people started talking, as you just said, about conservatism as a recognizable movement in the United States. There have been conserving forces, conservative impulses, but George Nash, in his history of the conservative movement, he really dates it from 1945. When I go back and consider, and Nash’s book was very influential as I was trying to think through these issues at a young age, the reality is that Americans didn’t have to talk. You quote the famous quote from Lionel Trilling, in which he basically said, “The problem is there are no conservative ideas.” That became very different with the rise of the conservative movement.
Matthew Continetti:
Absolutely. Lionel Trilling wrote that in the preface to his collection, The Liberal Imagination, published in 1950. One, it wasn’t quite true because Friedrich Hayek’s main work, The Road to Serfdom, had been published a few years before. But within a few years after Lionel Trilling writing those words, you would have major texts in the history of the post-war conservative movement, such as the memoir, Witness by Whitaker Chambers, The Conservative Mind by Russell Kirk, Natural Right in History by Leo Straus. Then in 1955, there is the founding of National Review Magazine, the flagship journal of the post-war conservative movement for decades.
It mattered a lot to these early figures in the post-war conservative movement, that their ideas be taken seriously, that they not be associated with the fringe or dismissed by liberals who had always just kind of said, “Oh, they’re cranks or reactionaries.” So there was a lot of intellectual work done in this period you and I are discussing, where the writers wanted to say, “No, we have serious ideas about how Western civilization found itself in the catastrophe of World War II, and also how we can combat the growing power of the centralized state,” which was proving so ruinous, not only with Nazism, which was extinguished, but of course at this time in the Cold War, the growing power of the Soviet Union.
Albert Mohler:
And the growing power of the state within the United States and the growing imbalance, conservatives would say, and the power differential between the states and the federal government traceable to those same wars as a matter of fact.
Matthew Continetti:
Yes, I think the post-war conservatives really thought of themselves as trying to roll back communism abroad and roll back the New Deal at home, to reorient America to the place where it had occupied during the 1920s, at the beginning of my story.
Albert Mohler:
You mention Whitaker Chambers and Witness, a book that had a massive impact on me. I read it not knowing enough of the history as a teenager to be able to put everything into context, but feeling the moral pathos of it. I was also just understanding the metaphysic that was at stake. I was a young Christian, thinking through the most basic theological issues. Oddly enough, Whitaker Chambers had a very profound impact just by getting back to first things. He even spoke of his infant daughter’s ear and coming to the conclusion that materialism had to be a lie.
Matthew Continetti:
It’s that beautiful moment in the book where Whitaker Chambers, a prominent journalist, was a communist, and also a member of a communist spy ring in the 1930s. Yet he says that his flight from communism began during breakfast one morning in Baltimore, where he was observing his young daughter eating breakfast. He just focused on her ear and said, “That ear,” and indeed what it represented is the entirety of the human being, “was not just some chance accident of atoms.” There was something greater at work. Once he made that leap, he went down a road where he abandoned communism and he truly embraced his version of Christianity.
Albert Mohler:
I will tell you that reading his book at a young age, and it was recommended, I think the Olin Foundation had arranged to put National Review in public school libraries, or some foundation similar to Olin, so my high school library had it. I think it had a net reader of one, but it was an entire education for me. That’s how I came to know who Whitaker Chambers was and got to Witness and checked it out. It was a frightening book to me because of his pessimism. And where he writes, in that letter to his children where he said by breaking from communism and defending ordered liberty, he was leaving the winning for the losing side.
I was growing up in Florida shortly after the Cuban missile crisis. I knew what it was like to crawl under my desk for atomic attack drills. That was a very sobering book. It is not inspirational.
Matthew Continetti:
No. Chambers’ favorite writer was Dostoevsky and it shows in Witness. It’s a very Dostoevsky and dark night of the soul type book. You’re absolutely right to say that he believed that he was on the losing side. He did not believe that the West had the spiritual fortitude and strength of will to fight the contest with communism. This is something that turned out to be wrong in the end. There is, I think, a very interesting thread throughout the book that there are conservative thinkers and figures I discuss who tend to be more negatively charged, more pessimistic about the future, and then others who have a more positive attitude and a more optimistic view. We certainly see that, of course, in the rise of Ronald Reagan.
Albert Mohler:
Absolutely. I’m trying to discipline myself not to race there too quickly, but the other monumental achievement in my mind that defined conservatism at that time was the contribution of Russell Kirk. I was introduced to Russel Kirk in the pages of National Review, and I had no idea how awkward that relationship was. All I knew was I’m getting a magazine and I’m reading it at the high school library. Russell Kirk’s understanding of conservatism and tradition was an intellectual turning point in my life. The publication of The Conservative Mind was simply, I think, epic in its importance.
Matthew Continetti:
It can’t be understated. I’m younger than you are, but I too, when I was discovering these ideas in college came upon The Conservative Mind, which was then in its sixth edition. I was truly shaped by that book because of what Russell Kirk did. Russell Kirk, a very unusual figure from rural Michigan, he goes and studies at St. Andrews in Scotland. He’s associated with Duke University and has ties to the Southern Agrarians through his time at Duke. He provided the post-war American right with a tradition, with a set of figures and books and ideas that they could look to for guidance. Many of these thinkers were British. The tradition he provided really starts with Edmund Burke, the founder of philosophical conservatism, who was an Anglo-Irish politician. He wrote the famous reflections on the revolution in France and opposition to the French revolution and a warning of the direction that the revolution would take, which he turned out to be very prescient about.
It carries on through other thinkers associated with the European and British conservative tradition. It is just a very important book in shaping the minds of what Kirk always called the “rising generation of conservatives.” Although with Kirk’s traditionalism, he’s the key thinker of the traditionalist wing of the postwar movement, he was rather skeptical toward the other wing of the postwar movement, the libertarian wing. That tension was something that works out throughout my history.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, it does. That’s why I began by saying it’s the battle within American conservatism. As a matter of fact, Russell Kirk did not recognize many of those more libertarians as conservatives at all. Even a battle over the word right now in our contemporary time reminds us that these political labels are contested terms. Sometimes like religious denominations, they are foisted upon a movement. Methodists didn’t want to call themselves Methodists. It was Wesley’s method that led to people in derision calling them Methodists, and now they owned it. As a Baptist, like I say, we didn’t name ourselves Baptists. We were named Baptist by others because of conviction. Eventually we came to own it. Conservatism’s a little different because the word conserve is at the heart and it is actually what commonly unites whatever conservatism is.
Matthew Continetti:
Yes, though that word is there, conservation. And the question then is always, well, what are you conserving? And for Kirk, I think it was basically the traditions of the Western civilization and the cultural inheritance. Kirk did not give anybody a six-point plan for what they should do about tax rates. He was concerned about cultivating the mind and the culture and preserving that. For him, a conservative was someone who had a disposition toward old things. He wrote of a belief in the supernatural, a belief that the material world is not all there is. Kirk wrote ghost stories, some were very successful. He would go on long walks in Michigan with a walking stick and a cape, so he was kind of a man out of time himself.
Albert Mohler:
And he enjoyed it.
Matthew Continetti:
He did. And for him, conservatism was this much broader appreciation of the diversity of life and different types of people and the broad legacy of the Western tradition.
Albert Mohler:
I enjoy, as you do, the story of William F. Buckley visiting Russell Kirk in Michigan, which had to be one of the most awkward weekends in human history. Buckley was such a bon vivant compared to the very taciturn Russell Kirk.
Matthew Continetti:
Yes, Kirk was devoted to his books. But in his home there in rural Michigan, especially as he grew older, he turned it into something of a community for young people and for scholars. The Kirk Center is still still there today. But there was a certain rivalry between Kirk and William F. Buckley, Jr. I think Kirk was always a little bit wary of Buckley’s fame and prominence. It wasn’t necessarily a guaranteed thing when Buckley asked Kirk during that visit to join the masthead of National Review Magazine. Kirk never appeared on the masthead, but he was a columnist for the magazine for 25 years. He was a little bit leery of Buckley precisely because Buckley was so ecuminical and able to include libertarians and many ex-communists in the movement he created.
Albert Mohler:
It is my citation of William F. Buckley, Jr. that got us a little out of sequence here, but I want to take us back to the Eisenhower years, in particular. When looking in retrospect, we can now see that an organized conservative movement really was coming into existence with funding for newsletters and political movements. You write about the political death of Robert Taft as closing a chapter, with his defeat by Eisenhower the internationalist. By the time you get to the end of the Eisenhower administration, would you say that the Cold War had largely forced a sharpening of those arguments? It seems to me that an awful lot of things that people might have thought were intellectual options for conservatism in the 1950s really were eliminated by the actual constraints of the Cold War and the battle of the Soviets.
Matthew Continetti:
I think there is a real shift on the American right as a result of the Cold War in the Eisenhower era. One is that anti-communism was able to unify various factions of the right. Even if the traditionalists and the libertarians didn’t quite get along for reasons we were discussing, they could both agree that communism and the Soviet Union was the enemy.
The other thing that happened was anti-communism served as a link between the right and the American electorate. After the Great Depression and World War II, conservatism was not really, as we have discussed, in the mainstream of American political life or intellectual life. But now with the threat of communism, the conservatives found that they could get broad support and that many voters shared their concerns, not only about the external threat, but also the threat of internal subversion. The third thing that happened was the arguments that had always been made: against intervention on the right, against joining permanent alliances, against forward deployment of US forces based overseas, against a standing military establishment and a huge defense expenditure. All of these arguments diminished with the onset of the Cold War and the power of anti-communism to unify not only the right, but also to serve as a connection between the right and the American people.
Albert Mohler:
You did mention the seismic development, which was the arrival of William F. Buckley, Jr. on the scene. The formation of the magazine that became National Review, rather than the National Weekly, and the magazine that was essential to the creation of the modern conservative movement. I mentioned to you that my exposure to so many of these ideas came by going into the library every 14 days, looking for the new edition of National Review, and ravenously reading it from cover to cover even where I didn’t understand it. It shaped my thinking profoundly.
Matthew Continetti:
That is the ideal function of these little magazines that don’t turn a profit. I don’t believe National Review has ever turned a profit, but nonetheless can have profound impact, especially on young people as they begin to form their political views. What Buckley wanted to do when he created National Review was to create a platform where all the various types of conservatives could publish and also a platform that would demonstrate to Americans that conservatives had ideas and proposals. These went beyond fighting communism, and also dealt with the domestic issues of the day. But Buckley’s conservatism expended a lot of effort fencing itself off from other tendencies on the right, which Buckley felt would undermine conservatism’s long term potential.
Albert Mohler:
There were direct threats to not only intellectual credibility, but even to moral credibility, the John Birch Society being one of them. And the accusation, for example, that President Dwight David Eisenhower was either consciously or unconsciously an agent of world communism. My favorite response was Russell Kirk I think, which was one of the greatest conservative lines of all time when he said, “Ike isn’t a communist, he’s a golfer.”
Matthew Continetti:
That’s one of Kirk’s great quips. The John Birch Society plays a big part in my story. It was a mass member organization. It was secretive, so it’s hard to know just how many people belonged to the John Birch Society. It was anti-communist. It was conspiratorial. It followed the line set by its leader and founder, Robert Welch, who was a conspiracist. He believed Eisenhower was in on it. When conservative leaders were confronted with these ideas, they often told Welch he shouldn’t spread them, but he did nonetheless. There began a lengthy process by which the post-war conservative leaders like William F. Buckley Jr, or Barry Goldwater tried to separate themselves from the John Birch Society, its views, its leader and eventually from its members altogether, but that took several years.
Albert Mohler:
There are so many plots and subplots to all this and it’s intellectually fascinating. I think it is historically important to trace all this out, but there are also just personal points of intersection. I’ve served for nearly 40 years in denominational leadership in the Southern Baptist Convention in one way or another, so it’s fascinating to me that I have met, been in meetings with and rubbed up against, so to speak, in social terms so many people who are important to this. The Hunt family in Dallas, you go down the list. Dallas is a big part of the southern dissemination of conservative views. The one thing I would say to your book, which I’ll say as a southerner: it’s kind of a Yankee book.
Matthew Continetti:
Guilty as charged. I’m from the Yankee part of Virginia, northern Virginia, which is kind of a land unto itself. I went to school at Columbia. My mom is from Rhode Island. So yeah, it has a Yankee perspective, I suppose.
Albert Mohler:
I’m not saying that’s even unfair in the sense that organized conservative thought with the distinction of, especially in the 20th century, the Southern Agrarians, it basically became a part of a national conversation with southern manifestations. Later in the story, you’ll tell about people like Phyllis Schlafly. I spoke for her and for Eagle Forum twice and sat at the table while she interrogated who I think was Malcolm Forbes and Gary Bauer about their political aspirations. She was a power broker and she knew it.
But all these people are real, live human beings. At the center, to go back to Buckley, who I only met once, he lived one of the most consequential lives of the 20th century. He was, as Tom Wolf would say, “A man in full.”
Matthew Continetti:
He was an incredible person. I actually was fortunate enough to meet him on a couple of occasions before his death in 2008. Buckley served several functions. One was his personality which was so charismatic that a lot of young people just wanted to be like him. They wanted to be with him. He had those qualities of leadership that rallied people to your side. It was the way he carried himself; his sense of humor, so important, his skill at debate, a very underrated skill. One of my favorite Buckley lines is RFK, Bobby Kennedy, was always reluctant to debate him. Once Buckley was asked, “Mr. Buckley, why won’t Kennedy debate you?” And Buckley responded, “Why does bologna fear the grinder?” A classic Buckley line. There is the personality.
Then there is the institution building, and I think this is often overlooked. It is not just National Review, it’s also ISI (Intercollegiate Studies Institute), which still exists today. It is also Young Americans for Freedom, which is still around and which he played a big part in. It is also shaping the conservative re-entry into Republican party politics through his advocacy of Barry Goldwater and his strong support and friendship with Goldwater. Ironically, once Goldwater does win the nomination in 1964, the Goldwater high command freezes Buckley out because they didn’t want to be associated with National Review. But Buckley and National Review had done a big part in getting Goldwater to the point where he could win the nomination. In all these dimensions: the personal, institutional, and political, Buckley played a huge role.
Then there are his communication skills. You and I are both communicators, and it is something to just sit and watch. The man hosted the longest running program on television, 33 years, “The Firing Line”. Ironically, it was on PBS where Buckley, a limited government conservative, found a home. It was a debate program, especially in its early decade, where renowned intellectuals of the left would go up against Buckley. It set a standard for debate. He wrote a newspaper column from 1962 until literally the day he died. On the day he died, in February, 2008, he was at work on his next column. He wrote something like 30 books, including many novels. Toward the end of his life he switched to fiction writing. It was this tremendous output that kept Buckley in the national conversation and allowed him to be such a formative figure for the post-war conservative movement.
Albert Mohler:
To mention Buckley and National Review is to invoke Frank Meyer and “Fusionism”. In terms of the battle to define conservatism, I think that’s very much still the argument. So just define fusionism and tell us, did it work?
Matthew Continetti:
Frank Meyer was one of those ex-communists who joined National Review and who became a major figure in the magazine and in the development of conservative doctrine in the two decades after the end of World War II. Meyer dies rather early, dying in 1972 from cancer. I think that was a tremendous loss, not only to conservatism at the time, but also retrospectively, we don’t appreciate his contributions as much as we do some of the other major founders of the movement. Meyer had been converted from communism by reading Hayek’s Road to Serfdom. He was very much drawn to the libertarian strain of the American right. Yet he also thought that the American right needed to ground itself in the American founding and look to the founding for inspiration. When it did that, according to Meyer, the ideas of personal freedom, self government, moral strength, and traditional values were not in conflict.
He didn’t think those things came into conflict until much later. If you look to the American founding, you could see a way in which liberty and order, tradition and freedom could work together. That became the guiding principle of National Review. Theoretically, it had a lot of problems, problems that were exposed throughout the years by some of Meyer’s friends. But practically, it does seem to describe a lot of American conservatives for a very long time who say, like William F. Buckley Jr., are both devout religious practitioners, as well as believers in economic competition and choice and property rights and such. So Fusionism, as it’s known as a theory, I think, has always rightly come under some scrutiny. Fusionism as practice, I believe, is still pretty strong among most people who would call themselves conservatives today.
Albert Mohler:
There are limits, I would say, to Fusionism as it works in say 1922, compared to 1955. The absence of the Cold War explains an awful lot of that. We don’t have a common adversary. You trace this very well in your book, even to the point that the war on terror actually did not become a cohesive external force like the Cold War was.
This is pretty much my lifetime. I was born in the 1950s, barely, but I really came to intellectual awareness in the late 1960s and in the 1970s. All of this is what I’m trying to think through, especially as I was younger. It was more than I could understand, but I wanted to understand it. I wanted to understand the difference was between a Russell Kirk, a William F. Buckley, Jr., and for that matter, others.
By that time, the neo-conservatives were arriving on the scene. I’ll be honest when I picked up your book, and I’m a more traditionalist, theological national conservative, just to put that on the table, so I wanted to know how you would handle neo-conservatism. I think you handle it with intellectual honesty. That is not to say that I agree in every respect, but I think you are honest about it. Tell the story because neoconservatives really, I would argue, were not imaginable in the 1950s, but they became a powerful force by the 1970s.
Matthew Continetti:
Yes. Neo-Conservatism is a term that needs to be unpacked. Usually today it is used as an epithet. If someone is called a “neo-con”, that means that they are for unnecessary war. That is not what the term means, and it is not what it meant in the beginning.
I find in my story that there are three waves of neo-conservatives. The first wave was composed of ex-radicals. These were men who had been communists, or actually not communist party members but just kind of Marxists in their youth, but de-radicalized in the 1940s and 1950s. By the time of the 1960s, they were anti-communist liberals. They were Democrats, but they believed in this anti-communist foreign policy. Because of social changes in the 1960s and the launch of LBJ’s Great Society in 1965, these anti-communist liberals became more and more skeptical of big government liberalism.
They found through their academic work and journalistic work that the Great Society was not achieving its desired aims. In fact, many Great Society programs were making things worse. So they began moving to the right. A figure like Irving Kristol and his journal, The Public Interest would be the first wave.
The second wave were ex-Democrats. These also were anti-communist liberals who were more concerned with foreign policy than with domestic policy. Because of the Democratic party’s changes associated with the Vietnam War, the Democratic party is split in several directions over the war. The anti-war movement becomes a huge force. In the 1970s, the Democratic party under George McGovern becomes the party of “Come Home America”, leaving many of these Democrats who believed in a strong anti-communist foreign policy and defensive democracy and human rights, stranded. They become integrated into the conservative movement under Ronald Reagan. This second wave of neo-conservatives are figures like Gene Kirkpatrick and Norman Podhoretz and they are associated with his magazine, Commentary.
Then there are the third wave of neo-conservatives, the group that I think most people associate with the term today. They are very different than the first two waves, though many of them are related to the first waves of neo-cons. The third wave of neo-conservatives comes about after the end of the Cold War. There’s an argument about what role America should take in the world now that we have emerged from the Cold War. Figures like Bill Kristol and Bob Kagan and the magazine where I used to work, The Weekly Standard, believe that America should be the hegemon and should protect liberal democracy throughout the world: always be engaged, always be on offense and use hard power as well as regime change to basically make the world safe for democracy. Even though they started off not ex anything, this third wave is now ex-Republican.
The journey of the neo-cons is from ex-radical to ex-Republican over over many, many decades.
Albert Mohler:
In 20th century Protestant theology, the movement known as neo-orthodoxy was massively influential, even in ways that today I think are not adequately understood. I wrote my doctoral dissertation on evangelical theologians, engaging Karl Barth in particular, the Swiss neo-orthodox theologian. I had to deal with, “What in the world is neo-orthodox?” Which is it? More neo or more orthodox? I came to the conclusion that it was ultimately far more neo than orthodox because it had changed the foundational basis. There’s no ontology.
I look at neo-conservatism somewhat the same way. When I, as a young person especially in the 1980s and the 1990s, I was devouring everything written by Irving Kristol and even people like Daniel Bell and Peter and Brigitte Berger, and Richard John Neuhaus. Neuhaus became a friend. That friendship was sorely tested when I would not sign the Evangelicals and Catholics Together Statement. But I was glad to be in his home. He was another bon vivant, by the way, a brilliant entertainer and one of the finest conversationalists I’ve ever seen. He was like human velcro, he would just make attachments. “You should meet him”, “He should meet you and you have that conversation”. And that’s to say some different things because the leading neo-conservatives most important formative figures were Jewish, or at least it was Jewish dominated in terms of conversation.
I learned a lot but I appreciate in the book the fact that you mentioned the criticism was overly sociological. That was helpful to me as a set of intellectual tools at a time when the actual sociological world and the academy was so leftist. It was great to have people like Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, and especially people like Peter Berger come along and demolish these patently false arguments with reams of documentation.
I know this is close to home for you since you literally married into the movement, but the bottom line is, I come to a very negative assessment about the conservatism of neo-conservatism. Am I wrong?
Matthew Continetti:
I think it depends about who and at what point in time you are talking. Even for those first wave neo-cons, for example, you mentioned Daniel Bell. Daniel Bell, a sociologist, Columbia and Harvard professor, he never became a Republican.
Albert Mohler:
Not a conservative Republican.
Matthew Continetti:
No, not a conservative at all, but nonetheless, a neo-conservative, especially in the 1970s and late 1960s. Irving Kristol, I believe, was actually more conservative than people often give him credit for.
Albert Mohler:
That would be your wife’s grandfather.
Matthew Continetti:
He would be, yes. I didn’t know him very well. We met only a few times and long before I knew my wife actually. Regardless of my personal connection, I think his ideas are heavily conservative. In fact, one thing that is unique among those sociologists you mentioned is his appreciation for religion and his belief that it was very important to conservatism. Other neo-conservatives later like Charles Krauthammer, who I put in that second wave of neo-conservative. During the 1980s, I think you’re right, the neo was much heavier than the conservative if you read Charles Krauthammer in the 1980s. But when Obama is elected in 2009, he is a conservative. He becomes the face in many ways of conservative intellectual criticism of Obama.
Within this his broad category that we discussed, as I said, which can be subdivided of neoconservatives, the figures are more changeable, more fluid in their beliefs over time than some of the other characters, like some of the ones associated with National Review conservatism, or even the old right conservatism. I think it would be hard to make generalizations because it depends on the person we are discussing and at what point in their intellectual journey we’re referring to.
Albert Mohler:
The way in which you tell this narrative is written brilliantly. I think it is important to acknowledge, and your book is evidence of this even where I agree and disagree with your judgments, arguments are moving and we are temporal creatures. The emergence of what is now called national conservatism and other similar kinds of movements, those have roots in the past but you really can’t have that conversation until you fast forward to the aftermath of, say, the war on terror, I would argue.
Matthew Continetti:
Yes.
Albert Mohler:
But you really do bring us up to date. Related to the cast of characters, I mentioned Phyllis Schlafly, and of course, Jerry Falwell, who I knew very well and I preached for him. I saw Falwell at his absolute greatest in handling people. I need to tell this in a memoir sometime, but he got deep into all kinds of controversy over Y2K. He had gone on the Old Time Gospel Hour telling people, “Pull the money out of the banks!” and he scared the Fed to death. I was preaching in chapel there one time and Dr. Falwell said, “Just come by, see me in my office, like 8:00 o’clock and we’ll talk.” I got there and there were all these guys in suits, very expensive suits. It turns out they were some of the governors of the Federal Reserve Bank. He actually had me come in his office in front of those guys. I got in and I said, “That might be a matter of urgency,” and he said, “They’ll be more amenable when they wait a bit.” He knew how to read a situation.
These were larger than life figures. I don’t think I’ve ever met a creature of such indomitable will as Phyllis Schlafly. Movements like the conservative movement are not created by weak-willed, weak-minded people. But sometimes their conflicts could be massive as well. When we get to the current moment, I kind of wish your book would continue a little longer. So, what is conservatism in your view today? And not only what, where and who?
Matthew Continetti:
This is one reason that I called the book The Right and not Conservatism because as we started off discussing, this is a contested term and there are many different versions of conservatism today. However, the right, I think, is in a place where it is gathering strength from a growing populist revolt against the elites and against the liberal misgovernance of the Biden administration. Even though there is great dissent within the movement, and maybe even an uncertainty about its future direction and anxiety about the course of America and Western civilization, it’s nonetheless very energetic and growing. Its ranks are growing.
Let me just discuss a few things. One aspect of it is a change in the political terrain from the bulk of my story, where the arguments are over the size and scope of government, to arguments now over who is an American? Who should become an American? Under what conditions? What values should reign supreme? What is the role of a parent in education? What view should we take of American history, of American symbols, of American anthems? This terrain is different. It’s not so much about the sides of government, it’s about who we are as a people. That, I think, has taken some adjusting for some conservatives and for some Republicans, even though it seems to be a very powerful issue. Though that libertarian strain is also present in some of the skepticism of the public health authorities during the COVID-19 pandemic. We don’t want lockdowns. We want to have our businesses. We want to go to our religious services. The government should not force us into our homes. You see the libertarian strand there, and you also see the more traditional strand, I think, playing out in the culture.
I think that we’ve reached a place right now where you look at a figure such as Ron DeSantis and even a figure like Governor Glenn Younkin, where the right is willing to use the law to basically weaken these cultural institutions, which have become so dominated by the progressive left. That’s a different attitude than I think many conservatives held for most of the story I tell in my book. I think the view on the right now is that these institutions have become so left wing and so corrupted that the only recourse of the right is to use the law to weaken them. To weaken them on one hand, to show them that they’re not running the show and also of course, to empower parents. It’s that last part, I think, that has huge political potential for conservatives, for the right, and for the Republican party.
To be the party of parents is a very important thing. Parents want, I think, the same things everywhere. They want to be able to wake up in the morning, send their kids to a good school on safe streets and raise them in the religious tradition that they grew up in and that they want to raise their children in. Government interference in those things is something that most Americans rebel against. It may also serve as a point of contact. Resistance to that government interference might be a way of unifying the new national conservatives you mentioned as well as the more old line kind of Reagan, constitutional, limited government conservatives who occupy a lot of space in my story.
Albert Mohler:
I don’t think there’s an inherent conflict there because I really would identify with both of those traditions to some extent. I began more in a Kirk/Burke tradition mode, and I worked for Reagan energetically in 1976 as a teenage volunteer in the Great Crusade that came close. I was enormously shaped in my entire adult life by the Reagan years and by Reagan as a personality. As you say about Donald Trump, he changed the Republican party, and in the next paragraph you say he changed the Democratic party. I think that’s absolutely right. I think Reagan did too. I think Reagan changed both parties, but in a different way. At the end of the Reagan administration, Bill Clinton is adopting, in so many ways, his policies of welfare reform and all the rest.
We are in a different cultural moment now, and I think we are in an extremity. I’m not just reprising Flight 93 culture, but I got to tell you, the people that I love and work with the most closely have a sense of that just about every day.
Part of what I try to do is say, look, there’s hope. First of all, there is hope in the gospel of Jesus Christ. There’s hope in our families, our marriages, but it’s got to be based in something real. So, to be honest, part of what my greatest frustration is, I not only have to argue against the left, I’ve got to argue against David Brooks, in terms of the something as basic as the definition of marriage. I will simply say, I think a lot of the frustration in the people in the more traditional, theological, Christian conservative lane is that you can trace our words, our speeches, and our messages over the years, we haven’t moved. But there’s the sense that a lot of people who would like to call themselves conservative indeed have moved quite far.
Matthew Continetti:
I’ll pause there for just a moment just to think about this attitude toward government power, which may, I think, have been a change.
Albert Mohler:
I don’t think you’re wrong in noting the change.
Matthew Continetti:
Yes. Right, but you’re saying there are reasons for it.
Albert Mohler:
Absolutely.
Matthew Continetti:
I’m not denying that here are reasons and motivations that people have for it. But one, I think it’s funny that you don’t include David Brooks on the left because I kind of do.
Albert Mohler:
No, I know. That’s my point. But he’s in your book because at some point he was identified, and wanted to be identified with the right. No, I definitely place him on the left. I just published an article about that as a matter of fact, a few weeks ago. The problem is that there are many people when they introduce him, they’ll introduce him in the media or in the New York Times, as someone who’s a conservative voice. And frankly, that’s more frustrating to me than having-
Matthew Continetti:
Having a liberal voice.
Albert Mohler:
Than having an argument with a genuine liberal. Michelle Goldberg, I understand.
Matthew Continetti:
It does kind of get to understanding people and trying to figure out where they’re coming from. But I would say, I guess that one of my takeaways from this book is that’s always kind of been the case. I mean, there’s always been this fight within, as you say, and the fight without, and people do change over time.
We’ve just spent a lot of time talking about the neo-cons. There are people who have left the Republican party, especially because of the war on terror that I get into. But now there are whole new people who are entering the Republican party and conservatism. That, I think, actually is a reason for hope. I do think that despair is something that needs to be avoided. To relate that to the conversation we had about Whitaker Chambers, despair can lead to a place of self-defeat. If you think that there’s no hope, it leads to this kind of resignation. I think that temptation should be fought against.
Albert Mohler:
Yes. Your book, The Right: The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism, you are a writer of great skill. You are a historian who has put a lot of work into this and a lot of insight. I will tell you that as I reach the end of every chapter, I had not wished you had written less.
Matthew Continetti:
Thank you.
Albert Mohler:
I wished you had written more. You also take the risk of entering into an argument and that’s a part of the conservative movement as well. It began as an argument and it will continue as an argument, and you’ve contributed to that. Matthew Continetti, I want to thank you today for joining me for Thinking in Public.
Matthew Continetti:
Thank you for having me.
Albert Mohler:
Many thanks to my guest, Matthew Continetti, for thinking with me today.
If you enjoyed today’s episode of Thinking in Public, you will find more than a hundred of these conversations at albertmohler.com under the tab, Thinking in Public. For more information on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College, just go to boycecollege.com.
Thank you for joining me for Thinking in Public. And until next time, keep thinking. I’m Albert Mohler.