#matthew continetti

[dk-thrive]

At Chicago, Mr. Epstein discovered the world of books and ideas and found his vocation. “I had nothing resembling a social life at the University of Chicago,” he writes, “only a reading life.”

— Matthew Continetti, from "‘Never Say You Had a Lucky Life’ Review: Joseph Epstein Looks Back" (Wall Street Journal, April 12, 2024)

[gettothedancing]

The Iran Crisis Is Here

As if we didn't have enough to worry about: This week Iran escalated its war against the West.

For over a year now, the Biden administration and its European partners have attempted to lure Iran back into the 2015 nuclear deal, a.k.a. the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Those negotiations have failed. Iran keeps upping the ante. It wants Biden to drop sanctions on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, its terrorist army, and to guarantee that future presidents won't back out of the deal. The first demand is harmful to national security and a political hot potato. The second is impossible. Result: deadlock.

Deadlock that favors Iran. The mullahs have used the months of jaw-jaw to prepare for war-war. Ayatollah Khamenei has placed radicals in top positions, including the presidency. His proxy forces have spread violence in Iraq, Yemen, and throughout the Greater Middle East. He has plotted to assassinate U.S. officials. He has evaded sanctions. And he has built up his stockpile of nuclear fuel.

Iran has enough enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon. Last week, David Albright and Sarah Burkhard of the Institute for Science and International Security (the good ISIS) wrote that "Iran's breakout timeline is now at zero."

Swell. How does President Biden respond? He says there is still time to make a deal that even his lead negotiator, State Department official Robert Malley, admits is "tenuous at best."

The complacency is maddening. The other day, when a reporter asked National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan for his thoughts on Iran's dispute with the IAEA, Sullivan said, "From our perspective, we have to view these on separate tracks, and that's how we're going to proceed." Translation: We won't let Iran's hostile behavior get in the way of appeasement.

[gettothedancing]

The Working-Class GOP: A Muddled Concept

Despite the emerging consensus that the GOP is a working-class party, there is little agreement on what such a party should stand for. Industrial policy? Trust busting? Family subsidies and financial transaction taxes? Banks sidesteps these trendy measures on the intellectual right. He suggests instead that Republican candidates adopt Trump's posture of opposition to illegal immigration, offshoring of manufacturing jobs, COVID-19 lockdowns, Big Tech censorship, and political correctness.

It might take a second—or longer—to see how the issues Banks highlights relate to the material interests of Republican voters. What they have in common is an adversarial attitude toward the votaries of managerial liberalism. Indeed, Banks's dichotomy isn't between working class and capital, but between populism and elitism. Republicans, Banks writes, must "highlight the cultural and economic elitism that animates the Democrat Party." It's "Democrat elitism" that has driven working-class voters to the GOP. And "nothing better encapsulates Democrats' elitism and classism than their turn towards ‘wokeness.'" Taxes, spending, welfare, and entitlements do not come up.

For all of the "working class" rhetoric in conservative discourse, few Republican politicians have adopted the economic measures put forth by Oren Cass at American Compass, Samuel Hammond at the Niskanen Center, and Julius Krein at American Affairs. Rubio and Hawley are political entrepreneurs willing to push the boundary of conventional GOP policymaking. But they are outliers. A figure like Banks, who has to win reelection every two years, is more cautious. He perceives that Republican voters are more interested in aggressive prosecution of the culture war than in technocratic manipulation of the economy.

The "class war" mentioned so often in conservative discourse is in fact the continuation of the half-century-long war over which values and social roles should be authoritative in American culture. Imposing a class framework on this struggle leads to confusion. . . .

Ideology, partisan affiliation, and religiosity mark one's place in the culture war far better than income or education. Liberals went for Biden 89-10 in the exit poll, and conservatives backed Trump 85-14. Both candidates won 95 percent of their respective parties. And the gaps between voters without a religious affiliation and all others, and between white evangelical voters and all others, were huge.

Ideology also explains the Republicans' surprisingly good performance among minority voters. There's evidence, for example, that black Protestants are moving toward the GOP. "What happened in 2020 is that nonwhite conservatives voted for Republicans at higher rates," election analyst David Shor recently explained to New York magazine. "They started voting more like white conservatives." Why? Revulsion at the far-left messaging of radical elites on immigration and policing.

When the pollsters at Echelon Insights asked Republicans what they want from a candidate, the answer was someone who would "fight" for the conservative cause, support the Trump agenda, and speak out against cancel culture. The most important issues for Republicans are illegal immigration, law and order, taxes, and liberal media bias. The Echelon data have been replicated elsewhere. My AEI colleague Ryan Streeter writes, "Large national surveys conducted by the American Enterprise Institute suggest Trump's supporters are actually quite content with American economic life but highly reactive to elite dominance of American culture life."

Calling Republicans "working-class" is a self-flattering way to put the party on the side of the "forgotten American." But it risks reducing voters to factors of production. And it flirts with an economic program actual Republicans don't seem to want. The new class consciousness is another example of the Europeanization of American politics: For decades, the two parties competed for the loyalties not of the working class but of the middle class, and public policy experts devoted themselves to improving the condition of the urban poor or "underclass." Now, Republican communicators are beginning to sound like the leaders of European parties whose anti-bourgeois romanticism often manifests itself in ugly ways.

Maybe less has changed than people think. Remember that Barry Goldwater first identified himself with the "forgotten American" back in 1961. The GOP remains a populist conservative party whose voters are incensed at the values, directives, and rhetoric of the men and women who occupy the commanding heights of American culture. It's the party of married parents, of the small business owner, of the journeyman who aspires for a better life for his family. It's the party of peace through strength, low taxes, safe streets, legal immigration, national pride, and traditional pieties. And what it needs most in 2022 are strong candidates who inspire the grassroots without terrifying independents.

[gettothedancing]

Return of the Propeller Heads

Barack Obama had a nickname for the highly credentialed economists who surrounded him during his first term.

When you read the Biden-Sanders unity task force recommendations, go over Biden's potential cabinet picks, or examine the membership of Biden's COVID-19 advisory board, you see the outlines of an administration committed to the same technocratic principles and top-down, uniform, centralized style of governance as its Democratic precursor. In some cases—if Susan Rice becomes secretary of state, for example—the very same people will be in charge. In other cases, the personalities will be new, but the methods will be similar.

The center-left views of academic, media, and cultural and foreign-policy elites will be ratified as sacrosanct. Officials will attempt, not always successfully and with unpredictable effects, to turn these opinions into policy, through legislation if possible but through regulation mostly. Dissenting forces will be problematized as disingenuous, malevolent, or not entirely sane. The one place where the public will be able to register its opposition is the voting booth.

Many opinion leaders in Washington dispute the above scenario. They point to Biden's reputation as a moderate, to his decades-long relationship with Mitch McConnell, to the constraints he will face with a narrow House majority and a potential Republican Senate. They hope that the establishment, restored to its former fading glory, will reassert its control and "turn down the temperature." Biden, they add, will have a "caretaker presidency." He and McConnell will work out some small-bore tax changes. Maybe an infrastructure plan will pass. Otherwise things will drift merrily along, with Trump tweeting furiously from the sidelines.

My pundit friends forget the nature of the propeller heads. The propeller heads know they are right—their degrees and titles and offices and accolades prove it. They know that government exists to perform the functions of social uplift and rational control. They are not about to sit back and let the Delaware gang and the apex predator of American politics run the show. There's a virus to crush, a climate to save, a liberal international order to rebuild. . . .

"There's nothing more dangerous than a propeller head who doesn't know his limitations," David Brooks wrote in 2009. Today's propeller heads are more ambitious than they were a decade ago. And far more moralistic. Come January, they will return to their old offices and resume their old games. Sure, a few of the names will be different. But the results will be the same.

[psycheapuleius]

This Is a Republican Moment. Can Trump Seize It?

Republicans outnumber Democrats by the biggest margin in 30 years. It’s an opportunity for Trump to recast the political landscape.

“Republicans and Republican-leaning voters outnumber Democratic-aligned ones, 45 percent to 41 percent, according to the most recent NBC News poll. The GOP hasn’t held such an edge in more than three decades.”

— Matthew Continetti, The Free Press, 3/18/2025.

[arcticdementor]

The Rise and Fall of the Conservative Movement - The American Conservative

Matthew Continetti's new history of the right tracks American conservatism from the introduction to the expulsion of its liberal element.

Matthew Continetti opens his new book on the history of American conservatism with a reminiscence of his first day at the D.C. offices of the Weekly Standard “on July 6, 2003, three months into the Second Iraq War.”

…

As the fawning introduction makes clear from the get-go, The Right is driven largely by nostalgia. It is, in part, an elegy for two overlapping traditions: that of the Cold War, which saw classical liberals, religious conservatives, ex-leftists, and others aligned against Soviet communism; and that of the Weekly Standard, which unified the fusionism of National Review with the neoconservatism of Commentary, promising a new path forward for an alliance whose common enemy had vanished.

This is an odd time to publish a positive history of either. The strange liberal conservatism that bubbled up in the GOP for just under a century is almost entirely gone now—consigned to the ash heap of history, to borrow a Reaganite phrase. Second-generation neoconservatives like Kristol (Continetti’s father-in-law) have abandoned the pretense of conservatism entirely; eminent paleo-neoconservative Norman Podhoretz, meanwhile, is publicly pro-Trump. Those who stand athwart history yelling, “Okay, fine, but could you be a little nicer about it?” no longer control the conservative movement.

So The Right is a study of the “true conservatism” issued just as it disappears. History written by the loser can be a fun genre, done correctly. But Matt Continetti does not have Jeff Davis’s flair for the dramatic—only his propensity for detail.

Which is to say that this book is, above all else, a boring one. Anyone who already knows a bit about the subject will not learn anything new here; anybody who doesn’t know already is unlikely to care what Charles Lindbergh wrote in his diary on any given day, or how, when, and why a minor thinker like Michael Novak changed his mind about capitalism.

The overload of historical minutiae is exacerbated by overwriting. If Continetti would like to know why the American people think right-liberal elites are out of touch, he might start with the fact that he calls the problem “disintermediation.”

The shortcomings of The Right are not merely structural. There are crucial errors in the substance, too. Prejudice for the respectable, centrist conservatism of the Weekly Standard breeds a skepticism of certain figures who belong at the center of the conservative story.

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The careful reader, too, will detect a hint of inconsistency: In page after page of positive treatment of Jude Wanniski, the eccentric apostle of supply-side economics, the rather important name “Farrakhan” (a personal friend and hero of Wanniski’s) does not pop up once. Yet elsewhere Continetti is more fair—David Frum, for instance, a neoconservative superstar, comes out looking very badly. William F. Buckley Jr., clearly Continetti’s hero, has his virtues exaggerated but his vices recognized. The folly of the Iraq war is never quite admitted, but it’s certainly hinted at.

Continetti also readily admits to the populist thread running through the whole tradition. A kind of continuity is suggested between the old New Right of Paul Weyrich and co. and the New Right on the rise today. Yet that strain, opposed as it is to the liberal one, is treated with skepticism. Donald Trump is introduced as “a populist like Andrew Jackson, William Jennings Bryan, Huey Long, Father Charles Coughlin, Joseph McCarthy, George Wallace, Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan, and Sarah Palin.” Besides the fact that none of these people is a populist like any of the others, suffice to say that the comparisons (save maybe that to Sarah Palin) are not meant to be compliments.

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Here Continetti’s vision becomes clear: The tenuous alliance between conservatives and liberals against a common enemy, rather than conservatism itself, is the subject of The Right. This, and potentially more, is suggested by Harvey Mansfield’s approvingly quoted belief “that the principal task of conservatism is to save liberalism from the liberals.”

Nobody who sincerely believed that could claim to be the arbiter of the right’s true history. Necessity forced right-wingers to make a deal with liberals that lasted for generations; that practical alliance did not magically fuse the content of liberalism with that of conservatism. But it did (for reasons predicted by Brent Bozell and others) give liberals the upper hand. It is entirely predictable that now, as that alliance starts to fracture, they should recast history to justify continued dominance of a movement that has afforded them so much.

[nosferdoc]

[gettothedancing]

Biden's One Hundred Days of Hubris

Why does Biden think he can avoid Obama’s fate? Like a good lawyer, he has a theory of the case. It goes like this: Neither Bill Clinton nor Barack Obama spent enough money to ensure a strong economic recovery. They didn't emphasize jobs above all else. Their caution was responsible for Democratic losses in the midterm elections. And all it takes is GOP control of one chamber of Congress to spoil a liberal revival. By opening the floodgates of federal spending, Biden hopes to deepen and extend the post-coronavirus economic boom. Growth and full employment will prevent a Republican takeover. And a second Progressive Era will begin.

The problem with this theory is its selective misreading of history. It wasn’t just the economy that sank the Democrats in 1994 and 2010. It was independent voters who turned against presidents who campaigned as moderates but governed as liberals. Nor did rising unemployment stop Republicans from picking up seats in 2002. And an economic boom didn’t save the House GOP in 2018. In every case, assessments of the president—among independent voters in particular—mattered more than dollars and cents. By committing himself to the idea that massive spending will safeguard the Democratic Congress, Biden may be inadvertently guaranteeing the partisan overreach that has doomed past majorities.