The Right Quotes

“On economics, crime, and welfare, the Clinton presidency offered plenty for conservatives to like. They never forgave him for it.”
― Matthew Continetti, The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism

“The danger was that the alienation from and antagonism toward American culture and society expressed by many on the right could turn into a general opposition to the constitutional order.”
― Matthew Continetti, The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism

“What began in the twentieth century as an elite-driven defense of the classical liberal principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution of the United States ended up, in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, as a furious reaction against elites of all stripes.”
― Matthew Continetti, The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism

“The character of President Ronald Reagan may have affected Kristol’s rosy assessment of populism. The fortieth president injected the populist rebellion of the late 1970s with his peculiar qualities of optimism, sunniness, humor, and unflappability.”
― Matthew Continetti, The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism

“The Trump method of bluster, ambiguity, threat, and parry created a sense of ongoing crisis. It alienated critics, strained overseas alliances, and exhausted the patience of the electorate. Populism identified real problems and acted as a check on unaccountable elites, but it was also susceptible to demagoguery, scapegoating, and conspiracy theories.”
― Matthew Continetti, The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism

“Trump had exposed many of the assumptions of conservatism circa 2014 as false. He had regrounded the GOP upon a base of white working-class and rural voters who were antielitist, suspicious of government, doubtful about America’s overseas commitments, and fearful of globalization. He convinced this base to view the federal government as a vast and corrupt engine of special privileges and redistribution on the bases of identity, partisan affiliation, and personal connections. He moved the culture war away from sex and toward US history and patriotic symbols such as flags, holidays, language, and statuary.”
― Matthew Continetti, The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism

“There was no distinguishing between “Trumpism” and Trump. His rejection of politics as usual included the “decision-making loop” through which ideas traveled from the conservative superstructure to the legislative and executive branches of government. All that mattered to Trump was the last thing you said about him. His impulses replaced the daily schedules and routine processes”
― Matthew Continetti, The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism

“The writers and thinkers on the margins of the GOP—the Claremont gang, paleoconservatives, social traditionalists, and antiestablishment national populists—felt that Trump’s victory favored their side. Such vindication may have been a mirage. Trump failed to win a popular vote majority—he captured a smaller percentage of the vote than Mitt Romney had in 2012. His Electoral College win rested on seventy-seven thousand voters spread across three states. And for all his personal excesses and haphazard policymaking, Trump stuck rather closely to the Republican agenda of tax cuts, defense spending, and conservative judicial appointments. He rarely broke faith with either the New Right interest groups he had wooed during the campaign or with his core supporters, who would continue to defend him,”
― Matthew Continetti, The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism

“There was more to the Tea Party than constitutionalism, however. It was a manifestation of America’s “folk libertarianism”: a widespread oppositional attitude toward authority of all stripes.”
― Matthew Continetti, The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism

“The Tea Party was noteworthy for its hostility to both the Democratic and the Republican parties. When it turned to electoral politics, the Tea Party backed antiestablishment candidates, with a mixed record in general elections. That was because the Tea Party brought out both optimistic, forward-looking, mainstream supply-siders and pessimistic, anti-institutional, conspiracy-minded extremists.”
― Matthew Continetti, The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism

“As US forces began marching toward Baghdad, Buchanan wrote a cover story whose title asked, “Whose War?” He offered the same answer he had a decade prior, during the previous war with Saddam. Rather than attack the most famous and important leaders of the “War Party,” all of whom were gentiles, he impugned the Jewish intellectuals who backed the invasion. He said that these neoconservatives put Israel’s interests ahead of America’s. He called them a “cabal.” He accused them of colluding with a foreign power. He might as well have been quoting the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”
― Matthew Continetti, The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism

“Compassionate conservatism recognized the success of Bill Clinton in portraying the Republicans as enemies of education, Medicare, and the environment. It was an attempt to take back the moral high ground from the Democrats (there was no need to take it back from Clinton).”
― Matthew Continetti, The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism

“Buckley warned, “Those conservatives who take sly pleasure from Wallace’s techniques should reflect that that kind of thing is do-able against anybody at all; do-able for instance by the Folsomite Wallace of yesteryear, who roared his approval of his candidate’s attack on the ‘Wall Street Gotrocks,’ ‘the damned decency crowd,’ and ‘them Hoover Republicans”
― Matthew Continetti, The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism

“Welch insisted on personal loyalty and top-down control. Birch Society chapters were rigidly organized. Members were directed in secret to pursue political office. Birchers were drawn not only to Welch’s anti-Communist message but also to his description of a world where sinister elites were behind everything that had gone wrong in the country.”
― Matthew Continetti, The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism

“order. And it is the constitutional order that American conservatives are meant to defend. A constitutional order founded on the principle of human freedom and dignity. A constitutional order of enumerated powers, individual rights, and religious freedom. An order designed to “decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.” An order in which the deliberate sense of the people is channeled through representative institutions into positive law meant to “form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” An order informed by “a standard maxim for free society” that is “constantly spreading and deepening”
― Matthew Continetti, The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism

“Agrarianism was more like European conservatism in its desire to preserve ancient social patterns against the upheavals wrought by industrialism and centralized government. This attachment to a vanished means of subsistence gave agrarianism a Romantic, literary character. Its poetic models of chivalric aristocracy, however, did not dwell on, if they mentioned at all, the chattel slavery that had been the basis of the southern economy for so many centuries.
   This failure to reckon with the racist legacy of the South diluted the movement's impact. The Agrarians could not make up their minds on a political program or on civil rights for black people. The disparity between the Agrarians' beautiful rhetoric and philosophical sophistication and southern politics as actually conducted day to day was a brutal example of the difference between intellectual theory and democratic practice. Worse still, some of those who traveled in the same intellectual circles as the Agrarians flirted with another danger implicit in radical critiques of America: an openness to authoritarianism.”
― Matthew Continetti, The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism

“What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried? We stick to, contend for, the identical old policy on the point in controversy which was adopted by “our fathers who framed the Government under which we live”; while you with one accord reject, and scout, and spit upon that old policy, and insist upon substituting something new. True, you disagree among yourselves as to what the substitute shall be. You are divided on new propositions and plans, but you are unanimous in rejecting and denouncing the old policy of the fathers. —ABRAHAM LINCOLN, FEBRUARY 27, 1860”
― Matthew Continetti, The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism

“One cannot be an American patriot without reverence for the nation’s enabling documents. One cannot be an American conservative without regard for the American tradition of liberty those charters inaugurated.”
― Matthew Continetti, The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism

“Or as Bill Buckley said in 1970, “I see it as the continuing challenge of National Review to argue the advantages to every one of the rediscovery of America, the amiability of its people, the flexibility of its institutions, of the great latitude that is still left to the individual, the delights of spontaneity, and, above all, the need for superordinating the private vision over the public vision.”
― Matthew Continetti, The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism

“The proper question for conservatives: What do you seek to conserve?” George Will wrote in The Conservative Sensibility (2019). “The proper answer is concise but deceptively simple: We seek to conserve the American Founding.”
― Matthew Continetti, The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism

“It will require a delicate recalibration of the relationship between party elites and the grassroots populism that fuels the Trump phenomenon. It will require a depersonalization of the Right, with leaders focusing less on individual candidates and more on the principles that have guided the movement for more than half a century: anti-statism, constitutionalism, patriotism, and antisocialism. It will require a willingness to look ahead to the next election rather than dwelling on 2020. And it will require leaders who can set the agenda, define the alternatives, and model appropriate standards of behavior. The alternative would be a national populist GOP dominated by a single man whom not only educated elites but also a majority of the American people view with contempt.”
― Matthew Continetti, The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism

“Though their policies may have shared the same spirit, there were serious differences between Calvin Coolidge and Donald Trump. Coolidge was a model of reticence and comportment. Trump was not. Coolidge stood for the “American” way of doing things and presided over a “normal” government in a “normal” time. Trump stood outside the system, even during the years in which he was president. He and his supporters were not preserving the status quo.”
― Matthew Continetti, The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism

“The Personal Opportunity and Work Responsibility Act was the most dramatic blow against the welfare state in half a century. It was the culmination of a long-running argument between the Right and the Left over individual agency and the demoralization that accompanies dependency.”
― Matthew Continetti, The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism

“Every bad habit of the Right was on display in the Capitol riot that left five dead, $30 million in damage, close to three hundred arrested, and Capitol Hill an armed camp.”
― Matthew Continetti, The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism

“In the space of four years, Republicans had gone from running the White House, the House of Representatives, and the Senate to losing all three.”
― Matthew Continetti, The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism

“If Trump had followed the example of his predecessors and conceded power graciously and peacefully, he would have been remembered as a disruptive but consequential populist leader who, before the coronavirus pandemic, presided over an economic boom, reoriented America’s opinion of China, removed terrorist leaders from the battlefield, revamped the space program, secured an originalist majority on the US Supreme Court, and authorized Operation Warp Speed to produce a COVID-19 vaccine in record time. Instead, when historians write about the Trump era, they will do so through the lens of January 6. They will focus on Trump’s tortured relationship with the alt-right, on his atrocious handling of the deadly Charlottesville protest in 2017, on the rise in political violence during his tenure in office, and on his encouragement of malevolent conspiracy theories. Trump joined the ranks of American villains from John C. Calhoun to Andrew Johnson, from Joseph McCarthy to George Wallace.”
― Matthew Continetti, The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism

“Because of the coronavirus, states had liberalized mail-in and early voting, and millions of Americans had voted before Trump’s last-minute comeback. The exit polls suggested that Trump won late deciders. But late deciders matter less when most ballots are cast early.”
― Matthew Continetti, The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism

“For the first time since 1856, the Republican Party did not issue a platform.”
― Matthew Continetti, The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism

“And the Trumpified Right had far greater confidence in the ability of the state to coordinate activity and attain its desired outcomes. The basis of this faith was unclear.”
― Matthew Continetti, The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism

“Center, where doctors could better monitor his condition. The administration did a poor job of informing the public about the president’s health. Then Trump took a limo ride around the Walter Reed campus while he was sick just to wave to supporters. When he returned to the White House on October 5, he dramatically unmasked himself while standing on the balcony. These cavalier acts erased whatever momentum had been building for the incumbent in the polls.”
― Matthew Continetti, The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism