Quotes from Matthew Continetti

Buckley called him "Mr. Evil," "a dangerous man," and a "great phony." Buckley deplored the "uncouthness that seems to account for his general popularity.

Populism is the radical opposite of conservatism,

there are other dangers to conservatism and to the civilization conservatives are defending than the liberal Establishment, and that to fight liberalism without guarding against these dangers runs the risk of ending in a situation as bad as or worse than our present one.

He fed his supporters a diet of grievances. Like Huey Long, he capitalized on their sense of being dispossessed and disrespected.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

How good, and how strong, it is to take a principled position

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.

Trump's presidency emboldened the forces within the conservative movement that had long sought to expel the neoconservatives and libertarians.

Any influence that the journal might have had eroded further in the summer of 2017, after Trump's tin-eared and self-indulgent response to the death of a counterprotester at an alt-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Krein disavowed his support of the president. In the pages of the New York Times, he wrote, "Mr. Trump has betrayed the foundations of our common citizenship.

As Bush told Dan Balz of the Washington Post in the spring of 1999, "There is a role for government. But there is also a role for institutions that are value-laden, value-oriented, and that exist all across America.

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).

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.

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.

Emerson was right," he told the 1992 Republican National Convention. "We are the country of tomorrow.

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.