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[upbeat music] [groans] [upbeat music]
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ladies and gentlemen, uh,
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can I please have your attention? Can you dig it?
Jonah Goldberg
Good evening, dear listeners. This is Jonah Goldberg, host of The Remnant Podcast, brought to you by The Dispatch and Dispatch Media. Very excited about today’s guest. He wrote a really sort of lovely piece for us at The Dispatch
Jonah Goldberg
as part of the Next 250 series on the enduring lessons of fusionism. And, and just full disclosure, this more than a lot of podcasts, even for me, is probably gonna get in the weeds on conservative stuff. For people who like the weeds on conservative stuff, I, I predict you will enjoy it, and, and for those who don’t, try to stick around and, and maybe you’ll, you’ll acquire the taste. But I have with me George Hawley. He’s an associate professor of political science at the University of Alabama, and he’s the author of, of many books, um, a bunch of which I just bought this week when I realized them. He’s the author of many books, including, uh, Conservatism in a Divided America, The Right and Identity Politics, and The Mor- Moderate Majority, as well as a particular interest to me, Right-Wing Critics of American Conservatism. So George, welcome to The Remnant.
George Hawley
Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah, I, I have a lot of guests on here who, um, don’t really know the, um,
Jonah Goldberg
the full resonance of the term The Remnant, um, but I assume you’re a little more familiar with it than, than others. But why don’t we sort of start with what you wrote about for us on fusionism? You know, one of the things in the last 10 years I’ve read, uh, just a zillion times from people, particularly among sort of post-liberal or post-liberal adjacent critics of traditional mainstream conservatism, is that fusionism was just simply a political project. It was sort of the egghead n- label for Reagan’s three-legged stool, and I just think this is a distortion of what fusionism actually was, at least as propagated by Frank Meyer. So why don’t we just sort of start there and, and take as long as you like to sort of explain your take on fusionism.
George Hawley
Yeah, yeah, no, I agree with you on that. Um, and you know, in practice, you know, s- fusionism did sometimes look like, you know, a compromise between the traditionalists and, and the libertarians, but that’s not really what Frank Meyer, who is the person we most associate with fusionism, really believed. Uh, just for, uh, background, Meyer was a former communist, became a conservative, became an editor at National Review, and he’s most associated with this concept of fusionism, which is sometimes described as, as, as I mentioned, a compromise between sort of the libertarian and the traditionalist wings of conservatism. But that’s not fundamentally how he understood his project. What he was really trying to say was that, in fact, there was not a, a contradiction between these two elements. That is that if you care about virtue, which he thought conservatives should, you also need to care a lot about liberty, because a, a genuine virtue has to be freely chosen, otherwise it’s not actual virtue, otherwise you’re just living in a, in a, a totalitarian state, which is not a virtuous one. So in order to cultivate virtue, you know, you need to have, let people have, you know, genuine choices. And at the same time, if you care about liberty, if you want a society to be free from external coercion, you’re going to need a society that has at least a certain baseline of self-control. Um, a society in which, you know, people cannot maintain any sort of discipline or control over their appetites or be able to treat each other well will ultimately be one in which some sort of powerful state will be necessary in order to maintain a, even a baseline of order. So i- from this perspective, libertarians should not be kind of purest libertines saying, you know, “If it feels good, do it.” That, that is ultimately not going to be conducive to a free society either. So in, um, ultimately, in practice,
George Hawley
fusionism tends to look a lot like libertarianism, um, which was a major critique that, um, the traditionalists had with it, that they weren’t really given very much in terms of, uh, you know, practical policy concessions, at least in terms of the principles. But the, the key argument that Meyer was really getting at was that a free society and a virtuous society were not in fact incompatible and that they in fact required each other in order to function.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah, so this is one of these, um, raises another one of these frustrations, is that
Jonah Goldberg
Meyer got in a big fight with L. Brent Bozell Senior, and
Jonah Goldberg
Bozell,
Jonah Goldberg
you know, who was William F. Buckley’s brother-in-law, goes off to Spain. He starts a
Jonah Goldberg
traditionalist Catholic magazine called Triumph and writes about how fusionism is bad and, and dumb and that you actually can compel virtue. And the only reason I bring all this up is that a lot of the post-liberal types of the last 10 years
Jonah Goldberg
acted as if these arguments had never been had before [chuckles], you know, and that no one had ever thought of this idea of a confessional state that would compel virtue. I mean, and again, Bozell wasn’t the first person to come up with that. That goes, yeah, at least the Middle Ages, if not, you know, much further back. And so I guess the question I have is sort of related to your book on the right-wing critics of conservatism. Maybe we can just do a little level sta- setting on
Jonah Goldberg
nomenclature or terminology. Like, so in your mind, what is the difference between-Right-wing and conservative
George Hawley
I think of right-wing as being a pretty ecumenical term actually, encompassing a lot of different things. In the way I describe the right and the left, I describe the right as being extraordinarily heterogeneous. I think the left has a fairly narrow definition. I would describe the left as encompassing all of those, uh, ideologies that would place universal equality as sort of their guiding light, as their central principle. So if you’re left-wing, what you ultimately want is equality. Doesn’t mean there’s not lots and lots of disagreements on the left, right? There’s disagreements as to whose equality should be emphasized, which methods are most likely to achieve, uh, equality, how much freedom should be allowed, you know, in, in … throughout this process. But ultimately, really all the major left-wing ideologies will emphasize equality. I see the right is, is different from that. Now, some, you know, will have a similar dichotomy and say, “Well, because the left wants equality, the right must stand for inequality.” I, I disagree with that. Um, I think there are some right-wing visions that do support inequality as such, but I would say that the right encompasses really all of those ideological categories that place something else above equality in their sort of hierarchy of political values. So that means that, um, you know, you could be right-wing and say that liberty is the central value that you care about. But you could also be right-wing and say, “Well, what I care about is racial supremacy.” Or you could say … You could be right-wing and say that, “What I care about most is, you know, maintaining, um, you know, traditional religious values.” So that means that, you know, knowing that two people or groups are on the right, you know, it tells you that they’re not left, but it doesn’t necessarily indicate that they are aligned with each other on anything else, right? Uh, you know, a, a libertarian might actually be closer to the left than c- than he would be to a fascist. But the … Both the libertarian and the fascist are, in my vision or view, right-wing. Conservatism, you know, I think is a little bit harder to pin down because I think conservatism ultimately is context-dependent. That is, you know, the question is, is where do you live and what are you trying to conserve? So, you know, a, a conservative in the United States in the post-war era has a very different vision than a conservative in Afghanistan today. So when I talk about conservatism, usually I’m referencing more specifically the American conservative movement that’s, you know, been an important element of American life for the past 70 years or so. But I wouldn’t say that there is, you know, one definition of conservative that, you know, is valid in all places and all times. I’d say it, it is a context-dependent concept.
Jonah Goldberg
I mean, for me, the touchstone essay on this was Sam Huntington’s, uh, Conservatism as an Ideology in, what, ’57, I wanna say. And he makes the, he makes the point you’re making, which is that conservatism, much like radicalism, is a positional ideology insofar as … You know, used to drive my dad crazy that The New York Times would refer, refer to the most doctrinaire Bolsheviks in the Politburo as the conservatives.
George Hawley
Mm-hmm.
Jonah Goldberg
But there’s actually some legitimacy to that, you know. If you wanna try to have
Jonah Goldberg
truth in ou- you know, truth in labeling about these kinds of things, uh, the truth is is that a conser- You know, this is Hayek’s point as well in, in Why I’m Not a Conservative, even though he kind of says he is a conservative in the American context, ’cause he says in America it’s the one country
Jonah Goldberg
where you can call yourself a conservative and still be on the side of liberty, and he was really talking about sort of the European variants of all that. But so I struggle with this. I sort of struggle out loud with this on, on, on this podcast about how much utility there is in left and right as labels. And I take your point about equality. I think that’s a … Certainly, obviously it’s a defensible way of defining it, and, and I … And I can defer to almost anybody as long as they’re willing to define their terms, right? That’s one of the most annoying things about this stuff, is you get into these arguments where, you know, the Orwell’s thing about, you know, how fascism just means anything not desirable.
George Hawley
Mm-hmm.
Jonah Goldberg
Y- when you argue with those people, like it’s … it … things go off the rails really quickly. But I guess I’d push back just slightly on the equality thing. You know, if you read the … There’s a wonderful book, I wanna say the guy’s name is Josh Schoenbaum, um, but I could be wrong, uh, called Hitler’s Social Revolution. There was a certain con- concept of equality among
Jonah Goldberg
the Germans, right? There was a v- certainly a populist sort of … They always wanted to put the working class on par with the aristocratic class in all their public displays, and there is a form of equality that’s inherent in so- in sort of ethnic nationalism. You know, we are all Germans here. We are all French here. And so I just wonder if, if you’re defining it in terms of economic equality, then I think you’re absolutely right. There’s no way that’s anything other than left-wing. But there’s a lot of appeals in right-wing rhetoric to a kind of equality that talks about ethnic equality or, or cultural … you know, like a leveling of sorts that’s different than the left-wing version, but still, I think, in their own minds, a little bit about equality.
George Hawley
Yeah, and that’s why I’m saying that not everyone on the right is necessarily going to reject all concepts of equality necessarily. I mean, if we wanna go back, one of the, one of the people who really kind of messes up my explanation is people like Jaffa, right, who would argue that equality is sort of the fundamental conservative value, something I don’t necessarily agree with, and we can b- circle back to that. But, um, what I think makes a difference between right-wing discussions of equality and left-wing discussions of equality is, is that, uh, thatAddition of, of universal equality. That is-
Jonah Goldberg
Mm-hmm
George Hawley
… you know, if you look within national socialism, you know, they want greater levels of … would just at least talk about, if not necessarily in practice, say they wanted, uh, you know, more equality sort of within sort of the German volk, but there was no notion of greater equality between nations. They certainly weren’t-
Jonah Goldberg
Right, right
George Hawley
… pursuing equality between Germans and, say, the Slavs. Whereas virtually everyone on the left, I’m having a hard time thinking of contemporary exceptions, would say what they want is a world of fewer inequalities, be it between nations or ethnic groups or whichever the identity you’re focusing on.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah, I mean, there is this funny tendency, once you start looking for it you’ll see it all over the place, of
Jonah Goldberg
there’s a certain kind of left-wing rhetoric
Jonah Goldberg
that just doesn’t like separation, right? Like Babeuf, one of the French, the radical French revolutionaries, was like, he just hates walls, walls of any kind. Walls separating classes, walls separating people, whatever. And Barack Obama used to ha- who’s not a Babeuf, he’s not a radical and all that kind of stuff, but there is this rhetorical trope on the left about getting rid of all distinctions. And, and I just ne- I’ve never really un- uh, I guess that’s one of the reasons why I’m a conservative is I just never really understood it at the, the visceral appeal of that kind of thing. All right, so one of the things I struggle with is, is counting my new rights, and what I mean by that is, like, it feels like every 30 years, give or take, when someone says the old right, they mean the last new right, and I guess by my count, there are four, right? So, like, there’s the old right from pre-World War II, then there’s the new, o- the sort of the National Review right becomes the new right, and then the neoconservatives kind of become the new right, and then the, the sort of moral majority born-again crowd gets starts b- Richard Viguerie, th- they get start, start getting called the new right. And now we have this fourth new right that is this weird coalition of very different factions of post liberals, nationalists, alt-right,
Jonah Goldberg
and MAGA and, and, and various other things. Is that … Would you say that’s a fair-
George Hawley
Yeah, and, uh-
Jonah Goldberg
… listing?
George Hawley
And don’t forget the, uh, the French new right, which was also a pretty, uh, pretty crazy phenomenon as well. Yeah, so there’s … We keep on having these new rights, and then of course, even during, as you mentioned, you know, about almost concurrently, you have the neoconservatives, and then you have, you know, Paul Weyrich and his populist new right.
Jonah Goldberg
Right.
George Hawley
And they were, um, you know, at odds with each other and arriving at about the same time. Similarly, you talk about, you know, Buckley and his crowd being a new right, but simultaneously you had people like Peter Viereck, who were being called new conservatives, who had a very different vision. So yeah, um, I think we start, might need to start, uh, coming, getting a bit more creative with our prefixes.
Jonah Goldberg
Is, is that how you pronounce Viereck? Uh, pronounce it … Is it Viereck? Is that how he pronounced it? ‘Cause I’ve read his name for 50 years, and I just … I always said in my head it’s Viereck, but I don’t know that that’s right.
George Hawley
Well, in my mind, it’s Viereck, but I actually don’t know. You may be correct. Maybe I’ve been saying it incorrectly in my head all this time too. I, you know, I work with the written word, so I-
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah
George Hawley
… uh-
Jonah Goldberg
I mean, I have the same problem with Eric Voegelin, is that every time I pronounce it, however I pronounce it, someone will correct me. [laughs]
George Hawley
Well.
Jonah Goldberg
Just stay away from pronouncing it ever. But anyway, so, like, is there
Jonah Goldberg
… What would you say the through line is with all these different new rights? Like, I mean, it feels to me like we s- basically agree that we would like to keep the broad understanding of conservatism,
Jonah Goldberg
if you wanna qualify it, modern American conservatism of, say, the 1966
Jonah Goldberg
National Review through Reagan. The definition of conservatism that we understood probably up until about 2015. What does that share, and how is it different than all these other new rights?
George Hawley
Um, well, one through line b- between today’s new right and, um, you know, Paul Weyrich and Richard Viguerie’s new right is a definitely a more populist impulse that I think a lot of other conservatives rejected. This notion that sort of the Buckleyite or Russell Kirk conservatism is not really sort of meeting the public where they are, not really focusing on the issues that gets people animated, and, you know, you need a more combative, more culturally focused right wing. I think that is something you see both in the MAGA era and that you would see, um, in the, in the new right of the 1970s and into the 1980s. So I think there’s a consistency there, and I think it’s mostly accidental. I don’t think that s- that many people who would associate with what we sometimes call the new right today are, are necessarily familiar with this history, and I think they think they’re more novel than they actually are, which kind of gets to your point earlier about, uh, you know, today’s integralists and Catholic traditionalists who don’t seem to be aware that, you know, we’ve already seen this ideological dead end before, and that there’s no reason to think that they’re going to have any more success than, than Bazille or, uh, or, and his colleagues.
Jonah Goldberg
All right, so what is the relationship between populism and conservatism? I, I, just for levels, I criticized populism for 15 years at National Review, and it marked me as a conservative in good standing. And then all of a sudden, starting around 2015, people said I was a RINO squish cuck for criticizing populism. [laughs] Um, what, what is, what is your view of the relationship between populism and conservatism?
George Hawley
In, in my view, I think this may be one of the most fundamental tensions and problems with the right. You know, going back to the beginning. I mean, let’s go back, all the way back to Nok and the Remnant, right? What was his, his argument was-Look, if you want to tell the truth and, you know, be sort of a political prophet in kind of the biblical sense, it requires sometimes saying hard truths, not just about elites, but about the people themselves. That is, in my view, what a, a conservative should do. Yet at the same time, you know, we don’t want to just speak to a remnant and wait for society to collapse. You also want to win. That’s what, uh, you know, that was … You know, Buckley wanted to turn conservatism into something that could win, and that seems to require at least some element of, of a populist mindset. And I don’t know that conservatives have ever really sort of found a, a kind of sweet spot there. I mean, um, Buckley himself could never quite solve the problem, right? He simultaneously was an elitist in a lot of ways, kind of an American aristocrat. Um, yet he simultaneously says, “Oh, I’d rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone directory than by the faculty at Harvard.” Yet simultaneously, at around the same period, he’s saying, “Oh, we need to put new restrictions on the franchise in order to, you know, you know, uh, say fewer people should vote.” Yet if you were to do that, you know, the problem for conservatives is that the elites themselves then and today aren’t that conservative. So, you know, if you were to, you know, dramatically de- uh, decrease the franchise, say you need to reach certain levels of educational attainment or knowledge, what you’re going to end up with probably is an electorate that’s more left wing than you have now. It’s sort of a twofold problem. One, telling the truth about people is going to be a harder sell than demagoguery, and being a truly elitist ideology is going to have a very … gonna be very tough when, you know, if you were … Say we need to defer to elites more, and those elites tend to be sort of on the center left, you’re going to end up with a more left-wing society. So conservatives simultaneously need to figure out how do you sell conservatism to the masses and persuade, you know, more people on the elites to take a sort of conservative mindset. You know, some people thought that, well, all that matters is the elites, right? If you go to Hayek, who we’ve mentioned isn’t a conservative, but we’ll, we’ll put him in the conservative camp for the purposes of this conversation. He thought the elites were basically all that mattered, right? So there’s no reason to, you know, publicize, you know, what, what goes on with the mo- mount Pelerin society. We’re just trying to reach, you know, smart economists, and if you can bring them around, everything will follow. And then you have the new right saying, “No, let’s just target Wallace voters and, you know, convince them to kick over the table, and then we will, then we’ll take charge.” And, you know, I would say that neither of those is on, on their own going to ultimately be successful. So the dilemma I think that is a perennial one for, for conservatives on the right.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah, I mean, I, I, I think conceptually, part of my problem has always been going back to
Jonah Goldberg
the 19th century or 18th century, you know.
Jonah Goldberg
Populism was understood to a large extent as a leftish, not necessarily leftist, but leftish-
Jonah Goldberg
… phenomena, right? If you read George Lukács and these guys, you know, like populism and … I can’t remember the name of the book now. Um, but … And that’s understandable because populism and democracy go together, and in the 18th and 19th centuries, democracy was radical because it was in opposition to throne and altar kind of
Jonah Goldberg
establishment, right? Ar- aristocracy, divine right of kings and stuff. But if you look at like i- in the 19th century in America,
Jonah Goldberg
almost all the populists were, and through the 1930s, you know, were from the left. And, you know, people like Michael Kazin still talk about the populist persuasion as if it’s something to tap into. But, you know, I’m one of these people who actually thinks that even though Father Coughlin was an anti-Semite, that didn’t mean he wasn’t on the left, but we can talk about that if you want. But, you know, certainly William Jennings Bryan, Huey Long, these were all sort of aligned on the left. And I think there’s a philosophical distinction between populism and democracy because democracy is supposed to be deliberative and populism isn’t, sort of by definition. Populism is always based on passion more than reason. So I’m a small D Democrat,
Jonah Goldberg
but I’m not a populist. You know? The place for the expression of popular will is purely during elections and preferably when those elections have been handled in a deliberative way where arguments are mustered. Been having this argument now for 10 year- 12 years. I’ll say to people,
Jonah Goldberg
“You know, I think populism is bad.” They’ll say, “But you don’t understand how angry people are.” And then I’ll respond, “Well, yeah, no, I think I do. You should read my email. But when was the last time you made a really great decision
Jonah Goldberg
when you were really, really angry?” [laughs] And, and this is … I, I think this is the problem that I think conservatism has had since Buckley, right? ‘Cause McCarthy and his critics was really the defense of a populist demagogue in the form of Joseph McCarthy, and I, I, and I think we’ve … the right has been … The American mainstream conservatives have been schizophrenic about this problem ever since.
George Hawley
Yeah, I, I agree with all of that. I mean, um, if it … When I think about the, the standard social science definition of populism, we think of it as sort of a dualistic ideology where on the one side you have the pure people, and on the other side you have the corrupt elites, and if you could just get rid of these perfidious elites and allow the pure people to, uh, you know, implement the general will, then all of society’s problems would go away. And so, you know, I argue that the French Revolution was, uh, you know, so influential in so many ways, I think we often will forget that it was also, I would argue, the fir- the first fully successful populist revolution. And so if you think about the French Revolution as having been a populist revolt, then … And if we think about conservatism, modern Anglo-American conservatism being born with Burke-In, uh, the 1790s, then we can think about conservatism from its very origins, at least w- with conservatism as we’re talking about it, as being an anti-populist ideology. And yeah, the, the comment about McCarthy, I think, is, uh, is, is quite appropriate. I think that McCarthy kind of created a bit of a crisis on the right because it did sort of throw out some of, uh, the, you know, the old right theories that, oh, the masses are the problem. And then suddenly you’re finding s- starting to see some right-wing success, but it’s not coming from the elites, it’s coming from a, a demagogue who is getting the masses excited and agitated, and it’s throwing out what seem like basic, uh, conservative constitutional values. But at the same time, for the first time in a decade, conservatives felt like they were winning. If you look at what people were writing at the time, there was a lot of ambivalence about McCarthy. If you f- look about what people like, you know, James Burnham and others were writing, they didn’t like McCarthy, but they also saw, like, well, he is sort of moving the needle in our direction, so what is more important to us?
Jonah Goldberg
Right.
George Hawley
Is it, uh, maintaining, you know, a, a set of principles, or is it winning these perhaps, uh,
George Hawley
ephemeral, but, but still real political victories? And so I think that’s why populism has always been such a great temptation because it, it can, at least in the short term, you know, yield political dividends.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah. So, like I, I, I agree with that. I… Like, the allure of populism to me,
Jonah Goldberg
you know, there are, there are, there are a bunch of,
Jonah Goldberg
let’s call them concepts, that I think people in politics or people interested in politics, they get the is-ought wrong, right? They, they, they impose moral valence onto things. And so, like the one I’ve written the most about is the cult of unity. And you hear it in politics all the time, right? You hear it in pop culture all about sports. You know, it’s like, “If we all work together, we can make this the best yearbook ever,” right? [laughs] You know, to the rhetoric of every single president I can remember, including at times Trump, but really Joe Biden, Barack Obama. But, you know, they all do it, right? That, you know, that there’s nothing we can’t accomplish if we’re not unified. Barack Obama said, “Why can’t America become more like SEAL Team Six where we all work together towards common good?” You know, all these kinds of things. And the simple fact is that unity is an amoral thing, right? It’s like fire. You can do really wonderful things with fire, or you can burn wonderful things down with fire, and it is a kind of power worship masquerading as a political virtue. And, and I think it’s because it, it pings our sweet tooth in terms of, uh, e- in evolutionary terms, is that going back to Darwin talking about how if tribes are unified, that they will have a better chance to survive. And so people f- impose upon unity a moral valence that I don’t think is there. Rape gangs are unified. The mob is unified. The KKK is unified. And they’re like b- the, the Nazis, very unified, right? Like [laughs] it’s, it’s a form of power more than it is a moral status. And so, and so I think populism is another one of these things where people talk about, well, we the people, the people are on our side. You know, the people united will not be defeated. All these kinds of things. And it’s so seductive because it’s, it’s like the Lord of the Rings ring. And like, well, imagine what I could do with this if I marshaled this,
Jonah Goldberg
th- they always end up getting eaten by their own,
Jonah Goldberg
um, by, by the animal spirits that they release.
George Hawley
Yeah. And another problem with an emphasis on unity is that it can be at odds with concepts of sort of deliberation and of compromise. And the question is, okay, who is going to be and what is the institution going to be that is going to promote and maintain this unity? And the answer always ends up being a, uh, a strong executive, right? This is something that conservatives used to warn about. Uh, James Burnham wrote a whole book on this. Uh, Willmoore Kendall, despite being perhaps the most populist of the post-war conservatives, said that Congress needs to be the dominant political force. But, you know, Congress is slow, and it’s messy, and it’s full of compromise. It is not an institution that can claim to speak for the general will. Only the president, right, so has a truly national constituency. And so from the i- from the populist perspective, at least when the president, you know, was on the right team, can say, “Hey, I represent the general will. I’m the one who should be in charge. I’m the one who can… Is the only one who can bring this unity about.” And so what you end up with in the name of, you know, implementing the will of the people is a kind of Caesarism.
Jonah Goldberg
Mm-hmm.
George Hawley
And that’s something that conservatives used to be very, very concerned about, and it’s, uh, you know, quite alarming that that tradition has vanished to such a great extent over the last 10 years.
Jonah Goldberg
Look, uh, Willmoore Kendall was a brilliant dude, and his two majorities stuff is, I, I think, really, really useful for having a better understanding of h- how American politics is supposed to work. You know, the presidential coalition is this ephemeral, momentary thing, but the
Jonah Goldberg
congressional consensus, right, you know, is, it’s much more deeply rooted across the country and, and it is then, it is formed through deliberation, debate, compromise within Congress, and I think just much, much, it’s more authentically democratic, it’s more authentically Republican, both r, small R, small D. And that’s just completely been lost. And it drives me crazy all the things president- presidential candidates say they’re gonna do on day one as if like, “When I bec- get the crown, these are the decrees I will issue.” [laughs] And it’s just like, most of the things they say they’re gonna do, they can’t, they can’t do because that’s not how our system works. And that, I think, has been lost certainly at the rhetorical level in both parties. But the abandonment of understanding separation of powers and enumerated powers and states’ rights and federalism-By big chunks of the Republican Party. I mean, we’re talking on Wednesday, May sixth, and yesterday, a bunch of state senators in Indiana got crushed, um, by the National Party because they defied Trump on some redistricting nonsense. There was a time when… You know, I mean, I, it wasn’t, it was, what, fifteen years ago that Ted Cruz and all these guys were calling themselves Tenthers, you know, after the Tenth Amendment. And that, that notion has just gone completely out the window on the, uh, big chunks of the mainstream Right, and
Jonah Goldberg
I don’t know when it’s gonna come back, if it is.
George Hawley
Yeah, it w- it will be remembered, you know, after the Right has lost power, but it will have lost a lot of the ground, you know, to defend these principles, having thrown it, uh, having thrown them out the window while they were, while they, while they had power. So there’s, there’s going to be a, you know, a, a large amount of hypocrisy as people start once again talking about, uh, the prerogatives of these different, uh, uh, the, of these different institutions. And I think that we’re going to see that, uh, much of the Right will recognize, I hope, that perhaps it won’t openly express it, but it was a mistake to say, “Oh, we need to defer to the President on all things.” And then, you know, this isn’t a purely partisan thing. I would say that, you know, President Obama, you know, expanded the powers of the executive in ways that I consider inappropriate. So I don’t want to come across as just purely bashing conservatives and Republicans. But just because, you know, the Left has done something doesn’t mean that the Right should embrace it as well.
Jonah Goldberg
Right. No, I agree with that entirely. I wanna circle back to a question I was trying to get to and, and butchered. When I was working on my first book, I was told by an inordinate number of people that I had to learn up and go to school on the old Right. So the, uh, which Albert Jay Nock, who’s sort of implicitly name-checked in the title of this podcast, um, although there were other people like McDonald and others who had m- sophisticated ideas of what the remnant was that are different than Nock’s, but we don’t need to get into that. But one of the … I was just told, you know, like Mencken, Nock, J.T. Flynn, Garrett Garrett, you know, like, all these names from the … Ortega y Gasset, right? The era of the s- superfluous men, or I guess is one, one of the phrases that was used back then. And I went back and looked and started reading these guys, and
Jonah Goldberg
I was completely at a loss to try and figure out, other than a certain admirable curmudgeonliness, which I share, [laughs] I was kind of at a loss to figure out what the ideological throughline was for any of these people other than, again, I guess as you referenced before, a certain skepticism or animosity to mass man.
George Hawley
Mm-hmm.
Jonah Goldberg
Is there a coherent ideology, or was it that the old Right was more of a literary phenomenon than an ideological phenomenon, and so talking about it as a coherent ideology really is not gonna make much sense?
George Hawley
I wouldn’t describe it as a single coherent ideology, more as sort of a loose constellation of people who all agreed that they didn’t like Roosevelt and the New Deal. And if there was sort of an ideological throughline, I’d describe it as a kind of aristocratic libertarianism that you see. Probably the misanthropy was most prevalent in somebody like Mencken, but, you know, all of these guys were skeptical of, of the masses. I mean, um, you see it with, uh, yeah, as you mentioned, Garrett Garett, who, uh, really thought that, you know, if, if there is a true aristocracy today, it’s found in sort of the titans of industry and people like, like Henry Ford. You’ve got, uh, you know, the new humanists who were arguing that, uh, people like Irving Babbitt who were arguing that, you know, the celebration of the masses is leading to a, you know, decline in liberal learning and, uh, uh, self-control. But yeah, I would say sort of skepticism of the masses and skepticism of, of big government. So I would say that m- they were more or less, you know, often proto-libertarians, even if they w- even if the term wasn’t, uh-
Jonah Goldberg
Right
George Hawley
… wasn’t in usage at the time.
Jonah Goldberg
I mean, the, the common term,
Jonah Goldberg
maybe not in the ’30s, but, uh, uh, be- certainly in the ’40s, individualist-
Jonah Goldberg
… was the term for libertar- quote-unquote, “libertarians”. I, I don’t even know if people used that term in the ’30s or the ’20s. I’d have to go back and double-check. All right, so I, this is a question I, I d- I know I’m blindsiding you with some of these, but you can handle it. I’ve asked this of a bunch of people. So when I, when I was at National Review, I had full access to the archives, which was great fun, and, um, when I was working on my first book, you know, one of my inspirations for my deep-seeded hatred of Woodrow Wilson [dramatic music] was the, the, the arguments from Claremont in the 2010s. And, and so I went down deep in rabbit holes on my Wilson hatred, and I’m, I’ve a, I, I think I have a fairly well-considered view that FDR and the New Deal were really sort of continuations and accelerations of the groundwork that was laid by the Wilson administration. And
Jonah Goldberg
with an interregnum during the, the ’20s, you know, and the return to normalcy and all that, but, you know, some of the paleo-libertarian crowd are, are s- are very right on some of this stuff, you know? The, most of the agencies of the Alphabet Soup have their roots in stuff that the Wilson administration had done to fight World War I. FDR runs as a, “We’re gonna use the techniques we used in World War I to fight the Great Depression.” William Luckenberg, you know, w- once the dean of FDR historians, has this amazing essay on, uh, the New Deal, his analog of war, and how it was basically just an extension of the war socialism. It wasn’t. And the only reason I bring this up is to sort of level set for, for listeners, is that, um, modern American conservatism almost completely ignores Wilson until about 15 years ago. If I’ve made any contribution, however small, it is to help sort ofMove the clock back twenty years about, you know, the problems with New Deal. I mean, I, I… Or with progressivism. I’m not claiming anything like major credit, but it was like one of the things that I’ve been part of. And if you go back and you look at the old issues of National Review, there’s just basically almost no mentions of the Wilson administration. There’s very few mentions of Herbert Crowley. There are very few mentions of the progressive project. It’s like the things that conservatives were in op- American conservatives were in opposition to
Jonah Goldberg
kind of retroactively start with the New Deal,
Jonah Goldberg
and what came before the New Deal is almost invisible to the narrative of modern American conservatism up until fifteen, twenty years ago. Do you, do you have an explanation for that? Like, wh- wh- why does that happen?
George Hawley
I think it’s the best explanation for it would probably be that, uh, y- you know, if you’re trying to sell sort of a, a coherent narrative that a lot of people can get behind, it’s simpler to say that we had a good America that then was broken with this one pivotal event, and that being the 1932 election and saying that everything was fine prior to that. And, and you will see s- you know, strange things that different conservatives are saying. Like, I’ve always found it really kind of mystifying when Russell Kirk, when he was listing his examples of, you know, the most exemplary conservatives in American history, and he lists, you know, Teddy Roosevelt, who-
Jonah Goldberg
Mm-hmm
George Hawley
… I would consider a progressive in a lot of ways.
Jonah Goldberg
Sure.
George Hawley
And, um, so I think there was a degree of romanticizing those first decades of the twentieth century, which, you know, makes some sense. It was, you know, a, in a lot of ways, a conservative era, but we also forget, you know, that in, uh, in the 1912 election, it, you know, it’s a four-way race between three progressives and a socialist.
Jonah Goldberg
Mm-hmm.
George Hawley
So I think, you know, there’s probably… Perhaps there’s a better explanation as to why they kind of disregarded Wilson, but, um, my guess is that it mostly has to do with trying to, you know, sell a, a, a simple and fairly coherent story. But that’s, that’s more of a guess than, you know, a, a scholarly explanation.
Jonah Goldberg
I really struggle with it, and I come up with… Every now and then I’ll come up with a new theory of it. I think part of it also is that,
Jonah Goldberg
you know, when you talk about opposition to FDR being right-wing, this is one of my… This is one of the other things I learned deep diving is that what got… Uh, the, the causation was almost backwards, is that if you hated FDR, that made you right-wing. It wasn’t that if you were right-wing, you hated FDR. So you have people who
Jonah Goldberg
would count as sort of left of center or even far left people, but because they hated FDR, they were dubbed right-wing as a result. And it, it shows you how dominant FDR was in American politics, that he was in some ways like Trump, right? I mean, like right now, if you oppose Trump, you’re considered… I mean, like these guys in Indiana, right? The only thing they disagreed with Trump on was about redistricting in Indiana, and all of a sudden that makes them rhino squishes, you know, and all the rest. There’s something about some politicians that can shake up, that becomes so popular with one segment and so unpopular with another, that left right gets mapped onto them in weird ways. And so like if you look at some of the people who come out of the 1920s and ’30s, they, they become called right-wing in part because of their stance towards FDR, but then it becomes their stance towards communism, which worked the same way. And so like Joseph McCarthy was not a particularly conservative dude, right? And he starts out, I believe, as a sort of a Democrat. And even if you’re a Republican in progressive Wisconsin, in La- in La Follette’s pr- Wisconsin, odds are you’re gonna be pretty progressive, right? It’s just that, you know, whether you call yourself a Republican or a Democrat. But he was virulently anti-communist, and that all of a sudden I think defines
Jonah Goldberg
the scorekeeping on right-wing versus left-wing in ways that it’s difficult to appreciate if you’re just reading the contemporary s- stuff. Like Richard Elliot, the University of Wisconsin, if he had lived another twenty years, I think would have been called right-wing, even though I think he was essentially a socialist. But I don’t know. I, I go back and forth about it.
George Hawley
Yeah, I would agree with that. I mean, I, I… You know, like Mencken, right, is sort of considered sort of the quintessential old right thinker, but I would argue that probably in the 1990s at the peak of his popularity around the time of the Scopes trial, I don’t think that a lot of people reading him would have coded him as a right-wing thinker, um, you know, you know, attacking, uh, fundamentalists in Tennessee. It really probably wasn’t until the New Deal era that people started thinking of him as a, you know, a, a far right-
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah
George Hawley
… uh, uh, thinker.
Jonah Goldberg
I mean, that… This is… Have you read The Myth of Left and Right by the Lewis brothers?
George Hawley
I have not.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah, I’d be curious what you think about it.
Jonah Goldberg
I still think left and right are u- have utility as categories, so I don’t think they’re completely a myth, but it changed my thinking about a bunch of these things, and part of it is just simply the, um, the chronology insofar as I know left and right begins with the seating chart of the French National Assembly, but in America, it was not used to describe anybody basically until the Bolshevik Revolution. And then journalists originally categorizing the left and right in Russia, people started self IDing as left and right in the United States only really in beginning in like the late ’20s and, and ’30s. And so like the, the practice of like figuring out which f- which Founding Fathers were on the left and which were on the right is, is really a, a imposition, a modernist imposition, uh, retroactively on the past that I don’t think,
Jonah Goldberg
I don’t think any of those guys,
Jonah Goldberg
obviously since the French Revolution came after the American Revolution, they certainly wouldn’t have seen themselves as left or right in those terms at all. Um, but we retroactively impose those terms on a lot of characters in defiance of how they saw themselves.
George Hawley
Oh, I totally agree. I was thinking about this when you talked about how populism, um, you know, in the 19th century would … We would call a, a, a phenomenon of the left, but I don’t know that that necessarily applies to somebody like, say, Andrew Jackson, right?
Jonah Goldberg
Mm-hmm. Right.
George Hawley
And I don’t know that it, you know, th- there he had certain negative characteristics, certain positive ones, but I wouldn’t call him either a proto leftist or a sort of proto conservative. Though-
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah
George Hawley
… these terms, you know, really I don’t necessarily think apply once you get far enough back in time, unless you’re thinking of in a, in a very, very, in a high level abstract way.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah. Yeah.
George Hawley
But even then, it becomes a, a bit challenging to figure out where you’re … where you’ll put, say, sort of like the Whigs versus the Jacksonians.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah. No, that’s a good point. I mean, it … I think it’s fair to say Jackson was Caesarist.
George Hawley
Mm-hmm.
Jonah Goldberg
But that’s a, you know, Caesar- There are left wing Caesarists and right wing Caesarists, you know?
George Hawley
Yeah, I was gonna say, I also agree with your statement about Father Coughlin. Um, you know, really his only, you know, attribute that we can, we can call right wing would be his really intense antisemitism. But b- beyond that, you know, his, his economic platform is really not distinguishable from, from Huey Long’s. So unless you’re saying that left wing Semitism is a, you know, a contradiction in terms, which I don’t think is true, or yeah, that just being antisemite is enough to become right wing, then I would, I would certainly put him on the left.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah, I mean, I, uh, the only way I think it’s fair to say his antisemitism made him right wing is that in the 1930s,
Jonah Goldberg
antisemitism was coded as right wing because Hitler and the Nazis were seen as, for understandable [laughs] reasons, antisemitic, and the Soviets and the Bolsheviks were not at that point. And so hating Jews in that era coded as right wing, but the idea that left wingers don’t … There are no antisemites on the left is preposterous today or even back then. I mean, and also, you know, Stalin, not a huge friend of the Jews, you know? Um [laughs]-
George Hawley
Yeah. Yeah. I was gonna s- I, I was about to make that point that, um, well, if you’re going by that, uh, by that definition, that makes Stalin perhaps a right-winger, which of course m- makes the, the concepts completely, uh, com-
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah. It gets all goofy after a while. Yeah, I agree. But since we’re on antisemitism and all that, talk to me about your book on conservatives and identity politics.
George Hawley
Yeah. That was, um, that makes the case that
George Hawley
there’s something a little bit disingenuous about the conservative argument that conservatism is fundamentally and always has been rejecting of identity politics per se. And, you know, I’m not saying that it, that … I, I think it would be ideal if we could get completely away from, you know, the politics of identity, but I don’t think it’s necessarily realistic, and I think we can see all sorts of examples throughout the history of the conservative movement of, you know, making identity sort of central to the political case. I mean, you could make the argument, I would say, that sort of Phyllis Schlafly was, was arguing for a kind of a specific type of feminine identity-
George Hawley
… and making that central to, to her political project. In a sense, the best thing I can say about sort of the conservative rejection of identity politics is that it is, you know, for at, at best, kind of a noble lie, like or at least an aspiration, but something that’s never really been fully achieved, and I would argue probably is not ultimately achievable. Just as we look at the, all the findings that we found in sort of the fields of, uh, you know, public opinion and political psychology, it increasingly looks like for most people, partisanship is ultimately downstream from social identity, uh, which is unfortunate, but probably the, the reality of the thing. But what’s become most fascinating to me that is becoming harder and harder to dispute is the degree to which partisanship itself has become a key element of people’s social identity and who they are. That is, people don’t say, you know, “I support the Republican Party because of X, Y, Z pol- policy.” People say, “I am a Republican,” or, “I am a Democrat,” and that’s sort of who they are. And a nice thing about that finding though is that it helps us to understand how it is that people can have such intensely strong feelings about election outcomes and partisan fights, despite being more or less 100% ignorant of the actual stakes involved. Um, that we kind of root for political parties in a way that’s not totally dissimilar to how we root for sports teams, and that, um, sort of … That it might be useful for conservatives. If conservatism is going to take seriously this notion that, you know, what conservatives care about is a realistic view of human nature, then what we need to do is, you know, ac- accept this as a given as well, that this, that this is sort of part of our, our political psychologies. Um, I don’t really get very much into the antisemitism question in, in that book though i- in any-
Jonah Goldberg
Well, that’s fine. I just … Uh, the, the antisemitism is a kind of identity politics.
George Hawley
Yeah.
Jonah Goldberg
So that’s what brought it to mind. That’s all. That said, the way I try to explain it to people is that I think ethnic politics
Jonah Goldberg
are inherent to politics.
George Hawley
Mm-hmm.
Jonah Goldberg
Right? Because it’s a, it’s … Politics are about coalitions, right? And like I remember 15, 10, 15 years ago how obsessed some people on the right were with how outrageous it was for American politicians to campaign in Spanish,
Jonah Goldberg
and I was like, “Do you think that, like,
Jonah Goldberg
Ben Franklin, like, ridiculed people who spoke German to Germans in Western Pennsylvania in, you know, the 1790s or whatever?” I mean, like, like, politics … Ethnic politics is not identity politics though in my mind, right? ‘Cause identity politics just simply says that some identity, you know, gender, race, whatever,
Jonah Goldberg
is tantamount to being all explanatory about who you are-
George Hawley
Mm-hmm
Jonah Goldberg
… and that you cannot escape that iron cage, right? Ethnic politics says, “We do goulash here in this Hungarian neighborhood, and politicians should eat goulash when they come visit us on our, on our Hungarian Independence Day,” or whatever it is. That’s fine, right? That’s melting pot Americana.But I, the hard notion of identity is different, and I agree with you entirely that the problem with a lot of the partisanship stuff is that it is mapping as if it’s an ethnicity or a- as if it’s a religion. It’s becoming predictive of … Like, I remember Yascha Mounk point– I think it was Yascha Mounk pointing to some studies
Jonah Goldberg
about discrimination in America, and
Jonah Goldberg
these researchers, like at Yale, will do these fake resumes, and they’ll have focus groups see who they hire and re- measure implicit bias and whatever. And so they’ll put, like, Jewish names on a resume or they’ll put, you know, recognizably Black either names or things that will make it clear that the applicant is Black or gay or man or woman, all these different qualifiers. And they’ll find some level of this, you know, bias. It’s not off the charts. It’s much less than it would’ve been fifty or a hundred years ago and all the rest, but, you know, it exists. It’s the– in, not in everybody, but it, it’s a thing in life. And, and then they’ll put little tells saying Republican or Democrat, and it’s like Jim Crow level bigotry [chuckles] where Republicans want nothing to do with Democrats and Democrats want nothing to do with Republicans. And you get to this point where, like I was on a trip in Europe, and the guy who ran this tour group that we were on said they’ve had a huge drop-off in business from Americans ’cause Americans are terrified of having to talk about politics with people they disagree with while on vacation. And I hear those kinds of stories all the time, and it’s really … I used to criticize Democrats for thinking your partisan affiliation was the window on your soul, and now it’s at least as strong on, on the Republican side as well, that tendency.
George Hawley
Yeah, I agree. Uh, part of it, I think, is that ideological and partisan hatred is, is an acceptable hatred, right? In a way that people, um, would feel bad saying, “Oh, I hate group XYZ.” Um, people not only feel no problem saying, “I hate people from the opposite party or ideology,” you know, it can positively make them feel like a better, more public-spirited person. Um, you know, if you aren’t angry, if you don’t hate them, you don’t know what time it is. So that, uh, you know, you get to indulge some very negative personal characteristics, and not only not feel bad about it, but you can feel like, you know, you’re a better citizen because of it. And I think that is, uh, that might be one of the negative downstream effects of the degree to which we’re kind of laundering these other identities through this filter of partisanship, which, um, allows us to, you know, have this, this guilt-free indulgence of all of the, this, uh, you know, group-based identities.
Jonah Goldberg
All right, in the time we have left, I’m just gonna be incredibly self-serving and just throw at you things that I’m just curious about your opinion on about what I believe. So as you’re probably aware, there’s occasionally explicit, but long-simmering implicit debate on various factions on the right about whether conservatism is an ideology or not. Russell Kirk liked to quote H. Stuart Hughes, who said, I would say famously, but no one knows who he was except for, like, six people. But anyway, um, H. Stuart Hughes used to say, “Conservatism is the negation of ideology.” This is the conservatism as temperament, essentially, kind of wing of things. And you can draw from Burke to a certain extent on this, right, because Burke doesn’t like sweeping abstractions. He thinks everything has a limiting principle and that wisdom, blah, blah, blah, blah. We can get into it. And then on the other side of it are people like one of my favorites, um, Eric von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, who throws cold water on all that and says, “Look, all an ideology is, is, is a worldview.” In fact, if you look up the definitions, they are interchangeable terms, and I’m much more on that side. I think ideology is basically just sort of a checklist of priorities that you bring to things, hopefully well-considered. But I think the way that some of these people use ideology, they mean it as like this something that sets fires to the mind of men level of pure abstraction, which I’m against, right? But that’s not necessarily what
Jonah Goldberg
ideology is. Where do you come down on this? Is conservatism an ideology or is it not?
George Hawley
I’m inclined to call it one, and, uh, that all depends on how you define it, right? Because Russell Kirk would say that ideology is the, is indistinguishable from political fanaticism, that, uh, an ideologue is somebody who has a utopian vision and a platform and a program that is going to bring it about. And therefore, a conservative cannot, by definition, be an ideologue. But, you know, plenty of, uh, conservative thinkers disagreed with that. Um, you know, Huntington, who we mentioned earlier, disagreed with that. He said it, you know, it, so it’s a, it’s a semi-coherent set of principles that you use to guide policy. Robert Nisbet disagreed with that and said that too. It, it, conservatism is, uh, perfectly fine to describe it as an ideology as long as we think about it as a sort of a semi-coherent set of principles. And so I, I have no objection to, to calling conservatism, whether we’re think– talking about that narrowly or broadly in, in ideological terms. But my, my big problem with Russell Kirk, like, and I admire Kirk in a lot of ways, is he had a tendency to write things so, in a really abstract way and, um, say stuff that superficially sounded really wise. And then if you ask like, “Well, what do I do with that?” The answer is usually not clear. Like, “Oh, well, conservatism is about prudence.”
Jonah Goldberg
Mm-hmm. Right.
George Hawley
Okay. [chuckles]
Jonah Goldberg
No, it, it’s also like i- in a lot of those, those framings that he does, you could just flip them around. Conservatism is about prudence. What is prudence? Prudence is about conservatism.
Jonah Goldberg
You know, [chuckles] it’s like they’re, there’s … I agree with you. It, it’s a frustration of mine when I read, when read Kirk as well.
Jonah Goldberg
My formulation for a very long time has been
Jonah Goldberg
that American conservatism is about more than classical liberalism,
Jonah Goldberg
but an American conservatism that doesn’t conserve classical liberalism isn’t worth conserving. And I find it, of all of the things that are dismaying about the last ten years,
Jonah Goldberg
I always knew there were the fever swamp people. I mean, that they’re more influential than they used to be, that the gatekeeping has broken down, all that.It bums me out, you know, but, like, having been in National Review for 20 years, getting, you know, hateful stuff from Vdare fans, you know, and Lew Rockwell people, like, I, I knew these people existed, and they’re having … They’ve had a moment and whatever. That’s fine. What I find the most disturbing in some ways is the more mainstream figures on the American r- o- of the American conservative movement moving away from reverence for classical liberalism. People tend to define it in economic terms, but classical liberalism is also about limited government. And I’m tr- just trying to figure out, do you think that’s temporary? Do you think that’s basically tied to the Trump years and will go away? Was there a comparable moment that I’m forgetting in … since World War II where conservatism turn- mainstream conservatism turned on classical liberalism? And, like, do you think classical liberalism is part of American conservatism, and that without it, it’s not really American conservatism properly understood?
George Hawley
I would argue that, you know, a, any conservatism that I would want to be a part of in the United States wants to preserve the classical liberal tradition. And it’s hard to say … I …
George Hawley
You can be right-wing and totally reject the classical liberal tradition. That’s obviously true. But the question is, is whether you can be a proper American conservative and com- and fundamentally reject something that was so essential to the political culture of, uh, the revolutionary era. That … A simplification, obviously. There was elements that were not part of the classical liberal tradition. You have sort of the Puritan tradition and all these other things. But y- y- you’re not going to convince me that sort of classical liberal thinking was not essential to the early American project. And if you’re totally rejecting that, then you are rejecting something that is fundamental and important about America itself, which y- you know, you can do, and you can be right-wing and do that, but are you properly an American conservative? I would say no. And so the, the degree to which we see a conservative movement that is openly rejecting that tradition, I would say, does represent a genuinely new phenomenon, and one that I would consider alarming.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah. My, my friend Charlie Cooke, I had him on earlier this week, by the time people hear this last week, and
Jonah Goldberg
Charlie and I, we, we have our disagreements over what to be concerned about and what to emphasize, but on the fundamental philosi- philosophical stuff, we’re almost completely simpatico on most questions. And I used to reject horseshoe theory entirely because American conservatism
Jonah Goldberg
had this dogmatic thing about the Constitution, about classical liberalism. If you talked about conservative economists, you were talking about libertarian economists, right?
George Hawley
Yeah.
Jonah Goldberg
Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell and all the rest. And as long as that was essential to American conservatism, it couldn’t be fascist, right? I mean, the fascists were not
Jonah Goldberg
… First of all, they w- They, they, they weren’t free marketers. [laughs] They weren’t, uh, believers in limited government and, you know, and, and checks and balances, and they, they, they weren’t Orthodox Christians. I mean, you just go down a list. And so the horseshoe theory nonsense of a lot of mid-20th century American political science, I utterly rejected. And the thing is, once you get rid of the liberalism in American conservatism, horseshoe theory makes total sense to me, right? And then because then it is right-wing identity politics versus left-wing identity politics, right? Then it is right-wing statism versus left-wing statism. And, and Charlie had a nice formulation about this. He just basically said, “Look, I, I kinda am a binary guy, and I think there’s liberal things, and there are illiberal things, and some of them might code right-wing, and some of them might code left-wing, but, like, to me, they’re all over there, and I’m over here.” And I f- I th- That’s basically how I see it now, and it’s just very, very difficult given the damage done to the word liberal on the American right to figure out how to talk about liberalism properly understood as being conservative. And I’m just wondering, do you have vocabulary that you, that works with your students that other people recognize as, like, persuasive? ‘Cause I’m, I’m literally looking for words to use to explain this stuff to people.
George Hawley
Well, my hope is that we might see a revival of liberalism as a, as a useful concept again, um, not so much because of anything that conservatives are doing, but the degree to which the left has stopped using the term liberal often-
Jonah Goldberg
Mm-hmm
George Hawley
… as a self-description. And, uh, I frankly welcome the movement to more often call themselves progressives-
Jonah Goldberg
Me too
George Hawley
… rather than liberal. First of all, it seems more in- intuitive than conservative versus liberal. Conservative versus progressive seems like a, a more logical dichotomy. But to the degree to which the left kind of abandons liberalism as, as a self-description, you know, there may be an opening for people who are on the center right to start using it again without, you know, confusing everybody. Is that likely in the near fu- near term? I’m not sure, but, um, I think we are at least moving more in that direction.
Jonah Goldberg
All right. So maybe the last question, then I will stop abusing your time. So I love the George Nash book, The Conservative Intellectual Movement Since 1945. I mean, there are only a handful of books that I have read more than twice, and that’s one of them. It was sort of how I
Jonah Goldberg
learned the conservative extended universe growing up on that book in the 1990s. And, and so I don’t wanna take anything away from Nash, who’s a, just a lovely gentleman and brilliant guy, but it’s just one story, right? It is one version of where conservatism comes from. It’s one narrative. I think it’s a very good narrative. It is very top-heavy with, with intellectuals, which is fine. If you’re doing an intellectual history, you should probably focus on intellectuals. But there’s … You know, political history is not just the story of intellectuals. And then there are other histories of American conservatism. Uh, my friend and colleague, Matt Continetti, he begins in the 1920s andI’m just kinda curious as a, as a professional scholar of conservatism, where do you start the story? Do you agree with Nash? Do you agree with… I mean, uh, d- would you go earlier? Would you go later?
George Hawley
I mean, yeah. One, one of the big challenges for all of us who sort of work in this space is it’s really hard to not take kind of a National Review centric approach.
Jonah Goldberg
Mm-hmm.
George Hawley
In part because, you know, it’s the old joke about the, uh, you know, the drunk who’s looking for his keys, and he’s looking where, where the light is, and the written word is something we ha- can easily access. And so, you know, I find it useful. Let’s go back to the old National Review archives and start in 1955, and we can sort of trace a lot of these things. But there was so much that was happening outside of that, right? We think about it’s really hard to study, you know, what was going on in that first wave of right-wing talk radio, right? ‘Cause we don’t have, you know, uh, Billy James Hargis’ sermons that we can un- and, uh, or radio programs except for little clips here and there, even though they were massively influential. So I simultaneously recognize the problem but don’t have an easy solution to get around it. We can get a little bit of, uh, extra leverage by also studying, you know, the degree to which we have, you know, public opinion and things that were going on in the broader electorate during these periods. But it, it’s a, it’s a really, uh, tough, tough thing to do. And of course, there’s a little bit of path dependency, right? Nash is the one who kicks off this field of study, and so all of us are kind of following in his footsteps-
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah
George Hawley
… and sort of starting in the same place. But in terms of the other question of where does the story start, I, I really liked Colonnaetti’s book, and I think-
Jonah Goldberg
Mm-hmm
George Hawley
… that the 1920s is a, is a reasonable place to start. If you go much farther back than that, then trying to decide, you know, as we already talked about, who’s left and who is right gets, gets harder and harder as, as the, as the farther back in time you go.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things you have to kinda do, ’cause I’m, I’m on this deep in rabbit holes on, on this question, and I think there’s a case to be made that it’s really in the 1840s and 1850s insofar as when you still have the revolutionary generation alive, conserving, conserving what? Right? You know, it’s like these people are still here. The revolution is still fresh in people’s minds. It’s really that second and third generation after where people are, are starting to look backwards and say, “What are we gonna hold on to? What is the continuity?” You know? It, it’s where, where the whole, you know, the Whiggish Lincoln looking at the ideas that form the sort of mission statement of America and the Declaration and all of that, there’s a kind of conservatism that emerges there. It doesn’t mean… It doesn’t have the ideological political valence that conservatism in 1920, never mind 1955, has, but there’s something there. But really you have to start looking at the,
Jonah Goldberg
the history of classical liberalism in America, which goes back, understand, obviously further, in some ways to the Founding, and then there are the people who wanna hold on to that versus the people who wanna move beyond it. And but it gets complicated. It’s like any histor- every historian has to pick almost an arbitrary date to say, “This is when it begins,” and Nash has helped because
Jonah Goldberg
sec- the end of Second World War is a great place to start, right? I mean, it just is obvious. It’s, it’s intellectually defensible,
Jonah Goldberg
but everything has a prehistory.
George Hawley
Yeah, that, that mid-1800s period is so fascinating. I would almost think about it as not so much as a right versus left as sort of competing conservatisms-
Jonah Goldberg
Mm-hmm
George Hawley
… ’cause depending on who you’re talking to, you know, you could, uh, you know, uh, Russell Kirk thought that Calhoun was an exemplary conservative. Um, but, uh, you could also say that there was a, you know, a type of conservatism in the thinking of Henry Clay and in Daniel Webster, and these three guys, you know, they were all conservative, I would say, in different ways in terms of what it was that they s- they sought to conserve. Um, but none of them would I describe as, as left as-
Jonah Goldberg
Mm-hmm
George Hawley
… as we mean it today. Um, so, so yeah, this, uh, trying to continuously map on, you know, our contemporary terms in the more distant past, I think it’s, gets really, really difficult. And so I would say, yeah, uh, I don’t necessarily disagree with, uh, you know, Continetti’s approach in, uh, the book I’m finishing up now. I’m, I’m more or less starting that era, but, uh, Nash’s decision to start immediately after World War II I think is a highly defensible one, because that was what fucked a break with, with earlier period points in American history.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah. Uh, the only thing I would say that I think Nash… Again, I love Nash. It’s a great book, but and there are gonna be problems with when you start anywhere, right?
George Hawley
Mm-hmm.
Jonah Goldberg
You’re al- uh, by definition you’re leaving people out. But I think that one… I wrote about this not too long ago. I think people don’t appreciate the, the valence of Me Too Republican, right? So there was this phrase, I mean, I know you know this, you know, that Me Too Republican was the, the rhino of its day. It was this idea of, you know, Eisenhower kind of betrayed the right by basically making the New Deal bipartisan and not tearing it all down. And so this was like the, the people who were accommodating the Nelson Rockefellers, even the Richard Nixons, the people who were accommodating the statism of the New Deal rather than going back to the s- the, the Edenic pre-world, pre-Depression past and all of that. And I think that one of the things that people,
Jonah Goldberg
like by the 1950s when people are talking about how Taft wasn’t a Me Too Republican and then Goldwater wasn’t a Me Too Republican, that there was…
Jonah Goldberg
That was tapping into a prehistory about the 1930s where there was a lot of ugly stuff about, you know, Franklin Delano Rosenberg and a lot of Coughlin sort of populist right-wing-stuff about how, you know, FDR was a secret communist, and so the, the, and the Jews were popular inside the New Deal administration, and there was a weird kind of anti-Semitic American fascist ugly gross stuff going on, and the Me Too Republican thing was a dilu- much more diluted, but still an echo, the ro– callback to some of that, and I think some of that is missing in the Nash book. Or does it f- I don’t know how important it is, but I think it’s important enough that it, it was y- more useful context than g- than I think people realized.
George Hawley
Yeah, I would agree with that. I’m, uh, thinking about my favorite example of that would probably be, uh, someone I’ve mentioned before, Schlafly’s book, A Choice, Not an Echo.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah.
George Hawley
Like, you know, conservatives will still cite it as, oh, this was an important watershed, but, like, that book was Alex Jones level
George Hawley
conspiratorial-
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah, yeah
George Hawley
… crazy about, oh, NATO troops, you know, protecting this secret meeting where the Republicans would secretly gather with the Democrats and plan how they were going to lose.
Jonah Goldberg
Right.
George Hawley
Um, and that this was, you know, selling more than a million copies in, uh, in 1964.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah.
George Hawley
And so that element of the right, um, I think does get lost, especially when the right is talking about itself.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah. No, I think that’s right. Like, the Gerald L., LK Smith, I mean, there were these, these weirdos who I think ideologically were kinda left wing in terms of their… I mean, you read Coughlin’s, you know, stuff about the National Union for Social Justice, and it’s,
Jonah Goldberg
it’s to FDR’s left in terms of-
George Hawley
Mm-hmm
Jonah Goldberg
… how to organize the economy, but he gets pinged as right wing. But I think there’s a lot of norm- normie people on the ground who, because they don’t think in these ideological categories, they think you can be right wing and, like, crazy statist and all of that. And again, I’m not denigrating Nash,
Jonah Goldberg
but that kind of social history of populism gets left out when you’re doing a purely intellectual history of conservatism. And, you know, uh, Paul Matzko at Cato has this great stuff about talk radio in the ’60s that taps into some of this stuff. The Birchers stuff was a populist thing that kinda gets cartoonified in a lot of the intellectual history that I don’t like the Birchers, but like… Anyway, I, I just think there’s an interesting prehistory there that doesn’t quite get the academic respect that it deserves, never mind the intellectual respect.
George Hawley
Yeah, and this is something I, I really couldn’t, you know, get for that short piece I did for y’all. I, you know, I don’t wanna give the impression that there was the good non-populist conservatism that had been dominant for 70 years, and then suddenly on a dime it switched to the bad-
Jonah Goldberg
Mm-hmm
George Hawley
… you know, populist conservatism under Trump. I mean, we can see some of the more problematic elements of Trumpism already starting to take hold, like, during the Tea Party era, which, yeah, you know, I wouldn’t describe the Tea Party movement overall as being that distinct from, you know, mainstream conservatism in terms of its policy objectives. But in terms of its style and tone and-
Jonah Goldberg
Mm-hmm
George Hawley
… um, ramping up partisan anger almost as an end unto itself, I’d say sort of set the stage for, for Trumpism in some ways. Um, that this notion that populism could be used kind of instrumentally, I think, ultimately proved to be a mistake because the people who were running those institutions, I think, ended up losing control of the movement that, that they were trying to shepherd.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that’s a good point. All right, I really, ’cause I just like nerding out on this stuff, I’ve abused my privileges. Thank you for indulging me, um,
Jonah Goldberg
particularly with all of my weariness. And George Hawley, uh, I hope you’ll come back. When your, when your next book is done, let me know, and we’ll have you back for that.
George Hawley
Will do. Thank you so much. This has been wonderful.
George Hawley
[air whooshes]
Jonah Goldberg
All right, George Hawley has left the studio. Obviously, I have more thoughts. I coulda done this for a l- another couple hours. Again, this is gonna be one of these podcasts that some people really like and some people stop listening to three minutes in. So be it. And I want to apologize to people. I know I apologize about being tired all the time, but, like,
Jonah Goldberg
I had a 6:00 a.m. CNN hit this morning, and I ended up having to walk the dogs in this new neighborhood where I l- am living in this rented apartment until our new house is ready, and it was a whole thing. And so I woke up at before 4:00. And so I only say this in case I s- if I sounded drunk, I promise you I wasn’t. If I was slurring, if I just started blurting out, “Look, cows,” um, for no apparent reason, I don’t remember it. I w- I don’t even remember what I said 10 seconds ago. But I just wanted to get that out there. I’m gonna go home and nap and then write a G file. I’m not gonna try and sum up all my thoughts about this conversation now because, look, cows.
Jonah Goldberg
So with that, I’ll see you next time.
George Hawley
No, you will not. This is a podcast. [upbeat music]
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah.
Jonah Goldberg
[upbeat music]