In this episode of The Future of Liberty, Governor Mitch Daniels sits down with Matthew Continetti, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and founding editor of the Washington Free Beacon, to examine the evolving landscape of American conservatism in the age of Trump. Drawing on historical context, Continetti explores whether the MAGA movement represents a natural evolution of conservative thought—or a populist departure from its traditional principles.
In this episode of The Future of Liberty, Governor Mitch Daniels sits down with Matthew Continetti, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and founding editor of the Washington Free Beacon, to examine the evolving landscape of American conservatism in the age of Trump. Drawing on historical context, Continetti explores whether the MAGA movement represents a natural evolution of conservative thought—or a populist departure from its traditional principles.
Intro (00:02):
Welcome to the Future of Liberty, a project of Liberty Fund hosted by Mitch Daniels.
Mitch Daniels (00:18):
Greetings everyone and welcome to the latest edition of The Future of Liberty, a podcast presentation of the Liberty Fund, an organization devoted for 70 years to the promotion of freedom, individual dignity and autonomy. Our guest today, despite his tender years, is one of America's most respected historians of conservative thought and of politics generally. Matthew Continetti is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, the founder of the Washington Free Beacon, and one of the best read, most thoughtful commentators on today's scene, which he comes to armed with a deep understanding of how we got to where we got historically. Matthew, thank you so much for making time to be with us.
Matthew Continetti (01:04):
Thank you for having me. It's great to be here.
Mitch Daniels (01:06):
I want to start with something slightly off track, but not unrelated. You happen to be a graduate of Columbia University, which has been more in the public eye in the last couple of years than probably it wishes it had been. Tell me, what's your take about, first of all, the notion of a private university signing a consent decree about the way conduct its business with the national government?
Matthew Continetti (01:37):
Sure. Well, just on the principle of the thing, it is a fact that research institutions and universities in this country rely heavily on federal funds, and I personally don't think it's out of the ordinary that when you accept these federal funds, you have to follow the applicable federal laws. In this case, Columbia and several other institutions of higher learning have been accused by the Trump administration of violating the Civil Rights Act, and not just in terms of the conduct permitted in the harassment of Jewish students on campus, but also in the case of Harvard University, which is also engaged in the battle with the Trump administration over violating the Supreme Court findings that essentially said there was no right to racial discrimination in college admissions. So, at the level of principle, I see nothing wrong with what the Trump administration is doing, and I know to say further about Columbia in particular, I went to Columbia, I arrived in the autumn of 1999.
(02:55):
I graduated four years later, the spring of 2003, and I visited Columbia as a guest speaker in 2019. It was the first time I had been invited by a student group to talk to Columbia students in the craft center that the Student Activity Center. And I was told before I arrived on campus that there was going to be tickets, registration, and security for my talk. This surprised me. I'm not the most confrontational polemicist. I have beliefs, I try to make them clear in my arguments, but I'm not an Ann Coulter. I'm not a Ben Shapiro. I'm kind of an intellectual who writes for little magazines. So, I asked why, why were they requiring security to hear my talk on the conservative legal movement, the history of the conservative legal movement? And the answer came back was that the administration of Columbia at that time had reviewed my recent work and found my support for now Justice Brett Kavanaugh alarming.
(04:09):
And because I argued in a column that the Senate should call the role on Kavanaugh after the torture that he and his family were put through, I was deemed a risk. Now that was four years before October 7th, 2023, when Hamas invaded Israel killed 1200 innocent people, spirited away hundreds of hostages. And then on October 8th, 2023, the world exploded in this antisemitic orgy that is still ongoing. And Columbia in particular has been the incubator of much of the anti-Semitic, anti-Zionism we see in America today. That's a consequence of a very important professor who taught at Columbia, actually died not long before I graduated the literary scholar, Edward Said, and it was Said's legacy to hire several faculty members who then hired other faculty members who shared his anti-Israel views. And in the generation since I graduated from Columbia, those views have become so embedded in the institution that I have said publicly. I think that the only option left is the Carthaginian option for a school that I enjoyed. My time at Columbia, I learned quite a bit thanks to its core curriculum, but I believe it's almost hopelessly corrupt at this stage.
Mitch Daniels (05:46):
Well, it's sad to hear. And let me then just ask one more question. They're on there, I think, third president over this time period. There was some attempt to enforce order after a recent invasion of I guess the library. There are at least rumors that punishment will follow, but I don't think we've seen it yet. Do you have any hope that for reform from within or you stay with the judgment you just gave?
Matthew Continetti (06:13):
You know, I don't have much hope for reform from within at Columbia, and that is why I largely support what the Trump administration is doing. I wish that the leverage that the Trump administration had wasn't in the STEM money, wasn't in the money that we provide, the science and engineering, the technological research that is important in that if government's going to fund anything, it should be funding that. However, you have to work with the tools at your disposal. Also, those STEM fields, by the way, the professors there were pretty silent as this anti-Western anti-Israel, anti-Jewish ideology grew and grew at Columbia. And so, I am largely supportive of what's happening here. And I think the solution is pretty simple. These schools should enforce the law. They should expel everyone involved in the harassment of Jewish students, the destruction and occupation of private property, the trespass, the violation of property rights, and they should follow Supreme Court precedent and not judge by race in college admissions. And they should make it a point, and I am not asking for affirmative action for conservative professors, but they should make it a point at least to understand how radically monolithic the position of their faculty and administration is and what needs to be done in order to change that.
Mitch Daniels (07:47):
Yeah, thanks. We will move on to broader subjects, but this is one of several contexts I'd like to ask you about in which a current administration which calls itself or sometimes labeled as conservative has found it necessary or advisable to exercise the power of the central government in ways that conservatives have traditionally been opposed to or very hesitant about. So, let's talk about a little of this. I think a question that great historians, political historians like you need to help us all understand these days is this new phenomenon personified by President Trump, some believe is an evolution of conservative thought. Some believe it is a sharp departure, maybe an entirely new set of principles and a philosophy loosely described as populism by many and something it's neither that its personality based and therefore might or might not live on past this presidency. So let me ask you, first of all, should this complex of policies be thought of as conservative or an extension of conservative thought? Lemme just give you a few suggestions. The president has ruled, has basically institutionalized the welfare state. He's ruled off the table and reforms in the programs that dominate the federal budget. Now he seems indifferent to the federal debt that we've accumulated and its continued growth. He's been willing to use the agencies of government waves we just talked about aggressively against the people in institutions. He's asserted powers like the ability to unilaterally establish tariffs that may or may not be consistent with history.
(09:57):
And while he's at it, he doesn't mind wading into Walmart's business or whether Pete Rose should be in the Hall of fame. So, are these the actions of someone we should think of as today's conservative or is it something wholly new and different?
Matthew Continetti (10:11):
That's a big question. There are actions that you should think of as coming from Donald Trump. And Donald Trump is not easily pigeonholed. He sometimes calls himself a conservative, but it's not often. He has used the label nationalist more often. I think I should ask AI to do a survey of his language, of his self-identifiers. But in addition to conservative, he's called himself a nationalist. And in the past few years he's even dropped the nationalist a little bit. He talks more and more about the fact that he is common sense and common sense, is an interesting label because it's not ideological, it's the common sense. It's what people just naturally think, which in some ways is small C conservative, but in other ways might mean that he doesn't have the American conservative reluctance to embrace the state or to use state power. So, what is Donald Trump? He's a leader of this movement.
(11:32):
The MAGA movement make America great again, and MAGA is a populist movement. It is deeply connected to the American populist tradition, which as you know extends back prior to the founding of the Republic, prior to the ratification of the Constitution. And populism is again non-ideological. It is a hostility toward elites, a skepticism toward experts, a belief that the people in charge are either not recognizing or not doing anything about the most pressing problems for the majority. Sometimes it can manifest in what we would call left-wing economic populism, redistribution, larger state, better, bigger welfare benefit protectionism. Other times it can manifest in what we would call conservative economic policy. In my view, president Ronald Reagan was a populist as well, led a kind of a populist movement in the 1980 campaign. And in the 1976 primary at that time, the populism was about inflation and bracket creep and the sense that the average working man was not being able to take home enough of his pay.
(13:04):
So, there's some economic dimensions to populism I of the belief that the most important dimension of populism is cultural. And what we find when we look at history is that beginning in the middle of the 20th century, the populist movement, which for the previous 50 years had kind of been on the left wing of the political spectrum with William Jennings Bryan then going into the more progressive movements and finally culminating kindly in the creation of the New Deal, under Roosevelt. Well, beginning the mid 20th century, populism started going to the right because the people in charge at that time were all liberal elites overseeing the welfare state that FDR had created. And most importantly, in the second half of the 20th century, those elites began to adopt a progressive worldview on matters of social and cultural values and the difference between those elites and what Richard Nixon famously called the silent majority became a gulf.
(14:14):
So, when we look at MAGA or we look at Donald Trump today, we have to ask, well, what particular aspect of this populous movement are we talking about? And if it's some of the policies like you just mentioned, well no, those policies are not in the American conservative tradition at all. However, if you're talking about the policies of keeping taxes low, if you're talking about the policies of fighting crime, if you're talking about the policies of maintaining border security, if you're talking about the policies of funding the military, if you're talking about the policies of what sort of judges were appointed in the first term, the administration's position on economic regulation is another example, well then those policies, they would be conservative. So, it's more of a coalition and a mélange of many things than any one thing in particular.
Mitch Daniels (15:14):
Well, that's persuasive. I mean, it sounds as though you divine a degree of coherence in this new complex of views. Let me ask you about a couple of analysis that come to different conclusions. One, Mark Helprin, the author, he doesn't see, he sees this as a highly personal administration and presidency. He calls all these things you just talked about this melange, a tsunami of haphazard impulses and he is convinced that it will lead to wreck and ruin for the Republican party if it's a associated with them long term. Is that alarmist? Do you think that this could all end much better than he does?
Matthew Continetti (16:14):
I don't want to play the pessimism sweepstakes as conservatives were disposed to always say that it's always dark act before it goes completely black. As the late John McCain used to joke. I'll say a couple of things. I mean, we're talking about impulsivity. Well, obviously President Trump is an impulsive character. He makes no bones about that. He talks about how he operates on instinct. He is an improviser. He does not like schedules. He likes to have open meetings. He's always on the fly and he never sleeps. And the result of that are these wild swings in policy. On the morning that we're recording this interview, President Trump threatened to have tariffs on iPhones produced outside the United States, and then he threatened the EU, which seems to be pretty reluctant to engage in a trade negotiation with him and his administration with the 50% tariff. And of course, markets reacted. But then if past is precedent, if something will happen, things will back off, Trump will back off. One of these parties will attempt to appease him in some way and things will settle back down again. So he is clearly impulsive. In terms of the results, well, I think there are various ways you can look at it. I happen to think that the Liberation Day tariffs, if they were implemented as laid out on April 2nd, 2025, would be terrible economic policy, disastrous.
(17:49):
The fact that they haven't been suggests that people around Trump have convinced him that that's the case, that they would be bad. So, you can talk about the result on the level of particular policies, and I think the results will be mixed to put it charitably. But politically, here's where I disagree with the esteemed Mark Halprin. Politically, MAGA has been much more of a success than I or many other people ever anticipated. When you consider the result of the 2024 election, it was a pretty stunning election. It was the first time in 20 years that the Republican candidate had won the popular vote. It was the first time in 20 years that the Republican candidate had done so well with the Hispanic vote. It was the first time in 40 years where young people shifted to the Republican ticket so dramatically. It was the first time in a hundred years since the 1932 election that the electorate leaned Republican.
(19:01):
Hadn't happened in the New Deal era. That's why I passed. Republican presidents always had to win the independent vote. In addition to holding the GOP base, we have a trifecta, as has been typical the last 30 years when a new president comes to office. And moreover, as much as President Trump's approval, ratings seemed to have declined after Liberation Day, they recovered a little bit. He still is more popular than he's ever been. So when I look at MAGA, the Republican Party today, president Trump, I am wary of many of the policies because my conservative principles suggest that those policies will not result in the desired outcome and may make things even worse. But I am kind of impressed by the political resiliency and growth of the MAGA coalition.
Mitch Daniels (20:02):
The question is be will someone be able to pull off the same degree of personal rapport that he has with at least half of America?
Matthew Continetti (20:15):
That's unlikely because when you think about major figures of the past, their appeal was personal as well. I mean, think about, as you well know, the Republican party after Ronald Reagan had some rocky seas, right? The reason why I think the Democratic Party was successful after FDR, and of course even then Eisenhower wins in 52, right? So, Truman only actually is elected to one term after FDR dies in 45. But the reason I think the New Deal lasted as long as it did was that it was institutionalized. And this is where I'm most interested in the second Trump administration. Can this administration institutionalize its policies within the federal government, create constituencies for those policies in the broader electorate just like the New Deal did? And then can it successfully transfer power to a Trump successor like JD Vance, who in my reading of history is very similar or has the potential to be similar to Martin Van Buren taking over for Old Hickory Andrew Jackson back in the 19th century. But as you say, that's an open question. And as my mentor Fred Barnes like to remind me, the future in politics is never a straight-line projection of the present.
Mitch Daniels (21:53):
That's a very interesting analysis. I have to confess, I've not previously ever thought of JD Vance and Martin Van Buren, but I will from now on as having a lot in common. Well, let me ask you about a slightly different take, which I'll loosely describe as that we will get over this. And there are some people who write and speak from a more traditional libertarian or conservative standpoint who basically seem to see MAGA or Trumpism as a necessary corrective on all the fronts. You've talked about cultural high among them, but that having made certain improvements, let's say, will need to moderate its way out. Lemme just read you a line from a recent column. Karl Zinsmeister happened to write this. One says, ordinary citizens will soon want Washington to quiet down to become a quieter and more boring place. That way they can stop focusing on events in our nation's capital and pour energy into their traditional priorities of enterprise, family and community building. And he says that this tendency to this return to normalcy, let's call it will require, he says builders of consensus. So, first of all, do you buy that people will, that the public in general will look for a calmer times and calmer leadership? Or can the current momentum of a very aggressive, as you say, something new every day energetic executive be extended under JD Vance or somebody new?
Matthew Continetti (23:58):
Sure. Yeah. I mean it's a great question and I think there are a lot of things happening all at once. The first, the desire for normalcy, Warren Harding's campaign slogan in 1920 after the frenetic intervention in the domestic life of America, and then of course the foreign intervention that ad Woodrow Wilson
Mitch Daniels (24:20):
And more or less the Biden campaign of 2020,
Matthew Continetti (24:23):
Right? Yeah, right. That's what Biden was saying, right from his basement in 2020. I promise normalcy. And what happened? We didn't get it. We didn't get it at all. In fact, we got a president who we hear all about the revelations of his condition at the time, but we've also got a president who was told and became convinced that he could be more transformative than any progressive since Lyndon Johnson, maybe even Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And so, the result was the inflation, the result was the open border and the record number of illegal immigration. And the result was the collapse of American deterrence wars in Ukraine, wars in the Middle East. And the result was DEI and gender ideology being forced into schools and private institutions through the federal government. So, four years of that, in fact, actually pretty early on in Biden's presidency, his approval rating fell below 50% and never recovered after the collapse in Afghanistan.
(25:28):
And the public was tired. And as much as they may have mixed views of Donald Trump, I mentioned they've come to like him more than they did the last time around. They put him into office with the majority of the popular vote, though not an absolute 50% plus majority. So the desire for normalcy is there. If the Trump administration violates that desire, then it will lose popularity and the pendulum of American politics will swing the other way just as it seems to have been doing ever since the end of the Cold War in 1992. We've just got to go back and forth different configurations of divided government for 30 some years now. I think though, just to close, I think that there might be something else happening and that is a generational change. So Trump and Biden are two oldest presidents ever. Biden from the silent generation, the tail end of the silent generation.
(26:35):
Trump of course, the boomer President Trump is probably the last boomer president, and as I say, the 2028 election, I would say let's hope he is right. Well, I don't want to offend anyone here, so I'll let you say that, but the 2028 election looks to be pitting two younger candidates representing a different ethos. And I think that actually that generational change may express a different set of values and a different temperament to American politics. And then just finally on that generational aspect, I mentioned it earlier, but the remarkable shift in the youth vote I still think deserves more attention. We are so used to the cliche that young voters are progressive, that to see this turn among many young people, the generation Z and now the upcoming generation, my kids' generation, generation alpha, to see them turn to the right, I mean really raises a lot of questions.
(27:44):
And I think there we cannot escape the fact that the COVID pandemic and the government response to it moved young people to the right, whether it was the school lockdowns, the social distancing, the isolation, whether it was masking in schools, whether it was the accompanying cultural transformation for what these kids were learning from their teachers, the constant emphasis on physical characteristics, racial identity, an ethic, or rather a position that America's history is shameful, that we need to repent for being American over and over and over again. Well, what do young people do? They rebel. And if earlier generations rebelled from kind of a tough top down, follow my rules sensibility. This generation is ironically rebelling against the same sort of sensibility except the people making the rules and yelling at you to follow them are all liberals. And so that I think could have longer lasting effects. This younger group, how they merge and move into adulthood and middle age, if they retain some of that conservatism, then it may be to the benefit of this Republican MAGA coalition.
Mitch Daniels (29:14):
Yeah. Well, you mentioned earlier quite, I think correctly the resentment, the resistance to the rule of experts and to those who claim to be and certainly COVID exposed as some other events have the bankruptcy of many of our putative experts in the expert class. I want to ask you back to Zinsmeister yearning for builders of consensus, which are always, I think to be hoped for in a democracy that around one school of thought, one set of policies or another people can be brought together. But there's some who believe that that's just less likely than it's ever been, that you may be familiar with the work of Martin Gurri, who has suggested that the loss of monopoly over information by all our institutions means that we'll sort of be in a permanent state of unrest and suspicion and unwillingness to follow those who would attempt to lead us somewhere. Are we trapped in that sort of difficult circumstance? Now,
Matthew Continetti (30:47):
Consensus is a funny thing. I mean, one would want our politics to be civil, right? We want our elected representatives to set out and fulfill their mandates and hopefully do so in ways that find common ground. And I actually think there are a lot of areas of common ground between the two parties. Just this past week as we're recording this, the Senate passed the No Tax on Tips Act almost unanimously. A Democratic senator kind of brought it to the floor by surprise. Ted Cruz swept in and seconded, and next thing you know, boom, we have no tax on tips in the Senate. Of course, the house passed as part of its large, big, beautiful bill as well. China, I think there's been a consensus over the last decade that China is our greatest competitor, potentially in my view, our greatest adversary in the 21st century. And we have to take actions to maintain American power in a world that's witnessing China's rise.
(32:01):
The areas where we diverge most greatly are those social and cultural issues, the values questions. And that's been the case now for my entire lifetime, and I expect it will continue to be the case for quite some time. Is that technology part of it? But of course, as I just said, this value divides, emerged in the 1960s before we had social media. Social media might amplify them, make them worse. They certainly are. Social media is a great weapon for cancel culture. But as long as we have, I think these differing attitudes about human beings, about the family, about the place of religion and public life, about immigration, what it means to be an American, and as I also just mentioned earlier, American history, whether our stories should be celebrated or whether our stories should be denigrated. As long as those value divides exist, then I think we're going to have a hard time reaching consensus on those fundamental questions. Even if we were just referring earlier in the program, there definitely seems to be a consensus that we're not going to do anything about our debt. So, consensus can be bad, I guess is my, there's nice things about consensus, but consensus can also be very, very bad. And yeah, when Trump changed the Republican position on our entitlement programs to the view that, well, we don't have to worry about them, Democrats are happy to say, sure, we're for you. In fact, we want to spend even more money than you do on them.
Mitch Daniels (33:47):
One quick question about political structure and process, and its bearing on this in the name of democracy. A few decades ago, we turned over the selection of candidates in the parties to quote the people all in primaries now very few selected by party authorities themselves. And now we find ourselves in a situation where a highly motivated fringe on either end or group, on either end dominates nominations, and in more and more cases, nomination is tantamount to election. This, I believe, has contributed to the fact that we have so few people striving for consensus anymore. That's not how you win political office. You appeal successfully to the hard left or today the MAGA, right? Am I missing something or is that not a critical factor?
Matthew Continetti (34:44):
Yeah, I mean, I think primaries play a role in particular in-house races. If in a small electorate, then the primary becomes much more important. And I also think that you need to always speak about primaries in relation to gerrymanders because a primary in a competitive district, well, if the extreme nominates their preferred candidate, that candidate is probably going to lose. So there's a learning mechanism in a competitive district where you're going to have to, well, if you want to win, you're going to have to nominate someone that can win in the deep red or deep blue districts. Of course, the primary is the only election that matters, and it becomes very difficult to choose representatives who are consensus builders or at least kind of responsible figures. I mean, I think of Cori Bush from the squad member from St. Louis. It was hard to get her out of office, and eventually she did lose a primary last year.
(35:52):
So, I think primaries and gerrymanders, gerrymanders in particular, and the racial gerrymandering that's been going on for a generation creates a system of perverse incentives for political selection. At the same time, it's not so big of a problem in the Senate where there's statewide elections. And as many, I know many people don't like Donald Trump, but even Donald Trump is not a MAGA extreme. It's on certain issues. He's actually more to the center of the political spectrum than say Steve Bannon and the exponents of the MAGA vision. I think about Trump's views on immigration. Trump still supports legal immigration. In fact, he's talking about his gold plated visa that he's releasing. I think about abortion, I mean from the perspective of the politics of abortion, Trump's view that it should just be left to the state states, disappointed, many pro-lifers. But at the same time, it seems to have removed abortion as a significant political issue, quite frankly. And also think about foreign policy. Donald Trump's foreign policy is not the conservative internationalism that Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, George W. Bush, George HW Bush followed.
Mitch Daniels (37:23):
Although in that case you can find strands of that back through. There was always an isolationist.
Matthew Continetti (37:28):
Yeah, there. But my point is he's not even as isolationist as some of the isolationists in his coalition, right? I mean, there were some people in MAGA who wanted Trump to cut off everything to Ukraine on day one. And even though we had that terrible week where we did suspend our intelligence and military aid, it's still back on. So, I think that the primaries matter most at the lower levels of government and their effect kind of dissipates once we get to the Senate and to the presidency for the simple reason that in order to win, you have to have a candidate who can appeal to a broader section of the population.
Mitch Daniels (38:16):
Well, let me ask you a question on a different front. Most people who have thought of themselves as Friends of liberty and our democratic traditions, Republican traditions have placed a high value on character, and particularly the elections for president have, I think sometimes turned on personal characteristics. People have wanted to choose a person in whom they felt some trust and confidence. Much of what's going on in the current administration, I'll pick a gentle word, is cavalier about standards of conflicts of interest and so forth. Some of it looks pretty brazen actually, when you invite people who are enriching you to lavish dinners, president hosts, is this troubling or are these simply antiquated notions that aren't necessarily connected to policies that protect freedom and liberty?
Matthew Continetti (39:23):
Well, it's absolutely troubling of what's happening right now. It should trouble the Trump administration. I'm just, there's no guarantee the Republicans will control Congress two years from now, and if the Democrats control the House of Representatives in 2027, they'll impeach Donald Trump and Trump's financial behavior with this meme coin is kind of giving them a lot, the Democrats a lot to play around with and to investigate. So it should trouble everybody. I'm interested as well in why the character issue does not matter so much, and I think that speaks to the populist moment on one level and then on a particular kind of political level on another populism. So when you have this large group, millions, tens of millions of Americans believe that the people in charge for the past generation has messed everything up, has lied to everybody, has ruined the heartland and not cared about working men and women.
(40:39):
Well then, the attitude in 2016 was among Republican voters and enough of the electorate to get Donald Trump into office through the electoral college that we don't really care about this guy's character because he's the only person calling out the people in charge who we've come to despise. And that is a powerful sentiment in our politics right now, I would say the second election, the 2024 election, his second victory is a little bit different because Trump was paradoxically humanized throughout that campaign because we talk about Trump's character. But having going through all the lawsuits being convicted on this frankly spurious charge in the New York Court about the checks being shot in Pennsylvania, then almost being shot later at one of his golf courses in Florida, by the end of that election, I think Trump became more human to many people, to many voters. And that's why I think his victory was more significant in 2024.
(41:54):
And then there's the political level. I think many conservatives have always cared about character, rightly so. And as conservatives, we believe in the notion that character is destiny. But politically, the American electorate at large has not quite had the same consistency in its view. So, when you think about President Clinton and all the scandals of his two terms, he left office with the 60% job approval rating, and people still look fondly on his presidency. No one would say he had the highest character. At the same time though, the person we elected after him, George W. Bush, said he was going to run to restore integrity of the White House. And I think that helped him. So there seems to be, on the one hand, presidents can get away with a lot, but on the other there will always be a correction. I think Biden was supposed to be the correction to Trump's faults.
(43:03):
What happened though was that Biden had an entirely different set of faults, and those faults resulted in the country deteriorating over the course of his years. When you think about the loss in purchasing power, right, the decline in the standard of living, when you think about the social deterioration of the country, whether that was all the problems stemming from the open border, whether that was the crime increase, whether of course the position of America and our allies in the world deteriorated as well. And whenever anyone would point that out, they were accused of spreading misinformation and viable to censorship. So Biden was a false corrective, and so we get Trump again and the next president will probably be a corrective to what we're seeing now.
Mitch Daniels (43:56):
Yeah. One last question. You're uniquely equipped to help us think about Matthew. There are people from a host of directions who believe, predict and fear that we're headed for a cataclysm of some kind of the kind that do happen every so often in our history. We've had the Jacksonian Revolution, our own revolution, we've had the Civil War, we've had the New Deal, other events like that that could qualify as major turning points, and some see it coming either because of economics, political division, military setback, or the debt, some combination. Do you think this is likely, and to the extent it is on the backside of that, would freedom be in better shape or less? What could you imagine in the reshaping of society that those kinds of events always bring?
Matthew Continetti (44:55):
Sure. Well, when I look at the world scene right now, I think the two biggest dangers facing America are China and our debt. The first is an external threat. The results of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would be epical, and they would bring in other powers, Japan, Korea, Australia, the Philippines. They demand some sort of response. And when you think about the fact that there are currently hot wars taking place in Ukraine and in the Middle East, a third front in East Asia would just kind of put the marker down that we are in the third World War. So that alarms me greatly, and I think we should try to do everything to prevent that outcome. The internal threat is the debt. What we're seeing in the financial markets with the whole Sell America phenomenon, where the bond prices are falling, leading to higher yields, that increases the cost of servicing our debt as our currency is falling as well.
(46:17):
And then our equities markets have pretty much recovered. But there's the danger that you'd also see a slide in equities in addition to the dollar and bonds. That does not bode well for America's position in the world and for American prosperity, because I do think debt is a weight. I do think debt increasing debt burdens over a certain amount begin to weight down our growth prospects. So, either of those could lead to this sort of big bang you mentioned. And I honestly don't know whether America would be freer after that. I will say that the tradition of freedom in the United States is very strong, very strong, and very deep. It is our DNA and so tremendous, even if we're dealt tremendous blows, and we've been given a fair amount of blows in the past, I do think there's a certain American spirit that believes in individual freedom in economic liberty at the base case, don't tread on me, right? The suspicion of centralized top-down authority that is truly American, and I would expect that characteristic to remain as long as the United States exists.
Mitch Daniels (47:49):
We'll mark you down as an optimist, and we will draw optimism ourselves from this wonderful presentation you've made. I frequently, in fact, always ended these programs by asking will America be more or less free in 2050? I'm going to take your last answer in the affirmative and as I say will take some heart from that. Matthew Continetti you're a senior fellow but your way too young to be a senior anything and that's great encouragement to us all because we know we will be able to benefit from you insights, your advocacy of principles that we at Liberty Fund hold dear for a very long time. Thank you for joining us and to our audience thank you again for joining us on The Future of Liberty.
Outro (48:36):
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