Hello friends, welcome, always delighted to have you along and today we are going to dive into a fascinating conversation with Matthew Contanetti, who is the author of a new book called The Right, the Hundred Year War for American Conservatism.

And if you love presidents, if you love history, government, politics, fun facts, gosh, there is so much to glean from this conversation.

So let's dive in. I'm Sharon Nickman and welcome to the Sharon Says So Podcast.

I am super excited to have Matthew Contanetti with me today.

There is so much material here that I know everybody is going to just have a bunch of little brain tingle, mind blown moments. Thank you so much for doing this.

Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

I would love for you to start with an introduction and tell people who you are and more about the book that you've written that we're going to use the jumping off point to talk about the American right.

Sure. Well, I've been a journalist in Washington DC for 20 years, covering politics and policy.

But over the years, I developed an interest in history. I was a history major in college at the American Enterprise Institute where I'm a senior fellow.

I spent the past few years writing this book, The Right, the Hundred Year War for American Conservatism, which is really telling the story of American conservatism since the 1920s up to today.

And that's become my passion is telling the story and teaching it where I can and writing about it whenever I have the opportunity.

So there's so much to talk about because when you know colloquially these in the notions of what makes somebody right leaning is very intertwined with the modern Republican party.

And in some cases that has been the case in the past. And in some cases, it hasn't. And the Republican party has not represented the views of conservatives or all of the conservatives.

But I'd really like to start at the beginning sort of of where your book picks up.

Before we do that, though, I want to talk about something that a lot of people bring up, which is that the Republican party is the party of Lincoln.

I would love to hear your thoughts on the party of Lincoln and whether you think Lincoln would recognize himself in the modern Republican party.

Would he find a place in the American right? What is your view on that?

Well, that's such a great question, Sharon. Of course, the Republican party was founded as a result of the territorial crisis over slavery in the run up to the Civil War.

And Lincoln's election in 1860 as the first Republican president, which was the inciting event of that war, which which led to this session of the southern states.

And Lincoln is of the primary figure in the history of the Republican party. And indeed, I begin my book with an epigraph of Lincoln.

How would he view today's Republican party? I think he'd recognize elements of it.

I think he would not recognize other parts of it. What would he recognize? Well, in the epigraph to my book, the right.

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