Welcome listeners to the editor's desk, our regular First Things podcast. This is Rusty

Reno, and I am at the editor's desk. And joining me is Daniel McCarthy, editor of modern age,

and author of a review in the August September issue, a review of

Yaron Hazani's book, Conservatism, a Rediscovery in combination with Matthew Continenti's

book, The Right, the Hundred Year War for American Conservatism. And we gave the title of this review,

that we gave the title,

the right right,

as Dan gives us a tour of the various options

facing the American right in the early decades

of the 21st century.

So Dan, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks, Rusty. It's a delight to be here.

Matthew Contonetti, you begin, you do a very fine job giving the reader a sense of what these two books are about. And you, Contonetti's is a, is more of a straightforward history, it seems. Asonez is a more ambitious,

both serving historical figures and laying out a more theoretical approach. But so what is

Contonetti's project in this book? Yeah, both of these books are very ambitious.

So Matthew Contenetti's The Right covers a full century of both political and intellectual

conservatism going from the 1920s until basically the beginning of the Joe Biden administration.

And his argument is that there's something

of a cycle or a circuit that is completed during that century. The American rights of the Calvin

Coolidge era was somewhat protectionist. It was somewhat hands-off in terms of its foreign policy

engagements. And it was rather skeptical of free

trade. It was in favor of tariffs and a certain degree of protection for American industry.

...