Welcome back to the reeducation. Today's show examines the tensions between the paranoia of populism

and the better angels of the American right over the last 100 years. Trump versus Reagan, if you will.

We are joined by Matthew Contenetti, whose new book, The Right, is a wonderful history that examines the push and pull between these two strains of American conservatism between 1920 and 2020.

And this idea that government is beholden to the people that it has no other source of power except the sovereign people

is still the newest and the most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man.

This is the issue of this election.

Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far distant capital can plan our lives for us

better than we can plan them ourselves.

States want to revote.

The states got defrauded.

They were given false information.

They voted on it. Now they want to recertify.

They want it back. All Vice President Pence has to do is send it back to the states to

recertify. And we become president and you are the happiest people.

We just heard two clips that represent the rhetorical peak and nadir of the post-war American right.

The first is Ronald Reagan.

In his endorsement of Barry Goldwater, Reagan frames the 1964 election as a choice between democratic and bureaucratic rule. The second is Donald Trump

on January 6, 2021, insisting in a sly bit of larceny that an election he lost was actually

stolen. Reagan inspired his audience to preserve the American Revolution and the unique idea

that people should govern themselves,

Trump urged his superfans to undermine democracy and disrupt the peaceful transition of power

for the first time in American history. In the judgment of history, Reagan and Trump could not

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