Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I'm the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs Magazine.

I am joined today by David Austin Watt. He is a postdoctoral associate at the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism and a college fellow at the University of Virginia. He is the author of the new book, Taking America Back, the Conservative Movement and the far right.

David Austin Walsh, thank you for joining us on Curit Affairs today.

Thank you for having me. It's my pleasure.

So your book dives deep into the history of the conservative movement in the United States

over the course of the 20th century.

And I think one of the things that doing so illuminates for us is it helps shed light on a question that

I've certainly thought about a lot and a lot of people who've discussed, which is, is Donald

Trump an aberration? Is Donald Trump and the MAGA conservatism? Well, first off, is it conservatism?

We'll get to that. But does Donald

Trump represent a break or a schism with the Republican Party as it existed before? And if so,

to what extent? So let's start with where you kind of stand on that question.

You know, this is a question that, you know, every academic panel I've been on in the past

three years has asked.

And I think the consensus in those discussions, and certainly my view here, is that no, Donald

Trump is not an aberration. He is not a fundamental break in either the history of American

conservatism as a political tradition, or quite for that matter, the American political

tradition writ large,

I think that he's in deep continuity.

I do think that Trumpism has been, or mageism, whatever you want to call it, has been an

acceleration of trends that have been, and sort of factions that have been in conservative and whitewink politics in this country

for really since the New Deal.

...