Welcome back to the To the Contrary podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. We're going to be doing something a little bit

different today. We're going to be taking a deep dive into what conservatism used to be and what it

has morphed into and where it might be going. Conservatism used to have three stools. Under Ronald

Reagan was free market economics, social conservatism, and anti-communism abroad.

Now, though, we have the Maga New Right stool, which has four legs, nationalist economics,

anti-immigration, social conservatism again, but America first Foreign Policy, which we are seeing playing out.

And on today's podcast, we're joined by the author of a new book, Furious Minds, that takes one of the most interesting looks at with this new dynamic, the intellectual underpinnings of what we're seeing playing out in real time. And Laura

Field is a, Laura Field is an associate with the illiberalism studies program at George

Washington University and a non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution. And we have a lot

to talk about today.

Well, Laura, thank you for joining me.

You know, that comparison between the Gipper stool and the Maganu Right stool is from your book.

So let's just walk through, you know, what we're seeing now because, and I have a number of questions about the sort of the intellectual roots of the conservative movement.

I mean, a lot of these things have been around for a long time. I've described them as a recessive gene.

But you break them into a number of categories, the national conservatives, the Claremontors, the

post-liberals, and the hard right underbelly. So let's just start with, and there's overlap

between these groups, right? But they are distinctive. I think of them as like clustered network.

It's a clustered network.

So you've got a lot of overlap, a lot of people who could be in different categories.

And the book sort of tries to through the writing, not the chart, right?

There's a chart that sort of separates it all and disaggregates it.

But I think I'm trying to show how these people are connected and interact with one

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