Trump has risen to Reagan's level in the eyes of many conservatives, and I know that might stun a lot of the audience, but if Trump wins reelection, he will be at the same level as Reagan, I think, in the minds of a lot of Republicans.

Hello and welcome to the Ezra Klein Show on the Vox Media Podcast Network. I am Jane Kostin, I am Senior Politics Reporter with a focus on conservatism and the GOP.

And today I have a very interesting conversation with Matthew Contanetti, he is editor-in-chief of the Washington Freebeacon, a conservative publication based in DC.

He is very thoughtful, knowledgeable about the intellectual history that has provided the backbone of the conservative movement as we know it.

We talked about Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump, the beginnings of the new right, what neo conservatism was is and isn't, and a host of other subjects, and I thought it was a really interesting and informative conversation.

As always, you can email the show at Ezra Klein Show at Vox.com, and without further ado, here is Matthew Contanetti.

Matthew Contanetti, welcome to the podcast. First and foremost, can you tell our audience a little bit about yourself and the research you're doing on the history of intellectual conservatism?

Sure. Well, I'm the editor of the Washington Freebeacon, it's a conservative online newspaper. We founded it in 2012, before that I was a writer and editor for the Weekly Standard Magazine, now defunct, but I had done that since I graduated from Columbia in 2003.

I found that I had a special characteristic while I was at the Weekly Standard. I was the only member of the staff who had read every issue of the Weekly Standard because they had these beautiful set of bound volumes and trying to familiarize myself with my craft. I went through them all.

And that's developed of an interest in the history of the conservative intellectual movement, which is really now in its, well, I guess if you date it with the publication in America of the road to Serfdom in 44-45, it's now almost 70-75 years old.

So you take it from the road to Serfdom. I think a lot of people, when you think about a figure, say like William F. Buckley, they date it to God and Man at Yale.

So it's interesting that you talked about, you started at the Weekly Standard. Were you a collegiate network fellow?

I was. Yes. It's a funny thing at Columbia. We didn't have a collegiate network paper and the collegiate network, of course, is a network of conservative campus papers.

So in fact, the main paper at Columbia, the Columbia Spectator, was affiliated with the collegiate network. And that's how I became plugged into that organization. I also contributed to their National Magazine, which was called Campus Magazine.

And so CN very generously funded me for my first year at the Weekly Standard. And a little bit before that expired, I was promoted or hired permanently on the staff.

So I was also a collegiate network fellow. Congratulations. We can have the secret handshake now.

Yes, exactly. And the reason why I bring this up is that something that I think for a lot of folks observing conservatism and the world of conservatism from outside its boundaries is that our experience of being kind of brought into the collegiate network and a lot of other organizations being brought into the conservative movement.

Via a very distinct recruitment process is not that unusual. And I've been talking a lot this week about conservatism as I talk a lot about conservatism all the time every day for my entire life.

And that conservatism, I think in many ways, is a movement. It's a movement. It's not just a set of ideas or an ideology. It is a movement.

Can you talk about how the ideology of conservatism and the movement of conservatism relate to one another?

Well, that's a great question. One thing my studies and reading has shown me is that it's very difficult to speak of conservatism as just a monolithic ideology.

In fact, from the very beginning there have been competing definitions of what a conservative is or what he or she believes in.

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