Announcer: The last generation's icon of American conservatism Ronald Reagan supported free trade, welcomed immigration to the United States, and thought it essential that American military power be able to defend democracy nearly anywhere in the world.

In contrast, some of this generation's leaders of the Republican Party, notably Donald Trump and his America First movement, are seen by many as disagreeing with Reagan on all those issues, so what lies ahead for the American right?

This episode of "The Whole Truth" was made possible by: the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Department of Education; William and Susan Doran; CNX Resources Corporation; and NJM Insurance.

On today's episode of "The Whole Truth," we will explore what it means to be a conservative in contemporary American politics and what it's likely to mean going forward.

Is it conservative to favor a globalized economy with capital and human resources flowing around the world largely as allocated by market forces, or is it conservative to favor nationalistic policies restricting trade and immigration and seeking independence and national manufacturing capabilities.

Is it conservative to see the United States as the essential guarantor of international security and morally obliged to defend and promote democracy around the world, or is the conservative view that the United States should engage in the world only to protect its own vital national interests and to steer clear of the use of force for the pursuit of human rights?

In our culture here at home, is it conservative to accept tolerance of disagreement while accentuating the positive and the traditional in American life, or has it become necessary to aggressively attack progressive thought as an anti-American movement?

Our guests for this important discussion on what's next for the right are: from Wisconsin, Charlie Sykes, editor of "The Bulwark"; Christine Rosen, senior writer "Commentary" magazine; and remotely from California Victor Davis Hanson of Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

We're honored to have all of you on this show "What's Next For the Right?"

I think that begins-- and I'd like to go around the group, starting with Charlie and then Christine and Victor on how you would define a person of the right, and I have a, I would say, a second question, which would be are the terms right and conservative interchangeable, but without further ado, we're talking about the future of the right, so what is the right?

Charlie.

Sykes: I wish I had a good answer for you because I really don't know, and I don't know what the word conservative means right now.

I'm not sure that conservative and right are interchangeable.

I think we're in a period of, you know, genuine turmoil as we define whether or not conservativism is a set of ideas or whether it's a series of attitudes.

We think about, you know, what's happened over just the last half decade or so.

We've gone from a movement that we could look to someone like George Will as one of our thought leaders, and now it's Dan Bongino.

Conservatives used to look to Edmund Burke, and now, what, who are the thought leaders in the movement--Dinesh D'Souza and Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity?

I think that what you're going to see, though, is that the conservative idea will be distinguished from the conservative movement.

The conservative movement itself, I think, has been broken apart in a lot of ways.

In many ways, it has been overtaken by a cult of personality.

As things work out, though, I think the conservative ideas remain valid, but the conservative movement itself, I think, is going to have to decide whether or not it actually stands for ideas.

We could have had this conversation a few years ago, and I would have said conservatives stand for free markets, free trade, American exceptionalism.

They believe that character matters, believed in fiscal responsibility, American leadership abroad, our alliances with NATO.

I'm not sure that that defines what the right believes right now, so I'll be interested to here what the other panelists have to say.

Eisenhower: Christine, these are-- these are terms that have migrated...

Yes.

right and conservative?

Yes.

You know, very oftentimes during the Reagan years I used to sort of chuckle a little bit.

"What's conservative about a brand-new economy?"

Which is what the Reagan era brought in, and so these terms do migrate, but I think that this is--what Charlie was talking about there is a set of sort of attitudes, but from sort of a "Commentary" magazine perspective, how would you define a person of the right?

Well, I think right and conservative are different.

I agree with Charlie on that, but I can tell you what a conservative is, and some of us do still read Edmund Burke, so don't despair.

A conservative is someone who believes that human nature is deeply flawed, that we are best suited when we have strong institutions that are built from the ground up, families, other institutions.

We believe that tearing down is very easy and building back is much, much more challenging.

Tradition, family, and culture should reflect the real-world, on-the-ground needs of human beings.

There's a real allergy to abstract ideologies, whether they come from the far right or the far left, and I think right now my concern as a conservative-- and I've always called myself one, I've never called myself a Republican or a libertarian-- there are lots of labels.

The Republican Party has always been a sort of uneasy alliance of different groups-- free marketers, libertarians, culture warriors-- and they've always squabbled amongst themselves.

It's actually been until recently a great strength of the party, but conservatives right now have a real challenge ahead, and I think that is finding both new voters-- if you're talking about political power-- new voters who would now describe themselves as independent or more likely politically homeless who share the values-- a strong national defense, a real concern about how we raise our children and how we educate our children.

These are all concerns that a lot of people share right now, and not all of them feel like either side of the political aisle suits them, but I don't think they would call themselves progressive either, so I think conservatives have a real opportunity to reclaim some of that area.

Well, finding new voters, just as a footnote, I was actually in the Oval Office-- this dates myself decades ago-- sitting with Kevin Phillips and Richard Nixon when Nixon pulled a poll out of his pocket saying that for the first time ever the word conservative polled more popularly than the word liberal, and from that moment, there was an effort to, uh--actually, an experiment to fuse the partisan label Republican with conservative.

It didn't go very far.

In fact, it floundered, I think, in New York, Buckley in 1974, but, Victor Davis Hanson, but what would you say-- a person of the right-- actually, I'm hearing some similarities here.

This is allergy to ideologies, allergy to grand schemes, character is flawed.

As a classicist and so forth, these must be things that resonate in some way.

Hanson: Yeah, I think if you-- How would you define--yes.

I think there's a-- I think there's controversy over the person of Donald Trump, but if you take the person away and look at his administration and you look at it in empirical terms of conservativism or Republicans, whatever term you want, then on 80% of the issues, whether it's deregulation or lower taxes or support for Israel or support for energy production or skepticism of radical abortion, defense spending, they were all conservative issues.

What he differed--I think that he introduced to the Republican Party or the people that came out of the woodwork, the 10 million that had not voted for John McCain or Mitt Romney, were closing the border and emphasizing legal-only immigration.

I think both parties had felt that residency was really not that much different than citizenship and that borders should be porous, and then he was very skeptical of optional military engagement, say, in the Middle East-- Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan.

I think he was also much stronger on China.

He did not buy into the idea that the more China became affluent it would liberalize and eventually reach some kind of democratization in the way that we had once thought Russia would, and he was sort of Jacksonian in the sense that there was no--I mean, there wasn't-- it was more of a realistic foreign policy, but that was not the majority of his-- that was what got him elected.

That brought in people who had not been voting Republican, and then finally I think one thing that's happening to the Republican Party is that they're reemphasizing class, and I think that's much more ecumenical than race, so you start to see people who are Hispanic that want the border closed, and I know that-- I live in a community that's 95% Mexican American, and I would think that half of them are gonna vote Republican, if not more, in state and local elections.

We should remember also that the Republican Party had been very successful from 2009 to 2016 on the local level, almost 1,100-- and regional and state, but they have not won the national vote, nor did they do it under Trump, on 5 out of the last 6 elections.

They didn't win the popular vote, and they hadn't won 51% of the vote since George H.W.

Bush beat Michael Dukakis, and that was largely because they didn't play by the Marquess of Queensbury Rules with Lee Atwater.

He just took the gloves off and destroyed Michael Dukakis in a way that the Republicans said they never wanted to do that again.

So I think that there's hope that this stereotype of the last 15 years that everybody in the Republican Party played golf or they were mostly white hedge fund people-- it was an unfair caricature, but there's a lot of people who are not white and they're not wealthy and a lot of white people who are working class that voted Democratic.

For the first time in their lives, they're starting to look at Republicanism as not a monopoly of very wealthy people.

The wealthy people in today's politics, the very wealthy are on the Democratic side.

I'm speaking from Silicon Valley.

I can tell you that it's all left wing and the upper, upper professional classes and the very poor, and the Republican Party is in the process of being a party of the lower-middle, middle, and upper class but not the upper, upper and very low.

Eisenhower: That makes me nostalgic.

When I was-- a long time ago when I was a student, the way you defined Republican and Democrat was you looked at an income graph, and you just drew a red line through it, and people above an income level were Republicans.

People below that level were Democrats, and I think we were taught at the time that this was something that leant itself to compromise.

There's always-- on a money matter, there's always having the difference.

This was a much more, I would say, amenable approach than dividing into identity groups.

There is a notable turnaround here in the contemporary environment on major issues, Reagan era issues-- immigration, trade, things like this.

Is this a question of circumstances change, agenda change, or do you see a shift in principle, and I would pose that to Charlie, I'd pose it to Christine, as well.

In other words, is the right essentially about personality and personal circumstances change, or is this principle and policy?

Using some alliteration here.

Personality, principle policy.

How's that?

We did see a lot of-- Charlie's right-- a lot of intellectuals that were marquee players in the conservative movement sort of sat out, but for all that group of people who sat out, a large number of people came in, so the actual numbers didn't change much.

As far as--I think we have to separate verbiage, and I am not--I've been very critical of some of the things Donald Trump-- but I'm empirical, so when you look at the actual record, I think that the idea of jawboning NATO into spending-- and they did spend another 100 million roughly.

We spent another 100 million on defense.

We flooded the world with oil, and we crashed-- even before COVID-- the world price, which robbed Vladimir Putin of a lot of his oil income, and Afghanistan really hurt our deterrence, so when I look at the actual achievements, I think there's a reason why Putin did not go in in those 4 years, and Donald Trump has a bad habit of art of a deal-- you talk one way, you do the opposite.

I think he's paid a price for it, but the actual record, which I think anybody who looks at it empirically will see that the Democratic Party and the left were much more eager to appease Vladimir Putin in the last 4 years.

One wonders--and you're a historian of World War II.

I've written extensively on World War II.

I wonder whether this entire thing is a kind of tragedy in a way.

Here we are competing to see who's more anti-Russian.

Was there a window with the end of the Cold War to integrate Russia further into the West?

I think that was a big discussion, bipartisan discussion.

My father-in-law's own web site saying that-- quoting him in '93 as saying this was-- "We will fail if we do not integrate Russia now."

Well, Russia at the present time is at a crossroads.

It is often said that the Cold War is over and that the West has won it.

That's only half true because what has happened is that the communists have been defeated, but the ideas of freedom now are on trial.

If they don't work, there will be a reversion to not communism, which has failed, but what I call a new despotism, which would pose a mortal danger to the rest of the world because it would have--be infected with the virus of Russian imperialism, which of course has been a characteristic of Russian foreign policy for centuries.

George Kennan said the same thing.

Yep.

So here we are.

I remember he said-- he warned us that if you brought Ukraine--tried to bring Ukraine into NATO discussions that somebody-- he didn't know-- Putin really wasn't on the scene...

Right.

but somebody would emerge.

I'm thinking about major issues that appear in American life.

My own view is that parties generally prosper or die depending upon great issues and their stance on them.

What is--what are coming issues that you see in facing American politics-- coming issues, not issues that are here now, not issues that have been disposed of, say, in 2020 but issues that are on the way, and where does the right stand on those issues, and is the right positioned to sort of write the next chapter?

I think one thing that we can all agree upon is that we're in a transition period.

This has been a very strange period in American politics for quite a while.

It's a transition period.

So who comes out of this transition on top?

Is it--are we aligning in the direction of the right, or are we aligning in direction of the left?

Victor.

I think-- I'm optimistic because I think that a lot of-- I think what's happening is that the ideals of the conservative movement and the Constitution are starting to appeal to nontraditional voters in a way that they haven't, and I don't like to, you know, say, "These are what people think about race or these people about race."

I just look at what's happening, and for the first time in my life, millions of people who are Hispanic are considering conservative candidates.

Just a fact in a way that they didn't before.

I'm not giving credit necessarily to Donald Trump, but I'm giving credit to a ideology that said, "We're gonna look at class.

"You people that live along the border have real concerns."

In my hometown, people say, "I can't get "my mother onto dialysis because people from a different country are flooding our social services," or, "We can't have Advanced Placement "because we have too many people coming that don't speak English and might falter."

So--and these are not wealthy white Republicans, and African-American males, I think, are starting to look at conservativism, and so I think the big issue-- what I'm trying to say, David, is will that ecumenicalism of class bring in the middle classes and the lower middle classes?

I think there's a wonderful opportunity that the bicoastal elite will be left, and their values don't appeal to these people, and these people are going to really be Republicans, and it's gonna look a lot different.

Well, that's--one of the things that brings to mind-- I think I'm allowed to call myself a Republican since father-in-law and grandfather I'm allowed to do that.

Once of the things that I'm sort of interested in is how deep the Republican bench is at the moment.

There's a lot of talent in the Republican Party.

By contrast, when Democrats look at their future and so forth, they're having a rather barren dialogue about that, but we've had a collision, I think, an historic collision between priorities in this country.

Typically, American politics fastens on a priority.

In the late sixties, race.

Today, we have competing priorities-- race and opportunity, and I think that that's contributed enormously to the polarization, and I think equity and equality of opportunity.

They seem to be rather evenly poised at the moment, but, Charlie, what do you say about how Republican-- or not Republican-- excuse me-- conservative, right-- principles of the right line up vis-à-vis the issues that you think are gonna be major, salient, say, in the next 5-10 years?

Not now.

We assume move beyond our arguments right now.

Right.

So potentially, they line up very, very well, which is again why I think an off ramp to this--you know, the Trump issue is so important because look, um, the economy, opportunity--these are fundamental American values, you know, the ability to rise, work hard, play by the rules, get ahead.

That is fundamentally American.

I think that issues like crime and the border play very, very well for conservatives.

I think race cuts both ways.

I think income inequality cuts both ways, but I think all of these are winnable issues but with this caveat.

One of the problems that I think that the right and the Republican Party has to deal with is they have to deal with the crazy, they have to deal with the extremists, they have to be able to reign in the instinct to overreach.

William F. Buckley Jr. understood this in the early 1960s.

He understood that if conservatives were ever to win elections they need to do something about the crackpots and the John Birchers.

I think that there's a similar problem, but now there are no gate keepers.

There's no one to say, "OK. We are not going to go "to the crazy conspiracy theories.

"We are not going to embrace the white nationalists, "the white supremacists.

"We're going to engage in some serious introspection, and we're gonna engage in some ideological hygiene."

So what I think is happening right now is the Republicans are feeling their oats.

They are not willing to take on their most irresponsible voices, the people who are trafficking in some really toxic rhetoric and making alliances, and they're going to pay a tremendous price long-term.

Short-term, they're going to win.

Well, what-- Long-term, unless they develop a c--unless they become serious about policies as opposed to attitudes, I think they're gonna reap the whirlwind... What-- because-- OK. OK.

I-- I appreciate that.

By the way, I think that's a problem that parties have generally.

I'm not minimizing your point at all.

I think--I've been surprised to be honest the extent to which I would say strident opinion on the left has been influential over Democratic policies at the moment.

Big problem.

That's a problem that they have.

Huge problem.

But point well taken, but, Christine, what--how does this look long-range to you?

Rosen: I'm actually more optimistic, but the main point is I think you see a lot of people who would not naturally call themselves conservative and certainly never call themselves Republican finding appealing in the wake of, you know, the massive polarization of the Trump years, all the protests, all the discussions of race, the--you know, the very violent outbreak of some of the protests, you see a lot of these, you know, kind of arguments about what it means to be an American, questioning of our history that I think a lot of people--although they might welcome-- they certainly welcome a critique of what came in the past, they love their country.

So I think where conservatives are poised to actually build something is to tackle this mistrust in institutions.

You know, nobody trusts public health leaders anymore and with good reason.

I mean, I say that as someone who loves institutions, but, you know, we have-- there's a sense that there's an elite in this country, whether it's in the media or among our political leadership, that knows better than you do, the average person, and so the appeal for a real conservative leader is to say, "We trust you.

"Let's talk about how to fix things "in your community locally, also at the national level," and that is a humility that's lacking on both sides of the aisle right now that I think we need to see more of.

Eisenhower: Temperament.

Temperament.

I think that's something that is, uh-- and I'm also interested to hear that from the "Commentary" magazine angle and so forth that even looking at America's position in the world we're looking at a dialogue between equity and equality, which is something that should engage all persons on the right and conservativism.

This has been an honor by the way to have people as prominent as you are to be on this show to discuss this very important issue, and I have 50 pages of notes here.

Ha ha ha!

I could keep this going forever, but I appreciate it very much, and thank you.

The concept of a political right versus a political left had its genesis hundreds of years ago during the French Revolution when it literally referred to where supporters and oppositionists were sitting at a given gathering.

Of course, the meaning of those terms has never stopped changing in many important ways.

Still, the terms do continue to have usefulness, capturing the reality that there are different values in policy and politics given priority by different people and groups.

Some push the world for more change, others for more continuity and stability.

Some favor more powerful states while others want the powers of government as limited as possible.

Some seek the maximization of individual liberty and opportunity while others seek to maximize equality and security in the living conditions of ordinary folks.

All of these differences and outlooks between the right and the left continue in earnest in our time, but we focused today on what many believe to be the interesting and important development of wide differences of outlook within the political right.

The once dominant Reagan worldview, often called neoconservatism, seems to have been overtaken on the right by what some call the populism and others call the authoritarianism of the political movement led by former President Trump.

So what is next for the right, and what does it mean for the overall direction of American politics and life?

As always, we leave it to you to decide the whole truth.

I'm David Eisenhower.

Thank you very much for watching.

Announcer: This episode of "The Whole Truth" was made possible by: the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Department of Education; William and Susan Doran; CNX Resources Corporation; and NJM Insurance.