Inherited Knowledge and American Conservatism: An Interview with Conservative Commentator Matthew Continetti

By: Elizabeth L’Arrivee

Furman University, February 27, 2024

 

This past February, the Tocqueville Center hosted an event exploring diverse facets of American conservatism. Panels featured public intellectuals David Brooks (The New York Times), Matthew Continetti (American Enterprise Institute), Helen Andrews (The American Conservative), and Matthew Martens (WilmerHale). We had a chance to sit down with Matthew Continetti for an interview where we discussed 

About Matthew Continetti (from the American Enterprise Institute): Matthew Continetti is the director of domestic policy studies and the inaugural Patrick and Charlene Neal Chair in American Prosperity at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where his work is focused on American political thought and history, with a particular focus on the development of the Republican Party and the American conservative movement in the 20th century. A prominent journalist, analyst, author, and intellectual historian of the right, Mr. Continetti was the founding editor and the editor in chief of the Washington Free Beacon. Previously, he was opinion editor at the Weekly Standard.

 

Tocqueville Center:

From your perspective as a conservative, what is your understanding of the relation between truth and power in American politics?

 

Matthew Continetti: 

I think that conservatives in America for much of the last 100 years have thought more about truth than they have thought about power. And they have tried to separate the two categories. And so they have tried to speak up for natural truths, objective moral standards, moral absolutes, and moral clarity without reference to power or institutional power. When I hear the phrase “truth and power,” I immediately think of postmodern thought, which conflates the two.  I will say that on the contemporary right, many thinkers adopt the modes of postmodernism and think that the truth is an expression of power. I would say that the conservative tradition in America has stood for truth qua truth.  And a little bit more, maybe in that same vein, I think conservatives have seen themselves as having been traditionally on the side of truth, truth as truth.

 

Tocqueville Center: 

In contemporary politics, do you see conservatives getting carried away by emotions? Is there any emotion in particular that you see predominating and anything that you find concerning?  

 

Matthew Continetti: 

Well, I think the framing of the question is interesting. It seems like conservatives tend to bifurcate the liberals. They’re the people of emotion, the feelings people. And then the people on the right pride themselves on being more aligned with reason. But I’ve never really thought of conservatives as a rationalist party. I think that there is party of right reason, but I think that conservatism, going back to Burke and his writings on aesthetics, has had a rich tradition for sentiment, as he expressed in his defenses of prejudice, the beautiful, and the imaginary. And it was the modern liberals and the left that wanted to reshape society according to some rationalist program. So I would say conservatives today still retain, I think, the mantle of common sense, practical reason, maybe even prudence, and are skeptical of grand rationalistic designs. The idea that truth may reside in little platoons, for example, as opposed to bureaucratic structures. And I respect the particular biases of smaller groups of people at a local level. They have a kind of inherited knowledge.

 

I still think that’s a major part of conservatism.  I do think there are pockets of the right today that are more capital R Romantic in their vision of individual glory, in the idea that society can be oppressive. But I don’t think that they’re necessarily in the mainstream. I think that if you walked up to someone who said that they were small C conservative on the street, they would say that it’s the planners and the tinkerers and the do-gooders that they’re most worried about and I think that’s a genuine, long-lasting, conservative sentiment. 

 

Tocqueville Center: 

Some on the right have observed that conservatives have at most been able to slow down the aims of the tinkerers and planners, but that the progressives have for the most part set the agenda over the last century. Would you agree, and if so, do you think that that has led to possibly a growing sense of frustration on the right? 

 

Matthew Continetti: 

Well, I think the largest project of rational recomposition of society was communism, as embodied in the Soviet Union. And I think that the conservative movement in the United States made a large contribution to putting pressure on the Soviet Union so that it collapsed. So I don’t think that they simply went along with the flow in that regard. I do think the conservative movement has made valuable achievements over the years, such as in limiting the scope of government, which was one of its primary domestic aims, whether that is by lowering taxes or whether that is by abolishing condition-free, no-time-limit welfare. These are long-standing goals of the conservative movement. 

 

I think what you’re referring to is a sense among religious social conservatives that the America they grew up in is rapidly disappearing. And I would simply say where causes of that disappearance can be identified, they ought to be addressed, and they have to be corrected, whether that’s judicial, whether that’s educational. But I also think that these religious and socially conservative groups have a responsibility of their own to try to persuade people that their view of the world is correct and not simply rely on some imaginary idea that they will be able to obtain in due course the powers of the state and impose their moral vision on an unwilling populace. That, to me, is not conservative at all.

 

Tocqueville Center: 

The liberal arts have always been controversial from the perspective of established power.  What is the role of liberal education today, and why is it valuable?  

 

Matthew Continetti: 

That’s a great question. I think that the connection between liberal education and conservatism is integral. If we as conservatives want to pass on the best that has been thought and said, the means to do that is a liberal education. And so when you look at the history of American conservatism in the 20th century, a lot of it is a history of conservative critiques of education, whether it’s William F Buckley Jr.’s “God and Man at Yale” in 1951, or Alan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind in 1987, Dinesh D’souza’s Iliberal Education in 1991, Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals in 1984. There are so many conservatives who have been concerned about the state of undergraduate education in the United States, and I think their criticisms are warranted.

 

We do want to leave to our inheritance a world that they deserve, and the way to do that is by inculcating them in the culture that they are born into or that they adopt by choice. So I think it’s very important that conservatives devote resources to higher education. I think in recent decades we have realized that the challenge is even greater, that we also have to think about K through 12 because of what we saw out of the pandemic and the moment of radical transparency parents had into the function, or rather, you know, dysfunction of the public school system.  But just because the challenge is daunting doesn’t mean that conservatives are not up to it. 

 

Tocqueville Center: 

And then, since we are at the Tocqueville Center, we thought we should ask a question about Tocqueville. He has many warnings for democracy, as I’m sure you’re aware. Are there any in particular that you think stand out, particularly that conservatives should take heed of today? 

 

Matthew Continetti: 

Another great question. I think the major problem facing America that’s relevant to Tocqueville’s thought is the collapse of American civil society. When you think of the voluntary associations that play such a critical role in Tocqueville’s picture of America, we have to ask, how are they functioning today? And I would say that while there are many particular instances of wonderful small-scale voluntary associations tending toward the arrangements of society without the heavy hand of government weighing upon them, I also worry about people simply contributing to faceless charitable organizations and thinking that’s enough, right? The depersonalization of our relationships is very worrisome to me. And so I think that’s where Tocqueville could play a role in helping to educate Americans today. And that kind of goes back to your original point about the conservatives being open to particular sentiments of local groups of people and allowing the decentralization for those groups to flourish.

 

The role of the family is also critical in these civil associations. If think about the basis of civil society, and what Tocqueville identified on his trip through Jacksonian America, religiosity was important, right? And we see now the growth of the non-affiliated and a collapse in religious participation. We see religious identities turning into political identities.  And so that is very worrisome. And I think that there is a connection between religious life and family life. I think that if you have strong families, you’ll tend to have strong churches. And so we have to think through how we can promote stable two-parent families, which we know through social science, and through our experience, are the best environment in which to raise children.  That’s a public policy challenge, but it’s also a cultural challenge, and it will take a lot of work, I think, to press against the corrosive forces undermining institutions like family and faith.  

 

But I don’t think that all is lost. I don’t agree with the view that it’s always about to collapse. I think that’s a temptation for conservatives to always think that the world is going to hell in a handbasket. And the picture is always more complicated when you study history. So even though there’s a lot to worry about and to lament, there’s still, I think, a lot of good in this country and in this country’s families and in this country’s religious institutions that we can build on.  

 

Note: Interview has been edited for clarity and length. Views expressed are the respondent’s own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Tocqueville Center or Furman University.