“The outside pressure of Communism” helped unify the American Right during the Cold War—that’s how Matthew Continetti put it, as we spoke in the dining room of the American Enterprise Institute, where he serves as director of domestic policy studies. Existential struggle with the Soviet Union, that is, led various factions within conservatism—free marketeers, social traditionalists, foreign policy hawks—to put aside their differences and fight the common enemy. After the Cold War, many Republicans and conservative thinkers settled on a consensus characterized by deregulation, expanded global networks of trade and migration, and investment in national security, with some endorsement of conservative moral positions on family life and civil society. The unraveling of George W. Bush’s presidency and the rise of Donald Trump shattered that consensus, leading to an intensifying debate about the future of the Right.
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