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By his wedding day, Continetti had established himself as one of the Rights rising stars. He had published two books and had just launched a new outlet, The Washington Free Beacon, backed by hedge-fund billionaire Paul Singer, and designed to serve as a conservative rejoinder to left-leaning websites like ThinkProgress. A presentable white guy with glasses and a full head of hairimagine if Chris Hayes had a Republican cousinContinetti was an ideal face for the respectable Right in the Obama era, a polite young man who happened to believe that fiscal responsibility entailed taking a meat cleaver to the welfare state. While Breitbart News was running a vertical on black crime, The Washington Free Beacon was earning praise from liberals for its commitment to breaking news. Continetti poked the establishment to get its attention, not to draw blood. I dont listen to talk radio, he told an interviewer. I listen to NPR. To liberals, the signals were clear. He was on the Right, sure, but he wasnt one of them.

And yet he could always be trusted to advance the conservative line with absolute sincerity. His second book, The Persecution of Sarah Palin, offered a prickly defense of an unpredictable and courageous politician in the grand American populist tradition. After the Tea Party made its debut, he celebrated the emergence of a grassroots movement devoted to self-reliance, fidelity, piety, industry, and responsibility. Continettis dreams of a populism fueled by entitlement reform had zero space for Occupy Wall Street. Inequalities of condition are a fact of life, he lectured as protesters were streaming to Zuccotti Park in 2011. Some people will always be poorer than others.

If one figure stood for Continettis ideal politician, it was Paul Ryan. A decade older than Continetti, Ryan was another clean-cut veteran of the conservative establishment. Continetti described him as the brains behind the Tea Party and called Ryans budget programincluding major reductions in government spending, tax cuts tilted toward the wealthy, and privatization of Medicarethe GOPs only ambitious and intellectually coherent policy response to a looming fiscal crisis. (Steve Bannon, who had a very different view of what fueled the Tea Party, called Ryan a limp-dick motherfucker who was born in a petri dish at the Heritage Foundation.) The details of Ryanism were politically toxic, but Continetti didnt worry about the polls. Ideas, even controversial ones, are not hindrances in politics but boosters, he wrote. They propel you to the top. When Ryan looked set to take over as speaker of the House in October 2015, Continetti saw it as a coming-of-age moment for the Rights next generation. Liberals are terrified of what these young conservatives might accomplish, he wrote. Liberals should be.

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The Struggle for the Soul of the GOP - The New Republic