People are fighting and debating and arguing so strenuously because manager of value is something of value is concerned here, and that is the conservative movement which is still a a major actor in american politics. At the same time, we have an opportunity to accept change. I think thats apartment of what it means to be a conservative part of what it means to be a conservative today. Not to be so resistant that we wont allow anything to happen. Even edmund burke said that change is inevitable. The its the question of prudent change. Thats what i, as a traditional conservative, am looking for, the right kind of leadership, the right kind of debate is and discussion. So i welcome all thats going on right now, all the various strands, all the various straebss strains of conservativism. Thats good. Coming out of that is going to be a bigger, better and, i think, more relevant conservative movement in the years ahead. Host want to read you a quote. Barry would just go absolutely crazy if he were watching this today. He would be yelling at the television. He would think its embarrassing, this situation we have with donald trump. Its not the Republican Party or the country that we knew 25 or 30 years ago. That was Susan Goldwater on march 21st, 2016. Yeah, right. Right. Well, i think theres something to be said for that. But at the same time, goldwater was a practical politician. He was not just a man of principle, which he was, the conscience of a conservative, but he was also a practical person. And he would have said, wait a minute now, 63 Million People voted for this guy. Why . What is he doing . I think that he would begin saying, well, lets see now, Supreme Court nomination, deregulation, tax cuts, strong military, National Defense being built up, being concerned about trade that is not just free, but fair. I think Barry Goldwater would have applauded all those things. Im pretty sure he would have. At the same time, he probably would have said something like, well, why didnt trumps mother wash his mouth out with soap and make him understand that we dont need a potty mouth, except goldwater would not have used the word potty. Host how did you become known as a conservative historian, or the historian of the conservative . [laughter] guest well, i dont think i am. I think the historian of the conservative movement is george nash. Wrote a marvelous book many, several years ago now called an inte intellectual history of the conservative Movement Since 1945, and thats the bible. Thats what we refer to when we want to though what happened 40, 50s, 60s, up into the 70s. George nash is a marvelous, careful, painstaking, brilliant historian, so i i count him as the historian of the conservative movement. It so happens that ive written some books and ive written some biographies and ive written some histories, so maybe im sort of coming up maybe from fifth or sixth, maybe im making my way up in this race. I didnt start out to be a historian. I really started out all those years ago, as i say in just right, to be a novelist. That didnt work out so well [laughter] i wrote three very bad novels which neff got publish which never got published, thankfully, because they would have been an embarrassment. And then i got into political writing which is where i was for 20, 25 years. And then one day i said, well, im burned out. Ive had it with worrying about campaigns, all of that. I want to go to the academy, i want to teach, i want to write. So i went back to school, got a ph. D. , began teaching, and thats where ive been these last 20 or 30 years. I guess ive also picked up a little bit from churchill, and i love that one line of his in which somebody said, well, what is history going to say about you, mr. Churchill . And he said, i know because im going to write it. Well, i think what im trying to do in a small way with my work is to paint a picture of the conservative movement sometimes from the inside, sometimes a little bit from the outside so that people 20, 30, 50 years from now will be able to refer to my books and understand the conservative Movement Better and in more depth. Host one of the books you wrote is reading the right books a guide for the intelligent conservative. What are some of the books that are contained in there . Guest oh, gosh, well, there are 109 books, and some of my favorite books are in there. The conscience of a conservative, my own biography goldwater, which i think is a pretty good book. Bill buckleys god and man at yale, Friedrich Hayeks the road to serfdom. We have about eight, is it eight or nine different categories. We took these 109 books and put them into various states, economics, politics, history and so forth. And what we did was to take a book like, say, the road to serfdom, and then to boil it down to just a page or page and a half to try to get people to see what it is, perhaps to spark their interest in it and make them pick up the whole book and read it. A book and then condense it down to three or 400 words. That really its not easy. That takes an amount of concentration and focus to do that. I couldnt do it for more than a couple of books in any one day. It took us a while. To come up with a hundred and nine books. Visit our website a book to be dark. And on the index tab at the top of the page