society had hurt the people it was trying to help as a doctor i had been trained in empirical evidence, if the treatment is killing your patients, you stop the treatment. i think the most important element of it was what big government was doing to civil society. because the essence of a free society is the independence and strength of the institutions that lie between the government and the individual. the church, the school, the family, the community. i wanted to see a strengthening of civil society. all the evidence was that these well-intentioned programs were destroying the institutions or weakening them. that undermines the entire american experiment. >> gosh, i started reading charles when i was in high school in the "the washington post." probably when i was 15, i'm now 49. so a long time. i was a new republic reared. i was conservative. then the republic had this eclectic mix of brighters and a lot of intellectual