Transcripts For CSPAN Q A 20140103

This week on q a, yuval levin. Yuval levin, your wikipedia site has in the second sentence, he has been called, quote, probably the most influential conservative intellectual of the obama era. Whats that mean . Thats a very good question. I wonder by whom. I think its jonathan chait. Ok. Well then probably, in the course of criticizing me for something or other, but i guess what it means you know an intellectual in politics is a person who tries to connect events and practical questions to deeper currents, theoretical or philosophical currents. There are narrower definitions. You know paul johnson, the Great British historian, wrote a book called intellectuals in the 80s in which he said that an intellectual in politics is actually a person who tries to remake the world in the image of some theory he has. In that sense, there probably is no such thing as a conservative intellectual, but i think if you take a broader view of it and a notion that an intellectual tries to connect theory and practice then maybe thats right. Thats certainly part of what my work tries to do. The information on your background has you doing so many things. Whats the number 1 thing you do for a living . I am the editor of National Affairs, which is a quarterly journal of essays on Public Policy and political thought and im also a fellow at a think tank called the ethics Public Policy center here in washington. What does what do you do . Well, so editing the Magazine Means really editing the magazine. Its a quarterly journal. We run long essays, 5,000 words, 6,000 words, by experts for the most part, academics, think tank people, intellectuals, you might say again, about complicated public questions for the most part. Some of them are very practical, how do you fix Social Security . What do we do about education . Some of them are deeper, questions about american principles, american ideals or about the challenges of this moment. My job is to find those writers, to have them write for us, to edit their work, to makes sure that its read, to get it noticed. And as a think tank scholar, really my job is to study public questions, to write about them, to try to influence the public debate in various ways. Most of my work on that front is in the area of health care and of budget questions, but also i try to work some on, again, deeper philosophical questions, questions about how practice relates to theory in american politics. Where did this all start for you . Well, where to really start, so i started in washington as a college student. I came to washington to go to American University and in the course of studying at American University, studying political science, i worked on capitol hill, really from the very first week of my of my freshman year as a college student. Whod you work for . I interned first for bob franks, a wonderful member of congress, a member of the house from new jersey, who hasnt been there now for some time and sadly actually passed away this year, after a long fight with cancer. He was a really wonderful member of congress, a member of the budget committee. I worked for him for about a year and a half. I worked for the budget committee, because of him, after that and then i worked for Newt Gingrich while he was speaker of the house for the last year or so of his speakership. Whats the one thing youd take away from the Newt Gingrich experience . You know, working in congress in general is an extraordinary thing for a young person whos interested in politics. Id recommend it to absolutely everybody. Its washington is an incredibly open place, much more so than you would imagine. And i would say the more that i the more time ive spent in washington, the less cynical ive become about it in a certain respect. You cant believe conspiracy theories when you actually work in washington, because what happens is really people human beings, all the way down, trying their best to advance the good of the country as they understand it. Its very messy, its very complicated, because thats what human beings are, but its a very open process. Its incredibly open to people who are willing to work hard and who have ideas about how to do things. What i learned from the gingrich experience is that you can have influence as a it matters what happens in politics. It really does change the course of the country. Gingrich, you know in many ways was a wonderful speaker, in many ways was a problematic speaker, but i learned a lot of respect for people who are in public life. Its very, very difficult. Whats it like to be a conservative today . Whats it like . Well, you know in a lot of ways this is a challenging time for people who are conservatives. Weve got a not only a democratic president , but i think a quite liberal democratic president , who has not only been elected, but reelected after putting into place some ideas and programs and projects that i think are very wrongheaded. The public had a chance to think about that and they did reelect him, so its a challenging time. Its also an exciting time, if what youre trying to do is, as id say i try to do and many others are trying to do, is modernize conservatism, is bring it into line with the challenges that the country faces now, to help conservatives and therefore also the country think about how to confront the challenges of the 21st century. Neither side in our politics Neither Party is doing a very good job of that. Theres a lot of opportunity for thinking about what america in the 21st century needs to change about the way it governs itself, to get back to Economic Growth, to get back to prosperity, to get back to a kind of cultural revival that we need and so its challenging, but its exciting. Go back to before American University. Yes. You came to this country from israel. I did. I was born in israel, in the city of haifa in the northwest of israel. I came to this country when i was eight years old. My family came really because of economic reasons mostly, and i say mostly, because really my father was always drawn to american culture, to the american dream. He owned a small business, a small Construction Business in israel and at that time in the early 80s, the israeli economy was in great trouble and his business was too and he decided to make a change. But i think in a lot of ways my father was an american born in the wrong place and kind of came home and hes one of the most American People i know, which i mean as a very high compliment. So we came here when i was a small child and i grew up in new jersey, became interested in politics earlier than i can really exactly remember i guess, but decided that it was something i wanted to do, probably at some point in high school, and saw in college that maybe it really was. Can you remember when you had your first strong views political views and why . In a sense, i was always a conservative and, in part, that certainly has to do with my father, whos also a conservative. But i think it also as a young as a very young person, part of what appealed to me about it was that it was kind of countercultural. It was sort of unexpected. You know im jewish, i grew up in new jersey. Im an immigrant. Im sort of not supposed to be a conservative and there was there was something about the way of thinking that appealed to me. And there was something about the idea of human freedom understood in the american way that appealed to me. But i see that looking back now. I mean its hard to say exactly why you become what you become and your way of thinking about the world. I was drawn to the intellectual side of conservatism probably in high school. If theres a moment, it would be when a good friend of mine named adam kuyper gave me a book by george f. Will, called statecraft as soulcraft, which i probably would have been about 16 or so. And its not too much to say that it changed my life. I mean its it opened me up to a way of thinking about politics that i didnt quite know i was searching for and you know ive never stopped reading that book. Have you told george will that . I did tell him that. He was i think flattered by it. He also said that he doesnt agree with everything in that book anymore, which you can kind of see in his writing, too. But you know more than the specific arguments of the book, although, i probably agree with more of them than he does these days, the way of thinking, the way of approaching politics in a way thats grounded in philosophy and in history that takes politics seriously, as a human endeavor thats really about finding the truth and finding the best way of life. It appealed to me enormously and it and it continues to. What did you do for george w. Bush . I was a member of the domestic policy staff at the white house. So after working for Newt Gingrich, i went to graduate school at the university of chicago in a in a very Unusual Program at chicago called the committee on social thought, which is a kind of interdisciplinary graduate program. Combines political theory with economics, with the classics, with literature, and really allows you to kind of form your own course of study. One of my teachers there was leon kass, who in 2001, when president bush was elected, became his became chairman of his bioethics commission. And because i had some washington experience, he brought me back to washington with him. I worked there, i was the staff director of that council for a while and then, from there, went to the bush white house. So in the bush white house, i was a member of the domestic policy staff that worked on health care, mostly. Whats bioethics . Bioethics is a branch of ethics, which in turn is a branch of philosophy. Its devoted to thinking about the moral implications of biotechnology, more or less. So today that often means stem cells, cloning, but it also means and originally meant even more so, the ethics of medicine, of the relationship between doctor and patient, of the place of medicine in our in our social life and cultural life. So its a branch of philosophy that thinks about modern science. Give us, in a nutshell, what you think of obama care. Well, in a nutshell, i think its dreadful. I as i said, i worked on Health Care Issues at the white house. I had worked on them previously on the hill too. I think obama care is an encapsulation of the liberal way of thinking about health care and in that sense, its a very impressive achievement for democrats. Its Something Like what theyve been trying to do for a very long time. I think its wrongheaded because it embodies the notion that whats wrong with our Health Care System is a lack of centralized control, a lack of order. Its not a silly idea. The basic challenge in health care is really how you control costs. The problem we have presents itself on the face of things in two ways, as not enough people can afford insurance and so we have a lot of uninsured in america. And at the same time, the federal government is literally going broke paying for health care, for medicare and medicaid in particular. These two things would seem to pull in two Different Directions. On the one hand, we need to spend more on insurance so we have less uninsured. On the other hand, were going broke spending money on insurance. The reason they both happen at the same time is because Health Care Costs too much. The cost of it grows too quickly and has been for a very long time in america. And so the question at the core of the Health Care Debate for people who seriously think about it on the left and the right is how do you control those costs. And what it reveals is a very deep division between the left and the right, a kind of familiar division. The left says the reason cost grows so quickly is because the system is disorderly. Its chaotic, there are a lot of different interests pulling in a lot of Different Directions and nobodys looking out for the general interests, for the public interest, which is getting more people insured at a lower cost. The conservative answer is the system is opaque. There are no prices, there are no economic signals, nobody pays for their own care, nobody pays for their own coverage, nobody knows what anything costs. Really nobody knows. I mean, this came home to me in the bush white house. We tried for a period of several months to figure out a little factoid for the state of the union address, whats the average cost of hip replacement surgery in america, which is the most common surgical procedure, as a way of talking about Health Care Costs. And what we ended up concluding was there was no answer to that question. There are no prices in American Health care, not really. And conservatives think that the reason costs go up so quickly is that there are no economic incentives. Theyre all directed towards inflating costs, because no one is paying for what theyre getting and so everybody has an incentive to spend more and more and more. So what you need is a system that is more marketoriented. And in that sense, its probably less orderly, more chaotic, because the ironic truth the counterintuitive truth of capitalism is that chaos produces efficiency. There is a real deep difference of opinion between left and right about that and thats not just about health care. Thats been a difference of opinion about economics for a very long time and it presents itself in the Health Care Debate. I think obama care is the embodiment of the liberal view of this and i think its a mistake. The liberal publications have had an interesting time writing about you. Yes. Are you surprised about that . Yes, some. Its always a little surprising when your job is to sit in front of a computer and write about boring subjects that anybody would take an interest. Heres the headline, baby kristol. Yes. In the new republic, by marc tracy. And he says, as the editor of a dense journal called National Affairs, levin has acquired a reputation as the conservative movements great intellectual hope. Yes. Well, i hope there are higher hopes than that, but that kind of things obviously flattering. Like the other quote, its basically used in the service of criticizing me, but thats fine too. When he when he calls you a popularizer actually in this one, karl rove calls you a popularizer. Yes. What does that mean . Im not sure. I mean i think what that means in that context is that i try to make complicated ideas accessible to readers, to politicians, to anybody who cares to take an interest. So, for example, in thinking about health care, you try to start at a place that people understand, at a place that speaks to their life experience, and draw them from there to the deeper questions, to the theoretical questions, the philosophical questions. I wouldnt say im a popularizer of todays conservative agenda. Im, if anything, probably a critic of it. I think it needs to be changed, it needs to be modernized, it needs to be more focused on the problems of working families, which it really lacks now. But if what that means is that i make policy questions a little bit more understandable, thats certainly what we try to do at National Affairs, for example. We try to take the work of people who are experts and who speak the language of the academic world and make it accessible, at the very least to politicians and people in washington. What does it cost someone to buy National Affairs for a year . Its 27. 99, i think its worth every cent. A lot of it is online. I shouldnt say so, but a lot of it is online for free. We want readers. We want people to have access to these ideas and to these proposals and so you can get a fair amount of it online for free at our web site, which is nationalaffairs. Com. I think its worth reading in print and its worth paying for, because then you also get electronic access to the rest of it, and you know its sold in bookstores. Its sold in stores around the country and you can subscribe and get it in the mail every quarter. How do you pay for it . How do we pay for it . We pay for it in some part from subscribers, but we pay for it in large part from donors. Were a Nonprofit Organization and so donations from foundations support a lot of our work. Can you tell us any like the bradley foundation, which supports a lot of conservative efforts, the searle foundation, which does as well, and from some individual donors who give money to conservative intellectual efforts, people like paul singer. What does it meant that youve gotten the bradley prize and that 250,000 check . Yes. Well, its awfully nice. The bradley prize is a is an annual award given by the bradley foundation, which is a Philanthropic Foundation based in wisconsin that the award is to be given to people who the Selection Committee that the foundation chooses thinks have advanced the cause of protecting american institutions or strengthening american institutions. Theyve been giving it now for 10 years. Its given to four people each year and im one of the four this year. Lets go back to some things you said earlier. First of all, heres leon kass, who appeared on our callin show in 2002. I assume at that point he was starting out at the white house. Yes. And did you start with him . I was working for him, yes. Ok, lets watch what he says. Ive been working on these things for over 30 years. I was trained as a physician, i have a phd. In biochemistry, but at a certain point it struck me that there were enormously important moral and human and social questions raised by biomedical advance, that the powers that were acquired to intervene in the human body and mind, powers were acquiring for the humanitarian purposes of curing disease and relieving suffering are also the powers that can decisively alter human nature and what it means to be a human being and, if were not careful, could lead us down the road in the direction of a brave new world. And having written on these topics and worried about these things, i left the life of the laboratory to worry about the human meaning of these discoveries and have written and thought about these things and when the president of the United States says look, i these are important questions, im serious about this. I would like you to lead a group of scholars on these matters and try to help me with my decisions and help me educate the public as to what is stake, one cant say no. What did the council do, in your opinion, when you were there and how long were you with george bush . Well, i worked for the council for about three years and then i worked at the white house on the white house domestic policy staff for another three years, so i served for about six of the eight years of the Bush Administration. The council was called together to advise the president on bioethical issues, but it was really called together in the context of the president s decision about funding embryonic stem cell research. In 2001, before september 11th, one of the big issues that the president that new president faced was the question of how whether and how the federal government should fund embryonic stem cell research. The Research Involved the destruction of human embryos, which to a lot of us means the taking of a human life and the question was whether it was moral given the promise of it, or the potential of it, to spend public money on that kind of research. And the president made a decision that in which he was advised by leon kass, among others, that said that you could spend money on lines of cells that already existed at that point, but not on new ones, so you wouldnt be using federal dollars to encourage the further destruction of human embryos. And in the course of announcing that decision, he said these kinds of issues are going to stay with us. Theyre not going away and we need to we need help in thinking about them. And he called together the bioethics commission, which was a group of 18 scholars, almost all of them academics, people from universities, who would come together several times a year, consider a challenging bioethical question that had some Public Policy implications, and provide advice to the administration, and really to the country, in the form of publications of reports. And thats what they did. They wrote a report on cloning. They wrote a report on stem cell research. They wrote a report on enhancement technologies, ways of enhancing human abilities. They wrote reports on caring for the aged, on dementia and other related issues. I think the council did very important work. Its important work in the long run. Its direct effect on Public Policy is very hard to judge. The president called that Council Together after he had already his stem cell decision and so they didnt shape that decision and while i think their work was useful in a number of ways in certain particular junctures where those kinds of questions were central, their more important lasting influence is in the reports they did. So what has this president done in this same area . Well, this president undid president bushs stem cell policy and has allowed the funding of new lines the creation of new lines of cells. He doesnt believe that the destruction of a human embryo is tantamount to the taking of a human life and so he thinks it is worth spending public money on it and he has been spending public money on it. In some ways, you two are from the same part of the country. I mean you spent a lot of your life at the university of chicago. How long were you there . Well, not a lot of my life. I was actually present there for only about three years and then i wrote a doctoral dissertation, which i mostly did from here in washington. But thats you know in hyde park and what in i voted against barack obama before most conservatives did. I voted for the other guy who, not only do i not know his name, i dont think i knew his name then, who ran against him for the state senate. He was my state senator when i lived in hyde park. Did you know him . No, i didnt know him. I dont think id ever really encountered him. He was teaching parttime at the university then, but in the law school and so i wasnt aware of him. Whats your sense of why you know you come to the stem cell issue this way and he comes to it that way . Wheres that come from . Yes. Its a challenging question you know. I come to the issue because i think that i take seriously the first sentence of the second paragraph of the declaration of independence, which says that all men are created equal. I think thats true and i think that what that means is i think that its a challenging fact for american life. It has been many times. And its a fact that calls us to our best selves and its particularly challenging when we think about human life at its very origins, because that a human life at the very beginning is it cant speak to us, cant speak to us of its of its pains, of its needs, of its wants, and we have to work to understand that that is human being, that that is how all human beings begin, that that is where human life begins. And given that fact, we have to limit what we do, what we do to a human being, even when its useful to us to use that human person as less than a human person. We should restrain ourselves and find other ways and i think there are other ways to advance important medical Research Without doing that. The president certainly doesnt think that what he endorses involves the taking of a human life. Im sure he wouldnt endorse it if he did. How he gets to that point, it seems to me and of course i start out from a different place and so im inclined to be critical of his way of thinking, it seems to me that he gets to that point from the end and not from the beginning, by thinking first about how useful it would be to use these cells for other reasons or by thinking first about on the question of abortion, for instance, by thinking first about the freedom of the adult person rather than about the needs and exigencies of the very young person. And he simply persuades himself that human life begins sometimes later, maybe at birth, maybe at viability or we can invent all kinds of other things. I think there is no non arbitrary place to set that point of beginning than the beginning, than the conception, where a new human organism comes into being. As a biological matter, theres not really a question about when there is a new human being that didnt exist before. And to me, that means that we then have certain obligations, minimal, but at least the obligation not to take the life of that human being on purpose. Going back to another thing you said earlier, george will. What has george will changed in his thinking since he wrote the book that had such an impact on you . Well i think i think hes a little bit more of a libertarian now than he was. That book presents a kind of communitycentered vision of conservatism. It argues for an idea of what government can achieve that understands, first and foremost, the need for limits, but the need for limits in the service of a notion of community, a rich notion of community. And he argued then and believed then that government had an Important Role to play, a limited but Important Role to play in that sphere that government helped shape citizens, that one of the things that helps to shape the character of american citizens is the nature of americas government. I think he takes that to be less important now, or at least hes more worried about the downsides of government. Its understandable. Im very worried about the downsides of government as well. I think any conservative today would be and most americans today, in various ways, are. But i continue to think that theres no escaping the fact that government the nature of our government, what we do through our government shapes who we are citizens. And that means that we have to take a certain kind of approach to government. We have to take it seriously. We have to hold it in high regard and in order to hold it in high regard, we have to make sure that its a government that works well within the sphere that its supposed to work in, to be respectable. To be respected, it has to be respectable and our government has some trouble being respectable nowadays. I want to ask you to help define the nuances of conservatism. Were going to go back to 2005, eight years ago. Paul weyrich, the late paul weyrich was in that chair there and he said this and see what you think of this. Our culture is continuing to decline. Here we are, working on a marriage amendment you know something that i thought was selfevident that marriage was between a man and a woman, but now were having difficulty trying to get this passed. You know we are not succeeding in changing the culture to return to a time when values mattered. Theyre becoming less and less important in the society. And you know when all is said and done, it doesnt matter whether you have a minimum wage or not. And it doesnt matter you know what kind of trade policy you have, if in fact the moral fabric of the society has disintegrated. What about the morals, the values . I mean, his definition of values might be different than todays. Well, let me start in a general way. I think conservatism is the difference between conservatives and liberals, a very profound difference is that conservatives begin from a constrained and limited notion of limited set of expectations about what human beings can achieve, what Human Knowledge can achieve, what human power can achieve. And because of those low expectations, they value very highly the achievements we have in our society, the things that work and they want to preserve them. They want to save the preconditions for those things continuing to work. Liberals tend to begin from Higher Expectations, from a notion of greater perfectibility in the human being, from Higher Expectations about Human Knowledge, about human power. And for that reason, they start out with a sense of outrage about whats failing because they think we can do a lot better. They dont begin by appreciating what is best, they begin by trying to undo and root out what is worst. Both of these things are very valuable, very important and very necessary, but theyre quite different. You start looking at a world that has both good things and bad things and your first instinct is to be grateful for the good and build on it to address the bad, or you start looking at a world thats both good and bad and your first instinct is to be outraged and to root out what is worse, based on an idea of what could be best, an idea of perfectibility, you approach politics very differently. And what you see from paul weyrich there, in part, is a sense that what works about our society has to be protected, because its rare, because its enormously valuable, and because it could be lost very easily. Conservatives care a lot about culture, because cultures the way we sustain those things that work about our society. Any Human Society is always under constant barrage by new members, by people who were born without all the great progressive notions of what we can do. Were all born barbarians and we have to be trained to become civilized people. And the culture is what does that. Its what makes it possible to turn a newborn human being into a civilized american citizen. And so conservatives think thats not easy. That doesnt happen by itself. And one of the most important things that any society has to do at any given time is to preserve that, to worry about the culture, the way in which it can train the next generation to continue in the footsteps of past ones. And so culture matters an enormous amount to conservatives. Its not taken for granted as just being there and we can build on it. It has to constantly be nourished. Is there someone out there today that youve seen in public life that represents what you think and who you think would possibly have a chance of getting elected . Of getting elected president . President. You know no one perfectly, of course. No one ever represents you perfectly, but i think there are some great people in public life. I think paul ryan is a very impressive figure who has become best known on budget issues. Hes the chairman of the house budget committee, but who also is very serious about deeper questions. Hes been talking more and more about the problem of community, hes youve had a relationship with him . I know him. Ive worked with him a little bit. And im very impressed with him. I think hes one of the more intellectually serious members of congress and a very impressive one. But there are many others. I think marco rubio in many ways is very impressive. Hes a very interesting conservative political figure. Hes got a biography thats very different from most conservative politicians. Its actually a biography thats a lot like those of many democratic politicians and it makes him understand the ways of people who dont naturally disagree with him think in a way thats very important. I think bobby jindal, the governor of louisiana, is very impressive in a lot of ways. I think chris christie, the governor of new jersey, is very impressive in a lot of ways. What do you think of this guy . Well run a clip. And it is easy for us as conservatives to look at the november election, to look at that exultant, unabashed embrace of the left and to have a moments despair. Let me say this room is critical to preventing that to happen. National review has a long, long history of standing athwart history and yelling, halt. We can stop this. We can turn it around. And in fact, i am right now incredibly, incredibly optimistic that together, as they say, it is always darkest before the dawn, that we are on the verge of a rebirth of conservatism. He and marco rubio have a different approach. Theyre both cubanamericans. Yes. Which one do you think will be the most appealing . Well, it remains to be seen and its hard to say. And whats the difference in but yes, so thats ted cruz. Hes a new senator from texas, a very impressive guy. Hes held a lot of impressive positions, including in the Bush Administration. He tends to be more of a populist conservative than marco rubio. I think he sees himself more as representing a kind of tea party anxiety, although marco rubio is thought of as a Tea Party Guy too and in a lot of ways is. I actually think the distinction between them is about is about the connection of rhetoric to policy. The criticism that i have of a lot of republican politicians now is that theyre not turning their rhetoric into policy. Theres a lot of talk. A lot of it is very constructive talk and very useful talk. A lot of is trying to learn lessons from the last elections in ways that are important. But it needs to be turned into a policy agenda. And i think there is a sense among some conservative activists, people who i agree with in a lot of ways and whose rhetoric i find myself nodding my head to, but they then tend to think that what conservatism has to mean in practice is just less, less of the same. I think what it has to mean in practice is a transformation of the way we think about government in america, is a reform agenda, reform of our governing institutions. And conservatism, if its going to be an electable majority, has to be a governing majority, has to think about how we actually govern the country. And so i think that marco rubio in some ways is trying to do that. You can agree or disagree with the ways hes trying to do it, but hes trying to translate the rhetoric of concern that you would also hear from ted cruz about the direction that things are taking in the obama years, to translate that into a different direction, into a different agenda. And i think you dont see that enough in a lot of other politicians. Heres a fellow who is governing now and he, back in 2005 in that chair, defined conservatism. What do you think of this . Well i think labels come as a result of your political philosophy, and certainly in my case, your voting record. And if you look at my voting record and if you look at my political philosophy, its conservative. I have one of the most conservative voting records in the United States senate. I suppose some people are perplexed by that, because i challenged my Republican Administration on the war and other issues, detainee issues. But i do what i think is right and i say what i think is right. And i dont ever worry about is that republican or democrat or is that a conservative or moderate thing to do. Thats the way ive done everything in my life. How does a conservative like chuck hagel end up in the Obama Administration . Well, i think he agrees with the Obama Administration about a lot of things, including a lot of Foreign Policy questions and defense policy questions and so he was their choice for defense secretary. He also knew the president personally when they were senators together and i gather they got along well. I disagree with what i think is an important part of what he said. I think it actually matters that youre part of a party, that youre part of a movement. I think a truly publicspirited person has to see himself as part of team in politics and that when a person says that hes simply independent, that he calls things as he sees them, everybody calls things as he sees them. You know there arent people at least in my experience of politicians in washington, there arent a lot of people who just simply do what the party says. But they work with the party because the only way to really make your political ideas matter is to work with other people who basically agree with you, not 100 . No two people agree entirely about everything, but i do think its important to make a party work and to make a Political Movement work, because politics is a common effort. Its inevitably and necessarily a common effort. And the person who holds himself above all that and just says well, im just me, calling the shots as i seem them, is both not showing enough respect for people who are in the arena, because theyre all calling shots as they see them, and i think is not being serious about making his political ideas real. That has to be done through party. I think partisanship doesnt deserve the terrible reputation that it has. Its actually a way of moderating peoples views. Its a way of making people more practical and its a way of making Democratic Politics possible. Here is a man that talks about neoconservatism. Yes. Charles krauthammer. Neoconservatives generally are people who started out as liberals and as the dean of neo conservatism, Irving Kristol once said, was mugged by reality and they evolve, in time, into conservatism. So thats number one. If you ask a neoconservative, how did you vote in 1968, a seminal year, hed say Lyndon Johnson. If you ask a conservative im sorry, in 1964, he would say Lyndon Johnson and a conservative would say goldwater, so thats one distinction. Are you a neoconservative . Well, i tell you, i was born in 1977, so the people hes talking about had mostly made their move by then. So i think the term just means a little less than it used to. Its also come to be understood as a term about Foreign Policy, which it didnt used to be. I think it wasnt for Irving Kristol and for many people in that generation. That happened through the 1980s and became a much more prominent term really in the last decade. But i do actually identify with a lot of the early neo conservatives, because what they did, not beyond moving from left to right and maybe the reason they moved from left to right is that they tried to apply they tried to apply social science to politics in a way that led them to conservatism. They tried to be empirical. They tried to be concrete. They tried to be constructive and so they were a little less theoretical and a little more engaged with politics than earlier generations of conservatives. And i am drawn to that. I think it matters that politics be practical. I think it matters that it answer the particular concerns and needs of the country in a given moment. And i think it matters that it be policyoriented. And so in that respect you know i do i certainly look up to Irving Kristol as a great intellectual model and a lot of people in my generation do. I dont think that distinguishes conservatives and neo conservatives anymore. I think that distinction just doesnt mean as much for younger people who really just learned from those two strands together and have combined them in their own thinking and their own practice. Younger conservatives are not divided along the same lines as older ones. Theres not even quite the same division between libertarians and conservatives that there used to be, although that still does exist in many respects. I think the synthesis that was attempted, beginning in the 1950s and succeeded really in the 1980s is just the world we grew up in and so conservatism for us is a bigger tent to begin with. Who do you most admire in history . I know youre doing a book on edmund burke and on thomas paine, but who what book would you have on your shelf that you would go to first . Define your views. You know certainly edmund burke is someone that i that i admire enormously and that i think he combined theory and practice in politics, or philosophy and practice in politics in a way thats enormously instructive and his conservatism is a way of thinking that i look to as a guide. Not always, not in every respect, things have changed a lot. Edmund burke of course lived in well let me tell you a little about edmund burke. Edmund burke was an irishborn english politician in the 18th century. He was born in 1729 and died in 1797 and was very important in a very eventful period in british politics, the era of the french revolution, of the american revolution, the great regency crisis, a lot of problems in ireland and india. And burke was a voice for a new kind of reformminded conservatism. How long was he a member of the British Parliament . He was a member of parliament for 32 years and that was really his great arena. Hes thought of now in some ways as a political thinker. He really only wrote one book before he entered politics. He wrote a lot of pamphlets, a lot of essays, gave a lot of great speeches, and so he was an active politician who connected his political practice to political ideas. Why did you combine him with thomas paine . Well, the idea is really that the debate the argument between burke and paine is the first real instance of the left right divide that emerged in the era of the of the french and american revolutions. Burke and paine were contemporaries. They knew each other. They met. They exchanged letters. And maybe most importantly, the great english language debate about the french revolution was centered around a debate between burke and paine. Burke was a staunch opponent of the french revolution, wrote a kind of book, a long pamphlet called reflections on the revolution in france. Paine was a great champion of the french revolution, was in paris at the time and wrote a response, a book called the rights of man, which was a direct answer to burke. Burke then answered him. There was a back and forth and their debate got an enormous amount of attention. And what i argue in the book thats forthcoming later this year is that both in that debate about the french revolution and in their world views as they laid them out more generally, over many decades in political life, they embody what became the left and the right. They were both what we would think of as liberals, classical liberals. They both advanced the vision of government that we would quite perfectly recognize as a kind of angloamerican vision. But they came at it from very different places, thought about it in very different ways, and this distinction of, do you start out by being grateful for what works or do you start out by being angry at what doesnt work and everything that flows from it is very evident and powerfully evident in their writings. They were aware of it themselves and so its a useful way to think about the left and the right, for all that theyve change, of course, in the centuries since then. When will we see that book . That book will be out in december. Its an extension, in some ways, of my academic work, of a dissertation that i wrote to get my phd. At the university of chicago, but much altered and refined and it tells the story of their debate. It breaks it down thematically into the ideas they argued about, the meaning of nature in politics, the meaning of choice, of obligation, of rights, of reason, the power of Human Knowledge or the limits of it, and tries to use their arguments, precisely because of them were very engaged in politics at the same time that they were theoretically minded, to use their arguments to think about what the left and the right really are, or at least what they were to begin with. Theres another name attached to you, roger hertog. Yes. How does that work . Well, roger hertog is a donor to conservative causes. Hes a financier. He made his money on wall street in new york over the years and has given a lot to intellectual efforts on the right, actually, not only on the right, but mostly on the right. He was very involved in the new republic for a time, which is not really on the right, and various other ventures. But he supports intellectual work and he is the donor who supports me at the ethics Public Policy center, so my title there is the hertog fellow at the ethics Public Policy center. He supports a lot of other very important intellectual work. Why do you think people like roger hertog spend money on this . Yes. You know its a great and wonderful mystery in my world. I think they do it because they see it as a way to help their country, to advance a cause they believe in and you know that happens on the left and on the right. It happens in to advance causes that are not political at all, too, which of course, hertog does as well, medical research and other things. People who find themselves with a lot of money and feel like they ought to give something to the country look for ways to advance whats most important to them. And if whats most important to them is the intellectual life of the country, then they give to intellectual causes. Were obviously very grateful they do. Its how our magazine exists. Its how think tanks in general work and function and so a lot of washingtons intellectual life depends on the willingness of people like that to support such work. Whos your favorite liberal . My favorite liberal. Favorite liberal thinker, you know a lot of my favorite liberals work at the brookings institution, which is a kind of centrist liberal place and so ive looked at somebody like bill galston, whos certainly a liberal, he was very involved in Democratic Politics for a lot of years, but who think about things in a way that i think is serious and responsible and informative and useful. But there are a lot of liberals that i read and take seriously, a lot of liberal critics that i think are very worthwhile. And there are some liberal politicians who are too, now and then. Ive got another Leftof Center magazine. Yes, well left of center. Washington monthly. How would you define this magazine . Well, Washington Monthly is a magazine of the left. It publishes a lot of serious people who have a lot of serious things to say. I read it, i subscribe to it. Its an intellectually serious magazine. Ryan cooper wrote an article that and actually brought you to our attention, in the may june edition and its called reformish conservatives, reformish conservatives. And you came out on top in there and well show on the screen. You can see there where they had rated all the conservatives, the gop influence. You finished number you know with the highest points, 10 that meaning you have the most influence in the in the republican world, but your reformish score is low. I got to work on that. You know thats funny, i my friend, ramesh ponnuru, is rated much more highly on the reformish score, and talked about that after we saw that story, because i cant think of anything about which the two of us disagree and so its hard to say exactly what they mean by having by one of us being more inclined to a kind of reform conservatism, the other not. I also dont think im more influential than he is. Its a little hard to say what that means. I mean i would say most of the things i argue for are not currently the positions of republican officeholders and so in that sense its not easy to say what influence means. And i guess that particular profile didnt really define it either. But what i argue for and what a lot of the people that were profiled there argue for is a modernization of conservatism, a way of applying conservative ideas about what government ought to do, what the economy ought to be like, to todays problems, to the problems of working families who are facing higher Health Care Costs, Higher Education costs. A lot of what the conservative policy agenda is still directed to, in some ways, really are problems of the early 1980s. If you thought that hyper inflation and high marginal tax rates were the main problems today, then youd be very happy with the conservative policy agenda or with the things that governor romney ran on in the last election. But those really arent the major problems we have and if you think about how conservatives in earlier decades got to those policy goals and policy agendas, i think thats where we ought to begin. They began by thinking about what are the countrys problems and how do our ideas of a limited government, a free economy, a free society apply to those problems. I think if we did that with reference to todays problems, wed come out with a pretty different agenda. David stockman was here recently and i want you to parse this too, because he had some strong he says hes a conservative, had some strong things to say about people the conservatives who love Ronald Reagan probably will disagree with. Yes. Lets watch. I think the success that has been attributed to reaganomics is totally unwarranted. We had the greatest keynesian deficit binge between 1981 and the end of the Bush Administration, the first bush. Those 12 years are all really the reagan program. And so we did have an economy that rebounded, because volcker killed inflation and the deficits were enormous and they stimulated the economy. But they established a precedent for continuous, chronic, massive peacetime deficits and put the republican party, the old defender of the treasury gates in the position that cheney so ineloquently expressed, deficits dont matter. And that was the beginning of the end, because in a democracy, if theres not a conservative party that is defending the treasury, the taxpayers and fiscal rectitude, youre going to have a freelunch competition between taxcutters, the republicans, and spenders, the democrats. What do you think . I think thats much too narrow a view of the options we have. I think that reagan wouldnt have agreed with that in this sense, that what he saw the economy, not in terms of taxing and spending, but in terms of growth or a failure of growth. And what the reagan revolution in the Economic Policy achieved was a resurgence of growth, of Economic Growth. Growth really is the only way out of the kind of deficit trap that were in. And i do certainly agree with David Stockman that there was a failure in the reagan years, and in the bush years, to contain federal spending. Reagan why . Why was that . Well, because its very difficult to contain federal spending and if its not your only priority then its difficult to make sure that it happens, because its easier to achieve other important things. You say youre scared to death of the debt. Well, scared to death of the debt, i think the debt is a very big problem. I think that the trajectory of Health Care Spending, which is distinct from the debt but related to it, is a very, very big problem, because that really becomes impossible to contain in the coming decades, even if even if it grows at rates that are lower than what they were in the last decade and Health Care Spending has slowed some in this recession and slow recovery. I think in the long run, the trajectory of medicare spending and medicaid spending is not sustainable and that is a huge problem. And i do think that the size and scope of the debt that we have now is not sustainable, because at some point interest costs become totally uncontrollable and interest costs cannot be legislated away. You dont have any control over them. Once you owe them you owe them. So yes, i think the debt is a huge problem, but the way to get out of that challenge, out of that problem were in, first and foremost, is Economic Growth. Its very important to reduce federal spending in various ways, but thats not the solution. Thats part of the way of getting to growth. What reagan did was contain inflation and reduce marginal tax rates, above all, which brought growth back. That really did succeed enormously in making possible the other thing that happened in that period, of the 80s and the 90s, which was extraordinarily strong Economic Growth and that made it possible for the American Economy to rebound. Theres no question that it that should have meant that we then turned around and reduced federal spending. The Economic Growth we had did bring about a balanced budget for a short time in the 90s. That was first and foremost what brought it about. We didnt really cut spending all that much in 90s and we didnt really raise taxes all that much, they went up some. It was Economic Growth, the boom that made that possible. And at the end of the Bush Administration, the george w. Bush administration, just before the economic crisis, it seemed like that could happen again. We had a deficit that was less than one percent of gdp, or just a little more than one percent of gdp. But of course the crisis happened and growth slowed, stopped, reversed and then of course more federal spending was needed and more federal spending took place. I think theres more than a choice between continuing on the path of todays liberal welfare state or austerity, which is what David Stockman is suggesting. In fact, i think those two things are basically the same thing. Theyre just two sides of the same coin. Austerity is what happens if we continue down that path. It becomes our only option. For now, we have another option and that is modernizing our governing institutions, liberating our economy from some of the burdens that it suffers from Health Care Costs, from overregulation and a few other things, and allowing for Economic Growth. Reducing spending is an important part of that, but i dont think cutting spending is the essence of the conservative agenda or the goal we should have. Go back to and you were probably in the Bush Administration when this happened, i remember when the iraq war was about to start. I think it was Paul Wolfowitz that said if its going to cost said its going to cost us about 60 billion to do the war. Yes. Larry lindsey, who was a Economic Advisor at the time, said no, its going to cost 200 billion and he lost his job. Yes. And its now cost, what, a trillion. More than that. Im not sure if thats quite why larry lost his job, though it probably had something to do with it. Yes, the iraq war was very expensive and the war in afghanistan was expensive as well. I think you know National Defense is the First Priority of the of the national government, or the federal government and if our if the leaders of our country, especially the kind of Bipartisan Coalition that decided on the iraq war, decide that thats what needs to be done then we spend money on that. Whether that was the right decision or not you know i think a lot of people who were on that side then are no longer on that side and think it might have been a wrong decision. But i dont think thinking about the iraq war through the fiscal lens is the right way to think about it. And as i say, by the end of the Bush Administration, deficits were quite low. And then of course, again, came the crash. So the iraq war is not the reason were facing very large deficits. A failure of growth is the reason were facing very large deficits. And we are very poorly suited to getting back to growth today. Were very poorly suited for a lot of different ways. Our government lumbers along. Our welfare state is very, very inefficient and drags down the economy, especially in health care. Our Education System is not well suited to creating the kind of workers were going to need in the future. Regulations are targeted to consolidating the economy, rather than allowing it to grow. But we also have bigger problems. You know Economic Growth is basically a function of two things. Its a function of population growth and of productivity growth. And in the postwar period, after world war ii, we went through an explosion of growth in the labor market. The babyboomers entered the workforce, women entered the workforce in enormous numbers, and at the same time, we had these productivity explosions. One after another, technological advances that allowed us to become more and more productive. Our workforce is not growing that way anymore and its not going to be, because we have the babyboomers leaving the workforce, retiring and theres basically no way to have that kind of growth again, even through immigration, even through anything else we might imagine right now. So the only way really to get to the kind of growth we had after the war is productivity growth and we have to think about how to make that possible. Its not the only thing that matters. You know a certain kind of social solidarity matters. We have to care. We have to make sure that our society doesnt fall apart. We have to care for people who are very badly harmed by the social and cultural effects of the welfare state, of globalization and various other forces that are very hard to control, the collapse of marriage, the collapse of the family among the poor. And we also have to worry about productivity growth at the same time. That means that our National Leaders in the coming decades are going to have very, very difficult challenges to face and Neither Party at this point is thinking about them. How would you rate barack obama . Well, i think that i think hes not a very good president. I think that he first of all, i disagree with the agenda that hes tried to advance and so to the extent that hes succeeded in advancing it, i think thats not good for the country. Its again, its an agenda of consolidation of the economy rather than of growth. Its an agenda of consolidation of the Health Sector rather than growth. A very poorly thought out economic stimulus, a fairly poorly thought out reform of financial regulations, so ive been opposed to a lot of whats happened under president obama. I also think that he has turned out not to have been very well suited to being the chief executive of the federal government, that he doesnt like the management side of his job. He doesnt particularly like the political side of his job. Hes not all that good at bringing people together. And so you know it seems to me that he has not been the leader that we needed in this period and that that has had to do its not been the only reason, but its had to do with why our way out of the recession has been so sluggish and so slow. So needless to say, im not a fan. Who in history are you the biggest fan of . What president . In a way, it is a very iffy president. I am the biggest fan of abraham lincoln. I think lincoln saved the union and ended slavery at the same time which seemed like it would be impossible to do at the same time, almost what impossible. Lincoln is just an impossible figure, between his intellectual progress, his rhetoric, his statesmanship, his achievements, and absolutely extraordinary president. Just the person we needed at that moment. It is amazing that he was there. Similarly,ington, was an indispensable man. A lot of people have called him an incredibly impressive figure. I am a huge fan of Ronald Reagan. I think reagan helped get us out of a moral slump. He helped give us our confidence back in a time when we really needed it. He helped in every concrete way to get the economy growing and to end the cold war. I also have to admire franklin roosevelt, with whose domestic policies i disagree with in a lot of ways. He also was an extraordinary figure in a moment when the country needed an extraordinary figure. We have been lucky to have them. Our guest has been yuval levin, who is the editor of National Affairs quarterly, plus a lot of other things and we thank you very much for joining us. Thank you. [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2014] for a dvd copy of this 7726. Am, call 1877662 for free transcripts or to give us your comments, visit us at q anda. Org. Programs are also available as cspan podcasts. Span, political analyst charlie cook looks ahead to the 2014 midterm elections. After that, the first lady ladys encore continues with a look at the life and career of eddie ford. Later, Supreme Court oral argument on the states responsibility to control air pollution beyond its own borders. Houseate and several seats will be decided. Charlie cook of the Cook Political Report highlighted the upcoming 2014 midterm elections