>> now on booktv david davenport research fellow at the hoover institution argues that the debate over the new deal in the 1930s laid the groundwork or today's conservative movement. this program is 45 minutes. >> it is my pleasure to introduce david davenport. [applause] >> thank you. it's great to be with you today. this is somewhat familiar territory to me. not long ago i worked in senator

bob dole's office which i suppose dates may and this is a newer building then my time. the hallowed halls and something about the work that you do so thank you for taking a break to be here today. you are brave to come and listen to me in particular. in an earlier career i was an attorney which is a group known not only for its brevity of speech and now for a long time i've been an academic which is a group not known for its clarity of speech so as i said you are brave to come on a friday to hear what i have to say. i thought i would begin with the 2012 election and as i'm sure you are aware after that election many people proclaimed the death of modern american absolutism. one commentator said the titanic is sinking referring to american conservatism. another one observes that the conservative arguments we have heard in this election are going to be relics in a museum very shortly. lots of people said conservatism really needed to change both its

message and its methods if it so ever going to win an election again. it still being debated today. i noticed in this morning's "wall street journal" governor scott walker from wisconsin talking about what conservatives need to do to be relevant. his thought is they don't need to give up their principles but be stronger in their principles and people are looking for that kind of leadership. so in this book, we talk about that in the final chapter of the book. my co-author gordon lloyd from the pepperdine school of public policy and i talk about the future of conservatism in the last chapter. but we really began elsewhere and the great writer pearl buck said if you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday. and so in this luck our thought is to go back historically, to come back to today. in other words it's not really a history book in the sense that we go back to live in an earlier

era but we go back to understand the roots of conservatism in order to come back to public policy and politics today. the question is where do we go back to find the roots of modern american conservatism? conventional wisdom is to go to the 1950s. russell kirk, a great conservative political philosopher, william f. buckley in the 1950s, national review magazine was launched during the 50s and so the conventional wisdom is that is where you find the beginning of modern american conservatism and then amity shlaes this year wrote i think a very interesting book on calvin coolidge that proposes we ought to go further into the 1920s because calvin coolidge was the beginning of modern american conservatism that i saw her week ago when i said the overly launched a coolidge's cool movement. i said that probably wasn't easy to do because you see the cover of the book in the top hat.

he's not really a 21st century kind of guy but gordon and die in his book think the place to go is actually to the 1930s because in our view modern american conservatism is essentially a response to the new deal of the 1930s to franklin roosevelt. and to us, the conservative response in the 1930s was the beginning of modern conservatism. that response initially actually came from former president herbert hoover. lots of people debate how conservative hoover was as a president and as the secretary of commerce in the 1920s. i am happy to talk about that issue today feed like that we are looking at him in the 1930s when he was shocked really by the excesses of the new deal. the 1930s the new deal was really the height of regressiveism and we argue in this book that just as edmund burke the english political philosopher began modern

conservatism as a response to the french revolution, we think there is a distinctive rand of modern american conservatism and in effect the new deal was our french revolution. the deal change politics, change governance and so responding to our own french revolution herbert hoover starts weeping to stake out the case for modern american conservatism. if you think about it in our view we are still operating under the new deal paradigm. time today. we argue that politics, american economic policy today are essentially just a continuation of the new deal. this debate that started 80 years ago between progressives and conservatives between roosevelt and hoover in the 1930s really is the frame, the frame of the 2012 debate as i will illustrate in just a minute and we think is still a frame for today. and in fact if you listen to the debates of the 2012 election

you've really hear echoes of early all the themes i'm going to talk about today. in her look we look at three areas where herbert hoover and franklin roosevelt debated in the 30s and where we think that is still a key debate today the first of those is liberty versus equality. this is one of the fundamental debates between progressives and conservatives. if you have read some of your american history you will remember that when the french journalist de tocqueville came to america in the 19th century he observed one of the main differences between the french revolution and republic and the american revolution republic is the french were really all about equality. they talked about liberty but they were really all about equality. he said by contrast the americans in the american revolution is about liberty. they also talk about equality but with they are really after

in america's liberty. this is one of herbert hoover's biggest complaints about the new deal is that it was turning america into a form of european totalitarianism. hoover had spent the early part of his career as a mining engineer doing huge mining projects abroad and he had continued to live in europe when he did relief efforts. food relief efforts during world war i and the post-world era. herbert hoover is a hero for essentially saving the belgian people from starvation as well as in other countries. one of the things hoover noticed during all that time in europe was that it was giving way to various forms of totalitarianism, socialism, communism eventually nazism and fascism and then he came back to this country. he was shocked because in the 1930s he thought roosevelt was voluntarily turning us over two forms of totalitarianism. in fact if you look at to

cartoon icons of the 1930s if you will herbert hoover like to talk about the rugged individual and franklin roosevelt said no which really about the forgotten man. these are really two great cartoon icons of the 1930s. hoover argued america is about equality of opportunity and it's about individuals having the freedom to decide how they want to live their lives and to pursue that and so america is about equality of opportunity. franklin roosevelt said and this is actually a little shocking to me, he said straight out in the 1930s the equality of opportunity is dead in america. you can't get it anymore. so what we have to be about in this country is equality of the outcomes. we have to design public policy around the forgotten man were sometimes he said around every man not around individual freedom.

this i think is precisely the debate today. when people talk about income inequality and how we need to raise taxes on the wealthiest and we need to raise the minimum wage, what they are really arguing for is this a quality of outcomes in society. this is the way, the form in which that debate is continuing today. and so we go into this in our book. i don't have enough time to go into it in depth today but if you look at the data, the data is not as clearly supportive that there are massive income inequality problems as it sometimes claims. i'm i am sure you all brushed up to see robert reisch's documentary about income inequality. it's hot in california and it's maybe not quite as hot here in washington d.c.. we also argue more importantly is income inequality is the

right question to be asking and inequality of opportunity and society isn't the right question income mobility. are people able to move up and down the income scale not whether their incomes are actually equal. when you look at studies of income mobility what you find is we still have a great deal of mobility of income in this country. unfortunately these studies lag timewise. their conference have been difficult to do but studies of income mobility from 199,016,005 . out that we have a great deal of income mobility. it divides income into five quintiles and from that study what you find is half of the taxpayers during that tenure period move from one quintile to another. you find that half of the people in the bottom quintile of income during the tenure period move up to a higher quintile income which i think you wouldn't normally believe if you were just listening to the inequality

debates today and then even a fourth of the people in that top quintile dropped out. there is even mobility going down. it's not like the upper 1% as they always call them get their and stay there. even they experience mobility so it's sort of forks up and down the scale. that's really the question we should be asking about income. our people in this society still able to find their place and move up and down and the evidence suggests that is the case. and then of course the very fundamental question, is it really the governments business to be regulating people's individual income? as herbert hoover pointed out the big problem in government tries to do equality of outcomes is that people become economically dependent on the government and sort of loose the american spirit of entrepreneurism, of liberty and choosing what you want to go after.

this book that came out by lucas eberstadt in which he points out that mitt romney's inartful political statement about 47% of the people being dependent on government is actually pretty accurate. it's 49% are receiving government payments of some form. i think we should have exactly what does it do to this spirit and the will of the people in there have fully dependent on the government and the think again this is precisely the debate that we are having today. and so we feel like one of the problems that conservatism has is that it's not really getting out the liberty message the way it was articulated in the 1930s. i think progressives would like to turn the liberty bell into the equality bill. sorry my artisan at her. i couldn't find a good equality

bill but i think one of our problems today is that liberty has become a bit of an abstraction and when you ask people what about liberty, what about liberty? you don't know that we have any loss of that and i'm going to talk a little bit more at the end of the talk about how we address that. this whole idea of liberty and equality is one of the big debates post then and now. the second topic of debate is limited government versus -- and there's a wonderful quotation reminding us that has always been part of the american republic from the declaration of and then it's about king george iii. jefferson writes he has erected a multitude of new offices and swarms of officers to rest our people and -- and i think that can be well set today of a big government. we suggest in her book that there've probably two ways to look at the governmengovernmen t versus limited government. there is a quantitative way and

in fact there are several clock clock -- quantitative poison and there are qualitative issues. on the quantitative side there are lots of ways to add a puppet government has become or how far away we are getting from limited government. one would be to simply add up the number of federal employees or especially nonmilitary civilians which of course is that an all-time high. you could add up the pages of the federal register. government regulation obviously again in an all-time high and frankly in the last few years growing at an exponential rate. the most traditional way to do the quantitative analysis is this chart that i have here which is the federal government spending as a% of gdp. and in the early days of the republic from the founding say to the new deal it was generally two or 3%. government spent two or three% of gdp although they were the

spikes during wartime and as you can see now we have gone to the 25 or send level. when my generation the baby boomer generation really gets on the entitlement trained on social security and medicare and medicaid and health care that number is going to go up much further. in fact to a range that is untenable for government. we are talking about greece levels of debt and spending. so, i think from a quantitative angle this is really a concern. hoover on the other hand was really more concerned about the qualitative aspects of the government. government in his day wasn't all that -- his concern was how much of our life is government running? how much is the quality of nature of our life really impacting and controlled by government? and so one way i look at that is

well, how is the federal government doing in terms of taking over more of our life's? one example he mentioned the look is the classic local state issue has always been education. everybody would agree what's the one thing that's local and yet today if you ask teachers and educators what's the primary influence on k-12 education especially on k-12 reform, education reform they will say the federal government. starting i would say with "no child left behind" in the last decade in continuing with race to the top grants today. what the federal government has essentially done is tried, they can't force them but they can bribe them with cash to follow their federal approaches. so we have essentially the last decade federalized education. health and welfare was always part of the state's purview but once again with obamacare is and

i can't call it that now. it's the aca now, obviously health care is now essentially better lives. so, this would have been hoover's concern, how much of government control and this was roosevelt's big thing. we need more regulation or economic regimentation. if you look at areas of our lives and areas of state and local policy taken over by the fed that really is a serious problem. the last issue we take up that we think is very much a then and now comparison is constitutionalism. in this part of the book, we founded our research to great speeches. one given by herbert hoover on constitution day in 1935 in one given by franklin roosevelt on constitution day in 1937 so two years apart. it's just a classic comparison and contrast.

roosevelt begins his speech by pointing out that the constitution opens with the expression, we the people. and he said so, this reminds us that the constitution is a peep olds document. it's not a lawyer's document, to people's document. it was done by the people and for the people and what that means is according to roosevelt when the constitution gets antiquated and a little out of date and he was giving us a 150 year constitution we the people can fix that. we can take it over and change that in any way we want and accommodate it to today. if we need regulation and people ask if that's unconstitutional we shouldn't have to worry about that. you will remember he tried to pac the supreme court to get more judges on their to quit slowing down his centralization and regulation agenda, unsuccessfully it turned out that he finally got enough

judges to go along to begin the cycle of increased regulation and the regimentation. so this was roosevelt. in the iron is if you look back on the new deal there were no constitutional amendments that were part of this new deal revolution. of course the constitution says this is how you're supposed to change it. you are supposed to change it by passing and adopting amendments. there were no of amendments in the rep to share new deal. the only amendment in that timeframe was to say the president can only have two terms after roosevelt had multiple terms. it was all done by reinterpretation or by workarounds and i will talk in a moment about how we do that today. hoover speech is quite. hoover starts with the first 10 amendments of the constitution and he says what this reminds us of is one of the main purposes of the constitution is to protect the people from their own government. it's the exact opposite of the roosevelt view. the rest of his speeches about federalism and he says we have

this great system of federalism. checks and balances, balances of power making sure nobody can get behind the wheel of the government and start running over people or running headlong in one particular direction. he said all of this apparatus and here is to make sure that the founders called it the cool deliberate sense of the communities carried out, not some minority or majority faction of the people. of course if you look at the debate today this is exactly the debate we are having today. roosevelts we the people in the constitution may call today the living constitution. they're all kinds of claims out there that the constitution is antiquated and prevents us from tackling the serious problems of the day. it calls for constitutional prevention and it calls for just ignoring sort of the checks and balances because that is really slowing government down. there are workarounds and i don't know if you followed the national popular vote act where

people who don't like the electoral college say we know we can never get an amendment to eliminate the electoral college so we will just do a work around it and we will say that if enough states pass a law requiring electors to vote for the winner of the national popular vote than we have effectively won the electoral college and that is getting a fair amount of traction. again residence manning up if you will and amending the institution we do these workarounds and we make it a living constitution get rid of the acronym sums. so our final chapter then is about the future of conservatism. at the beginning of this chapter we have two authors in this book and we have written lots of offense together over the years. when we sat down after the 2012 election which is when we were fishing this look we had a disagreement about the effect of the 2012 election. one of us thought that this was a no country for old men --

tommy lee jones as the rural sheriff -- texas sheriff. as he comes up against the drug money, the amazing weaponry if you will and the drug. and traffic in this area. he just said you know this is too much. i can can't handle this anymore. he was overwhelmed. that is how one of us felt in 2012. effectively a new majority that come together, a majority that was progressive and not conservative majority that had younger voters, that had a lot of people who were receiving government assistance in one form or another constituting them new majority that essentially wanted government to pick up the tab for what they wanted government to do.

and if that is the new majority in his view he wasn't sure how we would put a stop to progressivism. the other author was more optimistic. he was mr. smith goes to washington. everything is going to be fine. harold wilson former prime minister britain said a week in politics is a long time. you have seen that it here lately. three weeks ago republicans were dead and now the democrats are dead for the blowup of obamacare. a week in politics as long time. should people get carried away but one election doesn't decide the future of conservatism or progressivism. the american people are center-right he said and if you give them a chance they will come back to their senses. what we decided was to ask hard questions that conservatives could answer and i've just listed two of them here that we think are important.

one is this liberty still resonate? as you go back to the history of conservatism and if you had to pick one theme that is the essence of conservatism i don't know how you could avoid liberty. for edmund burke individual liberty was the essence of the modern conservatives. when herbert hoover started speaking gives the new deal has look in his speeches were called the challenge to liberty. that is how he saw the new deal is a challenge to individual freedom. conservatives historically what conservatives are about is economic religious and political that is the heart of conservatism. but the question is does liberty still resonate with people today? has liberty become just a distraction to people that is part of their daily lives? i living culper ring obviously and when my wife and i were discussing redesigning her home

and i said i need a new showerhead. this one is kind of clogged up and i would like a more powerful one. we can't get that kind of showerhead because it's illegal here in california. i said well but i want to these knobs. we can't have these knobs. i said if i can have my shower maybe i'm over regulated. it was one of those moments where liberty wasn't a distraction for me. i can't get a shower so i've got a problem. if you lived in new york city there was a time when you couldn't buy a 16-ounce soft drink. you could buy as many eight ounces as you want and you could accumulate 32 or 64 but you couldn't buy a 16-ounce. a lot of people looked at the silliness of that and said liberty is not really a distraction if you can't buy the kind of coke you that you want to have. one of my children just got finally his first full-time job and you do the math and you see

your paying taxes until march, april and in some states into me and he think well i'm understanding a little bit more of the power of the state. it's not such an abstraction. and if i may say i think the american people are having one of these nonabstract liberty thoughts right now when their personal health insurance policies are being declared illegal by the federal government. if we go back to those two icons of the 1930s the forgotten man, we think american policy works best when policymakers think of both of those when they are making policy. the individual who wants freedom who wants to be able to work and get what he or she needs and then the safety net to protect the forgotten man, the person who may not be able to succeed as the individual but when we have gone off one deep end or another is when we have had problems. if you take health care the last

time the government worked on health care in the 60s the great society medicare and medicaid what was the solution? the solution was for the individual and you worked at your employer generally and your employer gave you a certain kind of health plan and you negotiate with your employer perhaps to get the kind of plan that you wanted. and then for the forgotten man the addition of medicaid and the addition medicare and the building of the safety net, the extension of roosevelt's new deal safety net. that is how it was discoverediscovered. in obamacare is think there's a huge tip now to the scale that the american people are only now seeing. in order to cover the uncovered and i'm not an economist but hoover economists have pointed out that probably only about 15% of the american people could not get health insurance who wanted to get it so in order to meet their needs we had to federalize the whole system. now people are waking up that

it's illegal to have the policy. it's not just whether the president promised it but it's also liberty movement. i can't have this policy that i worked for and we all agreed that i would have. it's now illegal to have that policy. they just restated that yesterday and california. we are not going to allow those policies to be. instead you need a more expansive policy that probably has things at lease end the case of my children in their 20s things that they don't want. when liberty becomes less abstract it becomes more real. and i think that is a question conservatives have to wrestle with. how can we make liberty realty people? that is at the heart of conservatism. the same question we raised is the time for conservatives to give up on values. there a lot of people today saying this is the time we need to get rid of all these crazy social conservatives, christian conservatives and the difficult social questions that they keep

raising. certainly in california where i am from we have lots of people who would be fiscal and economic conservatives but who on social issues would be moderate, would be liberal or libertarian art really interested in a lot of the attention to those issues by government. but one thing we concluded in this book is we have to remember that conservatism has always had some kind of value space component. edmund burke, again the father of modern conservatism said that we needed a quote manly regulated liberty" math. we couldn't have been under regulated liberty. the founders also knew we were going to have a free society that works you have to have a virtuous people. otherwise freedom doesn't work. my concern is that we not, conservatives not throw out the

baby of values with the bathwater but instead probably conservatives have to work on having in our view less specific less concrete values and be working on a broader set of values that makes the free republic work. ronald reagan is being quoted saying just because you disagree with someone 20% of the time doesn't mean you can't work with them on the other 80%. unfortunately conservatives have gotten down to where if we disagree on 2% we can't be friends anymore. i'm sorry, we can't work with you. rather than throwing out that it seems to us conservatives need to move towards some broader sets of values. we also suggest that conservatives have two we learn federalism themselves. they reached this federalism message but when one of their favorite pet issues is at stake they are just as happy to go to the supreme court. we complain about judicial

activism but we are right there going to federal court in going to the supreme court. if we believe in federalism they probably have to practice that ourselves and not make every issue a federal issue. so that is sort of the argument that we make. i think of the old story in closing about the husband and wife who are having a conversation. the husband says to the wife i just have to ask you, if i lost everything. if i lost the house and if i lost the car and the boat would you still love me? the wife thought for a moment and she said yes, i would still love you. i would miss you but i would still love you. well, why i tell that is after 80 years, progressives and conservatives are still kind of joined appear together. conservatives haven't dropped from the scene and progressives are still trying to expand the new deal and add new things to very conservatives are in their

wrestling against it. it's really amazing if you look at the relevance of conservatism is really amazing that obamacare is passed and signed into law over three years ago. still being debated and worked out today. so conservatism isn't dead and liberty is an dead as you look at this obamacare is debate over a law that's been in effect for over three years. the political philosopher wellmark kendall says the american people are center-right in their hips, in their constitution if you will. i think the argument that we make in this book is that conservatives could just give americans some philosophy and some ideas for their heads and their hearts they would match up with their innate conservatism in their heads then conservatives might have a hopeful future. so that is our book. that's our essential case and i'm happy to open the floor for questions, comments.

you don't have to format as a question. if you want to just make a comment, that's great. just don't go on superlong. let's open the floor. yes, sir. >> you spoke of checks and balances and this administration has been very good at the workaround you're talking about towards spending and discretionary spending to be automatic in the resolution. the nuclear option yesterday as of now goes -- analogous. how can congress call back some of the authority that has been delegated over the past two years by the administration. >> unfortunately this is not a republican or democratic album. whoever's in power doesn't want to give up the executive power and so even in the bush of administration we had signing statements and executive orders.

aged administration seems to ratchet that up further. i would give a couple of hopeful signs. one is probably the only institution that you hear willing to roll the clock back a bit if you will is the u.s. supreme court. we have two or three justices on the u.s. supreme court who openly say now that we are not so much slaves to every court decision that has been decided ahead of us to say now i'm sorry we were wrong in that decision and go back to a time before the most recent supreme court decision. so that actually gives me some hope that some of this is the challenge say in a legal sense. we now have some justices on the supreme court that might be willing to as you say call back or roll back the clock to some decisions that have been made. the second hopeful sign that

this is always painful to wait for it is there is kind of a pendulum or -- i have have a potential review of history how it goes so far and finally it's enough that i will say just a quick story. i'm from california. the california republican party has apparently hit rock autumn. there's a two-thirds democratic majority in the legislature. at the hoover institution we have ahead of the american republican party and we were giving him a brilliant ideas about how they could do a better job. he said i just have one goal. i had forgotten how many seats they had to win to undo the two-thirds majority. he said the only goal i have is to win the --. that's great. i only have one goal. i want to win the three seats. what i'm saying is the republican party has gotten so bad that they finally have said this is the one thing we have to

roll back. i would guess that in the pendulum or view it will hit the stage where even you had some democrats and some republicans on the recent obamacare is vote. you have not very many but three democrats joined the republicans on the nuclear option vote so as i said that was painful because if you wait until the pendulum gets to far truly painful. those are a couple of hopeful forces. other questions, comments? yes. >> i got from my perspective and i don't know if this is accurate or not, but it seems that people who disagree with conservatives by their moderate left or more liberal and maybe it's the same, vice versa but the difference between conservatism and extremism on the right.

and so i'm wondering if you agree with that conception -- perception and also there's a big problem with why people are saying conservatism is dead because they see it all as extremism and lastly, how can conservatives separate themselves or make it clear that they can have conservative principles and values without being an extremist? >> right, right. no i mean, that's a good -- frankly politicians and i know that's where you work or not the best that communicating philosophical conservatism because it comes down to a win/lose on particular issues and conservative politicians have the win today and that is sort of the game. so i think it is a challenge kind of who they are listening to. that is way asked why we wanted

to write a book like this. it seems to us that the core message of conservatism is not as extreme as many political leaders have made it sound. and we think that some of the political leaders have made mistakes in sort of embracing the win at all costs strategy, where conservative means we think are important along with conservative ends. if you go back and study the russell kirk's and the william f. but lee's conservative means are not as extreme as some of the things that conservatives have been doing to win at all cost. so in when her view we think the political views need to think about conservative means as the end. they may not wind every round doing that but it seems to us that it will make their message more consistent in the long-haul and then secondly it seems like again this basic message of liberty. that conservatives have to find a way to make that resonate. first of all liberty is not an

extreme message but at the end of the day we acknowledge that the message of progressivism is sometimes friendlier if you will than the conservative message. william f. buckley said conservatives are people who stand at the -- yelling stop. i mentioned earlier i worked for senator bob dole and he was called senator gridlock. when asked about it he would say there are a lot of bad ideas in washington and somebody needs to stop them. that was his idea of conservatism. he said at least they have to call me dr. gridlock now. when you hear a problem progressives are quick to design the government solution for the problem. we feel your pain and we are going to design something that

will fix your problem whereas conservatives are getting more conservative posture in saying we don't want to go with the government. but the next part of the conservative message does not get heard. we believe in individual freedom and helping people by individuals. we believe in churches and all of these associational approaches. they believe in building a safety net but not a complete takeover of health care for example. so we agreed that i think the conservative message is a harder one to get across but we think that it can be improved. liberty can be made to resonate with more people. again i don't want to go off of my children who are in their 20s. one of my sons said all of the politicians are just trying to tell us how to live and he

thinks that of conservatives and liberals alike. liberals are trying to tell them what kind of insurance he can and can't buy and he's just a strata with it all. maybe that's a part of our message telling people how to live in the message's liberty. let's keep this government out of the way. i think even for 20 euros that can be a good message. any others? yes. >> i think a lot of us gave ourselves some questions and we saw a few weeks ago the governors race between christie and cuccinelli the media highlights the polarity within the republican party. i would like to ask in regards to modern conservatism the center-right and the conservatives who would be right

in this instance and how can we create more of a unity within the party rather than a separation? >> it's tricky because at the end of the day what conservatives have to do to be most relevant is to win a presidential election and to do that you have to find somebody who embodies the message and can win. so you'd know it's a lovely thing to write up local political philosophy but basically you have to find a candidate who can embody a enough of that to be a conservative to win. a lot of people fell for example selection that wasn't really a philosophical conservative, that he was more of a pragmatic businessman and maybe wasn't a court that bought into all of these policies. as you have seen there's a debate between christie and cuccinelli example. one thing i think conservatives have to do is to quit killing each other and to give each

other a little room to breathe. right after the election chris christie had beaten his opponent by a moderate landslide and he said that i'm a conservative. in my view he has the sort of conservative impulses to try to reach conservative policy. he saw the slain a blue state and isn't going to have the success that he would have been my home state of kansas for example and so in my view he has had a little bit of -- for the places he has had to govern but then republicans come in and with the surrender coalition and they have all the rhetoric to suggest he is not a real conservative. ..

the. >> but washington is the only place where sound travels faster than might. i know it is a fast place kind of place and i appreciate you coming and we have a copy of the book so if you would like to read one