were very much in need and yet often i had the opposite effects. that caused me to question my faith in the old-time religion of new deal or great society liberalism and to look for other ways. i began while i was still young. i was in my 20s, reading work by daniel patrick moynihan, irving kristol, a commentary magazine and the public interest and listening to and considering in a serious way alternative ways of helping people who were in need that did not involve large state-run bureaucracies and especially in powering the institutions of civil society to deliver the health education

and welfare benefits that they historically have been so good at delivering. that doesn't mean i am a libertarian. i am not. i don't think government has no role. i think government has a very important role in promoting public health safety, morals, advancing the common good and helping to provide a safety net for circumstances like those we found ourselves in as a nation during the depression. my conservatism isn't on the libertarian wink of conservatism but i do believe in limited government, government should be small but strong, government should assist, in no way impede or usurped the autonomy or of 40 or integrity of the institutions of civil society. government should not try to replace the family or the church or the civic association when it comes to those fundamental purposes that those institutions serve and i think very often what happens is government steps in and pushes those institutions to the margin and does less well

with those institutions can do very well when they are adequate in their resources to do the job so that'll move to me in the direction of what today counts as conservatism. but in an earlier era of the word conservatism wouldn't have been used for that idea at all. in madison's day or toqueville's day that would have been liberalism. as a conservative who is not a libertarian i am a kind of old-fashioned liberal. madisonian limited government strong civil society liberal. >> host: you are also professor at princeton and the author of this his most recent book "conscience and its enemies," confronting the dogmas of liberal secular reason. you're watching booktv on c-span2. >> booktv is on twitter. follow us to get publishing news, scheduling updates, author information and to talk directly

with doctors during our live programs. twitter.com/booktv. >> we rarely see politicians on the left contributing to this. we usually see them as the champion. at the time congress was charging full steam ahead with this grueling leave punitive law and order approach then senator joe biden basically not only cheated them on but helped them along. some of you are old enough to remember the willy horton ad the bush administration, bush i campaign in 1988, everyone looked at that and said what? that is so incredibly racially charged it is a scare tactic and a very subtle way and that is the take on that ad but the fact

is in 1988, joe biden sort of got on that boat, picked up the same thing and he said, i am quoting, one of my objectives quite frankly is to walk willie horton up in jail. if you heard what willie horton did, everybody would want to lock him up but this might have been an opportunity for joe biden to stem the tide, to offer some balance, to mitigate this push by offering the other side. not everybody is willie horton, not every black person is willie horton. there are other ways of preventing willie hortons and so forth but he jumped on the bandwagon. what i find really troubling about what than senator joe biden did was in 1994, when congress was putting in place what bill clinton called the

toughest and smartest crime law ever enacted in the history of the country, the racial justice advocates that i showed you before what they wanted to do as clinton was expanding the death penalty to dozens more laws, they wanted to include in that a racial justice measure. that measure would have said for those who are in states where there are disparities in capital sentencing along racial lines, let's allow the defendants in those cases to prevent that as evidence and prosecutors would have to rebut that and show there are nonracial influences. is not about racism. a relatively innocuous way of helping to mitigate this. joe biden basically said racial justice is not as important as

passing this bill. he said the question is whether to accept the house provisions, racial justice which will rebuild the bill and that was scrapped and eventually signed by president clinton. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> here is a look at some upcoming book fairs and festivals happening around the country. this weekend the city of new orleans is hosting the tennessee williams literary festival. next, the san antonio book festival will take place on the eleventh of april. look for some of this festival's programs to air on booktv in the following week. on april 18th and nineteenth booktv will be live from the university of southern california for the 20th annual los angeles times festival of books. on april 25th the annapolis book

festival will be hosted by the key school in annapolis, md.. let us know about book fairs and festivals in your area and we will add them to your list. e-mail us at booktv@c-span.org. here is a look at some books that are being published this week.

look for these titles in bookstores this coming weekend watch for the authors in the near future on booktv. >> if you asked what do the british fear dean most they thought it sterling gained were fanatics but they knew their numbers as they engaged mostly in political assassination. never more than 5,000 persons including support. what they always worried about was as you described 40 to 60,000 members, then they would get both of those paramilitary forces decided to actively participate at holding onto palestine would be untenable. as you know there was a brief period after world war ii they

allied, and engaged in attacks against british targets, the radar stations along the coast that intercepting ships bringing illegal immigrants. in june of 1946, the famous night of the bridges, they blew up all the bridges, linking palestine with lebanon syria, jordan. vicki with the important ones shift in the book is following the king david hotel another controversy i couldn't get into because they had a role in selecting targets, of more complicated story but after the carnage that arose this alliance apart completely and generally speaking after 1946, they concentrated almost exclusively as you described on information and illegal

immigration. they now longer attacked the british but that was the importance in constantly keeping a much smaller force, constantly keeping the pressure on the british and making the rule untenable in the sense that there was a large garrison guarding against revolts, even having trouble defeating 5,000 let alone 60,000 men at arm's. i am not trying to finesse this worse a privilege, one was more important than the other but as someone who spent his entire career studying the effect of terrorism, like government decision making and trying to better understand the countermeasures that can be used to defeat terrorism that was my interest and why i thought at least in the english literature it is pretty much neglected. in hebrew literature it is contentious and controversial

because as you described the new zionist organization, revisionist party's opposition to the labor zionist was this issue of socialism versus capitalism. it is still woven into the fabric of the israeli policy today but in the english language a lot of these debates and nuances are less well known. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> now on booktv our coverage of last week's regina festival of the book. for the next two hours we will be new panels on community organizing influence of money and politics corruption in america, destruction caused by superstorms but first the panel on the vietnam war. >> so. this is the vietnam war

literature panel and in my career i have written an awful lot about vietnam war. .. >> the vietnam war has spawped many legacies -- spanned many legacies not all of which are positive. but one of the positive ones is that an enormous number of topnotch books that have been published on the war and near lu all of them --