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tv   In Depth Steven Hayward  CSPAN  September 11, 2022 12:00am-2:01am EDT

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, apostle of freedom. >> how would you describe the perfect conservative? >> i'm not sure there is any thing -- there is such a thing
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as a perfect conservative. i am -- everybody, i think -- it is like the parable of the blind men and the elephant. it is hard to see the whole picture, but someone with a generosity of spirit, what can they learn from the other camps rather than having theological disputes about different points. >> you have written as much on ronald reagan as anybody. of those different kind of conservatives, what kind of conservative is ronald reagan? steven: he was in idiosyncratic conservative. he was not that conservative, and a couple of ways. he was fond of quoting tom payne. he loved to quote him saying, we have enough power to make the world over again. i remember four years ago,
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anytime, anywhere, that is nonsense. people say that is part of reagan's optimism. there is a truth to that, but on his headstone, i think the word is, i know in my heart that man is good. that certainly leaves out the christian doctrine of sin, which others keep in the forefront of their mind. he had libertarian sympathies and traditional sympathies, but he was his own special thing. john: when did ronald reagan become a conservative? steven: that is an interesting question. probably in the 40's when he adopted antiliberal --
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it was in the 1950's, especially when he was hosting general electric theater. he was reading a lot of early conservative literature. they were big, conservative books in the 1950's. he talked himself into becoming a conservative. he did not become a republican until 1962. john: talk about that change in becoming a republican. steven: i'm not quite sure -- he said one time, i woke up and realized i had been supporting all the people whose ideas i am criticizing now. he had been part of occurrence for nixon, so he had already moved to supporting republicans at an early time. he was slow in changing his party registration.
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john: a quote that you use in your book, ronald reagan was humanly accessible to people but impenetrable to those who try to know him well. why? steven: his theory has to do partly with reagan's upbringing as the son of an alcoholic. there is good psychological evidence that people who have alcoholic or abusive parents tend to be more remote. also, reagan moved around a lot as a kid. his father struggled to keep a job, so he was always the new kid in school, which made him shy. i think it is not unique to him. a lot of people said similar things about franklin roosevelt.
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his own kids did not get on with him very well. but roosevelt had this great connection with the people. he understood people intuitively and could connect with them. it is not an unusual trait for politicians to be a little bit remote sometimes. part of the acting career -- reagan was -- he did not care about the reviews of his movies. he was always denigrated as a b actor. but he understood box office and i think he always understood that there are two audiences and do not pay attention to the critics. pay attention to the people. there were certain issues that were showing up in the polls, so when he first ran for governor, he said, i think people are mad
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about the chaos on the campuses. nobody is telling us that in our polls. in 1976, he opposed the panama canal treaty. posters were not really asking about it, but when he gave the line about the panama canal, the audience just erected. he nearly sank the treaty. john: pulls today versus reagan's time -- did ronald reagan care? steven: he did. one problem is we do a poll every 15 minutes and i think there is an overload. if i can make one change -- no, he did pay attention to the polls.
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he was known as the great communicator. he gave some effective speeches, but there are some about especially nicaragua. he gave a couple of speeches and 84 and a opinion did not move at all. he did pay attention to the polls, he just did not talk about it publicly. john: ronald reagan is the subject of two books. a 1600 page set of books on the history of ronald reagan, the age of reagan, the conservative counterrevolution, the former greatness -- the age of reagan, the fall of the liberal order. these are just some of the books by steven hayward and we are talking about them on in-depth,
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if you want to join the conversation. you can also send us a text. if you do, please include your name and where you are from. on twitter, it is at the tv. steven hayward will be with us throughout this conversation of in-depth. i want to talk about ronald reagan and his relationship with or which off. gorbachev died just last week. what was the relationship like, when they were both in office and later? steven: that is an extraordinary story. initially, they were inclined not to like each other. reagan wrote in his diary,
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people tell me he is a different kind of leader. but he hoped to sit down with a soviet leader and see if they could make a breakthrough. gorbachev turned out to be that person, but not initially. gorbachev thought that reagan was a dinosaur. i think you're rich off was 55 or 56. there was about 20 years difference. he did not mean it because he thought he was old. very orthodox marxism. but they came to like each other. they came to like each other because they argued directly, for the first time, in a way that no american president or soviet leader had before. they argued about ideological differences between the countries. some of the transcripts are
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fascinating. we did not learn about these until the 1990's, but they were very frank, serious, earnest and a bit jocular. the most interesting one was the reykjavik summit. it was the one that was so dramatic because it looked like they were on the cusp of a deal. unthinkable in the decades before that. it all fell apart at the end because reagan would not concede the demand to get rid of the defense initiative. that was always the drama of a. i got my hands on the soviet transcript of their face-to-face meetings, which was more complete. at times, they would have really tough arguments on ideology. reagan was arguing, we have a one-party system or two-party system.
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and gorbachev says, i respect your system and we have to coexist. but reagan says, i would like to persuade you to become a member of the republican party. gorbachev was a little nonplussed. he said an interesting idea. can we get back to nuclear arms now? john: did the public know that they were having these exchanges? steven: no. they were both smiling and one talk. reagan was very tough, but also friendly. reagan came back from geneva saying, i think he is a different kind of leader. i think margaret thatcher is right. we can do business with this guy . they still had sharp disagreements. one of the things gorbachev rings up himself at reykjavik was, all i can tell is that you
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still believe in that talk of evil empire and your speech about how the soviet union will end up on the ash heap of history. what am i to believe about that? so reagan had to reassure him that, this is what i think. the argument goes on. john: how did he go about reassuring him? how do you walk back of the date men? steven: it connected back to the main subject. we are the only two people who can prevent the destruction of the world, of each other's countries. once it became clear that they were sincere about wanting to do that, it broke down technical details. but everyone thought, we have never had fundamental conversations about this, between the countries and how we actually unravel this unrest.
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john: reagan wanted to tell gorbachev that if the earth was invaded by aliens, they would have to work together to fight the aliens. steven: reagan said that in their first meeting together. colin powell was working on the security council and said, this just sounds so crazy. reagan told that story a few weeks later. luke had a great quote about that. he said, i'm sure gorbachev was nonplussed about fending off martian invaders. it used to be that in summit that you would sit down -- they were very slow affairs. and then the russians, including the premier would have this big
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notebook and it would have a prepared response. probably no page on l.a. and invasion. that was the first summit where they had simultaneous translation. they were not referring to briefing books. that is what made it different from everything else that had gone before. steven: -- host: gorbachev -- john: will rich off as men of the decade. what did you think of that? steven: he deserves a lot of credit. he did want to end the arms race and he did repudiate the doctrine that said, once there is socialism, we defend it by force. he announced in 88, unilateral reduction. he gave us that without any concessions from our side, which was remarkable.
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the part of what is going on, imagine if you had done to graduate school and at the end of 1990 one, the soviet union did not exist anymore. the nobel that gorbachev guy -- i always thought that part of that was the academic establishment could not stand that reagan had been so effective and had been vindicated in many ways against all criticisms. suddenly, you have real deals. i think he kind of embarrassed them. i think that was one way of getting back at reagan was ignoring him and giving gorbachev all the credit. john: did they have a relationship later in life? steven: i do not know how much they kept in contact. but he did visit reagan at his
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ranch in santa barbara. there are pictures of them getting together. gorbachev said to somebody later that he was unimpressed with reagan's ranch. gorbachev thought, the president of the u.s. should have a big mansion and not this little ranch house. just cultural differences, i suppose. john: what was your journey? steven: you know, i grew up in the conservative town outside of l.a. with conservative parents. true story. my mother and my dad were into goldwater. they thought he was going to win by a landslide. i remember as a first grader, that not only did goldwater lose, but he lost by a lot.
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the rest of the world must be different than my neighborhood was my thought. from there, i joke that i am conservative by self structure, but i started reading national review in the eighth grade. i said, i do not understand a word this guy is saying, but he seems fun and interesting. john: when did you start understanding what he was saying? john: pretty early on because as a sophomore, i remember meeting him a lot. in high school, those days he still had to do vocabulary, quizzes and all that. i was always sending in crazy words from national review. my teacher would say, where are you getting these? and i said, i'm getting them from buckley. i was precocious that way, i guess. john: where did you go to
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college? steven: i went to college in oregon. i was a student journalist. i became the editor of the paper and started learning how to write up beds. right after college, i went to work in washington as an intern. who formative experience. while i lived in washington, i noticed that capitol hill is run by people in their 20's. all smart, eager, ambitious, and i got to thinking, i do not think i want to be part of that scene. if i come back to washington, i need to know more to be a serious journalist or writer, so that is when i decided to go to rajoy school. i graduated 40 years ago this week, in fact.
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i thought about chicago and a couple other places, but i went there because it was close to home. it had a number of conservative professors there. i decided i would learn from the best. john: why was your first book on winston churchill? steven: that is a funny story. i got stuck in one of those leadership seminars one day. the person doing the workshop kept mentioning churchill. he said at the end, you know a lot about church hill. you should write a book about his leadership style. so in graduate school, one of the principal thoughts is that the best way to learn about politics is biography. especially biographies of
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lincoln, both roosevelts, de gaulle, but in particular, church hill promotion i found interesting because my parents were world war ii generation. and that is why i ended up writing about church hill. i knew a lot about him already. what i learned about, better ways of approaching political life. john: fast forward 25 years. he came out with conservative wit, apostle of freedom. he wrote that this could have easily been called, why stand matters -- stan evans matters. steven: there are always short biographies about why so-and-so matters. i thought he deserved a biography because he is already
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being forgotten. he is really unknown by the younger generation. if you are of the reagan and buckley era, stan was a hugely important year as a journalist, as a thinker and as an activist. combining all those roles that are usually kept the -- separate. his last one was a serious attempt at a vindication of mccarthy. he was everybody's favorite guy because he was friendly with everybody. he was funny in person. seldom in his writing, but everybody has their favorite evans jokes. other people that viewers would be familiar with include ann coulter.
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tapscott at the examiner. he influenced a whole generation of conservative journalists. john: this is stan evans from the archives in 1994. >> i am a conservative. i have been on here a number of times. i mean by that, the things that i was just talking about. i am interested in conserving certain things, not because of the status quo. oftentimes -- conserving the tradition of freedom of a limited government, which is the tradition of the u.s. and western culture in general. because i believe in those values, i am a conservative.
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john: stanton evans back from 1994. he is known for the sharon statement. steven: it was the founding document for young americans for freedom. it was fall of 1961. coming out of the goldwater boom , a lot of people said, let's capitalize on their enthusiasm. they came up with americans for freedom. stanton was about 28 years old at that point and was asked to write the statement. it contrasts with the later statement of the new left, which was 5000 words long and it is a basic statement of intervals. resisting communism, of course is the one part that is kind of
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archaic, but the rest can be repeated today, pretty much verbatim. stan never bragged about the primary drafter. he would say, i did not come up with anything original. i was trying to express wisdom. john: we, as young conservatives believe that -- that liberty is indivisible that political freedom cannot long exist without economic freedom, that the purpose of government is to protect those freedoms to the preservation of order, the provision of national defense and the administration of justice. it goes on from there. is the sharon statement still relative today in conservative
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circles? john: there are -- steven: there are different directions you could go with that. there is orthodox marxism. did -- descending from that, 1950's, one of the big intellectual current was behavioralism. in 20 -- floyd is a -- it said that individual consciousness is determined by subnational forces. it is pushing against that idea that human beings are free, that we have genuine, metaphysical freedom. you could interpret it as the view that the government should plan or supervise more aspects of your life, for your own good. that is less ideological -- ideological. john: a half hour into our two
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hour in-depth interview with stephen ayers -- steven hayward. i want. good morning. glenn, are you with us. caller: sorry. thank you very much for taking my call. mr. hayward, i would like to ask you about what you think about the current state of how american history is being taught and higher education now, especially stuff like the cookbook plan and the founding fathers, who basically were on the same team, stuff like that that has kind of taken off during the george floyd psychosis that happened in 2020.
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specifically, would you comment on an article that you commented on, on your website, power lines. it was an american greatness article called america never existed. steven: right. do we have a whole extra hour? goodness. i could go on for literally days , but i will not. the short version is that the teaching of history has been decaying for a long time and now it is deplorable. a people's history of the u.s. -- never mind some factual errors, but the framework is they represent the whole of america, the defects. i think that is wrong.
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from then, you can go on a long time. glenn elmer's wrote that article about america never existed, a provocative title trying to get people's attention. what he was trying to suggest was -- let me put it this way. i have been asking questions this week from seven -- several people. if all leading patrol institutions shift that america is run, our history is terrible and our constitution stinks, cannot country long survive in its present form? there is a lot of talk about another civil war. we do not have geographic divisions, so probably not.
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but when they teach you that the country is so defective as to not deserve any respect at all, that will be a problem for the longevity of the country. if those views become widely accepted by american citizens, the country may not fall apart as an actual entity and being. the u.s. might go on for a couple hundred more years, but it will not be the same country that we used to cherish and celebrate for its breakthroughs. we hold these truths to be self-evident. a power -- a blog that i write -- it does pretty big traffic. it became publicly visible almost 20 years ago, when one of my cowriter's on the site, scott
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johnson, about 11:15 at night. they look fake to me. he was the first person to start the avalanche rolling, unraveling that story. traffic went through the roof and we have had big traffic since then. they asked me to join several years later and i write for it almost every day. john: you have been a visiting fellow, scholar or lecturer at plenty of universities. uc berkeley -- like -- why continue to do that if you have such concern about higher education? steven: it is a mistake, if conservatives do not compete to be in these institutions. i am currently, as i put it, an
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inmate at uc berkeley. berkeley gets a bad reputation. it is such a big place, but there is more intellectual diversity there than at a lot of small places. i do like university life. it is also good for people to hang around with people with different views. i enjoy the challenge of being the only conservative in the room at a seminar. i attend a lot of workshops there at berkeley. it is not that i disagree violently with what is being done. i will often raise my hand and people say they enjoy having a challenge from the right. i have a disposition for it. i tend to be a people person and i attend to like everybody, even if they have different views for
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me. john: you see yourself staying at berkeley? steven: possibly. covid has kind of thrown a wrench into things, but student life is not quite back to what it was before the pandemic and it is slowly recovering. that is very discouraging. john: he talked about competing for the space. who are today's conservative thinkers? who are the leading conservative thinkers? steven: i mentioned one earlier. glenn. michael antone is a very controversial guy. he is a hugely interesting person, who i hope will write some longer series or heretical books. the thing about conservatives is that -- tom, still alive at the
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age of 93 or something -- a lot of what you say about conservative books is, we do not need new books because a lot of our old books hold up just fine. i think some of the older books from 1980's holdup extremely well. a lot of philosophical books. leo strauss's works -- he has been dead for years now and his books are still on the reading list for conservatives. there is a lot of new thought. the impresario of a new thing called national conservatives of -- those figures are challenging the liberal tradition and self, which is kind of you. john: i want to focus on one of
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those names you brought up. harry jaffa. who was here he jaffa? steven: he was a longtime professor of political philosophy. he is known for two things above all. one for -- i do not want to say rescuing lincoln, but directing attention to abraham lincoln as a much more serious thinker than a lot of people treated him. that was his book all caps -- crisis of the house divided. he was the principal author of the acceptance speech, including the famous line of moderation in the defense of justice is no virtue. that was a scandalous line, very controversial among a lot of his political philosopher.
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his. he had been a democrat until 1962. a lot of those people we think of as conservatives were democratic party members. anyways, he is known for those things and then later on for a lot of his feuds. that is what the book is partly about. he was a colleague. i am one of a handful of people who knew both men very well. i always regretted their feud, which turned very personal. disagreements -- jaffa in the 1970's wrote some state -- scathing attacks. they were not around to defend themselves and walter took some offense to that. walter diamond was another person who was attacked, but
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walter took some offense to that end came to their defense and it spun out of control from there. john: harry jaffa and walter burns book died. went to the conservative movement lose with them? steven: quite a lot. the fact that they died at the same day at the age of 95, that is like jefferson and adams dying on the same day. i wound a short article saying, adams and jefferson put their feud behind them in later years and burns and jaffa never did. there is a book in that. i will say to to be of things about it. it is intended to be for those are not marinated a academia. it is meant to be in -- an
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introduction to this unusual world of thought that they represented. i do not have a literary model for. 40 years ago, there was this terrific book written by barry, who taught philosophy at in my you for some time. it was a memoir from the 1930's come into the 1970's. people like irving kristol was in there. a bunch of other figures now forgotten. there -- it was a wonderful memoir and i was trying to emulate that style. john: the book patriotism is not enough came out in 2018. define patriotism. steven: the title refers to the fact that this is one thing that they agreed about. it is not attached to where you live because it is where you live.
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walter burns' last book was called making patriots. it does not happen spontaneously. it has to be taught. this gets back to the question of how we teach american history these days. jaffa used to say, we need to have informed patriotism. you cannot love the country unless you understand it and understand its principles. i like to say that the critics of nationalism by definition of its patriotism they do not like. nationalism has this baggage from the mid 20th century. germany comes to mind, italy and so forth. a lot of historic feuds like yugoslavia -- i do think that there is a case for your
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attachment to your nation and i think patriotism is more connected with the political principles of a regime. that might be a little harder to understand but the distinction is hard to work out. john:: how is that playing out? steven: first, you think about brexit, which shocked everybody and then the election of donald trump, which shocked everybody. i think what is going on is a rebellion against the centralization of things like the european. it began as this cooperative scheme that would make everybody more prosperous, but it has grown into something that has become somewhat of a smothering organization. it is one thing to have a common currency, maybe. we will see if that survives in the long term. it is another thing to try to
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impose cultural uniformity. a little hungry right now -- people they bad things about the ok. i do not know a lot about the merits of those situations, but they are mad about them saying this is a matter of positive law, threatening them with sanctioned and all kinds of angst because they are not on board with what most other countries are doing with same-sex marriage and other aspects of identity politics and i thought, why can't they let -- why can't they leave them alone? people can leave or go as they want. john: what would ronald reagan think of donald trump? steven: that is a tough question.
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reagan, like roosevelt, like most successful politicians, they had a way of making their attacks on the other party, especially reagan, with a twinkle in their eye and with some wit about them. they talk about their friends in the other party. there was always a latent generosity to their disagreements with their opposition. trumps seemed to have less of that. he can be funny, but not in the way that reagan is funny. it is easy to miss it. i think reagan might say, you might be effective in rallying your troops, and i think we saw this in the election. i do not think it leads the other party -- we saw the
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democratic party did not accept his election. they thought there was something metaphysically wrong about this happening, which was not true with reagan. they hated him and they hated being defeated by him, but they accepted him. i would have loved the trump administration without trump. he kept doing a lot of things that i approved of. when he was doing things i liked , some foreign policy things, i thought, well that is unexpected and i'm pleased with that. i did not expect him to be as conservative as he was. trying to sort out the trade problems with china was a mess. i think that is a very difficult problem and some steps might have been counterproductive. we will see about that in the
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long term, but one more thing about china, public opinion polls here and overseas, public regard for china has plummeted in the last seven to eight years and i think trump is a big reason for that. i think biden's administration is continuing with that. john: do you want to see donald trump run again? steven: i do not think so. i do not know. i did not want to see him run the first time and i thought he would lose. i have been wrong about 70 things. john: if he runs, do you think he will get the republican nomination? steven: i think that democrats are successfully goading him into making some mistakes. he is lashing out about the fbi raid on mar-a-lago, which i understand that.
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i do not know. i -- it always worked for him in the past. you cannot lay a glove on the guy. it is astounding how resilient he is. it could be that for all his obvious flaws and his age is an issue. he might be the best vehicle for channeling a lot of the populace energies in the country right now. steven: steven hayward is our guest in these two hours. we are taking phone calls as well. dave has been waiting in omaha, nebraska for you. caller: you are a prolific writer. in addition to your academic duties, you write for powerline and you have your podcast. can you describe your writing process? steven: i think i know which days you are.
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you mentioned, how did i become a conservative and how did i become a writer. in the fourth grade, i was assigned to write a short story and i came out with 28 pages, singlespaced. i clearly have a problem. but i actually try to live by the advice of ray bradberry, a famous science-fiction author who says, everybody should buy 1000 words a day. it does not have to be a manuscript. it could be a diary or letters. i have lived by that for a very long time. when i am writing a book, i make it a point of sitting down. the hardest thing about it is putting your bottom in a chair and start typing. it is hard work, like anybody else.
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but my general discipline is, i like to write in the morning, when i am fresh. i will set out to write 1000 words and i will not quit until i have 1000 words. otherwise in the afternoons, i usually run out of gas after lunch, at my age. i like to read and do research john:. it is that we have a guest who recognizes a caller. steven: i hear from him a lot in comments. he is an avid reader. it is not unusual. we trying to do six to eight items with a couple of guest
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writers. it is not unusual to get 300 to 400 comments on each item. if it is a hot topic, it might be more. john: long island, new york is next. john, you have to turn down your television and just talk through your phone. i tell you what just because we are a little bit delayed over the television. caller: i would like to give a little historical background for my question, if i may. i came to uc berkeley in 1964. i walked right into the crisis, which essentially was a matter
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of affording them adulthood status instead of -- they ended up with this notion, which was 5000 or 2000. the next semester, the originator of this whole thing -- there was another referendum, which was the free student union. now their committee could woo all student activities, and we struggled to beat that with reasoning, the proper steps and all of this. 21,000 before. clearly, there is a great issue. i find it very hard to
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understand why. when i looked into it by stepping out of my area and looking at the process, new york you learned that history is an important subject, but a very maligned to subject, depending on who is in power. i saw that professors of history , they just see it as -- they see it as a factual and twisting the facts, massaging reality. as a result, by the next year, the whole students -- the graduate students are all professors. they are doing the exact same thing that the professors were doing. the cold war revisionists are still back there with a third
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generational. what is this holding pattern for historians? they feel the right to just lie and misrepresent their materials. as a conservative, the conservatives are as bad as the liberals. it was a lack of respect for the historian. i would like to know why you think that in america, history is such a bs field and you do not have to do anything with it. steven: there are four of hearts to your question, in my mind. on the business, i recommend to you and viewers to look into this controversy raising at the american historical association where the president is a historian of african history and the slave trade in and a
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liberal, but he said what affects them is the idea that we interpret the past through our current bias and i think he is absolutely right about that. he had to apologize within 48 hours for the harm that he caused, especially to scholars of color. it is a familiar apology cycle that we have seen, but the biggest problem is that history has not always been that way. but academic history, one thing that is strange to me is, there is this huge hunger for biographies, grant, hamilton and so forth, but they are almost always written by nonacademic writers. the biographer of truman and other people -- you almost never
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see a biographer eli that from an academic historian, maybe a few, but back 75 years, academic historians were people like arthur at harvard. wonderful books, reading wise. he was a great pro stylist and made good, strong arguments. he had a liberal bias. the speech question that you started out with, the speech movement using the old abbreviation, it is still well remembered around berkeley. i think you said it. the students of the new left in the 1960's said, we want to grow up and have an -- responsibility now. down with administrators. that is what was said at berkeley. what do we hear about?
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say spaces. one of the things that shears me is that every fall -- until covid came along, i would get you -- i would get asked to be on a panel for homecoming weekend. some of them come in and look like they have not left wrigley. they all say the same thing. what is the matter with students today? we were for a free speech and we meant it and now free speech is dying on campus. it is something that is true. it missed -- it metastasized. it is a longer story. on the one hand, the pre-speech movement that i think was a great milestone for free speech. the university was trying to control free speech too much.
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they blundered every step of that episode. it is a fascinating story, but at the same time you had some of the roots of the campus conformism that grew out of the bad side of all of that. john: given that you are a california native, what is your view of one-party governments in california and the reasons for that? if there is potential for reform, how would that be accomplished? steven: the hispanic vote, nationally and in california has been shifting to the right. there is a lot of data on this. california was always a reliably public state and elections until bill clinton flipped it. part of what has happened is the industrial base of the state, it completely changed.
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the cold war ended. the california that i grew up in was big into aerospace, defense production and all the moon rockets were built there. that was a very republican industry and it all left the state. what replaced it was silicon valley, the entertainment industry, which has always been very liberal, and a lot of people have left the state. a lot of republican voters have to texas, idaho, everywhere else. as i say it, the hispanic vote and the asian vote are trending in a more republican direction for many reasons. i do not see democratic control being overthrown anytime soon, but i do think -- i have said a lot of controversial things and i do not shy away from that, but
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when you have sustained one-party rule, that is bad when you do not have political competition. you start getting some corruption. california is now losing population for the first time as a state since 1950, and that is astounding. how can a state with so many assets be losing population? john: about one hour into our to bom or conversation, our deep dive conversation with steven hayward. the age of reagan, it is a two volume work. i want to come back to the age of reagan. he said that the entertainment industry has always been very liberal. take me through ronald reagan,
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navigating the entertainment industry, and what he learned from that. steven: i say liberal -- democratic navy. in the 1940's to 1950's with certain directors that were very pro-american. you asked me have reagan became a conservative, but i skipped over the late 1940's, when he was head of the screen actors guild. it was always thought that communist influence was a misadventure, but not really true. we later got some documentation that the kgb spend real money trying to infiltrate hollywood. they believed in the propaganda value of entertainment. reagan saw all of this and carried a gun for a while because there were threats against him for standing up against us. he was threatened a few times.
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he realized that some of these groups were really communist front groups and they were kind of dupes, i suppose but fast forwards in the 1980's and george shultz says to reagan -- reagan ignored his briefing book and wrote his own talking points for a while. secretary schulz said, there are some people worried that you might not be fully prepared for the equal of gorbachev. there was some nervousness about it. he said, do not worry about it. i have dealt with communists in hollywood. i know what they are like. that had to be a wholly unreal assuring answer, but he meant it. that whole effort to try to influence hollywood not come to anything partly because of reagan and forgotten figures who
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worked hard to seal off that threat to the industry, but reagan in later years would talk about how, i miss those movies that were pro-american. one of my favorite lines -- he was on johnny carson in 1972. carson said, after you leave the governor's office, do you think people go back into making movies? he said, no. i am much too old to take off all of my clothes. john kline you talk about him writing his own briefing notes and you talk in the books about his writing process as a prolific writer. why did he have such an affinity towards winston churchill and quoting him?
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steven: here is how that came i noticed reagan quoted churchill a lot and i got curious. i started looking up the usages and previous presidents. there is a canadian writer, i forget his name, who said it is imperative in american politics you quote churchill. all of our presidents did in that era. reagan quoted or referenced churchill more than all previous presidents put together. i thought, that's interesting. and i noticed he is not using the famous, familiar quotes but employing churchill in a serious way, and sometimes obscure quotes. the i realized their thought patterns were the same, especially on the cold war. was separated reagan from every conservative -- and everybody --
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was that the cold war does not have to go on forever. not because it is by itself a bad thing, but that the soviet union was unnatural. everybody else thought the soviet union, kissinger, nixon, thought it was here to stay. we have to find a way to get along with them. reagan said, i do not know how this could last. they can make missiles but they cannot make cornflakes. he would collect jokes about their social dysfunction. churchill thought the same. he thought this form of rule cannot exist and it will collapse. john: ronald reagan quoted one of the many times he quoted churchill. 1981 in the first inauguration speech. [video clip] >> can we solve the problems confronting us? it is an unequivocal and emphatic yes.
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to paraphrase winston churchill, i did not think the oath i have just taken with presiding over the dissolution of the world's strongest economy. john: that moment. steven: i was there for that. i had just gone to work for stan evans. i had grown up with reagan. the original churchill quote was, i think, "i did not become the king's first minister to provide the liquidation of the british empire." which happened anyway, but that is a separate story. reagan liked to quote churchill -- he and churchill had parallel thoughts about nuclear weapons. churchill in the late 1940's or early 50's said, the west had a monopoly on nuclear weapons and we did not use it to conquer the world. is there any doubt if the russians had a monopoly on weapons, they would use her conquest? reagan said the same thing in the 1960's.
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most famously in a debate with robert kennedy, whom he clobbered. you can see their thought patterns ran alike. john: we started this tangent on churchill by talking about reagan's writing style. it is one of the things you get into, the similarities between the men. both of writing and preparation for speeches, from moments like that. explain the parallels. steven: yes. on the speechmaking, churchill wrote his own speeches. reagan wrote more than people think. but the speechwriters will always say it was easy to write for him. we just looked at what he said before and updated it. he would make a lot of changes. above all, they both practiced their speeches. i don't know if they did it in front of a mirror, but they always rehearsed it in their mind. i think reagan took some of that from show business. churchill came to that because
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one day as a young mp, around 1903 or something, he fumbled and could not finish his speech. since then, he always came in with notes on cards and rehearse his speeches. he wanted to be prepared. and i have to say i am critical of speechmaking by modern politicians. it is one thing if you are not a great speaker. reagan had all of those gifts, a great voice, acting background. but i see a lot of politicians who have not really worked hard on their speech were practiced it and they give a poorly. they do too many. in washington, a center will always accept the speaker to go to the national convention. those are pretty bland. john: who is america's greatest speech make right now? steven: right now?
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that's hard to say. i think in the ordinary sense, obama was a good speech maker. he has natural talent. i don't know. oratory is not prized the weight used to be. nixon, who is not that good at it, but he worked at it, so they had some effect. john: the book on reagan and churchill, "greatness: reagan, churchill and the making of extraordinary leaders." what makes some of the politically great? steven: this is one of my hobby horses about academic conventions. i think they were both statesmen in the serious sense of that word. that is a term that has disappeared from academic literature. as recently as the 1970's you can read an article that talked about statesmen and statesmenship. someone say, there is no objective definition. that is not new. i think it was thomas reed in
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1900 who said, the statesman is the popular politician who is safely dead. [laughter] to be sure our partisan passions will say, if you are liberal, you would not call reagan a statesman. but i think when you drill down into it, a statesman is someone that combines two things. one, key principles about how they think the world ought to work or what is the most important issues. combined with, as i put it, a profound grasp of the circumstances. in other words, i may have this principle, but here the world how it is. how my going to maneuver in that world? that is why lincoln is a great case study, also churchill, and i think reagan. going on a lot about reagan and the last thing i will say is there is a great moment in the spielberg movie about lincoln which i think is great.
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lincoln is talking with thaddeus stevens, played by tommy lee jones, and he says, senator stevens -- i am paraphrasing -- senator stevens, like a sailor that sees the northstar i am going to go at it. lincoln says, you are not take into account the shadows, the reef, the swamp, the things you have to get around and get through that will require you to zig and zag. i think the people we bestow that exalted moniker of statesman are people who understand that and do it. john: more callers waiting for you. john in el paso, texas. you are on with steven hayward. caller: i am concerned. i served in the military, joint 1964. -- joined 1964.
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at the time, it was a requirement and we do not have that anymore. the old draft is gone and nothing has replaced it. we have politicians seeming to serve the demands of the contributors rather than the popular vote. the winner takes all the state electors when they run for president. the ones who do not get the majority vote really does not count. my question is, what do you think we could do to actually make somebody become a member of the united states other than paying taxes? that seems to be the only thing you have to do to be a citizen of the united states. steven: oh, boy. john: may i ask before he gets off the phone? steven: sure. john: what do you think would be a good requirement?
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are you still with us, john? caller: are you still there? john: yes. what would you want to see? military service again? caller: i believe we should have national service and it does not have to be military. it could be social services, an engineer building levees or solving water crises in drought stricken states. some form of service to the country, because right now, it seems everybody is out for themselves for the states or their parties and nothing is going back toward building, you know, a love of the country and support for the country like the way we used to have with the draft. steven: at least two interesting parts to your comment in question. the idea of national service periodically resurfaces. there is a lot to it in the abstract. i think in practice it would be difficult for this country to do
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because of our size and diversity, rightly understood. it would be hard to manage. but i think it is going to surface again because, at the heart of the second part of your question, which is, what makes us citizens beyond the legal requirements of paying taxes and living here and registering to vote? so, national service would depend on -- and real meaningful citizenship -- depends on what we have in common. one of the things that bothers me today and a lot of people's we are emphasizing our differences -- is we are emphasizing our differences all the time. your identity is determined by your skin color, gender orientation and so forth. and if we start thinking of other americans as alien from each other, it is hard to have
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common citizenship. you think national service might solve that by the way military service -- which huge participation in world war ii and afterwards -- was not quite a right of passage, but for a lot. it is now down to 2% or something goes into the military? national service would get people together the way military service used to get people together from different backgrounds. that was good for the idea of the american melting pot. i think in practice today is you get the special interests saying, you do not have to join the army, would join the environmental lobby. or joined the rifle and pistol club the nra sets up. we are very good these days that self organizing our special interests and i have a hard time seeing how you would avoid that. if you say let's avoid that by having a government define a one-size-fits-all, i do not
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think that would work very well. could be wrong. i kind of hope i am wrong if we try someday. john: what would work? steven: [sighs] i hesitate. you often hear people say this. the person on the street will say, the country comes together at a time of national crisis, like depression or world war ii. you would hate to say we would need a crisis to draw the country together, because lots of bad things happen in crises. john: was covid a crisis and why did not draw the country together? steven: yeah. i mean, yes and no. serious illness -- i think the mistake made -- there were a lot of the stakes and we will be studying this -- mistakes and we will be studying this for years. but you saw centralization of
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policymaking when there was so much uncertainty and so much we did not know early on, we should have been more open to letting local states and health officials experiment with different strategies. but look what happened. governor desantis, they called him governor death sentence. statistically, i think this is correct, but their experience was no better or worse than anybody else. a lot of the interventions did not have a lot of effect. people will argue about masks forever and i am tired of it. but making one person, anthony fauci, the oracle, i think he was overexposed on tv every night. i thought that was probably a mistake. should have had more plurality of voices and improvised our way through it. john: is that a certain kind of
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crisis you think might bring us together? steven: covid was not a threat to the regime. world war ii was. we were attacked. 9/11, oh boy, that was shocking. for the first couple of years president bush enjoyed 80% approval ratings. that was the country rallying around the commander-in-chief because he never got 80% of the vote. [laughter] he had cooperation from the other party and that dissipated because the war went on and that is unfortunate. it has to be something people perceive as a threat to survival of themselves in the country. that would make people put aside -- john: we are getting back to it. steven: the martians invading. little green men. [laughter] you hate to put it that way but, when something like that happens, people put aside a lot of their particular passions, i think. we can come back to that later.
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i do not know that we can get that by persuasion or inspiration. i hate to be this pessimistic but we may be beyond the point of no return when inspiration or gifted leader kent bind the nation's wounds. john: are we more divided than we have been since the civil war? steven: i think we are but it is not geographic. it is unthinkable you have a civil war in uniform with blue and gray, but i could see scenarios -- the january 6 event might be the fire bell. i have thought of some pretty crazy scenarios where it might erupt. right now, i am keeping those to myself. john: you wrote about january 6 in "the city journal." steven: yes. john: this was on january 7, 2021.
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"the republican party just experienced its worst day since the assassination of abraham lincoln, or at least since the resignation of richard nixon. even if lincoln were alive today and agreed with president trump, that the election was rife with fraud, he would not merit an uprising." steven: lincoln's first famous speech of 1838. i will flip it around a little bit. one reason it was such a disaster for republicans, i think, before elections washington, d.c. and other cities boarded up downtown. what was the worry? that trump was going to win and they would be riots on the left. trump did win. they took -- the cities on boarded themselves -- unboarded themselves. on january 6 that comes from the right, or trump's populist
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supporters. and that muddied the waters. it shocked a lot of people in washington, not just because the spectacle was unprecedented, but you heard -- i heard secondhand but from reliable sources a lot of people in the federal bureaucracy said, we are not sure we can trust the police forces. it was a confusing scene. you had some capitol police letting people in. around the other corner there is violence against the police officers. what a mess, but it really shook people, more than just the shock value that it happened. john: january 7, 2022 in "the new york post pickup hysteria over the shambolic right at the capitol year ago real deals not only the hypocrisy of the left but it's deep insecurity, ideological hollowness, and what
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psychologists call projection. a tripping to others what is going on in your own mind. steven: i have an article i drafted that i have not published yet. i think a lot of what you see today from democrats has long roots. stephen douglas, one of his favorite attacks on lincoln was, you and black republicans. the black republican party. that was a straightforward appeal to racial bigotry, which was widespread in the country at the time. it may be the people in the north were opposed but they did not want free slaves in their neighborhood. now, it is not perfect, but ma republicg -- maga republicans. i think you can see deeper roots. oh, there is a favorite cliche these days used by liberal
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activists, "our democracy." our democracy is under threat. stephen douglas and other leading democrats in the 1850's to the run-up up to the civil war said, oh, the referred to the democratic party as "the democracy pickup the implication was democracy was the sole proprietary thing of the democratic party. if you are for trump and you disagree with democrats or liberals on election integrity, it is a threat to democracy. this to me has echoes of what you saw from the democratic party in the 1850's. i know that is a strong thing to say, but there is a third thing i will mention. the irony is nobody seems to see that the 6019 project that the founders did not -- 1619 project
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of the founders did not believe in, nobody seems to notice that the talking points the left uses today were those of the confederacy in 1860. we are in a big mess. john: thomas in tucson, arizona, you are next on "in depth." thomas, are you with us? caller: yeah. john: go ahead. caller: i went to school at southern illinois university and there was this great genius of a guy who designed the geodesic dome. it uses 1/6 of the building materials and one third of the energy to heat and cool. what a great time for this idea to come to fruition. how do you think this could best be presented?
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i am not the world's greatest public speaker myself, but this idea should be acted upon i think. steven: i was a teenage fan boy of bucky fuller. john: who is he? steven: i forget his biography, but he was an inventor, futurist. the dome, i made one in high school with my friends. it took all summer because there were no kits. we bought aluminum piping and we had to measure things out, then you had this thing, bold them together. we made one. [laughter] i am right with you about how they are neat in concept. but they are a dome. i have seen a few houses made in that form, but there are no design features. i do not want to say they are ugly, but i do not think people would find them rewarding if they were widespread. on the energy efficiency, i used
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to do some on policy. not as much as i used to but we have gotten lots of energy efficient design features rolled out across the world. i think the superiority of the geodesic dome, as opposed to conventional building materials, is less so now. john: energy efficiency takes us to climate change. steven: oh, god. john: your thoughts? steven: another hour. [laughter] i am what is called a luke warm er, which is not allowed. you either have to be all in and we have to hand over our khakis to al gore. the skeptics say you have to say there is nothing happening. the lukewarmers say -- and lord ridley over in england has said this -- it is warming, human
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activity has something to do with it. reason to think the extreme views are overestimated. but, step two as a policy analyst, which is also what i did half the day in washington, you want to analyze policy with uncertainty and risk. long-term climate change has a fat tailed risk, small probability of risk. i look at what we are trying to do on climate policy abroad and finding it a farce. my final proposition is the more serious you think climate change might be in the future, the more you should be frustrated and contemptuous toward what the environmental climate move has been trying to feed us the last 30 years. john: why? steven: they want to make carbon
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expensive, they want to stifle natural gas. i understand why you want to phase out coal, it is high in emissions. so, it is a lot of happy talk of how we can go completely carbon free in 10 years. for a while, hydrogen was the new thing. levinson did a 180 about that. would get a lot of frivolous stuff because nobody is calculating -- i will give you a fact. i was one of the first persons i think to dig it up. we talk about net zero by 2050. 15 or 20 years ago we used to think of 80% reduction in carbon emissions by 2050. i figured out what that meant by going through the energy consumption statistics. that would take us back to the energy, fossil fuel energy use, of 1910 when we had 100 million people, no cars.
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someone is going to have to show me how we are going to power a country, 5 billion british energy units a year, and how you get there with nonfossil fuel sources like wind, solar and geothermal. it does not add up. john: maryland, this is eric next with steven hayward. caller: good morning. there is a political idea known as fusionism that is taught to unite libertarians and conservatives. as a libertarian, i view this as benefiting conservatives more than libertarians, but i would like your thoughts on how the social conservatives displaced the fusionist coalition within the republican party as you leave the reagan era.
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probably started it even before. steven: very well put. the fusionism, to say more the definition, it was trying to bridge a theoretical and practical difference between libertarians wanted to maximize individual freedom and traditional conservatives who worry about tradition. cultural things, like the family, and so forth. the social conservatives and the new right come along and they are more united, but they are starting to point to things like, pornography and erosion of morals, abortion, needless to say. fusionism used to try and -- evans hated this term. he said you're trying to put together two things that are an
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unnatural match. you cannot have liberty -- he thought liberty rested on some traditions and a moral understanding of what human beings are. in that respect, frederick thought much the same. abortion. most libertarians are pro-choice. most traditional conservatives are not. so, that split -- i think you want to say this on behalf of social conservatives. aside from the electoral consequences, most reformer democrats. but i think what ought to be said is abortion was not a national issue before the 1970's. it was an issue but on a state-by-state basis. a lot of spectrum of views of how it should be handled and what the law should be. once we nationalized it,
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suddenly, it became front and center in our politics and it was unavoidable. it does not matter what you think about abortion or same-sex marriage. once they become national issues , if you are a social conservative, it is going to be hard to keep that coalition together. john: eric still on the line. did you have a follow-up question? caller: no, that was great. i appreciate his thoughts. john: michelle, orlando, florida, you are next. caller: good morning. i guess my main question is this. the republican party leadership is very confusing. unlike what happened in watergate, we are finally -- of the leadership came to nixon and said, enough. you are caught. you got a problem, you got to go. we got leadership that, on the one hand, on one day, like
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january 6, will criticize trump or criticize him on other behaviors. and will turn around, like kevin mccarthy, and go down to mar-a-lago and make nice. it seems to me there are so many things that are such misbehaviors on trump's part that he's not held accountable for in the public forum except for people like liz cheney. how can we accept, the republicans accept a person who has so much misbehavior, recently know what these classified documents, and nobody comes out and says your behavior is wrong, get off the public
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forum, work in a different way if you wish, but this cannot represent party? yet they continue to pander to him constantly. steven: i guess we will mark you down as undecided on the trump question? your point about the confusion and public leadership reminds me of will rogers comment about the democrat party. you can say that about republicans. i don't think there's any mystery to what is going on. that is trump has a lot of republicans intimidated because he does have a hold on and energetic base of the party. i think it's true -- the days and hours after january 6, there were a lot of senior republican saying he's got to go.
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there were rumors people thought we are going to do like they did with nixon, go down to the white house and say don't wait until january 20, go now. i don't know how serious, someday maybe we will find out. maybe document and emails and texts and whatnot. but i thing it's that simple. an analytical statement, i think is true -- indisputable -- he's the dominant political figure in american life this last decade. my hunch is the people who don't like him or think he is a drag on the party, and that may include mitch mcconnell and kevin mccarthy, they've got their fingers crossed hoping that he will just go away. or it looks like ron desantis is gearing up to run and -- my opinion is he ought to run now. people say he's young and he can wait. that's true but i think there
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are moments in politics where you have to do it and i think his moment is now. if he waits another four or eight years, that moment might not present itself again stop that could happen. john: about 30 minutes left on our program this sunday. joining us to talk about his various books, his eight books, if you want to join the conversation. viewers on the close-up shot have been seeing over your right shoulder the real jimmy carter. we have been talking a lot about reagan and we've talked about donald trump stop they are probably wondering what you think the real jimmy carter is? why write about jimmy carter? steven: several reasons. he bugged me. but i've warmed to the guy a little bit. i think it should be said his assent to the presidency in the
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76 election was a thing of genius that showed some insight. after johnson and nixon and watergate and all the rest, what the american people really wanted in the president was somebody who talked sunday school. he taught sunday school for real. metaphorically, but i think there is a serious point there. his campaign was really only organize. it is his post-presidency that is the most interesting in some ways. i spend half the book -- i think he is the first president who took on significant causes after he left office with the tiny exception of herbert hoover, who did the hoover commission on how to restructure the federal government. hoover was the perfect person for that in a lot of ways. carter took on a lot of causes, a lot of which are excellent. habitat for humanity, working to eliminate the guinea worm. but he also interfered with
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foreign policy as an ex-president. most spectacularly in the run-up to the first gulf war in 1990 or 1991. he was actually on the phone to some leaders in the middle east saying you really should not along with what president bush is trying to get you to do. the bush administration got wind of this and were outraged. there were people talking like can we charge him with the logan act or some of these other statutes that are vague and have never really been used? he's also moved to the left a bit since he left office. he wrote a book about how israel is an apartheid state. i think that goes too far. going back to the 70's, he campaigned for office in georgia, the traditional southern race baiting democrat and that's all been forgotten. somebody, i forget who, somebody said he's a mayberry muck of
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elion. behind the smile and religious faith, he's a pretty tough guy. john: you call him the overlooked meddler. how did he metal during ronald reagan's presidency? steven: i wrote that book 15 years ago and i've forgotten some of the details. but he was saying why reagan should be resisted but most presidents stay out of the scene , but he seemed more active than that. his carter center wasn't just the presidential library -- this is being copied by other people. his views on human rights, some of that is fine but he's a different kind of x president and he is now the model for ex-president. john: michael and broward county, florida, you are next. caller: good morning. you mentioned desantis and history and i want to see if we
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can weave these together. i'm in broward county, and activist school district and this issue of people schools opening and closing and it's a matter of life and death, usually for the elderly. i think i'm going to be able to give both reagan and trump and -- and out here because -- based on history. i want to describe what i heard myself -- i wonder if reagan would have been there where trump and desantis said they were wishing to increase disease in the population by using kids as smallpox blankets to spread the disease amongst the population to increase herd immunity. they said it worked -- i think that's going to be a problem for desantis if he runs and it's eventually going to be a problem for trump. i don't think what they are
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doing is bad. i don't think these people are people. it's the view in science we pushed to justify slavery. but that is from herbert spencer who founded the education system and they came up with this false belief and competition and survival of the fittest. that's not how evolution works. evolution works by cooperation. john: there's a lot there. steven: there is a lot there. i've been trying to stay out of this covid stuff. let me state this part -- i think we learned early on unlike the spanish influenza of 1918, children are very low risk of serious complication. the number of children who died were in the single digits.
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even those who had comorbidities -- i think more and more people are coming around. the british have in the last couple of weeks said we should have embraced a focused protection model. which is for elderly, you had governor cuomo in new york sending elderly back into nursing homes who still had not gotten over covid. you should have sent them to the ritz-carlton and giving -- and given them room service. we should have had focused pretension to the people who were most vulnerable to it. people with comorbidities and the elderly. more and more people are coming around to that point of view. unfortunately, we were hoping we could get around the natural course of the pandemic like we saw with spanish influenza and likely seen throughout history without herd immunity reaching a critical mass. the idea that we have to get to herd immunity at some point -- the vaccine turned out to have
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been oversold. that's a much order question then people thought. i think those guys may end up being vindicated. the way the color put it is a little harsh. -- the way the caller put it was a little harsh. john: you are on with steven hayward. caller: after the great depression, we introduce regulation to the banks to avoid economic catastrophe. afterwards, we experienced decadent days of economic stability. when reagan came into office, he had the decision to reintroduce deregulation to the economy. what role or responsibility do you think he played to the eventually -- eventual 2008 crisis? steven: i actually think not
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much. one particular part, one of the big d regulations that was part of that was the changing the regulation of the savings-and-loan regulations and those crashed in late 80's, 20 years before the 2008 catastrophe. the legislation that changed the regulation of savings and loans passed in the lame-duck congress before reagan took office. that was a bipartisan fiasco, which is often the case. glass-steagall was the main banking regulations separating commercial banking from investment banking. the big banks in new york hated it. that was not repealed until bill clinton was president. i think the role of that in 2008 was overstated but it is one of many elements. i don't think reagan is the bad actor in all of that. it was in the middle of the 80's
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when you had senator mccain, alan cranston and a couple of others. they got caught up in lobbying regulators to go easy on charles keating in arizona. i don't think you would blame reagan for that. that's a commonplace problem, unfortunately. john: ron in arlington, virginia. caller: good morning. it's great to talk to you today. i do think you are exaggerating on the covid-19. the former president was the executive at that time and i pick we should keep that in mind. my question goes to the america first movement in the 30's when nazi-ism was spreading throughout germany. they issued radios to every citizen and i do believe our cable media, fox and msnbc and cnn are entertainment channels.
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what's the impact of their misinformation and why wouldn't we defend the country against all enemies foreign and domestic? why would we not want to do that? steven: we certainly do want to do that. one problem is and the first part of your question put your finger on it -- we disagree on who our enemies are. we are making enemies of the other side too. in simple terms. i would say this about the parallels with the 30's and now -- people comment on this a lot -- you now get to pick the information you like. if you are on the left, you watch msnbc, if you are on the right, you watch fox. he lost the common information channels which had its defects but when walter cronkite was watched by 70 million americans a night. now if a network newscast gets
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20 million, that's a great day in the ratings. even if you think fox is bad or msnbc is bad or talk radio is bad, they only reach a small portion of the population and there's lots of competing information channels now. i think fox, it's top rated show , tucker carl said now, gets 5 million or 6 million on a good night. that's a lot of people but it's not 300 million, it's not 70 million like walter cronkite got. john: do you watch much television news? steven: i started watching network news in college. people thought i was weird. i still do because i like to see how they cover stories. my one observation to make about network news is that it has become a human interest story. all three networks and on a spotlight of some farmer that rescued a puppy dog from a tree
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in akron, ohio and it's always heartwarming that it's not the sort of thing you would have seen on a walter cronkite broadcast. and that is playing to the audience. they like that sort of thing. the today show became two nights news. john: the author is also a book junkie. as we do with every author, we asked steven hayward his favorite books and what he is reading now. here's his responses to those questions. among his favorite books -- paul johnson, modern times. cs lewis, the abolition of man. leo strauss, natural right and history. winston churchill, who we've talked a lot about today, thoughts and adventures will aristotle, nick, ken ethics. and j.r.r. tolkien's lord of the rings. in terms of what he's currently reading, norman -- hungary. and alexander lee, machiavelli, his life and times. which one do you want to talk
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about? steven: i could have given you different titles from churchill and so forth. but i will say, not lord of the rings, because i don't write fiction. but modern times, i like not only because i like a great read but it's a style i try to emulate. i call it an analytical narrative. i once got to meet paul johnson and -- you tell a story and you drop in some analysis, what it means and so it's not just the facts of what happened. you can go wrong that way but i thought he had -- churchill did the same thing in his history books. he would tell the events and spend two or three pages on the significance of them and what they meant. that is a style i've tried to emulate. cs lewis, the abolition of man, it's 70 pages long and it is kind of dense. on the surface, about literature but it is really a restatement
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of the natural law tradition stretching back to the greeks and romans and a criticism of what modern times we would call moral relativism. i don't really care for that term. it's a really elegant statement. the lord of the rings -- i have a half joke which is one of the early callers referred to traditionalism and you can tell -- if they read i'm rand, they became raging libertarians. if they read lord of the rings, they read -- they became traditional style conservatives. i read lord of the rings. john: we also mentioned cs lewis, the chronicles of narnia -- why one and not the other? that's always a debate, the lewis and tolkien? steven: the talking book is just so much more epic. it's homeric. lewis did something that she
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worked in serious theological teachings into it. i more partial to his what is called the space trilogy. he wrote three science-fiction books. the last one, that hideous strength is the longest and hardest to get through but it stands up next to orwell's 1984 as one of the great anti-utopian novels of the 20 century. john: brian lamb, not this particular program but on this network spoke to one of your heroes, stan evans back in 1994 and asked how much of his religious beliefs were in his books and writings. how much of your religious beliefs are in your books and your writing? steven: not much at all, really. i don't quite know why but it's funny you should mention it. i'm currently noodling on a
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memoir currently on spec. it's about my best friend who died a decade ago somewhat mysteriously, but that's all we talked about was our religious faith and politics and a whole lot of other things. his name was kelly clark. you can look him up in a new york times obit. we spent a lot of time talking about religious faith and we always said we will figure it out when we get older sitting out with a cigar in the back yard. i've been trying to use this, describing our friendship which aristotle said true friendship is to people at the same soul. that was us. i feel blessed. maybe i can finish this story and maybe i will finish doing this and i will have a book where i will buckle on about religion and theology in a personal way. i've never tried something like this before. john: why was kelly clarkson
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when you could have those conversations with? steven: i will refer to my previous statements -- we thought so much alike about certain things. the same questions were on our mind. john: did you grow up with him? steven: no. we met in college and were inseparable since then. we kept in close touch -- we use to write, in the 80's before email and everything else, we strike each other at the end of the year long letters. -- we use to write each other long letters. we would summarize what we thought was most important in the previous year, what we read, what we were thinking about and we would exchange those letters at new year's. who does something like that? we got busier later on and dropped it. i thought there may be a story here and maybe it's a place to work out what my here -- what have been my here too for private thoughts. john: if you wrote that letter
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today, what would be the most important thing in your life in the previous year? steven: this is pretty personal. it was a year ago yesterday i had cancer surgery for a very mighty -- very minor cancer. i had some nodes found on a kidney quite i accident. where -- well before they would normally present as a problem. and since then, i thought don't wait. i took my family on an extravagant two month vacation to europe. don't wait. i normally would not start off on a book manuscript without a contract. but i'm to chapters into this memoir i just scribed, so i'm not going to wait on that either. not just last year, but the last several years -- ordinary things like not getting donald trump and then marveling how this has all unfolded -- who could have possibly predicted this?
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it is increasing socratic ignorance of the more things i thought i knew i don't know. i again have joked, the older i get the less i know. of course i could read more things but it gets more confusing to sort out the world. don't wait. john: 10 minutes left in this conversation, several colors waiting to chat with you. north carolina, good morning. thank you for waiting. caller: what a wonderful conversation this has been. i'm very familiar with professor hayward. i'm a big fan of his three whiskey happy hour podcast. listening to him talk about his books and reagan, i'm not friends with them but i feel like i could be a friend with him. what prompted my call was the call from michelle and her question. i wanted to get professor hayward's thoughts on this idea
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which i've discovered in the last three or four years about nixon. i know we haven't talked much about nixon but there's a gentleman named jeff shepard, a retired attorney that served under makes his entire presidency. he makes the case nixon was driven out of office as part of a plot by a series of people who took advantage of a situation that happened with the plumbers and the break-in, that nixon had no idea what was going on and spun it up to the place where nixon could not fend himself and no republicans to defend him and he resigned. if the facts had come out in totality, there else acts and the criminals should have been prosecuted, but it wasn't nixon who is the criminal in that situation. i will get off the air and continue to enjoy the last few minutes of this program. steven: you mentioned jeff shepard who was a young lawyer in the white house. i did a two-part podcast with him about three months ago.
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john: heat is on washington journal on the anniversary of the break-in. -- he was on washington journal on the anniversary of the break-in. steven: he's a fascinating guy. i have often wondered if watergate would have happened differently if we had today's media environment? fox news would have been defending him, twitter would have been alive with stuff -- the cycle might have gone quicker. nixon might gone in six months or he might have survived. we can't know. but i think it the fullness of time, there will be a lot of rabbits drenched -- a lot of revisionist histories written about our gate. i will just say that. caller: good afternoon. how are you guys doing today? first off, great news to hear about the cancer recovery, i'm
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giving you a big thumbs up. i'm happy to hear everything is going well with that. steven: thank you. caller: it hasn't been talked about when it comes to the reagan presidency is the role howard baker played as chief of staff after the debacle of don regan and iran contra when it looked like reagan was in big trouble, especially with questions about his mental capacity. i would like you to lay out how consequential howard baker was as chief of staff the end of the reagan administration. i will hang up and listen. steven: what an interesting question. a complete answer would take a while because the whole chief of staff cycle in reagan's presidency is interesting. you could say this -- one reason reagan chose howard baker, ask howard baker who had been retired from the senate, a revered figure, had been the
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ranking republican on the watergate hearings. reagan wanted somebody who had good relations with the hill, was well respected, a pillar of washington, to come in and write the ship. don regan was a terrible chief of staff. good treasury secretary but terrible chief of staff. i'm not quite sure if there is an undertone of whether baker was a bad influence, a moderate republican like the first baker, james baker. i thick that's not true. reagan was very much his own man always in this widespread view of reagan's critics that he was staff driven turns out to be almost entirely wrong. john: how do we know that? steven: documents that have come out. people telling stories about certain kinds of meetings and entries in his diary. you triangulate a lot of source material and realize -- i could give a lot of examples. maybe the most famous was the
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famous star wars speech of late march. just about everybody was against it, some strongly so and they went ahead and did it anyway with maybe only two people on his staff that thought it was a good idea. john: just about three minutes left. a big question on reagan -- when you come back to in a couple of your books, including rate debts and the age of reagan, you write reagan was more successful in rolling back the soviet empire than rolling back the domestic government empire chiefly because the latter is the harder problem. explain that. another big question in a short amount of time. steven: that the conclusion got some criticism from reagan and his guests came out. now, i'm sitting back with ironic satisfaction that a lot from conservatives say reagan, totally irrelevant to today.
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we don't need warmed over reaganism. you hear this a lot from smart people, people i like, usually younger. this connects to the big problem that i will mention of the administrative state of the corrosion of the constitutional separation of powers, the entrenchment of a permanent bureaucracy. reagan battled that. the lesson of all eight years, which they learned while bait was there this is tougher than we thought to reform a bureaucracy. nixon tried and it is part of the watergate story. things have marched on and look back in hindsight and say reagan could have been bolder and attack harder but it turns out our own homegrown problems are tougher than dealing with a decrepit soviet union. john: we started with the question about the perfect conservative. was ronald reagan a perfect conservative? steven: stay close as a
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politician. stan evans is -- i thought about the title for the book because he was so check you medical and his views. john: that current work -- m danton evans, conservative wit. we have been talking these past two hours to steven hayward, the author of eight books, among them, and age of reagan follow the old liberal order. at age of reagan, the conservative counterrevolution, patriotism is not enough and most recently, the stan evans book. i with
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, apostle of freedom. >> how would you describe the perfect conservative? >> i'm not sure there is any thing -- there is such a thing as a perfect conservative. i am

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