and reaffirm jefferson's ideals. are ties conversations of great minds i'm joined by dr corey robin dr robert is one of america's foremost scholars on contemporary forms of conservatism in american society has writings appear in the new york times harper's the london review and a variety of other publications he's widely recognized for his work his blog has been awarded the the char charm quirk or the third place award by three quarks daily best writing in politics and social science in two thousand and eight he was named a lawrence as rockefeller a visiting fellow and a fellow in the program an ethics and public affairs at princeton university currently he's an associate professor of political science at brooklyn college in the city university of new york graduate center and the author of multiple books

including his most recent the reactionary mind conservatism from edmund burke to sir pale an actor corey robin thanks for joining us from our new york city studios tonight. thanks for having me shit what is what is conservatism in your opinion how would you define. both as a as an abstraction as a word and also as a movement. it's a movement of reaction against democratic movements from these are movements like abolitionist movement the french revolution the labor movement the women's movement and what conservatism is is a politics of reaction against these movements that tries to come up with a defense of hierarchy in that in the face of those movements what william f. buckley rather famously said conservatives stand athwart the arc of history with their hand out shouting stop it sounds to me like you're saying it's quite that

benevolent. yeah i mean it's conservatism and some conservatives like to say that they have some kind of an orientation towards history but but what they really have an orientation to is the question of democracy and hierarchy that's really the fundamental question and in opposing movements egalitarian movements democratic movements they often times rather than trying to stop history will try to send it in a different direction and so again from the beginning with edmund burke in the seven hundred ninety s. up through the neo conservatives most recently they're not trying to stop the direction of history they're really trying to change the direction of history trying to make it less equal and less free in many ways in the in the seventy and thirty's thomas hobbes and will buy it then laid down kind of the first marker of the modern conservative movement and say in the human nature is

essentially sinful and without the iron fist of church or state life would be nasty short. i'm paraphrasing badly here i know and also the modern liberalism the idea that people can govern themselves something that was. picked up a generation later by locke and were so and then a generation after that by jefferson. do you see a direct arc from from hobbes and leviathan to. have been burke and his famous debates with thomas thomas paine which so provoked pain that he he wrote the rights of man and just as rebuttal to burke and from there to russell kirk nine hundred fifty three the conservative mind which was the enemy in force for barry goldwater and william f. buckley is the is that a continuous arc and if so is it is there still some purity left to it or is it been completely distorted in the last three or four decades. well i think hobbes is a really complicated figure but the continuous thing is that he faced this

extraordinarily mass mobilization from below commoners who wanted to transform the british monarchy to abolish it and to create a republic and why hobbes is so important is this he is really the first person to understand that if you're going to construct a defense of hierarchy a defense of authority a defense of power in the face of that kind of movement you can't simply state the traditional arguments he understood that the reason that did that the mass movements had triumphed was that those traditional arguments no longer worked so what he did was he took the arguments that he was of this mass movement and he tried to use them as an argument on behalf of hierarchy and that's what's so fascinating by him is that he really understood that you know to to boil it down to simple terms if you're going to beat the left you have to oftentimes borrow from the left and i think you see this over and over and over again with burke in his battle with pain. and so on up until the modern era but

the barry goldwater conservatism in arguably the william buckley william if i interviewed buckle. back when he was alive for a book i wrote a number of years ago and have. without going into all that. they seem to hold to an ideal almost an idealized world and it seemed. the hierarchy was important i mean you know kirk's the first chapter of the conservative mind is devoted to burke and burke's whole thing as you point out was it was hierarchy. but there was utopianism that there was associated with the goldwater movement the drew in people like like hillary clinton and me when we were teenagers i was thirteen and you know when i went door to door my dad for barry goldwater and that seems eight to have been largely

lost and corrupt you know if there's any little piece of it left it might be in the ron paul movement by modern conservatives have they modern conservatives seem to be not about the elegant discussion but rather the defense of billionaires and transnational corporations am i misunderstanding the sore is. has there been some sort of a transformation or aura or a seizure of conservatism by the very wealthy. well it's important that you know first of all this utopian element of conservatism because it's oftentimes been denied by conservatives themselves and by historians but i think you're absolutely right and again this goes back to the very beginning that what's what's made conservatism such a kind of a strange animal and hard to get you know one's mind around is that it has been this defense of inequality of this defense of hierarchy but it has been defended in school extraordinary utopian oftentimes almost futuristic progressive terms and

goldwater in that regard was very much in keeping with the conservative movement and i would say in terms of the contemporary scene i think you saw some of that. of utopianism with the neo conservative movement that really dominated the bush administration the second bush administration in its vision of a kind of. a modern and american imperium it was an extraordinarily utopian vision of the united states governing the planet and moving the wheels of history forward and you know that was that was the operative framework of the conservative movement up until you know several years ago not in that we're not talking in ancient history here i think what's going on today to get to your question. is that conservatism the conservative movement has really succeeded in all of its air at least in most of its primary goals remember the modern conservative movement begins in the wake of the new deal it cheever's

a tremendous amount of momentum in the one nine hundred sixty s. in the one nine hundred sixty s. and it really comes to power with ronald reagan and its primary goal was to roll back the welfare state which it has to all intents and purposes succeeded in doing to stop the civil rights movement in the feminine feminist movement and to a large degree it has succeeded in doing that the one movement it is not been able to roll back is the gay rights movement which is a sort of interesting story in of itself but it succeeded in its goals and i think that's part of the reason why conservatism today seems like such a bankrupt movement it's not because it went off the rails or anything like that the way some people like to claim it's that it is succeeded in doing what it had to do and now the question is what future does it have and my prognosis is that it's really going to be on a downward trajectory and it won't really have a kind of idealistic mission like the one that you talked about from goldwater

until it has a real movement from the left to oppose once again doesn't have that in occupy wall street. well that remains to be seen it's very interesting occupy wall street is the is the beginning of something but remember occupy wall street has yet to pass a single law has yet to empower a single political official it has yet to win an election or anything like that and it is uncertain about what it's trying to do it has certainly caught the attention and perhaps even begun to set the agenda but there's a big big difference between the beginnings of a social movement and a kind of transformative politics of the sort that we saw in the one nine hundred thirty s. with the new deal or in the one nine hundred sixty s. with the civil rights movement and the great society so i don't think it's until you're really going to see until occupy really becomes a kind of for middle political power that really can essentially get control over

the political agenda and start legislating then i think you'll begin to see the beginnings of a conservative backlash that we just haven't seen it yet you argue the you know conservatism is basically reactionary force against democratic movements and if that being the case this country was born in revolution our founding principles are revolutionary and a lot of the rhetoric i'm hearing right now from from the republican right in the primaries doesn't sound like an appeal to constitutional principles although it's wrapped in that it sounds like an appeal to articles of confederation principles when individual states were actually sovereign and. so if if there is some truth to that perception could it be that throughout its history in modern america the conservative movement has been fundamentally in opposition to the american revolution the revolutionary principles the

constitutional principles to what america is. right we have to be careful here because of course the articles of confederation at the time that they were adopted was thought to be the fulfillment of the revolution of the american revolution itself and there was a big battle over the constitution whether or not that was a betrayal of the revolution or fulfillment so i don't lie to you i try to be careful about saying that one movement is sort of anti american or in sync with america america is a complicated animal but you're absolutely correct that the contemporary conservative movement and in this regard it's in keeping with you know a certain part of the conservative movement historically is very much appealing to the principles of opposition to national political power defense of local and state privileges but the reason why that is is that at least for the most of the twentieth century the national state has been seen as the instrument or the arm of

these democratic movements from below him in of course that goes back to the civil war the abolitionist movement turned to the national state to abolish and break the chattel slavery the labor movement did the exact same thing in order to try to bring to bear the power of the national state over modern corporations and employers the civil rights movement did the same in the sixty's so conservatives have good reason to oppose the national state because to their mind and i think they're somewhat accurate in this perception the national state has really been the instrument for democratic emancipation and i think that's really the fundamental thing that's driving the conservative movement i'd like to i'd like to drill a little more into that in there into that piece if i can we have to take a real quick break here more conversation. of the great minds featuring dr corey robin coming up right after this break.

from los angeles to chicago to birmingham twenty trauma centers have closed since two thousand severe problem is not enough in patient beds not enough urgency department beds and not enough nurses commandos to take care of all the people who are here the only real health care system that we have in the city of los angeles is the los angeles fire department in fact when i started my venture is a firefighter i didn't want to be a mask i started out wanting just to firefighting it's about eighty two percent of what we do the far the problem is medical i've had a rescue couple weeks ago waited four hours for i've waited sometimes three hours i was it's a same francis in lynnwood for four hours and fifty minutes standing against a wall of patients and we have a federal law that mandates that you can't turn no one away who seeks care in an emergency room. we have the most expensive health care system in the world and it's probably valued

the least. but i. was struck with that idea you're going to tell you there's no we're going to see you get to the monk. if you want to have sex go and have sex. well with the. technology innovation. developments

around russia we've. covered. go back to conversations with great minds and joined by dr corey robin leading scholar on conservatism and neo conservatism in america and author of the reactionary mind conservatism from edmund burke to sarah pailin let's get back to it dr robin did you want to finish that thought that you were on one when i interrupted you. no i was just you know as you're always we're wrapping up those just to say that the conservative movement the reason why it has historically opposed national political power and defended local government or state government or you know and sometimes perfectly no government at all is really because they have seen and i think again rightly so the national government as the wing of the arm of the instrument of the great social movements of the left the abolitionist

movement the workers' movement the feminist movement civil rights movement and so that's why they're always in this battle and sometimes they're very forthright about this barry goldwater inconscious to a conservative says that the bearer of the state's rights principle today writing in one nine hundred sixty is the anti integration movement in the south and so they've always understood a very clear connection between these principles you know absolutely. thomas jefferson was. and is criticized these days by some of the more conservative historians like joseph ellis for being so fond of the way histories i i thought through was actually brilliant and was fascinated by jefferson's observations of them but he hated hume and wrote at length about how much he hated hume and everything from his jurisprudent prudence to his to his history. you write

about how hume in the in this in the seventeen hundreds was i don't recall the year and i'm guessing you may. basically laid down a legal principle that established for several hundred years literally up until nine hundred eighty in the united states that it was legal for a man to rape his wife. can you tell us about that and what does that have to do with the modern conservative or the historic really the you know three centuries of conservative movement. well i just a small but also large correction it actually wasn't hume it was a jurist by the last name of hale actually. yes yes you're right. and he didn't like hale either i'm sorry nixon. yeah i didn't i didn't want to lay that on poor david hume's tombstone. but matthew hale was a jurist and he came up with

a doctrine about that involve the question of sexual consent in a marriage and the doctrine that he formulated and it proved to be extraordinarily influential and as you said lost it for many centuries was that essentially when a woman consents to marry a man and she has to consent to that it's very important that she does consent to that that she's essentially consenting to give him sexual access to her body not just at that very moment but for the for the perpetuity of their marriage and this became a notion of basically it was called implicit consent so that throughout a marriage if a husband or a man ever wanted to have sex with his wife he essentially did not have to get her say so he could have it and therefore if he raped her by definition it wasn't rape because she had given her consent at the moment when she consented to be married and what's you know what's astonishing about that argument is not just

the argument itself but what's really is that it lasts and endures as a principle of common law in the united states up until the one nine hundred eighty s. in the book i cite a legal textbook in the one nine hundred fifty seven i believe it was and i remember one nine hundred fifty seven that is the heyday of the warren court and when we think of the triumph of the modern liberal jurisprudence in one nine hundred fifty seven a textbook would say that basically a man legally cannot be held to have raped his wife because of this principle. and it took an extraordinarily long time again it was an intel about the one nine hundred eighty s. that legislatures and courts began overturning this principle now the reason why this matters and the reason i talk about it in my book is because it points to the persistence of these private forms of domination in what we call the private sphere of the family or the workplace and that it has been the job of the left in this

country and elsewhere to try to use the power of the state to overturn these private relations of domination and these have been extraordinarily ferocious struggles that have prompted the resistance of husbands of employers of slave holders and that conservatism is really the theoretical voice of that resistance to these movements and again you see this in burke when burke looks the french revolution he sees many things but one of the things he sees in the french revolution is this effort by commoners to overturn the power of their superiors in the private sphere and he predicts that the french revolution is going to him and lead to the revolution of the slaves in haiti which of course eventually did and so on and so forth and so i think in the end that's really the struggle between the left and the right it's whether or not people in their private life are

going to be able to live lives of equality or not and the left has tried to make that the case and the right has always consistently resisted that effort and i think probably the most important of those areas right now is the workplace we're seeing an assault with that in wisconsin indiana you know across the absolutely absolutely i mean that i say this at the end of the book that in the two thousand and ten election immediately following that when you had this wave of tea party victories what was the two areas where these republican governors and legislature state legislature. as we're most active the first was on the question of workplace rights as you just pointed out and that was a you know fundamental battle line and it continues to be and the other was on the question of reproductive rights there was a real effort which we just have seen this past week. begin to go back to two thousand and ten to defund planned parenthood because these these two spheres reproductive freedom and labor freedom the right of workers are really i think the

front lines of the battle between left and right today russell russell kirk in one nine hundred fifty won or fifty three when he wrote the conservative mind. you know started out with burke but around that time he had given an interview in which he had basically predicted the sixty's suggested that if the middle class america became large enough and powerful enough if if if the average person the people that john adams america's first conservative president arguably used to refer to as the rabble if those people were given enough power you would see riots in the streets and in the one nine hundred sixty s. william f. buckley on his program firing line would frequently cite that i used to watch it and say see we're seeing the fulfillment of kirk's prediction these people have been given too much power the blacks are rising up and the men in power now the women are burning their bras the young kids don't want to go off to war they're

saying no to authority figures this is a society that is disintegrating because we've given too much power to the middle class and the subtext it seems to me of that in retrospect is we have to take that power away from the middle class in order to stabilize society in order to make it safe for american america you know assuming the very best of intentions on the part of buckley it would you agree with that with that analysis and if so how far are we into that process of stripping the middle class of their power and certainly the economic portion of their power in the. ical power and and you know where are we going with this and how might we stop it assuming that you that you're agree with that analysis. yeah i mean i think i've just slightly tweak it which i think that the conservative movement of the twentieth century was really about restoring power to employers and restoring power to husbands in the case of the women's movement and restoring power to white people and that those two latter to the women's

movement and civil rights movement cuts across certain class lines and it's part of the reason why conservatism has had such appeal across class lines and has been able to build a majority coalition but as i say i my reading of things today is that that project has really run its course and it's been so overwhelmingly sex is successful i mean you see these numbers that come out daily about the levels of inequality in the country i mean they're they're mind boggling. but until there's a left that really is serious about doing something about those numbers and i just i don't quite see us there yet i mean you see stirrings of course as you mentioned with occupy and in certain parts of the democratic party but we're nowhere near where we were in the one nine hundred thirty s. of the one nine hundred sixty s. until you start seeing a movement like that i think we're going to be in a bit of

a holding pattern and and. it'll it'll persist for a bit it could persist do you think it could go even more conservative i mean at the time of the american revolution there were actually maximum wage laws in england it was illegal to pay a worker more than a maximum amount because the people in power did not want the middle class to emerge they wanted there to be small riches small mercantile middle class and a very large class of disempowered working poor we seem to be moving in that direction are we how much farther do we have to go before there's a a a a liberal reaction or a progressive reaction that actually can push back against this. well this is an interesting question i mean i don't know the answer and i don't think anybody does and the reason that we don't is that when the left or liberals whatever you want to use the term it's always the most unpredictable thing on the world nobody predicted the civil rights movement nobody predicted the labor movement nobody predicted the

women's movement nobody predicted the abolitionist movement the left is a politics of initiative and is on no particular timetable and so we really have no idea i you know sometimes i think occupy is the first shot across the bow and it may become something quite big or it may fizzle out and this is just you know we just have no way of predicting that question it's going to be fast and we're going to have to keep an eye on our politicians as it were and keep a lot of wind on their backs to move this thing along dr corey robin thank you so much for joining us tonight yeah thank you it's a pleasure an honor to have you with us to watch this conversation again as well as other conversations of great minds go to our web site of conversations with great minds. after the break looks like the keystone x.l. pipeline is. republicans continue to use it as bludgeon legislation to go shushan

more on that and other topics coming up in tonight's big picture on the. if you. are going to take three days for charges. three. three stooges free.

and free blog video for your media project a free media oh god r t dot com. welcome back this is the headline it's. a split within the ranks of syria's opposition fighters as far as they claimed and they were behind twin blasts in the country's second city of aleppo which killed at least said to people but another spokesman denied responsibility just an hour late that. the greek cabinet unanimously approved the trump a bill on austerity measures demanded by brussels in return for a commercial one hundred does that simply then a cottage with a final vote coming shortly that's despite ogoni violence as police clash with protests here is that you can't have cost cuts on jobs and they've been stunned.

and observing political change russia's public figures come together to show us and three presidential got a while to try they know to take sides. as the headlines and not us go back to the second part of the big picture show at all she's a washington studio. are you ready to rumble joining us for the nice big picture rumble neil mccain mccabe excuse me columnist with human events richard a follower democratic strategist and advocacy director for the young democrats of america and tony katz host of the tony katz radio show on the all patriots but he didn't ever hate radio guys i got a house and we were ok chip gentlemen see pac is in town and beyond all the over the top rhetoric about president obama the republicans.