roof of this detention center staying open i find that to be unforgivable and a weakness of character on their part and the poll also showed us that eighty three percent of respondents approve of obama's use of the drone program to go after terrorist suspects overseas including seventy seven percent of liberal democrats now right there's an argument to be made for precision strikes don't put more u.s. troops in harm's way but as i document here on the show on a daily basis it's the way that they go about the drone program it's an issue it's the secrecy which doesn't allow us to know how many civilians are killed which holds nobody accountable and instead only fuels anti-american sentiment and the countries whose skies they patrol that's enough for me not to approve of the administration's drone program if we instill transparency and accountability that allows us to have a legal and ethical debate about it on a public level that we can talk. let me now get to what i thought was the worst part of this poll for which i do not see any room for debate or varied interpretations this poll found that of those who approve of drones targeting

terrorist suspects sixty five percent still agree even if the suspect is a u.s. citizen now this is what we get to the point where it doesn't matter where you find yourself on the political spectrum this is where we get into basic fundamental values that we hold dear in this country as a citizen you have the right to due process and you know what these respondents approve of is the government throwing that part of the constitution out the window completely circumventing the rule of law so this means that they approve the president the united states acting like a dictator or a monarch playing judge jury and executioner all in one no it's not forget in the case of anwar locky we have never been handed any evidence to back up the administration's claims that he played an operational role in plotting terrorist attacks against the united states and secretary of defense trying to claim last week that he had wanted to or how do you wanted to he could return to the u.s. in question being placed on that assassination list but there's no way to find out

if you're on one of these lists because no lawsuit was ever brought no public statement was ever made about it and the only reason we found out was because of a leak but it's not just about on want to lockie it's about what we've allowed this president to do how we've allowed him to change the rules and set an incredibly dangerous precedent and sure they did it without asking i certainly would not have allowed this would by approving these respondents have just given the executive branch the permission to do this again and again and again so this isn't about terrorism this is about standing by certain values and laws that are put in place to shield us from tyranny and this poll shows us that these respondents out of fear are accepted. i had time for a happy hour and joining me this evening r.t.

correspondent christine for sal and anthony rendez own director of economic research for the reason foundation is joining guys. so herman cain is about to make an appearance and have a few things to say like everyone else did the pack about how liberals are the worst or the cancer of the earth and blah blah blah but there is the way that he said it i think that deserves a little making fun of take a listen. get at the brain. and ballots at the ballot box we outsmart the liberals we must support the stupid people that are trying to ruin america. so the stupid people are ruining america so we decided to take this moment while a good comment to just remember some of the moments about herman cain you know some of the things that we loved about him. and when they asked me who is the president of becky becky becky becky stan stan i'm going to say you know i don't know.

view china as a potential military threat yes no military threat they've indicated that they're trying to develop nuclear but we'll see if you think i'm dumb enough not to study up on these issues i've been studying up on these issues for months. anyway things this do of people are really american almost ruined america by running for president he's not stupid people can ruin america spark people. i don't think he's that will thank god he's not really america but if he had better luck to. have a self-fulfilling prophecy libya the most interesting thing to me i was at sea-tac yesterday he spoke yesterday he was walking around everyone was shaking his hand is that he's sort of become a prominent hero in the republican party even joe the plumber who i interviewed said i wish herman wouldn't have stepped out i don't know who to back now i was

going to back herman cain herman cain despite what you just saw there has become kind of a famous republican donor why he's a wrongful are ruining america because they still like people like herman cain is their pale and despite all of the stupid things that they say and ann coulter the other way i'll just say stupid as much as i. said. only beautiful women are republicans. really and. i'll hold my tongue on that i was going. to say one of the savvier on a friday let's just talk about some other fun stuff that's going on at the pac so you know conservatives not so down with gays but it turns out if you take a look at craigslist there are some people that are cruising for some love and what i'm saying is in the city the city first see back the next few days looking for a d.l. guide a j.-o. with maybe a more normal young professional guy here cleancut five ten one fifty auburn blue six. if you're at the marriott wardman park even better be in shape one of the

masculine i. discreet and chill your pick mine you're clearly not a pro. you know to me but so that. it was really this entire thing is happening another one says getting a group of discrete guys together from c. pack for a group thing in the hotel room send stats and a body pic and let's do this but the name of the closing speaker of the subject line so i know you're real and last one by guy back we're going to meet up with other c. pack by guys mostly interested in oral but more is ok with the right guy why thirty five. very discreet smiley face and staff and photo can host in my room tonight people are getting down at the back well of course they're getting down it's the fact they get down all the time the only thing is groupthink your hotel room you go even if it's a world ok ray that isn't. even know what half of the stuff mean yeah i may have

been overthinking it a little bit too much but every one of those advertisements is reading through had something about like send a picture so i know you're real and know when you're high yeah they like to put you on the sat and. it took everything within me to just like just send some like massive responses screw with these guys like how do the how do you know i've not experienced enough in trolling for sex through craigslist but i am a little shocked this works well it was interesting to hear you know you have by guy every one wants to be discreet why can't they just be out about it all we have to there are conservative there where you at sebring last year i mean i was there yesterday i mean well and the interesting thing is heritage this year because they don't have to boycott because the daughter out is been sort of shoved to the sidelines. real quick let's take a look at. kagan how to say about this idea that's now leaving a senate committee and heading to the senate floor it's about cameras in the supreme court. they know more about you if you allow cameras in the court room as

we have here what do you think would be a good idea of what the cameras with the lights splintering and i say right now i think yes we really know but. actually i've said before that i do think it would be a good idea and i differ from some of my colleagues. i can't imagine who it is that he differs from but i'm i'm down and i say why not televise the supreme court i mean this is one of the three branches of government making decisions that impact all the people of this country of course it should be televised the fact that it's twenty twelve and we only get drawings that come out of the most important that's crazy you get audiotapes too i mean they should be televised but this shouldn't be a u.s. congressional bill that should tell her and i agree that's kind of where you we just have to get the last story this is the special they're having a pizza hut for valentine's day proposal if that's. ok listen to this well wants to help you you are that's right they're offering

a proposal package for ten thousand and ten dollars ok for that amount of money you get a ruby engagement ring flowers fireworks a limo service and of course a pizza party pack to celebrate. i want to meet a girl that would say yes to that you have ruined my valentines day card not just you know how a girlfriend watches this and i'm going to come up with stuff that arsenal are movies like illegal in this country and second of all i thought there might be i don't know i don't i read that somewhere anyways tell me it's had available so we need to follow only ten and below and we don't we i mean you actually know actually get seriously and you can't buy your own like that like that's i maybe i maybe you know just because you know the exact you know i think that the key point there but the ten thousand dollars by your own letter you know order a box of little favor by your words this actually might be a good value i don't know depends on where you get together up but i would think you join me tonight that's it for tonight so thanks for tuning in make sure you come back next week we're trying out

a new segment called monday hangover can review panel so you want to miss it and in the meantime you know where to find us on facebook on twitter and on you tube and coming up next the news. down the official location to your i pod touch from the top story. on the. video them to. build costs. now in the palm of your. los angeles to chicago to birmingham twenty trauma centers have closed since two thousand severe problem is not enough inpatient beds not enough urgency department beds and not enough nurses to man those that take care of all the people who are here and 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 mass and i started out going to just do fire fighting it's about eighty two percent of what we do the fire departments medical i've had a rescue couple weeks ago waiting for our. as for bit i've waited sometimes three hours but i wouldn't say saint francis in lynnwood for four hours and fifty minutes standing against a wall with a patient and we have a federal law that mandates that you can't turn no want 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. he thinks. you're.

in washington d.c. and this is the big picture here's what's coming up tonight. what makes a conservative tick what's at the very heart of conservative ideology pose these questions and more to our guest and it's conversations with great minds also speaking of conservatives see packers intel birth control software firestorm of us senators and hot water or in these stories and more insights big picture rubble and achieving a quality education in america has become like

a luxury that only the wealthy elite and obtain how can this nation get back to its educational roots and reaffirm jefferson's ideals. for tonight's 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 work for the third place award by three quarks daily for best writing in politics and social science in two thousand and eight he was named the lawrence as rockefeller a visiting fellow and a fellow in the program and 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 serve a pale actor corey robin thanks for joining us from our new york city studios tonight thanks for having me i appreciate it what is what is conservatism in your opinion how would you define that as 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. 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 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 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 and to. to cirebon burke and his famous debates with thomas thomas paine which so provoked pain that he he wrote the rights of man and just as a rebuttal to burke and from there to russell kirk one nine hundred fifty three the conservative mind which was the animating 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 buckley 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 kirks the first chapter the conservative mind is devoted to burke and burke's whole thing as you point out was it was hierarchy. but there was utopianism the there was associated with the goldwater movement the true in people like like hillary clinton and me when we were teenagers i was thirteen and you know when i went door to door

of my. dead from barry goldwater and that seems eight to have been largely lost and corrupted 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 an

extraordinarily utopian oftentimes almost futuristic progressive terms and goldwater in that regard was very much in keeping with the conservative movement now i would say in terms of the contemporary scene i think you saw some of that that kind 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 you know 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 is 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 fan the 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. 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 b. it 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 but we just haven't seen it yet you argue the you know conservatism is basically a reactionary force against democratic movements and. that being the case this country was born in revolution our founding principles were 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 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. well 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 fulfilment so i don't like to 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 into that piece if i can we have to take a real quick break here more conversations with great minds featuring dr corey robin coming up right after this break.

let's not forget that we had an apartheid regime right now. i think it is even going to well. whenever the government says they're going to keep you safe get ready because you get their freedom.

you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so silly you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear or see some other part of it and realized everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm tom harpur welcome to the big picture.

welcome back to conversations in the great minds i'm 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 paling let's go back to a. doctor robin did you want to finish that thought that you were on one when i interrupted you. no i was just you know 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 or 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 of a conservative says that the bearer of the states' 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 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 whig histories. i thought through and 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 is to his history. you write about how hume in.