The Ricochet Podcast - NRI 2015 Ideas Summit: Why the Future Is Conservative

Episode Date: April 30, 2015

From the National Review Institute 2015 Ideas Summit at the Willard InterContinental Hotel in Washington, D.C., an introduction from National Review Editor, Rich Lowry, then a panel discussion on the subject, “Why the Future Is Conservative.” The panel members are: Ramesh Ponnuru, National Review; Mona Charen, Ethics and Public Policy Center (and co-host of Ricochet’s Need to Know Podcast)... Source

Welcome everyone to the 2015 National Review Institute Ideas Summit. The story goes that when the Berlin Wall was falling, a 90-year-old Frederick Hayek watched on TV, and despite the fact that he could barely speak at that time, looked away from the TV, smiled, and said, I told you so. It is the contention and perhaps the presumption of this conference that we all will be able to look back decades from now and say the same thing. And I'll be honest, it's been a tough time for these National Review Institute Idea Summits the last several years, beginning in 2006.

If memory serves, the themes of the last three National Review Institute Summits have been what went wrong, not again, and God help us. This one is different, but before I do anything else, I want to thank the National Review Institute and especially Lindsay Craig and all her wonderful staff for the hard work they've done to make this possible. Thanks, guys. So why are we in a different cast of mind? Well, just on a personal note, I don't like to brag about my personal financial circumstances,

but I was an early investor in Uranium One. You know, yes, my wife was a little nervous when I decided to make Frank Giustra our personal financial advisor, but you can't argue with results. And I'd like to mention for those of you who like to plan ahead that the next National Review Eurasian River cruise will be on the Irtash River, very scenic, and I believe the most beautiful waterway in all of eastern Kazakhstan. And my next big move after this

windfall, these shrewd investments, we'll be hiring Al Sharpton's accountants. If someone had told me 10 years ago that commentators for MSNBC didn't have to pay taxes, I never would have signed up for Fox. So let me just share with you, by way of opening this event, three broad reasons I think we have to be optimistic as conservatives. One is just the pendulum swings in American politics are always based on which side has blown it most recently. You never get Reagan without Carter. You never get Speaker Gingrich without the tragic comedy of the first two years of the Clinton administration. And with President Obama, we are looking at a failed presidency on his own terms.

He wanted to restore faith in government, and despite all the hectoring on this score, despite all the activism, only 23% of people, according to a recent Pew survey, trust government to do the right thing at least most of the time. And why not? The stimulus made a mockery of the phrase of shovel-ready projects and green jobs. We've seen an anemic recovery badly trailing the Reagan standard. We have a health care program that hasn't reduced the cost of health insurance, involves massive new spending and taxes, and parts of which aren't even legal. We've seen a disastrous meltdown in our global position,

the nation that will almost certainly have gained the most by the end of the Obama administration is the anti-American theocracy in Iran. Decades of progressive rule in urban America have created and abetted cascading institutional and social breakdowns. And whenever this comes to the nation's attention at a time of great crisis, we are told in a scolding tone that it's the fault of all the rest of us. And on top of all this, Joe Biden is vice president of the United States, literally. So this is a poor record and a significant opening for the right, which brings me to my second point. Although it's less true than it once was, and we've seen an erosion on this front, our ideas are still more with the grain of the American idea

and the American character than theirs are. When it comes to dark theories about President Obama's origins, my guess would be, if I was going to play that game, that he's a secret Prussian. Someone please get the word to Donald Trump right away. But the leading idea in 19th century Prussian political thought was that the state was the vehicle of history with a capital H. For Hegel, the state transcended the particular interests of civil society and represented rationality and progress, represented God's march through the world. Hegel, the government embodies the indwelling of the spirit and the history of the nation.

Obama, if the people cannot trust their government to do the job for which it exists, to protect them and to promote their common welfare, all else is lost. Hegel, society and the state are the very conditions in which freedom is realized. Obama, preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action. Hegel, the owl of Minerva flies at dusk. Obama, you only live once. So, okay, perhaps this comparison isn't perfect, but you get the point. And modern American conservatism, in contrast, is in sympathy with the Anglo-American tradition of liberty that is still written into the American DNA and represents a system uniquely suited to human flourishing. There's a tradition

that features an inherent distrust of government and adherence to the rule of law, not of men, a constitutional system that gives an outsized place for deliberative assemblies, a belief in certain unchanging truths about human nature and our God-given rights, and finally, in its concrete expression in the political economy, what was once called free labor ideology, which rests on a profound belief in the dignity of all labor and the right to the proceeds of our own labor. And that brings me to my third and final point, which is the right is simply more vibrant than the left at the moment. And this is not just because the vanguard of the left is busy trying to carve out safe spaces from unwelcome ideas on college campuses and is consumed with debates over things like whether the bodies of transgendered men create unrealistic expectations for women's body images, to which I would venture the answer, yeah, probably yes.

And these are questions we'll take up in more detail at the next National Review Institute Summit, which will be held at Oberlin. But the fact of the matter is that the right has the new ideas. The presumptive standard bearer of the Democratic Party right now is a 67-year-old grandmother who has been at the top of American life for 25 years, whose chief challenger right now is a 73-year-old socialist, and the two of them are set to have a fascinating debate over whether their party's animating ideas should have their pedigree in 1965, 1933, or 1789. At the moment, among President Obama's hot new ideas are infrastructure spending,

the minimum wage, job training, and Head Start, all of which were probably among the leading agenda items of any Democrat over the last 40 years. These are ideas that have the freshness of the hula hoop and wage and price controls. At the moment, the political and ideological project of the left is to muster a coalition of the ascendant on behalf of an agenda of exhaustion. In contrast, on the right, we see a time of genuine ferment. Near his death, Bill Buckley said that conservatism needed to be re-baptized. The Tea Party has been the concrete vehicle for that reaffirmation of the pillars of the conservative faith, and we've begun to see a real effort to fill in the details of those principles with concrete policy, whether it's the entitlement reforms of Paul Ryan,

the tax plan of Marco Rubio, or the health care proposal of Richard Burr and Aaron Hatch. Much of this flies under the banner of so-called reform conservatism, which should properly be understood, I believe, as either a misnomer or a redundancy, because reform shouldn't be a faction within conservatism properly understood. It is an inherent part of conservatism. Going back to Burke, who of course said, a state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation. Bill Buckley himself in the 70s wrote a book called Four Reforms, a program for the 1970s. As Senator Mike Lee has said, it's not enough to have a leader for the ages, which of course we all fervently hope and wish for, without an agenda for the times. And we are seeing now that agenda sketched out, and we'll hear more about it the next couple of days here. Now, for all the confidence

of the theme of this conference, of course, nothing is inevitable, and the obstacles are formidable to a conservative revival from the heavy inertia that inheres in almost any government program, and to the breakdown of the family in the lower and increasingly in the middle of the income distribution. For a new conservative program to be enacted, it'll take argument, effort, and yes, some lucky bounces. One of Bill Buckley's favorite themes was gratitude, which should always be part and parcel of the conservative impulse, because we are heirs to a civilization that has given us liberty and dignity unimaginable throughout most of human history. And none of us have done anything to establish it. We weren't at Naseby. We weren't at Philadelphia. We weren't at Gettysburg. All is asked of us is to have a proper attitude of thankfulness for all of this, which I think

requires a concrete expression in a fighting gratitude aimed at defending and revitalizing the system and the ideas that have been bequeathed to us. Now, whether or not we'll be able to say, I told you so, like Hayek watching the Berlin Wall fall, I don't know. But we will be able to take satisfaction in engaging in this most noble struggle. And to say to anyone who sat it out, something in the spirit of the French king, Henry IV, who wrote to a missing lieutenant after a famous battle, hang yourself, brave Creon, for we fought at Arki and you were not there. Thank you very much. And have you all turned on your mics?

We have. Apparently so. Hi, guys. My name is Raihan Salam, and I work with Rich at National Review and also with Lindsay and co. at the National Review Institute, and I am extremely excited to bring you this group. We have with us Ramesh Panuru, a senior editor at National Review who has actually been with National Review for almost two decades.

I was reading him when I was, I have to say, I must have just been a year or two younger than Ramesh, but I remember him from my youth, and I actually am pretty sure that Ramesh is someone who wooed me to the political right, so it's a real honor to get to work with him now. Mona Charan is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and she's also a columnist for NR, among other places, and she is one of the keenest political analysts I know, and also a very sensitive and thoughtful observer of the culture. And opposite of sensitive and thoughtful, I'm kidding, is Kevin Williamson, our roving correspondent. And if Mona and Ramesh

are the brains of the American right, I'd say that Kevin is kind of the poet. Kevin is someone who is just an incredibly compelling storyteller who certainly can think in terms of abstractions, but he's also someone who really gets in the nitty-gritty of what's happening in American life today. You all should feel very lucky to be here with these guys. Charlie Cook is staff writer at National Review, and he, frankly, frightens me a little bit. Charlie is a foreigner, now a naturalized American, but he is a dangerous radical who wants to teach Americans lost lessons about freedom. And frankly,

I find it kind of alarming some of the time. But, you know, we're going to get into that now. So just a few miles up the road from here, you have Baltimore, a city that was once a thriving, flourishing place, a city of over 600,000. That's really in the middle of this incredibly wealthy corridor of knowledge creation and wealth creation. And yet, weirdly, Baltimore is a pretty grim place. And, of course, Baltimore has been in the middle of this amazing series of this

urban unrest. And you guys have all had things to say about it. And I want to start with you, Kevin. Kevin, President Obama tells us that Baltimore is an indication that we need a more centralized America. Baltimore is failing because the federal government hasn't stepped up and hasn't done enough. Yet you're from Texas, and you've done a lot of traveling around the country, and it seems that there are actually other parts of the country, other cities, that are not doing quite as badly as Baltimore. Sure. I think Baltimore is almost 900,000 or a little more than 900,000 at one point. It's just under a million people at its largest. Yeah, I wrote this the other day that I think things will probably radically change

in urban politics in America the day someone walking around Baltimore stops and says, why doesn't this crap happen in Provo? Because it's a very different sort of place. But if you think about, in terms of centralization of government, probably the least centralized place in the United States is Houston, which famously has basically no zoning laws.

You know, it's like skyscraper, house, Taco Bell, country club. But, you know, Houston has a really very thriving middle class economy, manufacturing jobs. People don't talk about that that much. Everyone thinks it's just an oil city. There's a lot going on there. And a lot of the things the left worries about are problems that are, if not exactly solved, certainly ameliorated in a lot more conservative parts of the country. So if you look at things like income inequality between blacks and whites

or income equality across the board between the very top and the very bottom, the least unequal place in America is Utah. So, and again, not to go off on this for too long, but you've got a real test case here, and you've got more than one test case. So if these sort of left-wing, progressive, government-led, economic planning ways of running the world worked, then you wouldn't see serial failures in places that have been controlled by progressives since the 1940s or earlier. So, you know, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit, to an extent places like Chicago and Los Angeles and San Francisco as well, all have similar failures.

They've all failed in the same way for the same sorts of reasons. And in some places, this is really striking. You know, something I was writing about for a while was this ongoing scandal with the cheating in the public schools in Atlanta. I mean, how messed up does your view of government have to be when you have your public schools organized as a criminal conspiracy against your children. And that sort of thing doesn't happen by accident. This isn't just

one of those things where someone made a bad decision. But then it turns out it's not just a few bad apples situation where we learned earlier in the week there's a similar cheating scandal involving the Atlanta Police Department, which, you know, good thing we haven't seen any problems with police misbehaving lately. Well, but one view is that, you know, basically you need the federal government to step in because this kind of local corruption is just going to be endemic. Yet part of what I'm hearing is that, wait a second, there are some places that work. So is your sense that the places that don't work are, if only very slowly and over time,

learning from the places that do? Are citizens actually responsive in that way? I think so. You know, you saw pretty radical changes in New York in the 1990s in terms of the way cities are organized. In terms of, you know, New York didn't become a conservative place by any stretch of the imagination, but it became a place in which, you know, New York didn't become a conservative place by any stretch of the imagination, but it became a place in which, you know, certain sorts of managerial standards and standards of effectiveness were demanded. And that makes a huge difference. You know, there's a reason why, in spite of their having a larger public sector and a bigger welfare state, that Canada and the northern European countries are not, you know,

hell holes where nobody wants to live. They're actually fairly pleasant places. It matters whether you actually have a corrupt or non-corrupt government or whether these systems are effective or not effective. I mean, that makes a huge difference. And you've even seen some reform in places like Philadelphia is a good example of that, which was in really, really bad shape in the middle 1980s. They did some smart economic things to encourage some investment and redevelopment.

It made a huge difference in the track that the city was on. stupidity of its local political culture is not in the same sort of situation that Detroit, for instance, was in, in which this really polarized racial politics prevents any sort of real democratic redress. Got it. So you do see some source of optimism there. Mona, one thing that was very striking about the President's remarks is that, you know, sure he said that federal investment is going to be the cure for these deep-seated ills, yet he also said something else.

He did talk about the importance of fatherhood. And I wonder, you know, in your experience, there are a lot of things to be depressed about when you're looking at changing family structure, yet is it fair to say that we're seeing a kind of growing consensus around the importance of two-parent families? Well, Tuesday, let me say, was a great day for me because it was the first time in, I think, seven years when I felt that I had an opportunity to praise Barack Obama. And so I jumped on it.

I was on Twitter. I said a couple things about, you know, that some aspects of his remarks in the Rose Garden were actually helpful. You know, he said a person who takes a crowbar and goes after a store and steals things is not a protester. He's a thief.

He said when you set a fire, you're an arsonist. You're not a protester. Great. That was great. And as you say, the other thing that he said that was helpful when he was diagnosing what's wrong with the cities and why we have these festering sores in many cities in America.

He mentioned that you have whole communities of people growing up where there are no fathers to set an example. So I praised him for that too. I think people who follow me on Twitter must have been like adjusting their screens. There's a mistake here. It looks like Mona Charon's praising Obama. But then, of course, the president reverted to the standard line, which is, you know, having given lip service, and I think it's good that he said it, but he then said that the answer was a massive federal investment in inner cities. And he took a swipe at the Republican Congress and said, you're not going to get that out of this Congress because, you know, they don't care about people.

When in point of fact, for decades, starting from when I was in diapers, the policy of the United States of America has been to spend trillions of dollars trying to revitalize cities, trying to have urban renewal, spending money on Medicaid, job training. There are 92 different means-tested federal programs that attempt to lift people out of poverty. And the president has been deep-dyed in progressivism. He believes that that's the answer, that people who know best in Washington can distribute dollars, and that will improve matters, whereas others— I encourage you to look forward a bit.

So we've had this debate, and you saw it in 2012 and also in 2014, this idea of a war on women. So basically there have been many years during which conservatives were talking about social issues in a way that was somewhat effective, and then it suddenly seemed as though the left was talking about social issues and using them very effectively. Do you believe that the future is going to be, in let's say the decade or two to come, that the left is going to continue winning these debates on social issues? Or do

you think that the right has some effective way to counter, or that people are growing more receptive to the right's message on those issues going forward? Democrats had a good run with the war on women in 2012. There's no question it helped them, partly because there were a couple of Republicans who said boneheaded things that played into the Democratic narrative. And of course, the war on women in 2012. There's no question it helped them, partly because there were a couple of Republicans who said boneheaded things that played into the Democratic narrative, and of course they always have the press. So that worked, but it didn't work in 2014.

They overplayed it. By then, it was washed up. Mark Udall got tagged with the nickname Mark Uterus because 50% of his ads were about abortion and birth control, and people wanted to hear about the economy and other things, and women started to feel patronized. It's run its course, but that doesn't mean that Republicans will not be victims of other kinds of attacks from Democrats along the same lines. You don't care about people being the one that has been a hardy perennial, and I expect to see it in force.

Do you see anyone out there, any conservatives, who have been able to articulate a message that is a bit more effective, that's actually addressing these arguments head on? Oh, I think there's tremendous intellectual life among elected office holders now that you frankly did not see so much of five or ten years ago. You've got the whole Reform-a-Con thing, which is among the intellectuals, but it's being picked up by members of the Senate.

You've seen some interest in Mitch McConnell, who most people say, oh, Mitch McConnell, he's the old establishment type. But he's interested in the notion that Republicans have leaned too far in the direction of talking about entrepreneurs and not talking enough about wage earners and people who just want a job. They just want a job with good wages so they can raise their families and be independent and not need the government.

And that message, I think, is getting through, and that's a very, very hopeful thing because the biggest problem for Republicans is the perception on the part of many voters that they are for the rich. So, Ramesh, I mean, do you recognize that as well? Do you see that you have Republicans starting to talk about issues in new ways? And are there opportunities being created by the left in that regard?

Well, I think that the first years of the Obama administration made Republicans go very far into opposition mode quite understandably and correctly. Those were the years when people were saying Republicans were the party of no. And the party of no was, I think, the right thing to be. But I think we saw in 2012 that merely being that was not enough. And even if it had been a reasonable strategy to pursue in 2012, it just doesn't make quite as much sense when you're in a different political context. He's been reelected. He's never going to be on the ballot again.

And you've got a different situation. Obama was going to be the liberal Reagan, or really rather the liberal anti-Reagan, that just as Reagan had sort of caused the fall of the old liberal order, so Obama would do that for the Reaganite order. And there are certain parallels, and there are certainly times when you think that the Republican Party might need to be reformed and conservatism might need to be reformed the same ways that the Democratic Party had to be reformed in the late 1980s. But the difference there is that Americans were actually pretty happy

in the late 1980s with how they were being governed. The Reagan agenda was seen as being largely successful and fair-minded liberals had to concede, well, maybe Reagan had a point about inflation or about crime or about high taxes. And I just think that we're in a very different situation right now where you've had liberal political success that is not matched by any kind of popular happiness. People still think that the country is on the wrong track, not the right track. And so I think that that basic unhappiness that neither party has really been able to tap

is what creates an opportunity for conservatism with a fresh agenda, conservatism that marries the public's basic ideological dispositions towards small government and towards concern about the family, respect for religion, to a practical agenda that explains how those dispositions can be made to work for people in areas like health care and higher education and so forth. We haven't done enough of that in the recent past as conservatives. I think we're starting to do more of it, and I think that if we do, it's going to be a hard to beat combination. Rich made a reference to the staleness of the democratic agenda right now. It seems that, you know, yeah, make the minimum wage a little bit higher. You know, let's have universal child care. And I'm curious, tell me what you think of that,

because I think that, you know, I guess from the democratic perspective, this idea that they're intellectually stale is crazy. Because to say that we ought to have, you know, kind of this universal provision that could make a huge difference for many working women, let's say, you know, this could be very politically potent. So is it your view that that is not going to resonate with the broad middle of Americans? Or do you think that, you know, it's a real threat? Well, nostalgia is a powerful emotion. So the fact that an agenda is stale does not mean that it lacks political potency. If you think about the Democratic calls for reviving the labor movement,

that is entirely steeped in nostalgia. I mean, if you read every other Paul Krugman column, which is about the rate at which I would suggest reading them, or the Center for American Progress's big report on what to do about the middle class, the storyline is essentially everything was great in post-war America, dominated as it was by an alliance of big government, big labor, and big business. And it was egalitarian, and it was high wage. And then Ronald Reagan came along and destroyed everything. And unions have been suffering ever since.

And so has the working man. Well, actually, union density in this country peaks around 1963. So this is a very long-running story of decline. The reasons for that decline have to do primarily, I'd argue, with the fact that unionized companies were less competitive than non-unionized ones. So if you're a non-unionized manufacturer, you're adding jobs at the same time unionized manufacturers are shedding them. And the public is actually less and less in favor of unions and more and more skeptical of them. And the basic liberal response to these trends is to plug their ears, shut their eyes, and wish that things could be made the way they used to be. And that nostalgia is just, I think, not sufficient as a program.

We can't have a debate where it's just, you know, to adapt things to something that Brink Lindsey of the Cato Institute says, where the right wants to go home to the 1950s and the left wants to work there. As strong as that emotion can be when there's nothing to counter it, there's no attractive agenda alongside that nostalgia, I think people can see through it if that alternative is presented. Charlie, when conservatives talk about social issues, there's oftentimes this kind of defensive reaction, the sense that, you know, let's say on abortion, public opinion is kind of holding the line tepidly. If you're looking at same-sex marriage, that's just been an utter collapse for social conservatives who oppose same-sex marriage.

Yet there's one social issue, if you want to call it that, gun rights, where there's been a really dramatic reversal in which what had once been considered pretty fringe conservative views are actually now very mainstream. Tell us a bit about that. Well, I think that the first structural reason that conservatives tend to win on this is it's the one time ever that we get to say to the other side, you can't take this away. Generally, we're the people who take things away. But here, it's the Democratic Party who wants to take the guns. It's a useful line. People don't like having their goods taken away from them,

their rights taken away from them. But I think historically, the last 25 years has been fascinating because it's been a great success for the right that can in some ways be emulated elsewhere. If you had said in the year 1990 to an average political observer that by the year 2015, every single American state would have a concealed carry regime of some sort, not perfect, but every single one would have one,

that Washington, D.C. would have had its laws overturned, that the Supreme Court would have correctly recognized the Second Amendment as an individual right and then incorporated it to the states, that there would be no so-called assault weapon ban at the federal level, and that the number of firearms in the United States would have doubled over 22, 23 years,

almost to 350 million, but that crime would have dropped in half and gun violence overall would have dropped 75%. People would have looked at you funny. They would have said, absolutely not. Clinton was popular when he proposed his reforms in 92, 93. The Brady Bill was popular. Ronald Reagan supported the Brady Bill.

Just out of curiosity, how many of you in the room own firearms? Just a show of hands. Got it. Well, you have a receptive audience, so let's hear it. So Ronald Reagan backed the so-called assault weapons ban, and he backed the Brady Bill. This would be unthinkable now. Now, the reason for that is not that the National Rifle Association suddenly came into existence in the year 2010. It's that Republican politicians, and indeed a good number of Democratic politicians, are responding to what was a grassroots backlash.

Some of it was 9-11. I think Americans felt a little more vulnerable after 9-11. You do see a spike in the support for gun rights. But more of it was that the laws simply weren't working. We've heard a lot about Stand Your Ground. We've heard a lot about Stand Your Ground, we've heard a lot about the Castle Doctrine, we hear a lot about self-defense. People don't realize that in the 1970s and the 1980s, many states essentially got rid of their old laws, the laws that had come from British common law,

and they were left at the mercy of prosecutors if they ended up killing somebody or defending themselves. That stopped working. The crime rate spiked in the early 90s, and Americans changed their mind on these questions, and they started to put pressure. And it really is a grassroots. You hear so much about the National Rifle Association,

but it really is a grassroots movement. Well, there's another element of this, though. When you're looking at, you know, when people are expressing anxiety about the political future of the American right, they often point to the fact that America's demographic mix is changing and it tends to be white voters who gravitate to the political right. Yet with regard to gun rights, it seems there's been a sea change of opinion among minority voters.

Well, it is beginning to change. 51% as of, I think, a few months ago of African Americans think that a house with a firearm in it is safer than a house without. That's a remarkable shift over the last 20 years. Women, younger people, even Hispanics who are less in favor of gun rights than most are changing their views on this. It is increasingly difficult to suggest that if you increase the supply of firearms and you loosen the laws, more people will be killed.

It just hasn't happened over 25 years. This is an example, I think, for the right, where the facts were on our side. People who really cared about this, they jumped, they took the opportunity, and they changed the laws. And there isn't much enthusiasm to change them back. One thing I wonder about is the way that when you're looking at economic policy debates, increasingly they come

to resemble cultural debates. So if you look at the rise of different entrepreneurial firms like Uber and Airbnb, it's been really striking because, you know, these are entirely new businesses creating new opportunities for many people. And yet I keep hearing about how, you know, gosh, Uber drivers ought to be unionized. You know, they ought to be full-time employees, et cetera. And I kind of wonder about that. Kevin, you wrote a book in which you predicted absolute doom and apocalypse for the post-war welfare state, and yet you said it was going to be really great. Tell us a bit about this war over the new economy we're seeing right now, in which it seems that every major media outlet seems to be declaring war

on these new entrepreneurial businesses. Are ordinary people buying it? What's happening here? Before I hit that, just a few things that have come up. For the political context of where we are, I think it's important to keep in mind how much has been accomplished. And that's one of the reasons why the right has, in the last few years, been going through a rethinking of some of its priorities. In the election of 1980, the issues, the things that people were worried about on the right were communism, which is gone, runaway inflation, except for a few guys who write for

Rolling Stone, runaway inflation, which is basically gone, and crime, which has been reduced by, depending on your measure, between 70 and 90 percent over the years. So we won a lot, and then we moved on to tax cuts. And we were so good at tax cuts that it stopped being an effective issue because we have so many people who don't pay any federal income taxes. So we've radically improved some things, and some things are going to get radically better, I think, still. If you look at the worldwide economic growth rate right now, it's about 3.3%, and that's what it's expected to be for the foreseeable future. That's all over the world, which means that kids born

today, 30 years from now, will be about 2.6 times as wealthy in real terms as we are on average. I don't think people who are 2.6 times as wealthy in real terms as we are on average are going to stand there and get themselves pushed around by someone who says, no, you can't have a car pick you up in New York City because we have to have a special rule about there has to be a guy with a million-dollar seal on his car to come pick you up in a special yellow car and drive you to the place that you want to go. And it's so important that we do things this way that it's a crime for anyone else to do it. I mean, it's just absurd. You know, you meet all sorts of, you know, young lefty progressives who will talk a good game about unions and all that sort of stuff.

They use Uber, too. Of course they do. I mean, it's just, it's the new normal, you know. You're not going to get to a place where people are going to give up things that they've gotten to the point that they think they can't live a normal life without. And, you know, it's true all over the world. What's interesting about this stuff, this sort of, you know, fractured entrepreneurial economy,

is that ordinary people are getting in a sort of new high-tech way the sorts of things that used to be the preserve of very wealthy people. You know, I know I go on and on about this, but the example I've always used is the cell phone, which in the 1980s, $10,000, and you have to be a millionaire to have one. Now everyone has one. But it used to be that you had to be Bill Buckley to have a chauffeur, right? Now everybody, of course, has a chauffeur when they need a chauffeur. Things like credit cards and things like that used to offer concierge services,

and that was a big part of what they did. Or if you lived in a really nice building or stayed in a really good hotel, there were concierge services. Now basically everyone has access to that stuff through things like OpenTable and other sorts of things like that. So I think it's going to be really difficult to get people behind this sort of Stone Age, 19th century regulatory mindset. The other thing is that technology is making it basically impossible to regulate a lot of things. You know, we had a war on drugs forever, but as it turns out, you can grow marijuana lots of places.

So we were never particularly good at stomping on that. Well, when you've got a world of 3D printers that are basically ubiquitous and you can make anything you want, good luck regulating guns. I mean, good luck regulating guns when every kid can make one at home. I just want to ask everyone in the audience, there are cards on your tables. So if you have any questions, please just jot them down on those cards, and we're going to collect them later on. Ramesh, so the United States has grown more affluent in recent decades, not as quickly as some would like, but it's certainly grown more affluent. And yet it's not clear that we've moved further in the direction of economic independence. You'd think that people who are far richer than they were in 1945 would say, well, I'll meet my own retirement needs, or I'll handle those various problems. Why do you think that is, and do you think that might change?

Do you think that in the future, as people grow more affluent, they might want to take more responsibility? Well, in some respects, people are taking responsibility. There's a lot more private retirement accounts, and 401ks have gotten better over the years at the same time that public retirement accounts like Social Security are showing no signs of change whatsoever, except that they're getting a little closer and closer to bankruptcy with every year. I think that when you think about the economic trends of the last couple decades, you've got to distinguish between the last 15 years and the last 40 years. So again, the left-wing story that I was talking about says

everything started going south around 1980 or maybe 1973. But in fact, the 1980s and 1990s were good decades economically. Everybody who lived at that time basically understood that. And the statistics show that as well. The last 15 years have not been so great. They haven't been so great even when you've had years with decent GDP growth. If you're in the middle of the income spectrum, you didn't really feel that growth yourself in your own take-home pay,

in your own standard of living. I think a lot of that has to do with some of the big-ticket items that make up a middle-class lifestyle where you have not had decreases in the cost of living. So there's been a lot of anxiety about paying for college, either paying off college debts for younger people, prospectively paying for your kid's college for older people, the cost of health care. So if you think about why people say they feel as though they have to work harder and harder to stay in place and they're at a constantly increased risk of falling out of the middle class or of their kids falling out of the middle class, it's that cost of

living. And I think that that is in itself a kind of, as ominous a sign that is, the confidence that our kids are going to do better than we did has really plummeted. But there's also something hopeful in it for conservatives in that most of those areas are concern issues where conservative policies have just not been brought to bear. Where really liberalism has shaped

the way American public policy handles health care and handles higher education. Conservatism really hasn't, has barely even turned its attention to those things. Conservatives have just been more reactive to liberal initiatives. That's right. But these are areas where competition, decentralization, accountability, consumer choice, if we give

them a chance, I think could have a real potential to drive value in these sectors of the economy as they do in every other sector of the economy. And that gets back to what Rich was saying earlier, that our agenda is just a better fit for the circumstances we find ourselves in. Mona and Charlie, I have a question for you both, and Mona, perhaps you can answer it first. This is a little bit abstract, but it's keying off of what Ramesh had just said. One view is that if you have sluggish economic growth, there are going to be a lot of people who think, I don't want your crazy

new redistribution scheme because, you know, frankly, you know, I'm a little concerned about what I'm going to have left over in my paycheck. And this sounds rather risky to me. And this is a government that has not delivered better outcomes for people. That's kind of one take. But another view is that, you know, when the economy is growing and flourishing, I'm more entrepreneurial. I'm more willing to take risks. and I actually might want a more kind of dynamic free market economy. So where do you think it falls? I mean, do you think that for most people, do you think that actually having a growing, flourishing economy makes them more conservative or the opposite? Well, it is the case that polls have shown that to the disappointment of the left, income inequality just doesn't rank very high on the list of priorities for the average voter.

They're not as angry about it as the Occupy Wall Street people and the Democratic Party, but I repeat myself, are. It's just not what motivates them. But what we do see, for example, if you look at the views of young millennials, so there's a distinction that they've drawn. They've sort of cut the salami a little bit thin, right? They've looked at older millennials who were just voting for the first time when Obama ran in 2008, and comparing them with the younger ones who are just coming up, the 18 to 24-year-olds. And there are differences in that cohort. And so one of the things that you find among the younger millennials is that they do believe in government solutions to problems.

Now, that might just be naivete. That might be something that they have to grow out of. But I think there is a way to address voters like that and to excite them about the possibilities for government to be an agent of reform to give them more opportunities. They are familiar with Uber, with Airbnb, with all of the new economy goods that are out there. But what they might not know is that government, though it's getting harder to regulate,

they still can crush job opportunities through, for example, licensing requirements. So that, you know, if you want to braid hair for a living, you have to go through all of this elaborate training and so on. So reforms like that that make it, that just force the government to step back and let people do their own thing. I hate that expression. Why did that come out of my mouth? But let people find opportunities and let them find work. If you can fit that under the rubric of the government is doing something for you, it will have appeal to the younger voters, too.

The moderator and I are both very concerned about the hair braiding issue. Charlie, one thing that makes me nervous is just the sense that when you have a sluggish economy because of excessive regulation and just cronyism and various other problems, then you just have this larger group of people with low incomes who will find redistribution more appealing. It just seems like this weird, vicious circle. Is there a reason to be optimistic? Is there a way to break out of that circle? Well, this is a commonly made point, but I think we should define what we mean by conservative.

We all know what we mean by that, but in a sense, we are conservative of radical ideas. What you're describing, Mona, is a conservatism of a sort among young people in that they want to stick with the presumptions with which they grew up. And it's always amused me that you can argue, if you so wish, that the American constitutional order, the American market, in, say, 1930, was unsuited to the changing nation. You can argue that the Depression had made it unreasonable. You can argue that the modern world, the industrial world, had made a constitutional setup that was designed for an agrarian nation, out of date. But it seems that it's not so much that the left today is making that argument as that whatever was decided between 1913 and 1963 when unions reached their height is now how it shall always be.

And to an extent, you have younger people who have only known that. Now, maybe they were more conservative when Bill Clinton was president because the economy was booming than they are now. But if conservatives want to make their point, I think they need to say, well, maybe we need a third development. Maybe, sure, there was a time when we needed change because the country had changed. It's changed again. Really, there's no living constitutionalism on the left. They just ossify what they wanted in the 1930s. And again, as Kevin said, do you want the taxi commission or do you want Uber? No disrespect to the chain that owns this hotel, but do you want Hilton or do you want Airbnb?

These are important questions. And in a sense, we'll need to regain the progressive mantle rather than the conservative mantle because the people who are advocating the radicalism are not on the left. They're on the right. I think that's the argument. I agree to an extent it may need to be couched in more government-friendly terms for now. But it does need to be said that the left is the man, not the right. I had to correct you on something, Charlie, but the choice isn't between Hilton and Airbnb. It's between housing projects and Airbnb, right?

Because there's choice in that stuff. Sure. Kevin, we have a question from the audience for you. Sure. And it's about Austin. Austin seems like a kind of quirky place where you have a lot of entrepreneurial spirit. You have a very young population of people

who are just generally kind of curious people, and yet the city just banned e-cigarettes. It's a city that seems to be moving in a kind of leftward lurch. So how do you reconcile those two things? Well, you don't. The thing about Austin is they have this dumb faux municipal motto, keep Austin weird,

because they think of themselves as being quirky and all that. I was out at Hillsdale a couple of months ago, and I wrote a little piece after where you should really be talking about keep Hillsdale weird, because that's the place that's actually different for the rest of the country. You know, Austin is full of people who are 24 years old and in their

first job and making some money and feeling like failures because they don't live in Brooklyn. So they're trying to make Austin into Brooklyn. Austin's problem is that it's second rate. It's a perfectly nice place, but it's a second rate place. It's not Brooklyn. It's not Berkeley. It's not San Francisco.

It's the same reason Jay Nordling always points this out, that the University of Michigan is so much more stridently PC than, say, Harvard is. Because, you know, Harvard doesn't really have all that much to prove. Austin does. Austin is just a second-rate place. So, and I say that as soon as someone went to school in Austin. Well, let me push back just a little bit. Could it be that in a city when you have large numbers of freelancers, when you have people who, you know, don't necessarily have kind of traditional nine-to-five jobs,

who are in creative professions, that they actually might want more government as a kind of bulwark against that instability that's just part of having those jobs. No, I don't think that's it at all. I think that's true for other communities. I don't think it's true for Austin. Austin's problem is the same problem that you have generally of well-off young people, which is that they're

stupid and insulated. So, you know, I lived in the South. You're winning a lot of friends. I'm winning a lot of friends. Millennials, yeah. I lived in the South Bronx for some years, as you know, in Jose Serrano's district, in the poorest congressional district in the country. So I hear people talking about, you know, we're going to solve these urban problems

with massive federal investment. I just want to take them to where I used to live in the South Bronx and say, walk around this neighborhood at 3 o'clock in the morning sometime, come back and tell me what the single biggest problem is. And the answer is going to be housing projects, which is the last big federal investment we had here. Now, if you're an upper middle class white person from, you know, Greenwich or Austin or some nice, sorry, it's not from Greenwich, you know, if you're moaning, you get pretty good government services, right? You get pretty good public schools. You get, you know, police who treat you with a measure of respect and dignity, and you've

got good public libraries and those sorts of things. So if you grow up and that's all you know about the way government works, then you tend to think, well, I can replicate that other places, which is sort of like people see, well, in Sweden they do their welfare state this way, or in Switzerland things are arranged this way. Why don't we do that in Pakistan? Or why don't we do that in Baltimore? Or why don't we do that in the South Bronx?

And, of course, the difference is that it's not completely the same thing. Yeah, please. Not on how I rate Austin, but on the general question of what's wrong with the kids today politically, I think we have to remember one of the major reasons, a big part of the explanation for why the 20-somethings of today are to the left of the 20-somethings of three or four decades ago is that a much smaller proportion of them are married, white, and Christian. And you've just got to keep that basic demographic fact in mind. The ones who are married, white, and Christian are quite conservative.

That's right. Now, this means a couple things to me. One is some of those things aren't permanent. You can get married, and these people are not lost forever. But I think the other thing to keep in mind is in addition to making some sort of generational appeal, there is just no alternative to conservatism making inroads among non-white populations in the long run. Mr. Panuro and Mr. Salam are concerned about the shortage of white people. I wouldn't put it that way.

Certainly not on this panel. Okay, so one of our questions about higher education and whether or not there's an opportunity for conservatives to paint them the way that the left painted big tobacco and big pharma. You know, is there a kind of a way to say that, hey, instead of aligning with your professors against taxpayers, you know, could you say, hey, why don't you, student, you, young person who wants an education, why don't you join with these taxpayers who are concerned about this enormous waste, you know, against a higher education system that's busted and broken? Mona, do you have any thoughts on this? I know that Ramesh has thought about this. There are. I recently drove around a lot of college campuses taking one of my sons to visit, you know, as all good parents do.

And, you know, you now see on college campuses big, you know, sort of banner ads about, you know, dealing with the high cost of college. And, you know, it's just everywhere. It's in the ether. Everyone's either worried about it or at least considering it. It weighs heavily on the minds of young people and their families. And so I certainly think that's an opportunity, and I think one of the things that technology is going to do is going to be to provide a possible alternative,

and Republicans can sort of get a jump on this. It's happening anyway. But, of course, you're taking the traditional college tour. You're not asking your son to – A lot of people are still going to do – many people are still going to do the bricks and mortar four years, but it isn't for everybody. And the online, open online courses that are coming and that will be available, they already are,

are going to open up opportunities for so many more people than can afford those unbelievably expensive four years in the traditional educational setting. And that's one of the reforms and one of the things that conservatives should be enthusiastic about. Charlie, you're a young man. Tell us what you think about this. Well, I think one of the groups that conservatives can start to make inroads with are those who don't want to go necessarily to do a four-year degree of the sort perhaps your son does, but I did, but who nevertheless are ambitious.

In my own country of birth, we've started to look down on people who don't go to university, to apply social pressure to them. And this, of course, does not mean they're not doing well in and of their own right. Plumbers in London earn far more than most liberal arts graduates. But if they go to a dinner party, there will be an undercurrent of judgment. We saw it with the way in which some on the left, Howard Dean especially,

reacted to the news that Scott Walker hadn't finished his four-year degree, which is really, I mean, you cannot make the argument with a straight face that Scott Walker hasn't done well for himself. He's the governor of Wisconsin, for goodness sake. There is nothing wrong with not going to college. Now, there's nothing wrong with going to college either. Conservatives need to be careful they don't make it seem as if they are anti-intellectual. But we have a good number of people who are maybe looking at these figures and saying,

this is not for me. It's important culturally as well as politically to say to them, it is okay for you to go and do something else, maybe a vocation, maybe something more direct. I'm hoping for quick answers from Ramesh and Kevin on this, but I do wonder, there is something specific about this idea of characterizing higher ed as a kind of corrupt interest group the way that people see big tobacco, or certainly the way they saw big tobacco. I mean, do you think that there's something to that as a kind of populist argument, as a way to change the politics around this issue?

Well, yeah, I think they're used car salesmen. You know, it's the old, you know, GMAC model of loan someone $30,000 to buy an $18,000 car. And, you know, you do that enough times, it ends up being pretty profitable, and the bank ends up making more money than the car dealership does. So, I mean, partly it's that. Partly it's this credentialist attitude that if I jump through this hoop, then I'm automatically guaranteed a comfortable middle-class life, which is why there are so many young people who are disappointed right now

because they graduated from college at the worst time in American history, at least modern American history, to graduate from college when the economy was just in a free fall in 08, 09, and they're very bitter about that. But the other thing is, and I think it's really a much deeper cultural problem of the contempt in which we hold non-symbolic labor. People who lay pipes, people who build things, people who do construction, that sort of thing.

As Charlie was saying, there are a lot of people who make quite a good living doing that and enjoy it. And what's funny is you've got all these people who are making $32,000 a year and hating their lives sitting at a desk, and then they go home and watch reality shows about people who build motorcycles. And so we're watching people do work on television, but we in real life hold people in contempt who actually work as mechanics and doing fabrication and that sort of thing, which is insane. I don't think I would so much make our higher education policy

about attacking traditional higher educational institutions, but I would say that the system we have serves their interests better than it serves the public interest and that what is needed is not an assault on those institutions, but the creation and expansion of alternatives to them. Online courses, apprenticeships, vocational educational programs, new forms of accreditation so you don't just have to be like every other higher education institution in order to have access to federal loans.

And then as all of us I think here are saying, we do need to push back on this cultural message that you have to go to one of those institutions or you're a loser for the rest of your life, which is very bad, which is really cruel for a large number of people in our society. And ultimately I don't think it actually serves the purpose of liberal education well either. Ramesh, one thing I'm struck by is that when I was a kid growing up in New York City, New York City had very acrimonious, very contentious racial politics. And then that calmed down to some degree, ironically, after crime rates fell. But Rudy Giuliani was a very polarizing figure in some ways,

but actually in some ways the racial climate improved after he was in office. To many of us, it seems as though in the Obama era, we believed that we would have a kind of less acrimonious racial politics, and yet it seems that we have a more acrimonious racial politics. And certainly there are issues concerning police brutality that used to be considered primarily local issues that are now becoming live issues, let's say, in intra-democratic primary battles and much else. Do you think that we're on a kind of one-way push that, you know, whoever the next president is going to be is going to be kind of engaged in this particular style of racial politics? They'll have to either respond to it, or do you think that this is just a kind of temporary aberration?

Well, that's a great question. I suppose it depends to a large degree on the outcome of the next presidential election. I do think that there is just a general way of thinking and acting on these issues that is very broadly shared on the left and is not the way that most of the folks who are on the right think about these things. So I don't think that you would have, I mean, in some ways you'd have, if you have a Republican administration, you'll have a racialized attack on that administration as being indifferent and callous and racist and so on. On the particular questions about police brutality and so forth, of course, that is, I think, very much tied to the fact that you've had this success in bringing the crime rate down.

The public's reaction to these incidents would be different if people felt that sense of danger that people in New York City, for example, felt every day in the late 1970s and early 1980s. And it's entirely reasonable to think about issues differently when you've got to change social context. But what would be unreasonable would be to discount the progress that has been made and just take it for granted and assume that any amount of anti-police rhetoric or policy can be indulged. And I suspect that in a way the political conversation about criminal justice has gotten a little bit ahead of the public in that I'm all for a lot of criminal justice reforms. I'm glad to see Hillary Clinton catching up to Rand Paul and Ted Cruz and Mike Lee on that issue. But it's very important that

the basic orientation of criminal justice reform be pro-public safety, pro-law enforcement, pro-police, and not move off in the wrong direction. Mona? This topic of what goes on between police and black young men is part of a much bigger picture with what has gone wrong with many aspects of our society, by no means limited to African Americans or minorities. It's part of a much larger trend of family disintegration, something that Moynihan started warning us about 50 years ago. And it's only

gotten progressively worse, and the statistics are just deadly. Everyone knows it, you know, that your chances of not graduating from high school, getting in trouble with the law, not marrying, and so on and so forth, are so much higher. You know, 70%, 80% if you grow up in a home where your parents were never married, which is the case with large numbers of people who live in these neighborhoods now. It's one of the great tragedies of the Obama presidency, which was iconic in some ways and good for America, electing the first black president. But it would have been so easy for him as a married father,

being a great role model, to make that a part of his message to all Americans, that the importance of family. It wouldn't necessarily need to aim it at any particular group, but just say this is really important for our social cohesion. It's important for kids' outcomes. It's a lot more important, frankly, than Mrs. Obama's, you know, eat healthy food and let's move campaign, right?

I mean, if you really want to improve life for kids, give them a mother and a father. And alas, this president did not choose to do that. One follow-up on that. So if you're looking at a figure like Barack Obama, who is so admired in the African-American community and other minority communities as well, he has a kind of, you could argue that he has a kind of unique position, a unique ability to make that case. Whereas, you know, the next president, let's say the next president is a Republican. If that next president is Scott Walker, it seems that Scott Walker saying that, hey, fatherhood is important, might have less resonance. Is that something that – Absolutely.

That's why it's such a tragedy that Obama chose not to do it. He's made one or two speeches. He's occasionally delivered this message. But usually it's been to an audience of, like, young black teenagers rather than to, you know, the whole country and making it a really key message of his presidency. But is it possible for someone who isn't Obama to be able to talk about this, you know, intelligently and sensitively in a way that might resonate? As long as it's not done as a scold to a particular community, then yes. You have to talk. And by the way,

I mean, that is the way to talk about it because it does affect every single group in America. The move away from thinking about marriage as the essential first step toward family formation is well advanced and

it is now only the college-educated in our society who continue to follow that pattern. Everybody else, middle-income people down to the poor and high school dropouts the very most, it's lost its normative value. So I don't want to wear out our welcome. I do have one last question for Charlie. You've often talked about this idea of conservatarianism, but also this idea that there are ways in which the right can leverage the left to make its case. Now, that sounds a little funny to my ears, so can you elaborate on that a little bit? Yeah, I think in addition to some of the technological points that we were discussing. The basic presumption of the right is that local communities and families and private institutions and states

should make the majority of the decisions and that only those things that have to be done by a federal government need to be done by a federal government and should be. And we are at a stage now in which the left has started to use the states to get its own way and is aware that some of its gains can be taken away from it. And I just want to caveat this by saying progressives do not believe in a particularly meaningful way in the concept of federalism. They use it to advance their agenda,

and then once they've won, they try to nationalize everything. But I'm thinking particularly, say, of the gains that have been made on the left in the marijuana debate. It is somewhat ironic to hear people in Colorado and in Washington who are progressives complaining that this big, bullying federal government could, at a moment's notice, take away their referenda. And I have heard very few conservatives... You don't have to believe that marijuana should be legalised to make this point.

I've heard very few conservatives go in and say, well, you know, that's what we're talking about. We are not particularly good at this. I complain frequently about how we argue against mandates. A good argument against a mandate is that we do not believe in mandates. What it is that's being mandated is irrelevant. I don't think that little sisters of the poor should have to pay for contraception is a winning argument. People who use contraceptions as sluts is not a winning argument. And often we do go too far towards the latter.

And I think when it comes to, say, the question of mandates, we could say, and make some inroads, hey, you know what, I'm really in favour of guns, but I don't want to mandate those on you. At that point, the other person recognises what I'm arguing. The same thing is true of federalism. Progressives are using the federal system. Let's point out to them that this is exactly what we're talking about just on the things that we care about. And that's where I think there is an opportunity here, especially given that they haven't got much traction at the federal level.

So you trade a more socialistic Vermont for a more libertarian Texas? Absolutely right. And I think just a final point on that. How many of you guys would take that deal? I just think on that point that it is okay for people in different parts of the country to live a little differently from one another. It's not just about having little laboratories that you can then nationalize. It's fine if people in Massachusetts want to live slightly differently. And the more diverse that we become, the more different in terms of questions of religious liberty, of gun control, of drugs, of economics, unions, and so on and so forth,

the more we need to use that. I would take that deal, and I'd take it not just with those two states, but with all 50. Thanks very much, guys. Thank you.