 Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Aaron Ross Powell, editor of Libertarianism.org and a research fellow here at the Cato Institute. And I'm Trevor Burrus, a research fellow at the Cato Institute Center for Constitutional Studies. Our guest today is Kevin Glass, Director of Outreach and Policy at the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity. So I guess let me start by just asking, what is the Franklin Center? What do you guys do over there? Sure, a lot of people actually, I think, are under some wrong impressions about it. It sounds like a think tank. It looks like a think tank. What it really is, is it's an organization that funds a lot of citizen journalists across the country and professional journalists for that matter. So it's almost like a, more in the vein of a pro-publica or any other public interest non-profit journalism organizations that you may know may be more prominent. But it focuses mostly and primarily on state issues. So we have a large group of journalists across the country in 24 different living and working in 24 different states, as a matter of fact, and not only in the ones that are going to garner the biggest headlines. So we don't have any, all many base journalists reporting on New York State. We largely don't have reporting on California, although we dabble in it sometimes. So we have a lot of journalists in Idaho, in Tennessee, in Alabama, in Mississippi. Some of the lesser-known lower-profile states where a lot of, you know, there aren't a lot of, there's not a lot of reporting on it. There's not a lot of news coming out of there. But we do think that a lot of the things that affect people's lives the most come out of your state houses, come out of county courthouses, come out of school boards. So we're trying to get journalism that is closer to the people that doesn't necessarily make Brian Williams on the nightly news headlines, but is still incredibly important and affects people's lives. So are these journalists talking to a national audience in the way that, say, pro-publica is or are they writing for local publications? Because I can imagine the school board may be important to a small group of people, but the interest is. Right. Well, they're writing for watchdog.org, which is a product of the Franklin Center. But we do have people writing in other outlets trying to reach a wider audience. So it's kind of both in-house writing and pitching out to other organizations, particularly on issues that are going to affect people and draw eyeballs in from a national audience. So for example, and this is something that hits more people and more of the national audience. We had a very long series on Terry McAuliffe recently exposing some of his cronyism, exposing some of his corruption, exposing some of his ties to actually Hillary Clinton and names like that garner eyeballs, they get excitement on the national level. But they're also reporting on the Richmond State House when all eyes aren't on the Richmond State House. So it's kind of an all-the-time thing. And when it bubbles up to the national level, we'll try and get more eyeballs there. But that's not always happening, and yet still some of those issues are affecting people on a daily basis. Now, I assume that one of the theories behind the Franklin Center and the project here is that exposing government, because government can do a lot of bad things in the shadows. And state governments seem particularly prone to being kind of insane, or at least the kind of laws we hear introduced occasionally that what they're exposing this, they're looking into this, they're providing a service from a conservative libertarian standpoint. Right. Well, it kind of falls in the conservative libertarian umbrella just because, yes, we're about exposing corruption, we're about exposing cronyism, we're about exposing local governments doing things that sound like they're insane, like they're things that governments shouldn't be doing. But our reporters, they're not ideological. We hire them because they're good reporters, they're good at investigative journalism. And I think actually it's something that this is a trans-ideological issue, is that progressives, liberals, don't want government to be corrupt because they want government to be good and government to be efficient. Conservatives don't want government officials to be corrupt because they want to use this as an example of why government shouldn't be doing thing X at all because all bureaucrats are corrupt or whatever. So it's more of a, we are exposing some of these issues and our reporters aren't particularly ideological themselves, but we do kind of get shoehorned onto the right because it is often on issues that kind of cross against some progressive ideals. We have an energy reporter who reports on cronyism in the green energy sector, which you would think, you don't want cronyism going on, although that I guess maybe has a— Some people might actually want cronyism going. The government might be funding these things to create solar panels and things like that, so there might be some people who want that. If I were to be a progressive apologist, I suppose you would say you have to get in bed with big corporations sometimes to get your progressive goals. Investing in America's energy future. Yeah, exactly. That's the word. Yeah, that's the word. Investing, exactly. And so maybe there is an apology case to be made there, but still generally you talk to an average progressive, a grassroots progressive. They don't want government getting in bed with big businesses. Especially sitting inside the Beltway as we are right now, it may be difficult to imagine how state and local governments can be as threatening, if not more threatening to their citizens as the federal government is. I mean, the federal government is this enormous entity that does, I mean, unfathomable number of things, most of them awful. And the state governments are so much smaller. And some of them even meet intermittently, like the half-time legislators and things like that. So how much of a danger, exactly. And I covered national politics previously. And one of the things that is important and draws eyeballs like I've been talking about is the amount of money thrown around at the federal government is just astounding. It's billions and billions of dollars. And if I think of $1 billion in the context of my own life, I'm like, oh my God, that is so much money, I can't believe it. But it's like on certain government programs, they're wasting billions of dollars a year. So that obviously has an effect on people's lives. But at the local level, some of the things that affect you on a day-to-day basis that you might not even think about. So we've been doing a series on, in different states, trying to reform some of their alcohol licensing laws. And that affects if on your drive home, you can pick up a handle of Jack Daniels at the supermarket, or you got to drive out of your way to a state-owned liquor store. And that's not, maybe that doesn't seem like a huge deal, but on a day-to-day basis, the amount of things that are happening at the local level that actually affect your life, I believe. And I think that a lot of our reporters would back me up is it does affect you more than the federal government wasting $10 billion on solar panels. These things add up, too. You don't often see those little oppressions where you realize that you can't buy beer, or you can't buy beer on Sundays, or you can't get in a certain location, or all these other different things. It seems like, though, if you think about the founders and the Constitution, they kind of had an idea, at least not partially, that one of the reasons they didn't want to give that much power to the federal government is because people weren't going to be very good at knowing what the federal government was doing versus knowing what their state governments are doing. Now it seems like people just look at the federal government and ignore the state governments because I'll get calls here to Cato that asked me about, you know, why aren't you guys doing anything to stop this, you know, the federal government's doing this to me. And I'm like, no, I'm pretty sure that's your state government. So the whole thing might have been flipped on its head from what the founders originally thought. Right. And I don't know founders' intent here, and that could have been one of the motivating factors, but obviously in the mass communications age, it's not hard to know what the federal government is doing, even if you're out in Idaho or Wyoming or something like that, where it would take days to send a letter. You get CNN on your TV, you get Cato on your Internet, you know, you have smartphones, you have email, you have all sorts of means of mass communication with the state, well, with your state legislator in Washington. So, and I do think that that's kind of nationalized politics, well, I think it has definitely nationalized politics to a large extent in that saying, you know, why should Vermont push for single-payer health care when we can all get together and push for single-payer health care in Washington, D.C. at the federal level. So maybe to a certain extent that's why, well, I think that is why people are focusing a lot more on the federal government because it's easier to, but it doesn't mean that a lot of those state functions have gone away. I mean, it might just mean that they're being overlooked and to a certain extent that's unfortunate and I think that a lot of people need to be more cognizant of what's going on both at their state and their local level. I'm also inclined to think that, I mean, it seems a lot of the attention that people pay to politics is kind of a spectator sport, right? It's fun or I guess some people find it fun. I don't quite fathom why, but some people find it fun. You're in the wrong city, all right. Some people find it fun to follow politics and see what politicians are up to in kind of a gossip-mag sort of way and I wonder if, you know, the competition that the multiple media sources and the Internet have brought, you know, you need to draw, you're competing with more outlets, you need to draw a wider range of interests and the federal government impacts all of us and if it ends up looking like, you know, the way that people tend to watch major league baseball far more than they watch, you know, minor league or little league even though it's happening closer to home and so I wonder if part of it is like trying to figure out how to make local politics more interesting so people will engage with it, you know, to cut against the pros. Right. I think that it just seems more like you have a bigger team, right? If you're rooting for team R at the state level, at your local level, at your county level, you've only got a couple thousand, couple hundred, couple dozen people on your team and those dozen people aren't all that active on Twitter, they don't engage with you on Facebook, they're not really getting together for little meetings, well they might be, but at the national level obviously your team has millions and millions and millions of people and so I think to a certain extent it's kind of a desire to belong to a team and I think mass communication in this area is helping to polarize us in that you can stay in your house all day and I don't want to fall into the cliche of being like those bloggers on their mother's couches, they never leave the home, but it's a way of connecting you with like-minded people and being able to galvanize your like-minded people not only in your community but across the country so in your community people might not think that Common Core for example is a great idea and they're not going to institute it at your local school board that doesn't mean that you can't call your buddy over in Nebraska and say hey here's this idea that I think we need to push and maybe not at the state level but we can get enough people, get enough of a movement to make a difference at the federal level which I think is a really weird and backwards way of considering our politics that you can create a large enough coalition to move the federal government but not your own state government. Well this interesting attention might be a rare commodity in the sense that we put all this stuff in Washington DC and people come here and they join whatever element they're going, lobbying the hill, the punditocracy, the shouting shows, any of those- A think tank. A think tank, yes, any of those things but then with all this focus of activity we still don't have enough attention that's even paid on Washington DC it would seem. There are so many things that happen in the shadows and I don't mean like smoky rooms where they make deals which I'm sure exist but just things like U.S. agricultural policy which no one really wants to pay that much attention to and so they kind of ignore it because it's like reading printed chloroform if you try and read U.S. agricultural policy and again like maybe we're just putting too much into Washington and for even the attention of this town to actually pay enough attention to check government adequately. Right. Well the federal government's power to tax is immense so like I said the amount of money being thrown around at the federal level is mind boggling and like you said U.S. agricultural policy makes no sense whatsoever and there's so much money invested in it but the stakeholders themselves the factory farmers even the quote-unquote small farmers have so much invested that it's hard to get a broad-based coalition to overcome the people who actually have an interest and a stake in agricultural policy and there's some interesting work that's been done on that because the sums of money are so large and I don't remember which economists are working on this but that large corporations are actually under-investing and lobbying if you judge by the amount of quote-unquote return on investment that because there's so much money at stake they could be actually doing more to get a piece of pieces of those pies and it might eventually reach a point where we're at a kind of balance of lobbying and that lobbying becomes less effective because more people are investing in it but you're right to a certain extent that there isn't enough attention paid to certain amounts of federal policy but to a certain extent I think you know it's hard to get a broad-based coalition to say we need to end corn subsidies because it's hard to see how that affects you as a as an individual who lives in let's say Chicago rather than a farmer who lives in Nebraska you need so much energy on the part of people who don't really have a stake in it other than a couple bucks in their tax return every year so it it it's hard to say that there's not enough attention being paid to the federal government when that is all were bombarded by on you know national level news but to a certain extent you are right that some of the weeds of federal policy still have a lot of sunlight that need well it seems that way on like I mean just as sort of going off that point on the shouting shows where Rachel Maddow is probably not gonna have a 10 minute segment on corn subsidies she is gonna have a 10 minute segment on you know crazy law introduced by a legislator in Indiana literally just freedom restoration act which is not crazy but like for example she's gonna have 10 minute segment on that which affects far fewer people than corn subsidies but it's just not that interesting so maybe on when we look at the state side we can start saying well people can start focusing on these things and actually working with government better than sitting in this town and just yelling at each other for a very long time and like I said it's easier to point to someone and say hey if Virginia sells off all their liquor stores you can buy your your liquor in Harris teeter giant or whatever then to say hey if you and a bunch of other you of your fellow citizens get together and come to Washington you can save five bucks on your tax return because we won't be sending money to Iowa for corn subsidies you know I think it's easier at the state level to point out how things are actually going to affect people's lives even when and this is the hard part they're not as invested and obviously it doesn't take up time on the shouting shows it doesn't take up time on Twitter or on social media or wherever else they might get their news Trevor mentioned the hypothetical local lawmaker making the crazy law and that makes me hypothetical yes because one of the things you notice in kind of these national stories of outrage about something that some lawmaker did is that the really crazy stuff seems to happen at in state legislatures and I worked for by intern for a little while during between college and law school in the Legislature in Colorado and there were quite a few just outright lunatics who had been elected and so I'm is that is that are people crazier at the state level is it easier to get nuts elected than you know at the national level people are less professional at the at the state level so it is and to a certain extent this is charming to a lot of people and this is why some legislators get elected is that it's like the guy next door to you he he's a he turns out to be a state legislator and he's got some really crazy ideas on you know trash pickup in the neighborhood or something like that and how he wants to nationalize trash pickup let's say I don't know something like that but it also they have this affectation and I don't mean to be someone who's coming off like an east coast cosmopolitan here but people have an affectation that gets them elected there and to a certain extent it's just supply and demand there needs to there's a demand for far far far more legislators at state and local levels than 500 people on Capitol Hill in DC so you need a larger supply of people who aren't who are sometimes not as ambitious they don't want to be a polished politician and not trained on not saying crazy things or whatever so to a certain extent yes people are less well thought out on at the state level but that's not to say that there's still not good things that are happening at the state level as you guys at the Franklin Center are hiring journalists to cover these stories that you say aren't getting enough coverage covering these topics that aren't enough coverage wasn't that especially that kind of covering the local issues that the dream of internet-enabled citizen journalism it does that play a role in this has as citizen journalism kind of sputtered out if it was ever a thing I'm I don't know the answer to that question I know you know back in the days of blogspot and early WordPress and things like that lot there were lots of quote-unquote citizen journalists working on hyper local issues I think that in the age of mass communication we've gone away from that so the local blogger wants to who's let's say the local blogger in Florida wants to blog about the Indiana RFRA instead of you know some small bore issue at his local level because everyone wants to have that kind of national level voice and I think it to a certain extent yes we have gotten away from quote-unquote citizen journalists but partly because as you said there's a large number of competing news outlets now back 15 years ago there were far fewer news websites there were far fewer news channels TV cable news channels or what have you so we have a lot more on the national level covering these things we have a lot more news sources a lot more news outlets I mean when's the last time you went to like a blogspot blog that was actually good and covering some of the local issues that to me and this is anecdotal I don't have any hard data here it seems like that was a relatively common thing that happened in the 2000 to 2005 era and I do think that some to a certain extent it's gotten away from that not to say that there aren't still very good hyper local citizen bloggers citizen journalists but it does seem like blogging quote-unquote I'm using air quotes that no one can see as a medium has gotten away from that and in addition to that why Franklin is the way it is is like I said we have our journalists are not ideologues they're not pushing an opinion they're not pushing a viewpoint and they're writing straight news stories for the most part they have professional journalism training so it's kind of a way of giving an at least air of professionalism an air of non-bias news source to some of these stories are you concerned with the death relative death of local newspapers that we're missing some of the sunlight shining a sunlight onto practices of local government because these bloggers and journalists right on national look more to the national level to a certain extent yes the dying of local newsrooms and local newspapers definitely means that there are issues that are affecting like I said affecting people's lives on a day to day basis that aren't getting covered all that much but I do think to a certain extent that is and I'm a very large believer in supply and demand of journalism itself it's also the fault of the news consumers at those levels they they're not interested for the most part in some of that journalism we want to make them interested it's not easy to do that so it means that yes there might be stories that are being under covered but it's also the faults of some of those newspapers for not covering them in a way that does interest those people for covering you might say the wrong stories are having the wrong beats things that don't affect people's lives so to a certain extent yes we're going to miss some of that but it really needs to be the job of news producers to be able to engage the citizens on that level when we had been emailing prayer to the show going over what we would talk about you had mentioned to me that this this divide between what goes on at state and local levels and what should go on and at the federal level was one of the reasons that you tend to think of yourself more as conservative than libertarian could you expand on that a bit sure this is not something that I have an academic philosophical justification for but I do think that the closer that a government is to its people the more just it is so this is maybe a explicitly anti-consequentialism argument but I don't really care if state and local governments are unlibertarian or hostile to freedom even I do care that people have a stake in their government and the closer that it is the larger the more outsize that one individual's political influence can be is more important to me than achieving libertarian ish or conservative or freedom loving ends so for example if I lived in Vermont I would be super against their Obamacare waiver single-payer system that they're pushing but I don't have a problem with it on a philosophical level because within the United States there's an incredibly powerful right of exit from any state like that any state regime like that and I think that that's more important I think then put then just saying that we need to maximize freedom at all levels and I know that that doesn't necessarily mean I'm not a libertarian I just believe I guess in democracy first and outcome second and then why I might be a conservative is is I'm really skeptical of all regimes to get it right including my own so I could be very wrong about everything that I'm saying so I would prefer everything be done slower which is the kind of classical conservative temperament rather than actual philosophy it sounds to some degree like you're describing the too often ignored third part of nozick's anarchy state in utopia is his utopia chapter where he articulates the view of the utopia of utopia is where people can get together for all sorts of reasons and live all sorts of various lifestyles but the right of exit makes it you know we care less about the particulars of one because if you don't like it you can up and move to another right I I'm interested in this is something that just is playing around in my head is a some kind of regime where you could get a right of exit subsidy or something from the federal government for very poor people who can't afford to just up and move around whenever they want to find the best regime that they want to live under but I think that that's an incredibly strong part of American democracy is the ability to choose where you live and obviously the freedom of labor the fear freedom of travel everyone in the United States I would rather see and this is again another conservative conservative idea that I know is supported by a lot of libertarians the whole laboratories of democracy thing that in every state and preferably even at the more local levels you get you can choose where you want to live and you can experiment and if some of those ideas are good they might scale up but it's important for people to be able to vote with their feet that exit subsidy is an interesting idea when I give I give a talk to the interns here about the origins of political obligation and political authority if such a thing exists and in part of that I undercut the notion of the the social contract being a thing and drawn you know David Hume kind of savaged the the social contract idea with precisely this like look you know the most of the people especially in his time were very poor didn't have a lot of options and so when you say things like well you know by staying here you've agreed to it or if you don't like it up and leave that it's that's not a meaningful choice for them they simply don't have that option but I'm struck that I mean we were very far from an exit subsidy and in fact the United States government routinely imposes substantial exit taxes on anyone who would want to leave now he's actually leaving the country itself yeah which requires paying some exorbitant amount of citizen we've renounced your citizenship you have to pay the government money which is really bizarre even renewing my I'm renewing my passport right now it's like oh it's what seventy five dollars that's a lot of money to travel to another country exactly in within the movement now that we kind of got in the conservative libertarian thing which is which is a big issue right now and you've been working in the conservative slash libertarian movement for a while but it's becoming more and more of a thing about whether or not you're a conservative you're a libertarian and the infighting within that within the two groups do you see that as is getting better getting worse do you see it as a resolvable do you see it as an intractable difference I guess that's like three questions all right one right there um I'm not sure the thing right now is that there's a Democrat who's president and what that means is that Republicans become more libertarian and libertarians feel more at home in the kind of broad based conservative movement I'm not that old but I have a fairly good view of history and I don't think that the arrival of a Republican president into the White House would portend more harmony between libertarians and conservatives than it has in the past so it's got quote unquote gotten better in the Obama era because again President Obama is a Democrat and Republicans act very libertarian when there's a Democrat in the White House except on foreign policy but well even so actually there are more kind of Republican realist-ish critics of some of President Obama's foreign policy oh yeah criticizing Libya and things like that absolutely just because he's on the other side yeah but I have no confidence that a Republican getting into the White House would not mean that there is just as many bobbings or civil liberties infringements or anti-libertarian policies emanating out of Washington and do you see because I could definitely see conservatives practical I'm putting that in scare quotes to practical conservatives more Republican minded people you know saying well we got the presidency now let's just do some things and the libertarians saying well we don't want to do bad things or things that are half measures are gonna have bigger problems in the future so we could a Republican president exacerbate that divide I mean look at the George W. Bush era you know he I can't name a libertarian-ish policy that he passed except maybe the tax cuts which maybe exactly I'm not sure any of the prospective Republican candidates maybe Rand Paul but he has some very unlibertarian leanings as well would and I again I think that most of the traditional Republican national issues are hostile ish to libertarian aims so you know expansion of the security state anti-immigration policies so I'm I I have no faith in continued if you can call anything that's happened in the last eight years harmony between libertarians and conservatives really lasting through an actual Republican governing majority you prior to your position at the Franklin Center you were managing editor of town hall dot com which is very large conservative publication and town hall publishes quite a lot of opinion pieces and I'm wondering if you noticed this trend and we so we can see this kind of trend of emerging libertarianism within the Republican party or drift in that direction was that something that was showing up either you know so established conservatives established kind of GOP people were paying lip service to these ideas because there was a Democrat in the in the White House and it made them look less like different more different from Obama or was it more a kind of new blood coming in who had this alternate viewpoint influencing the party I think a little bit of both there definitely are different conservatives in Washington right now than there were in the Bush era but I'm not sure that that is something that would hold in again in a Republican in the White House era I think that there's a large there are a large number of professional political operatives who want to you know there's obviously the winning versus being right argument in politics and the winning argument usually compromises the being right argument so even if you if you're being quote-unquote being right is being more libertarian they don't care they're happy compromising that and especially on national security issues where it's important for conservatives and Republicans to look strong and and say we're keeping America safe in this way and that way that isn't is something that I see going out the window day one of a Republican presidency from a political sort of voter base voter analysis standpoint going forward I often say that the Republican Party just if you look at numbers and trends on some level has to become more libertarian if it doesn't want to just go to complete obsolescence would you agree with that I have no idea I'm I would probably be the worst political prognosticator in the world because I have no clue I'm not a professional demographics analyst but I also tend to be very skeptical of my libertarian friends who make this argument that being more libertarian will get you more votes because I don't think that the American populace is very libertarian at all on major on most of the especially on most of the major issues that divide the conservative coalition and the libertarian coalition and I think and this is just me maybe just me projecting I think that the issues on which you can find polling in favor of libertarianism over conservatism that's largely people lying to pollsters so they say you know I want to repeal the Patriot Act but the moment a minor terrorist attack is to happen they will be very happy with Republican policies on on libertarian Republican policies on basically anything but what about trends like gay marriage or or civil civil justice criminal justice reform things that conservatives kind of led the the charge on and now maybe have to roll back as people are realizing that these are not good things sure on game gay marriage is a really interesting question that I think will not be a question in ten years maybe even faster than that and I used to tell all my friends who were well and all my friends are basically progressives I just have progressive friends who would say you know how can the Republicans be so terrible on on gay rights and I would say you know that's not going to be an issue in 2030 and I was wrong it's not gonna be an issue in 2020 it's and that's just going straight up going away and no one really wants to say it none of the professional conservative activists on these issues really want to say it or admit it but it's just it's not gonna be a thing what will be interesting is a breakdown on social issues and I know not all libertarians are pro-choice but it kind of gets defined in that social issues bucket as you know libertarians are socially liberal so they're pro-choice they're pro gay marriage they're pro drugs they're pro other things to pro criminal justice reform but younger conservatives are are just as if not more pro-life than they're the preceding generation of conservatives and that goes for kind of the country at large so on on social issues you might say it doesn't break down as cleanly as on gay marriage and definitely the Republican Party will evolve on this just as President Obama evolved on this it'll just take them 10 more years do you see a conservative movement or possible case for rolling back or ending parts of the drug war rescheduling marijuana is that something you see that could possibly change within the next 10 years I don't know about rescheduling marijuana I think that certainly there's more conservative movement in the last year two years on a lot of criminal justice reform issues and they were very that a lot of conservatives are very angry at President Obama's Justice Department saying we're not going to enforce federal laws in Washington and Colorado but to a certain extent I think that was anti just plain up anti-Obama sentiment and to a certain extent I think it was conservatives complaining about liberal hypocrisy and liberals not being punished for it right is saying that and Obama's executive overreach and all of that saying that oh they just think that they can't they can and not enforce the laws where they want to but I have seen a lot of conservative movement and maybe not necessarily rescheduling marijuana but actually on Capitol Hill there's been a fairly large anti-mandatory minimums lobby that's propped up that's been it's cropped up and that is encouraging to me and I think that on a lot of criminal justice issues the 90s are gone and in the 90s crime itself had spiked and it was this big nationwide issue and that's kind of gone out the window now and crime has been falling and I think that conservatives are realizing that a the war on drugs hasn't worked and b it's just not that big of an issue anymore so now the bigger issues and I went to the criminal justice reform summit last week is really interesting newt gingrich was there Pat Nolan who works for the American conservative union was there and they really brought in kind of the conservative Christian perspective pushing redemption narratives saying that you know Christians believe in redemption conservatives should believe in redemption and second chances so I think there's a large movement against a lot of the hard on crime policies of the 90s whether that leads to actual rescheduling of marijuana and other drugs or or other I guess rehabilitation measures remains to be seen but certainly you could say that they're pulling back from these heart this hard on crime stance that they've had for a long time one of the more baffling and new trends that we read about a fair amount right now it seems to be particularly hot in the last few weeks is this kind of overabundance of anti-tolerance on campuses that the notion that you should never say anything that might upset anyone and that everyone should be protected and it's kind of it's like a rehashing in a way of the early 90s politically correct movement that that's sputtered out and now seems to have come back with a vengeance and is that the kind of thing I can imagine that that being the kind of thing where the backlash against that could push given that it's mostly a movement of the political left right could push young people towards conservatism that they could you know they could be like look if this is what the left is and this is just in many cases I mean just off the charts irrational that maybe the left isn't for me or I don't want to associate with those kinds of people and so I'm going to embrace this other narrative again I'm not well I'm not a college student anymore so I don't know how your your run-of-the-mill college student thinks about these things but I think to a certain extent this is a factor of the internet and of mass communication so you can say the PC movement of the 90s died out but now all those people who had those tendencies in the 90s can all get together on tumblr and talk about you know the issues that matter to them and then bubble that up into their college campuses into their you know safety counselor guidelines things like that I don't know how much it is bothering your run-of-the-mill college student who might ordinarily line up as a progressive if not for progressive speech codes on campus or things like that it might certainly that's an issue on which I would say the conservative coalition and the libertarian coalition are pretty firmly aligned in favor of not not punishing people for certain speech violations let's say although I will say that to a certain extent conservatism pushes kind of social pressure over government pressure right they say that social norms will take the place of not of being able to do anything in the absence of a government mandate so to a certain extent the left is trying thing there they're saying well we're changing the social norms you can't say that anymore you can't do that anymore and all we're doing is we're publicizing it and then your employee we're not telling your employer anything but we're publicizing that you told this horrible joke and now you're getting fired for it and like this is a social norm you can't do that anymore so now I've seen at least conservatives kind of pull back and say social norms can't be everything and like we can't just because social norms are more important than government mandates doesn't mean that all social norms are good so I think we're gonna see that fight play out a little bit in the future as for actually pushing people away from progressivism I think it remains to be seen I haven't seen all that much movement on that in particular so going forward with youth and with local government and different changes that are happening in terms of conservatism and libertarianism one of these terms that we hear and I know Aaron hates it the libertarian moment which we like to use around here sometimes do you think that there's a possible libertarian moment happening or is that all just a bunch of fluff I think it's a bunch of fluff like I said I think that most of the polling that shows the American public receptive to libertarian-ish ideas and ideals is hogwash and when it comes to actually supporting certain policies they're going to be against it so can you give us the libertarian something to hope for that would be a horrible way to in the pot it's just like oh man like it's nothing it's a people they say the libertarian they're actually not they really want command and control they really want safety over civil liberty which is probably true but but is there is there a positive upside to this is there some some things that we can see some positive change ask that in a slightly different way because I think one of the things that makes it hard for one to advance any political view that doesn't fall neatly into one of the two parties and I think you're right the Republican Party is not nearly as libertarian or drifting in that direction as one might hope but one of those things is you're not a member of one of these two parties and people I mean even even independence we know from polling data that even people who identifies political independence almost always vote like strict party line there's not there's not many truly independent people and independent voters and and especially at the national level this I mean the parties are so powerful and so well organized and so good at telling you like this is awesome that's them and this is what the difference is and often widely exaggerating the difference between the policy sets of candidates from the two parties but at the local level is there more room for alternate views because the issues are smaller because there's less money focused on it there's less influence from the national parties there's less of this need to maintain that narrative less shouting less shouting but I believe we already covered more crazy yes I mean there are some states that explicitly ban political parties and political identification when you're running for office so obviously that means that it's not going to break down as cleanly as it does at the national level and I think you're right there that issues don't break down all that well conservative versus libertarian in a lot of different local levels you look at and our friends over at the R Street Institute they do urban policy and you see a lot of conservatives and progressives kind of uniting on certain kinds of urban policy like rezoning desoning so that we can have higher density neighborhoods and kind of progressives acknowledging that it's the fault of government planners that we have massive roads and parking lots when we need more density or trees or even like things that seem like they're traditionally on the liberal end of the spectrum they say well it's because the government planners failed in these areas so yes at us to a certain extent a lot on the local level breaks down and doesn't really fit neatly into team R or team D so and I think that there's a lot of hope for that although like I said I do think the national telecommunications is polarizing us so even if in certain states you can't run as a Republican or Democrat it it becomes very clear who the titular Republican or titular Democrat are and so somewhere in there possibly libertarian ideas can have a little bit of an influence and maybe also if we shine more of a light on local government maybe we can start realizing the government is kind of corrupt and bad in many instances right even at the state and local level yeah especially at the state local level I would say thank you for listening to free thoughts if you have any questions or comments about today's show you can find us on Twitter at free thoughts pod that's free thoughts pod free thoughts is a project of libertarianism org and the Cato Institute and is produced by Evan Banks to learn more about libertarianism visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org