 Good evening, everyone. Welcome to the 2020 Arrow Lecture Series on Ethics and Leadership. My name is Rob Riesch. I'm a professor here in the Political Science Department and the faculty director of the Center for Ethics and Society, which is the sponsor of the Arrow Lecture Series. These lectures were created in 2005, and they have become amongst the most prestigious lecture series at Stanford University. Previous Arrow Lecturers include a roster of other exceptionally distinguished scientists, social scientists, and philosophers, including Paul Collier, Danny Rodrick, Thomas Piketty, Tyler Cowan, Jennifer Doudna, Samuel Bowles, and two Nobel Prize winners, Amartya Sen and Esther Duflo. Speaking of Nobel Prize winners, the Arrow Lectures are named in honor of Stanford emeritus professor Kenneth Arrow. Arrow was one of the most renowned scholars ever to have taught at Stanford and one of the most influential economists of the 20th century. He was absolutely essential in creating the Center for Ethics and Society just over 30 years ago. He died in 2017 at the age of 95. Ken was the second youngest recipient ever of the Nobel Prize in Economics. He won at the age of 51. And perhaps even more remarkable than this, I think so. Five of Professor Arrow's students went on to win the Nobel Prize in Economics. We honor him, Kenneth Arrow, tonight with a presentation from William Crystal. The format for this evening is that Bill Crystal will come up to the stage and give a presentation on the topic about conservatism and responsible conservatism. And then there'll be questions from you. There are microphones on the side of the stage. And then we'll close the evening after a period of questions. Bill Crystal will be introduced tonight by an amazing Stanford undergraduate named Courtney Cooperman. Courtney is a senior, and she's majoring in political science, and she's writing an honors thesis at the program on ethics and society. Her thesis, which is nearly complete, examines an urgent social problem through an unfamiliar lens. She explores how a lack of housing prevents people from participating in the democratic process on equal terms with housed citizens, denying the homeless the most fundamental right in a democratic society, namely the right to vote. Courtney has worked as a political speechwriter and served for a summer in the office of her home state senator, Corey Booker, a great state of New Jersey, also my own home state. And she serves currently as the president of the Stanford Jewish Student Association and writes a column on politics for the Stanford Daily. Her name is one you'll want to remember. You'll soon be hearing her words spoken, I predict, by politicians, and soon be reading her words in the opinion columns of newspapers. Ladies and gentlemen, would you please welcome Courtney Cooperman. Thank you, Professor Riesch, for that kind introduction and just for the role that you've played in my education as a professor and an advisor. Just really grateful to you. The title of tonight's talk is a Responsible Conservatism Still Possible, Was It Ever? is one of the defining questions of our political moment. Right now is certainly a fascinating time to be an ethics and society student, to take classes that focus on big ideas like justice, democracy, pluralism, and representation, and to spend time working with peers and community members to foster a culture of public service that brings these values into being. There's a heightened sense of urgency around this work, as with every day and every headline, it seems like our most fundamental democratic ideals are under attack. President Donald Trump has been accused of dangerously polarizing our country, distorting the truth, and blurring the line between fringe movements and mainstream conservatism. Many Republicans who were wary of Trump's rise in 2015 and 2016 have become his closest allies. Few have found the moral courage to speak out against him. Tonight's speaker, Dr. William Crystal, is one of those brave and lonely few. Dr. Crystal holds an undergraduate degree and a PhD in government from Harvard University. He taught American politics and political philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania and at Harvard's Kennedy School, then launched a career in government service. He served as chief of staff to secretary of education, William Bennett, in the Reagan administration, and later as chief of staff to vice president, Dan Cuell, in the George H.W. Bush administration. In the early 1990s, Dr. Crystal chaired the Project for the Republican Future and became a leading Republican political strategist. He launched conservative news magazine, The Weekly Standard, in 1995 and served as its editor-in-chief for over two decades. Dr. Crystal co-founded the Project for the New American Century, a think tank that shapes the foreign policy of the George W. Bush administration and he currently serves on the board of trustees of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. He also currently hosts an online podcast, Conversations with Bill Crystal, where he interviews leading public intellectuals and political figures. This resume might make Dr. Crystal an unlikely hero of hashtag the resistance, but in my view, his conservative credentials make his criticism of Donald Trump all the more powerful. Dr. Crystal shows that we can disagree substantively on policy and still cherish the same bedrock principles of American democracy, like pluralism, the rule of law, and respect for institutions. That's why Dr. Crystal is currently putting his efforts into defending democracy together, an advocacy organization standing up for lower case L, liberal democratic norms, and principled conservative policies. As the 2020 election approaches and these values face an uncertain future, I can think of no better person to offer his perspective on what conservatism means in our current political moment. With that, it is an honor and a privilege to welcome tonight's distinguished speaker, Dr. William Crystal. Thanks Courtney and thanks Rob. Thank you for that very nice introduction. Courtney, it's a pleasure to be here at Sanford. It's really an honor to give the Kenneth Arrow lecture, somewhat intimidating and humbling since he was such a great scholar and also such an impressive man. I'm not that easily humbled, but it's not my, humility is not really my normal style, I would say, but in this case, I do feel humbled to give a lecture named after him, and which he was, I guess, involved in setting up 15 years ago or so. I also have a personal connection, sort of a slight sentimental connection to Kenneth Arrow. I knew him very slightly. I was in grad school, college and grad school at Harvard in political science when he was an economics professor at Harvard before he inexplicably decided to come out here to Sanford. But anyway, we'll get into that. And we were in the same building, economics and political science at the time. So they were at Littower Hall. So there's some receptions to which professors and grad students in both departments were invited. And so I met him a few times and he was always very gracious. I was, of course, intimidated by him. He was so famous and all the economists looked down on all of us political scientists anyway, since we were not serious scholars by their light. And when he concealed, he concealed that part of his, maybe that was his view. But anyway, the connection with him that I had, and we discussed this when we met, is my father, Irving Crystal, and he were classmates at City College, CCNY, in New York in 1940. And my father always told the story, and I actually heard this story and I heard about Kenneth Arrow before I even knew anything about any of his work because the story is, I think it's mostly true, maybe not entirely true. Well, this part is true. My father went to City College. He was gonna major in math and physics, I think, which I guess most, a lot of smart young people, smart young men, I guess they were only men at City College then. We're going to major in in the late 30s if you were a good student. That's what you thought you should do. He took a math course in his first term and Ken Arrow was in the course. And after about two days, my father decided to switch into history. And pursue a career in journalism and as a man of letters and not compete with Kenneth Arrow in anything that required mathematical knowledge. I think this story is true. I mean, they didn't know each other. They were genuinely classmates and knew each other some in college and sort of stayed in touch over the years. I asked my mother who passed away fairly recently at age 97 whether she thought it was actually true that my father had seen Arrow or whether it was just generally like so many people. He decided to switch majors and went into something else. And my mother who was a serious and scholarly historian said she had her doubts about the story. But I, as the editor of a magazine, think it's worth. We used to call stories like that too good to check. So it's one of those stories that get printed if you ever look, notice in the press. This happens with quotations too. It is widely reported that someone said, whenever you see that, it means they actually have not been able to find this quote. But people vaguely think that at some point he or she might have said something. So anyway, a long way of saying that I have the highest regard for Ken Arrow and his work obviously and also what he achieved just as a person. And it's sort of a sentimental thing for me to give a, and I told my mom that I was coming out here for this lecture and she was quite moved too. So I appreciate that. I am gonna take the liberty of not exactly speaking on what I said I was gonna speak on. This was a few months ago and I sort of forgot to tell the organizers that I had slightly changed my mind about, this is what you have to keep thinking. It's the spirit of Kenneth Arrow always questioning. Don't just stick with the topic you picked three months ago. That would be very boring. And so, but I will come back and talk to my conservators or something. But I honestly, the reason is pretty simple. I mean, these are interesting questions about conservatism and I've given it quite a lot of thought and I have a few things to say, I suppose. But I really think I'm now much more convinced than I was even a few months ago. We are facing a crisis of liberal democracy, not just a crisis of conservatism. Conservatism is part of it, obviously. And in a way it's too narrow, a view, a vision to just focus on this one particular political movement and its problems and how it produced or did it have to produce Donald Trump and all that. Those are interesting questions but in the real moment we're in, I think I'd like to take a broader look at where we stand politically and where we might go. And in the spirit of Kenneth Arrow, I think I'll raise more questions than I have answers or solutions to offer but that's the first step obviously in trying to think something through. I will give my sort of two sentence version of the history of American conservatism is if you dated back to when Bill Buckley founded National RU in 1955 let's say it went till 2015, maybe when Trump announced his candidacy and started to take over the Republican party, that would be 60 years. It's a pretty good stretch actually for a political movement. And I would argue a pretty respectable movement, pretty respectable set of achievements, not right on every issue, some issues wrong, blind spots, darker elements you might say of the movement but on a lot of big issues, especially on sort of basic free market economics, on I think basic foreign policy issues, a pretty responsible movement at times, actually a pretty impressive movement on some things as I say, didn't really come to grips with the changes that were necessary in the country as you'd expect of a conservative movement, it was resistant to change. But I think a pretty respectable, I think when historians look back and they say well what about this movement? There'll be a fair amount to give it credit for in some demerits and then there'll be a lot of debate about how it ended up with or collapsed into or collapsed before the challenge of Trump and Trumpism which I would consider a kind of nationalist populism, sort of demagogic, somewhat authoritarian spirit which elements of which were always present obviously in conservatism, they're probably always present in any big mass movement or some aspects of those kinds of elements are. But they took over the movement and the capitulation of the movement to those elements is a very depressing thing for me. Maybe that was inevitable, maybe it wasn't, that's something historians will have to decide but we are where we are and I think where we are is not simply in a crisis of conservatism or another way to put it, final word maybe on conservatism and the Republican Party for now is to the degree that there's a crisis of the Republican Party, that's a crisis for America in a way because we only have two parties, maybe we'll have more at some point but we have two big parties and it's not good for the country if one of those two parties is in my view not a responsible, reliable party that is fundamentally committed to certain core democratic norms and institutions but is willing to tolerate pretty shocking assaults and deviations you might say from those democratic and constitutional norms. That's not a situation we've had much in America, we've had elements of both parties that have gotten that direction but they've always been somewhat marginalized, they've never taken over either party I would say really since World War II, they've never taken over the presidency and in that respect the problem we have is an American problem, not just a conservative problem so I'm not trying to deflect responsibility for it but simply to make the point that it is a serious, you know it's not something that liberals honestly should take much pleasure in because it's not good for liberalism not to have a reasonably healthy conservatism it's not good for America not to have a reasonably healthy liberalism and conservatism and then maybe a few other things as well. Okay so where are we? Let me go back to 2016 so I do think that's obviously an important year in American political history but in a funny way under, appreciated just how big a shock it was and how important a shock it was. We elected in 2016, Donald Trump as president which again, whatever you think of him it's very, it is unusual just in the sense that Americans have elected every previous American president either served in elective office or served in the cabinet in a couple of cases and had never been elected to anything like Herbert Hoover or he'd been a general in the US Army but every single American president had held public office. America's kind of a, you know, wild west experimental innovative country but in its selection of presidents it's actually been rather cautious and conservative in who's been elevated to that office. For better or worse and I'm not even making a sort of moral judgment here just an analytical point for better or worse that pattern which has lasted for all of American history was broken in 2016. Furthermore I think of the nominating process I'm the Republican party a party that has been incredibly boring and hierarchical in the way it selected nominees suddenly selected as its nominee in 2016 someone who had no history in the party had never run for anything in the party but did active in the party or in the conservative movement who had given more money to Democrats than to Republicans who attacked the most recent Republican presidents the most recent Republican nominees a whole host of Republican orthodoxies ranging from American leadership in the world to free trade to well just many, many ones obviously disparage John McCain disparage George W. Bush again leaving aside what maybe was good that he did that maybe it was necessary to shake things up maybe there was that did turn out to be a market for that kind of anti-establishment anti-Republican elite rhetoric and to some degree policies but it's very unusual in American history for either of the major parties to nominate someone who runs against the most recent standard bearers and the most recent doctrines of the party we've had pretty we've had people who've modified the party Obama was wanted to change things a little more than Hillary Clinton in 2008 but we haven't really had a full on assault on the party establishment and party orthodoxy until Trump and certainly not a successful one I mean I guess the closest would be Goldwater way back in 64 but he got clobbered in the general election and the party assimilated a lot of the Goldwater elements and merged them together with some of the other elements but a very different situation better Trump victory and Goldwater was a sitting Republican Senator and so forth who had been active in Republican politics for a long time etc now that's the Republican side on the Democratic side we tend to forget this we don't forget it now as we're in the Democratic primary season something almost equally startling happened which is Bernie Sanders and again I'm not making a normative judgment here maybe he's right to challenge the Clintons all the corporate takeover of the Democratic Party and all the aspects of the party he didn't like but if you had predicted a few years before that Bernie Sanders a self-proclaimed Democratic Socialist who wouldn't caulk us with the Democrats in the Senate and wouldn't stand as a Democrat in Vermont stood against an independent because he regarded the Democratic Party as having sold out too much to corporate interests and so forth that Bernie Sanders would get I think he ended up with what 43% of the vote against Hillary Clinton in the primaries people would not have expected that Trump gets 45% of the vote in the Republican primaries he wins because it's a split field Sanders gets 43% of the vote in the Democratic primaries and loses because it's a one-on-one race but almost half of the voters and there was a lot of turnout big turnout in both parties almost half of the voters in both parties voted for candidates who and again I'm not saying this normatively but who were I think it's safe to say outside the what had been thought to be the mainstream of either party who attacked the most recent successful criticized the most recent successful presidents of that party who had always been dissidents within the party in Sanders case or in Trump's case just not active in the party I think neither of them had ever spoken at a party convention until 2016 is another way of putting it so that's unusual American politics for the last 70 years or so has been pretty conventional the Republicans more so almost ridiculously so they always nominate the next in line you know Ford beats Reagan in 76 so Reagan gets the nomination in 80 Reagan beats Bush so Bush gets the nomination in 88 Bush beats Dole so Dole gets the nomination in 96 then they go crazy and nominate George W. Bush in 2000 the son of a former president that's like the Republicans that was really exciting you know it's a really bold radical move Bush beats McCain wins in 2008 I remember giving a speech in 2011 and I was recounting this and saying you know this is such a ridiculous pattern I mean is it really intelligent for a political party just to nominate the second place finisher from last time it's probably not the best way to pick your candidates and some of those people were not actually a good general election candidates Bob Dole and stuff and I remember saying and so because it's kind of ridiculous I assume it'll come to an end and I assume that Romney won't be the nominee in 2012 even though he was the runner up to John McCain in 2008 and sure enough the Republicans cheerfully went ahead and nominated in mid Romney in 2012 but I was right in a way four years ahead of time in the sense of sensing that this couldn't go on forever but I did not expect it to break as radically as it did in 2016 and even on the Democratic side the Democrats are a little more daring they'll nominate a young governor like Bill Clinton or a young senator like Barack Obama but if you look at the Democratic nominees from 1980 on it's pretty they're former vice presidents they're governors who have some standing in the party Dukakis, Clinton, senators who've been around a long time John Kerry, Obama, upset Clinton that was sort of a big deal but he had the support of a lot of Democratic heavyweights and was an unusually talented obviously politician so again no huge surprises I would say nothing that would have predicted the degree of unhappiness with the way the party was going that Sanders was able to tap into another way to look at this I'll just one more point on this is if you look at American politics with the administrations from 1980 on what do we have? Reagan and Bush for 12 years basically Clinton administration for eight years Bush for eight years Obama for eight years three eight year presidencies following a 12 year stretch really we hadn't had three eight year presidencies since the first part of the beginning of the 19th century I mean it's the most stable in a way predictable least turmoil in American politics in a long long time now it didn't feel that way when you're in the middle of it Clinton's getting impeached and there's not 11 in the end there's the Iraq war and there's the 2008 crisis but at the party level at the political leadership level it was very stable and almost boringly predictable you might say and you could have predicted ahead of time half the cabinet positions of each president and they saw George Bush selected Dick Cheney's VP and I mean it just it was very much Obama took back the financial team kept some of Bush's financial people and brought in very sort of establishment you might say financial types in the middle of the financial crisis and kept Bob Gates as defense secretary and Leon Panetta I mean it was the establishments of both parties seemed to be riding high and they both crashed in 2016 the slight difference that Hillary Clinton did win the nomination but then she lost the election and Bernie Sanders is now probably the front-runner marginally I would say the front-runner for the Democratic nomination in 2020 so it's not as if that's just gone away and let's look at 2020 now moving ahead from 2016 Trump has intensified his hold solidified his hold on the Republican Party in a very big way people like me who hope did be rebellions at different points or separation or at least some flicker of a flame for non-Trump Republicanism have been solely disappointed the conservative movement conservative intellectuals mostly have accommodated to or rationalized or even embraced Trump and Trumpism so it would there's not much evidence that Trump's takeover hasn't been entirely successful and even going forward if he loses in 2020 it's an interesting question what happens I mean do we think in 2020 let's say we lose by a few points in 2020 and let's assume let's hope we have a free and fair election we don't have riots and Trump doesn't challenge the results and try to cause a constitutional crisis and we actually have a turnover of power even so he's not going away his kids, his family's not going away his supporters aren't going away and we're sure they, that's a free country they're entitled to continue to advance their point of view will it help or hurt Republican candidates for Congress for the Senate, for the House in 2022 to be Trump supporters or Trump critics? I would like the answer to be Trump critics since I'm a Trump critic but I can't confidently say that so I do think we've had a huge disruption and people who thought well it's just going to be a temporary disruption it doesn't look that way on the right certainly on the Republican side Democratic side's much harder to tell obviously a lot depends whether Sanders is the nominee or a Buttigieg or Klobuchar or Bloomberg that would be interesting and God knows that would play out then at the convention and what would happen but insofar as the younger part of the party is with Sanders it's getting a little hard to see a reversion to a kind of John Kerry Hillary Clinton Democratic Party as well I think things are much more up in the air on the liberal side on the Democratic side so in both cases you had a big break in 2016 and it looks like that break wasn't temporary at least for now certainly on the right maybe on the left so that's a big deal that doesn't happen that often in American politics as I say if you write the history from 1980 to 2016 you have a history basically of continuity for better or worse and again people can say there was too much continuity all kinds of issues were papered over the elites lost touch with the public the establishments were irresponsible and didn't pay a price for their mistakes in Iraq in 2008 that's all fine but just analytically it was the rebellions against them did not succeed the Papua cannons of the world did not win the Republican nomination or the Ron Pauls of the world the I don't know quite on the Democratic side who the equivalent would even be but Jesse Jackson I suppose maybe or even like John Edwards those people did not fundamentally challenge the Democratic establishment Barack Obama did sort of but then governed I think it's fair to say it's a pretty traditional liberal Democrat so that has now I think we are in a new era I think that's the first piece of wisdom really to have the one should have about American politics and thinking that it's going to go back to the way it was that I think is unlikely it's not usually the way the world works we could end up in a very different place doesn't mean we're going to end up with Trumpism in the Republican side and Sanderson's on the Democratic side forever or even for the next five years but it does mean that whatever happens it's not going to look exactly the way it looked in 2015 and it was unanticipated final point about this people did not sit around in early 2015 thinking Donald Trump's going to be the Republican nominee and Bernie Sanders is going to be the main challenger to Hillary Clinton and you know you can say people are out of touch and they should have known that but I don't know I'm not sure they really should have or even could have known that it really kind of came out of nowhere one striking thing is if you told a historian or a social scientist there's going to be challenges in both parties in the same year to the elites to the establishments and they're going to succeed in one case and you know come pretty close to succeeding in the other case with Sanders what do you think would be happening in the country then? I think any social scientist would say I don't know depression horrible economic challenges a war going very badly a Vietnam type situation which led to Gene McCarthy and then to George McGovern we didn't have that in 2015, 2016 now we had had a rock we had had the 08 crisis maybe it was a delayed reaction you can have fancy arguments to that effect but it's still pretty startling to me that in a country that was not you know visibly in a morass like Vietnam with 55,000 people young Americans dying that was not visibly in a great depression type situation in the world, in a world that was not obviously blowing up people like me were critical of Obama's foreign policy whatever but it wasn't you know things were we did not have, it was not the 30s right you still had this degree of discontent that I think is very revealing and has to be taken seriously now the one question of course is and I've touched on it already a little bit I mean how transient a phenomenon could this be there it does have its flukish aspects it didn't have to happen Trump didn't have to win the nomination Jeb Bush turned out to be a particularly bad establishment candidate Hillary Clinton turned out I think to be a pretty weak general election candidate it is kind of comical in the year when there was clearly a mood for change if not for radical reform necessarily there's a mood for change the two party establishments said you want change we have a great idea let's have a Bush Clinton race we had one in 92 that was fun so we'll just have another one and on the Republican side you know you already elected the president of George H.W. Bush and you elected his son so now you get a chance to elect his other son and the brother of the most recent Republican president and on the Democratic side you get to elect the spouse of the next to most recent Democratic president who also served as Secretary of State for the current Democratic president you want change we're giving you Bush and Clinton I do think that was actually a key part of Trump's success and probably Sanders as well the sense that the establishments were just giving we're not being responsive at all and therefore Trump was able to very effectively campaign against Jeb Bush the other candidates ended up hurting each other there were a lot of weird things that happened it didn't have to be the case that Trump won an interesting thought experiment what if Trump hadn't come down the escalator at Trump Tower in 2015 what if he just decided not to run he decided not to run a few couple of times before right how does that play out we probably end up with some Scott Walker or Marco Rubio or something you know nominee I guess a kind of boring race against Hillary Clinton maybe one of them wins and maybe we're discussing here how boring American politics is and you know and everyone on the left and the right sound happy because we have such centrist domination of American politics that everyone's too respectful of our institutions and too committed to our traditional alliances and so forth but it's so there is something fluky about it and of course winning the presidency really was flukish I mean drawing the inside straight in the electoral college winning with that two and a half million vote of deficiency in the popular vote getting the help of the Russians that didn't hurt probably getting Comey's intervention which I think clearly did elect Trump I mean it wasn't his intention but there's no question if you look at the polls that gave Trump not Clinton down appointed to at the end when he revived apparently on a very foolish grounds really the whole investigation into the FBI investigation into the emails and the server so none of those things had to happen but they did happen and now we're in a situation where Trump has been president for three years so what can go back and say it didn't have to be this way but it now has a certain reality that has its own effects I remember discussing this once at the weekly standard and we were going about all the kind of flukish thing including even much more technical almost things that happened in the Republican race that could have derailed Trump and then all the things Clinton might have done that would have caused her to win and it just kind of an accident that we are where we are and my colleague, young colleague John McCormick said you know it was sort of an accident that we stumbled into World War I right I mean there were one thing led to another in a very kind of unpredictable and somewhat and wack kind of odd way from about 1911 to 1914 but once you get into World War I the world changes right and the fact that it didn't have to happen and if you had had slightly more responsible behavior by the Kaiser or if the assassin had missed his shot in Sarajevo or if the Austrians hadn't declared I don't even remember the history particularly but you know if one country hadn't declared one another and if there hadn't been the alliance structure which triggered reciprocal declarations of war maybe the whole history of the world would have been different but it happened once you're in the war you're in the war and that has its own implications its own rationale so to speak and that's I think the situation we're in so even if it's somewhat arbitrary that we've gotten to where we are even if it's slightly inexplicable as to why voters were as discontented with the establishments as they were we now have a situation where we have Donald Trump as president again I don't mean to particularly demonize Trump I'm happy to do it a little bit but I'm not for the purposes of this talk but simply to say that it's having real effects obviously certainly on the Republican party certainly on the actual executive branch of the federal government certainly on Congress certainly on the courts and certainly on our public life you know it'll be foolish to minimize I think those effects so that's why I come back to 2016 being a pretty big division point it's worth taking a second on what might have been underlying the discontent the anxiety, the unhappiness that led to both the Trump and Sanders surges and that people like me I'm sure missed to a large degree I guess I have the kind of conventional view that in retrospect globalization let's go back to the social scientists coming down from Mars and taking a look at excuse me, taking a look at America on the one hand he or she would be surprised I think that there's no depression, no war why is there so much turmoil, so much unhappiness so much discontent, so much rebelliousness on the other hand if you told the social scientist or economist or historian well we're gonna have 20 years of globalization we're gonna basically the world trading system is going to admit China and India and those countries are gonna boom and there'll be a huge amount and they'll have a billion new people in the labor market basically that will put huge downward pressure on some wages in the US that will also lead to a lot of economic growth and prosperity especially in those countries but all around the world really but that's quite a lot of, that's a big change globalization was a big deal and if you look at history when you have a change of that magnitude it often has disruptive effects as you'd expect on the domestic politics of a country if you add in then the technological revolution which I feel coming here to Silicon Valley it's not, I don't need to go into this in any detail but I will say when in early days of the internet and email and all this I actually thought this is not going I mean of course it's interesting that it's useful and it challenges magazines but now we can't just have a print magazine we have to have a website and all this but it didn't seem to be fundamentally changing things searching for things on Google is much easier than doing Google search than going to a library to look at encyclopedia but you know in principle it's kind of research and putting out a website, producing a website is different from putting out a magazine but it's not that different and email is great but it's not it's faster than regular mail and it's easier than making a phone call but again it doesn't really change social relationships that much I do think I underestimated that though especially when you got the iPhone when you get the instant availability of all information to all individuals in the world and instant connectivity of all individuals to each other all over the world that's a pretty astonishing thing by historical standards and it has had huge disruptive it's having huge disruptive effects that I think unlike globalization where I think we've seen most of the disruption I think with automation we're just seeing we're probably in the early stages of the disruption that's going to have to people's jobs but also people's communities people's lives, higher education which has been actually amazingly resistant to much change maybe for better or worse maybe for better but you gotta think it's not Stanford now looks more like Stanford 50 years ago than one might have expected 50 years ago but I don't think in 50 years it's gonna, education will look the same as it does today and I took an awful lot of things will look very, very different so that's a big disruption those two together have had a real effect like how like Bill Galston who's a moderate democrat certainly Bill Clinton White House looked at these some polling pretty carefully about a year ago it was interesting, in 08 there was a huge crisis people lost their jobs, their houses went down 20% in value it was really scary at the time but people actually had a fair amount of faith that the system would work and the system did kind of work I mean we came back pretty quickly it was a slow recovery but people houses mostly almost entirely actually recovered their value people got back into, got employed again they didn't quite have the jobs they might have had before and they might have taken a hit on salary and so forth but you might say the economy recovered both nationally and globally what Bill noticed in the polling was interesting people had more confidence in 2009 that we would recover and that the future would be brighter than they did in 2013 and around 2013 they sort of looked up in sort of middle America if I can over generalize widely and saw, jeez, we're having a recovery things aren't going terribly we're not, it's not obvious they're going to go much better and yet I'm never really going to quite have the job I had 10 years ago I'm never going to get quite back to that level of income before the steal company left my city or before that something else changed in the local economy and my kids who maybe are not at Stanford but went to one year of community college and then didn't like it and dropped out and took various jobs are not going to have as easy a time getting to a kind of upper working class middle class lifestyle that one certainly could get to in America without a college education without a prestigious college education and Bill's analysis of the polls was that that sort of started to sink in to people that we really had a bit of change and that their own lives were looking a little grimmer than they would have hoped but more importantly really that they couldn't count on their kids doing better than they and in fact this is true if you look at the Gallup and Pugh polls for the first time really in modern American history and around 2013 people started to lose a majority of Americans or at least the plurality started to lose confidence that their children's lives would be better than theirs and that is a kind of indicator obviously of the social unrest and a possibility of having rebellious photos rebelling against the economic establishment the political establishment cultural establishment and so forth and then if you add to those two economic factors globalization and automation I guess you'd say technology a pretty big cultural transformation of the country a cultural transformation I would say that is mostly for the better but if you add together immigration which was pretty high has been pretty high for the last 20, 30 years and has been changing the look of the country and the changes in cultural and social mores obviously status of women, sexual orientation and so forth it's a lot of changes to happen pretty quickly I myself am okay even if I wasn't okay at first I am now okay with what's all those changes and actually I think they've probably been a good thing I think the reaction against them has been wildly overstated in some ways but just as an actual matter of human psychology you know people do get a little startled and a little unnerved and they grew up in a country that had a certain set of patterns for 40 years and their parents had it and suddenly everything's changing and what does this imply for them and they didn't get a vote no one asked them you know and suddenly these things are just happening around them I think and there's a sense of powerlessness and if you get demagogues who don't say hey look there's some pluses and minuses here but the pluses outweigh the minuses and anyway you're not gonna roll it back and let's figure out how you could have some of the things you care about while accommodating and accepting a lot of these social and cultural changes if you get demagogues who demonize the people who are carrying the change or the visible embodiments of the change or immigrants it's why immigration was such a big issue I think in 2015, 2016 it was a puzzle to a lot of political analysts immigration was a huge issue in parts of the country that have very few immigrants and where they're not taking jobs from anyone and why are people going around yelling about immigration while they've seen it on TV but more important really it's the sense that the whole country is sort of changing under their feet and they didn't get a chance to vote and then they believe whatever they see on TV about how no one is speaking English in a certain city and crime rates are booming in immigrant communities and terrorists are coming across the border and God knows what and suddenly you've got a sort of semi frenzy about that issue but it is interesting if you look at the polling in the US and in much of Europe immigration was the one issue that seems to really galvanize on the Trump side of things the unhappiness that's the inequality was kind of the equal issue on the left they're legitimate questions about inequality and it certainly got up in the last 30 years whether it's as much of a problem or a boogeyman or let's put it this way if you solved inequality tomorrow would it really change I mean just at 75% tax rates and wealth taxes and really reduce the Gini coefficients and all these things and had a more equal distribution of wealth would it really change the life prospects of someone in a town in Ohio who is 48 years old and was trained to do a job that doesn't exist anymore and whose kids don't have a college education actually wouldn't change it that much I don't think so there's a little bit of a mismatch there between the analysis and the remedy but I'd say immigration on the right inequality on the left both became the thing you could complain about and blame for whatever you didn't like about America today and it turned out people didn't like more about America today than people like me I guess realized or they didn't like it they'd always sort of not like certain things but in a way they hadn't been allowed to express their dislikes because the politicians for better or worse I would say for better many people might say for worse had actually not appealed to those unhept those resentments and anxieties very much and if anything had tried to damp them down a little bit President Obama I think would be an instance of this and Romney on the other side really and so you know but when you have politicians who are willing to say on the left the whole system is rigged you know it's just it's a kind of conspiracy in Wall Street to just deprive working people of their just gains and you know enrich the bankers and went on the left and the right I think more perniciously even you get the kind of Trumpy rhetoric once people hear that they think oh okay I've kind of always suspected that but now I have someone saying it for me and so they flocked to those champions which were Trump and Sanders but I think many people beyond Trump and Sanders obviously at this point. Just wondering on the cultural side I mean my friend Ron Brownstein the very fine journalist out it was with the LA Times for a long time and now National Journal and the Atlantic and CNN I guess now writes has this formulation on the two parties that we have a party of transformation the Democratic Party, a party that accepts and even applauds the transformation of our society and culture and a party of restoration a party that wants to restore us to the way things were at some mythical time or other but whatever the 50s or the 60s I mean it is very revealing I think Trump's slogan was make America great again which is funny in America which is such a forward looking country usually isn't it such a cliche our best days are still ahead of us every politician from both parties said that in every speech they've given so for my adult lifetime and suddenly you have a president saying Reagan used it a little bit actually but make America great again against Carter but that was much more specific Carter has done a bad job and we can get back up but Reagan's general rhetoric was very much different obviously you know, city on a hill aspirational future we have a bright future ahead of us that dark Trump rhetoric about the present American carnage and the yearning for some past is I think very revealing of what Ron calls a party of restoration when you have a party of restoration and a party of transformation it's a little harder to have the normal compromises across parties you have two parties that have to some degree really different visions of America one who sees a future that's diverse and multi-ethnic and same-sex marriage and high tech and this and that and another that sees a certain kind of nostalgic America perhaps in the 50s and 60s a little hard to there's a certain tendency when you have two parties that are governed or that are inclined that way it reinforces what already was there which was the polarization and hyperpolarization of the parties and of our politics which had its own causes somewhat separate I think from the Trump-Sanders thing but it all fed together to create a situation of a sense that the country was out of control the establishments were failing the other party was not a party that you could responsibly deal with that it was as the rhetoric went the flight 93 election it was an election where if we lost this would never have a chance again that was very strong on the right this year it's stronger I'd say on the left and so we have a situation that's very different from American politics from as I say from 1980 to 2016 really and it happened quite suddenly and it didn't happen with you know the stormy with the bus deal and the execution of the king or some dramatic events in a funny way it happened with one election campaign in a fairly placid time economically in terms of foreign policy and then the aftereffects of that election campaign as I said I think historians will write very interesting books and articles about what would have happened what if Hillary Clinton 77,000 votes it got differently in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Hillary Clinton were presidents I really don't know I mean would think would we still would that just have been like a band-aid and eventually we would have ended up with the kinds of politics we now seem to have Trumpism on the right and dissatisfaction on the left or would it really have changed things and I really don't know actually I think history is pretty contingent so I don't like the argument that you know these things were inevitable but there clearly were things brewing that exploded in 2016 and continue to progress for me that's part of the story I mean if Trump and Trumpism would just address the conservative side of it if it were temporary we would see it we would see a lot of young republican politicians sort of distancing themselves from Trump we would see a lot of your conservative intellectuals saying well that can't be the future we need to rethink some things but we can't go down that path we're not seeing much of that at all could we see more of that after Trump loses sure being a winning is a very big deterrent to big inducement to get on the team to get on board but the degree of it I find unnerving the less more complicated I will say and I think there's much more of a real debate and much more uncertainty about where they go what's gonna happen I don't know obviously political prognostication was always risky and over oversold but of course after 2016 we all should have been we were all thoroughly discredited I will say in my defense the thing that surprised me was as you from this talk consistent with this talk I really assumed the republican party would have do what it always did which was have a Donald Trump run just the way Pap you can and ran just the way Herman Cain and there was always Steve Forbes who were different from Trump but still there were always these business candidates who challenged the politicians they often did well for a while and sometimes they led the polls or won one state and then you know the party kind of pulled itself together and nominated the Bob Dole's and the George Bush's and the Mitt Romney's and I assumed that's what would happen so I was totally wrong about the primary I just didn't see that coming at all and again I don't think I was crazy I mean the republicans had won the house in 2010 with running pretty conventional politicians little tea party stuff but that got absorbed into the party 2014 Republican candidates if you looked around the country the people who won those senate races totally normal basically republican politicians there wasn't a lot of talk about let's have protectionism let's abandon our traditional allies abroad let's demonize immigrants the immigration issue was harder but even there the establishment of the party was inclined towards trying to work something out and damp down the frictions and so forth anyway it certainly didn't go that way the party went the way it went what will happen anyway so I got the republican primary wrong I will say that I did see in the general election that Trump had a chance I mean I just I'd been through the 92 election where George H.W. Bush lost and I was part of that white house the country was not in terrible shape in 92 we had won the Cold War you know without firing a shot we had a minor recession in 91 which we were coming out of the country was you know had a pretty good decade I would argue none of us expected Pepe Buchanan to suddenly get 37% of the vote in New Hampshire none of us expected a young governor of Arkansas to suddenly emerge and for a lot of voters to decide that it had enough of Reagan and Bush it was time for a generational change but that in retrospect was pretty easy to explain we won the Cold War the voters thought Reagan and Bush had done a good job they were foreign policy presidents especially George H.W. Bush really was I remember a meeting in the White House in 92 with President Bush and he couldn't really believe he was losing actually because in his generation if you were a good national security president what you was you got re-elected that was the task of the president education, healthcare, that was Congress that was the states mostly it was complicated people would work that out you should give some general guidance the idea that they would replace him after pretty masterful management of the end of the Cold War so that we now just take for credit but of course it didn't have to go that well and then kicking Saddam out of Kuwait and so forth he just sort of assumed that that was the same electorate that had elected Reagan twice elected at once and it was literally the same electorate except for the four years it turned over but it was a good lesson for me and how fast things can change and a good lesson for me that if people want change I mean I spent 92 giving speeches but hey things are pretty good Reagan was a good president Bush was a good president do you really want this untested governor from Arkansas Democrats are ready to control Congress they have enough power and people are very nice and they promptly went out think about this George H. W. Bush who was a pretty successful president historians I think would say got 54% of the vote in 1988 he got 38% of the vote in 1992 16% drop what's my math here 1 in 4 more than 1 in 4 Bush voters deserted him from 88 to 92 and it wasn't Hoover you know it wasn't in the middle of the depression we hadn't had any horrible failures in foreign policy or in domestic policy in fact he signed some good legislation in a bipartisan way Americans with Disabilities Act the Clean Air Act and stuff it's a good lesson for me that voters can be irrational it's too strong but they can get in a mood in that case the mood was for change and Clinton tapped into it and Ross Perot tapped into it 19 million Americans voted for you know a crazy person from Texas to be president they used to tell this jokingly and say it was a wake-up call for me I'm sort of a political scientist you assume voters are kind of rational you assume that the facts matter a lot and now Ross Perot I mean he had one issue which was legitimate but I mean he wasn't really one of his president but that was in a way a bit of a precursor to Trump honestly twenty what twenty eight sixteen twenty four years later but of course that had then faded away that was the funny thing right Buchanan faded away Perot faded away it went right back to normalcy Bush you know Obama etc and it all sort of came back on steroids you might say in 2016 so that's why you did think in the general election that Trump had a chance when the mood is for change people will take a risk on change and Trump was going to change things Trump had a clear agenda he was going to build a wall he was going to cut up get these immigrants from flooding in he was going to stop fighting wars that our allies should take care of themselves they should take care of their own problems he should just protect us from very bad foreign trade deals and no one could describe Hillary Clinton's agenda as simply as Trump could describe his and this one Hillary Clinton he put it to me you know bad solutions be no solutions it's unfair to say that she had no solutions but it looked that way I think to voters and Trump's simple solutions and non-solutions really ended up narrowly prevailing anyway I remember during the campaign saying I thought there was a chance Trump would win people said oh no he couldn't do it and I just said I don't know I've been through this a little and if people want change they want change and maybe that's what happened a little bit in 2015-2016 it's not clear to me that the objective correlatives were there but people, countries go through these periods and grievances accumulate and they get changed I'll tell one last story and then I went to a Trump rally so when was the Virginia primary was well March just like it is this year so this would have been February I suppose in 2016 and I wanted to see it sort of for myself so it was right near pretty close to where I live in northern Virginia so I went there and you know various people recognized me at the Trump rally and they weren't all thrilled to see me since I was already outside Trump Republican but they kind of vaguely liked to be from I don't know the old days when I was on Fox News Sunday or something so I remember having a nice conversation with an intelligent woman this is northern Virginia pretty upscale kind of communities you know a woman who was for Trump and she couldn't understand why I was so worried about Trump it's a hostile and I said I don't think his policies are good I don't think his character is right for being president well we need change we just need to we need to shake things up and I remember saying well I'm actually myself for most of my career in Washington have been on the reformist side of things on the shake things up side of things you know I was a Kemp Republican I was a McCain Republican I wasn't really that much of a defender of the status quo but I do think you have to be serious and responsible about the kind of change you want to have and make sure it ends up better you know and she was oh that's just the establishment talking we need to really just blow things up and I said really I mean you know yeah is it that bad and she said it can't get worse I thought America 2016 Northern Virginia which is actually quite a prosperous area you know and people are doing pretty well it can get a lot worse really you know and it has been a lot worse for a lot of our history and but once that mood gets out there it's not fair to make fun of people either I mean they have their own issues and their grievances and so forth you don't know their personal situations but once that mood gets out there it can be strong I thought a lot about this is the fact that we weren't in a recession that we weren't in a Vietnam war type situation that there weren't riots in the streets really is the fact that objectively the situation you might say wasn't that bad but there was so much discontent is that heartening in the sense that it suggests that maybe the discontent kind of just fades away that would be like 92, 93 I would say the parole voters get absorbed the Buchanan voters kind of just fade away and the country returns to normalcy or is it more worrisome that without that many objective causes I would say there's this much discontent what if there is a recession what if there is a we stumble into a war it could happen not because of Trump even just because of the way the world is right or there's a difficult foreign policy challenge or you know she decides to divert people from his mismanagement of the health crisis to buy you know and lobbing some missiles at Taiwan are we getting into some exchange I mean these things can happen and what do people do that I mean so I don't know whether it's a good thing whether it's whether we should be encouraged or discouraged that based on relatively in my view not so serious you know challenges or setbacks we've had such a high level of discontent in any case what could happen we could muddle through obviously that's usually what happens in history America's muddled through crises before we muddled through the late 19th century early 20th century massive change from agriculture to industrial industrialization we had the progressives we had we have Gen. H. Bryant trying to bring us back to older America we had progressives in both parties Teddy Roosevelt Woodrow Wilson and eventually Roosevelt and the New Deal and you kind of made it through this historical epic with the institutions of American government change to some degree but recognizable and I think stronger perhaps at the end that at the beginning written I would say you could find a comparable story in the early 19th century during their industrial revolution where you know in the middle of it it looked very dicey and there are riots there are politicians getting assassinated there you know talk about revolution on the left and revolution on the right and there are such revolutions going on in other countries but healthy political systems kind of take the blows and make it through and with some adjustments obviously to the institutions I would say if you want to look more recently for a model think about America from 1960 let's say to 1980 so I said before that from 1980 to 2016 I think we have a period of relative stability but look at 1960 to 1980 1960 totally boring conventional election between what was regarded as a centrist Republican Richard Nixon centrist Democrat John Kennedy close election very few issues really at stake Kennedy wins nothing much happens Joseph Gregor Burns a very distinguished political scientist writes a book in 1962 deadlock of democracy things are very bad in America nothing can get done you know Congress can't pass any legislation the American Political Science Association is very worried that the two parties are so centrist and mixed up and they're all these Southern Democrats along with Northern Labor and Northern Civil Rights activists and the Republicans have all these Northeastern Republicans as well as much more libertarian and conservative Republicans from the West and you don't have party accountability and it's all just a total centrist model very dissatisfying if you're a political scientist who wants clarity then we promptly have everything you know huge wave of legislation obviously in the 60s the parties reorganize themselves a good example of how political scientists often get things totally wrong but think of the 60 to 80 so 60 election Kennedy gets assessed that Republican party goes right and Goldwater wins the nomination in 64 a huge upset first successful challenge to the Eastern Republican Establishment in 30 years gets clobbered by Johnson everyone decides well that's finished but in fact Ronald Reagan an really not even that well-known actor a B level actor who gave made his entrance into the national scene by giving a national speech on television in October a very effective speech for Goldwater whoever is still lost by 22 points you know Reagan runs for governor of California in 66 defeats the moderate establishment mayor of San Francisco actually that's kind of funny that San Francisco had a Republican mayor in 1966 in the Republican primary it was an upset and then clobbers the popular Democratic governor Pat Brown in 66 governor for two years two terms ends up as president in 1980 I mean so that shows how much happened in those 20 years Reagan speaks for Goldwater Colbert Reagan wins the presidency 16 years later Democratic side Vietnam Wallace the Southern Democrats split off the government rebellion the left takes over the Democratic party sort of insurrection against the establishment the government gets clobbered by Nixon Nixon gets is going to get in peace and resigns in 76 Jimmy Carter comes out of nowhere to win the Democratic nomination Ronald Reagan challenges for the incumbent president almost beats him in 76 in 80 Kennedy challenges the incumbent Democratic president Jimmy Carter almost beats him Reagan gets re-nominated and wins an election in which he loses actually a liberal Republican John Anderson splits off wins as a centrist I mean the story of American politics and the story of American society if you think about those years Vietnam the Civil Rights Revolution the beginnings of feminism the beginnings of environmentalism I mean those 16 years in establishment figures getting falling on both sides I think you could argue we came out of it stronger then we went into it and some of the change a lot of the changes were necessary and healthy but if you were in the middle of it and I was just old enough to kind of remember the sentiment you know and it went to Harvard in 1970 it was pretty crazy and pretty unnerving to a lot of people so that's an example I do think our politics will be more like the politics of 1964 to 1980 for the next couple of decades than the politics of 1980 to 2016 which is hard for people of my age because we we all grew up and lived in a kind of politics of one kind and now we have to get adjusted to a very different much more volatile fluid unpredictable politics it worked out okay in that case I would argue Civil Rights Revolution was a good thing environmentalism was a good thing feminism was a good thing on the other hand Reaganism was I think mostly a good thing so we ended up okay will it this time that we don't really know I mean that is the question and I'll just close with this thought I mean we hope the institutions are strong the institutions enormous from American politics have been strong I mean thank God they are you know we deserve no credit for this our ancestors do they've been built up over a couple of centuries you know it's pretty hard for one irresponsible president or one irresponsible political party or maybe even two irresponsible political parties that really damage American institutions in a deep way if you elect Victor Orban in Hungary and you've only been a democracy for 20 years or so and Orban is a pretty ruthless guy who's you know tapping into populist sentiments going after various liberal institutions he can control half the media in Hungary in five years he can get people fired from universities he can really reshape businesses and civil society institutions which are much much much harder to do obviously in the United States and people at Stanford don't think they're supposed to respond you know to follow Trump's lead and people in businesses don't think they have to follow Trump's lead and we have federalism which is very healthy but that means there are many more centers of power and we have a big free private sector which is good and we have civil society and so forth so on the one hand I'm encouraged by the strength of our institutions but we are running a test we really haven't really is willing to do things and say things as president the previous presidents haven't been willing to do they really stress I think the institutions in a way that it's been a long time since they were stressed you know they were stressed in the 60s in the early 70s but the people in office mostly tried to damp down the stress I mean Nixon we think of us as crook and all that but he had Democrats in his cabinet he had he you know founded the EPA he tried to actually and that's why he was successful in 72 in Israel actually tried to get into Vietnam he tried to actually in a way bring the country together maybe it was based on some political agenda but it actually he didn't just try to divide the country he didn't govern like George Wallace even if he was happy to have the support of George Wallace voters we're in a very different situation today and that for me is really the big the big question in a sense and so finally I think for conservatism and liberalism the question is does conservatism rise to the challenge conservatism likes to talk about American exceptionalism but is that as sturdy I think to rely on as it once was our politics look a lot more European than they did five years ago and just saying American exceptionalism or believing well we're America we couldn't go down this path it turns out to be I think maybe wrong if you just look at the last three or four years on the Republican and conservative side liberals have progress their progresses they believe in history it's a nice belief it's some mostly true I think I guess it seems like it's worked out that way in the last couple of centuries what is the quotation of Martin Luther King that everyone likes the arc of history bends towards justice I think but not always right and so I say there's too much complacency on both sides liberals are too confident that history will save us conservators are too confident that America will save us and what we do need I do think is a pretty thoroughly rethought and revitalized conservatism and liberalism and maybe it won't be a conservatism or liberalism anymore maybe it'll just be people thinking through how to have a vigorous and successful democratic capitalist economy and liberal and liberal democratic society and maybe the old conservatism and the old liberalism won't really even be in a way recognizable but it is a new moment with new challenges I'm optimistic that we'll meet them but I think it'd be foolish to be complacent about that we will thank you thank you and thank you for a wonderful meandering walk through 60 years of our history I find it surreal to be here as a lifetime liberal asking a responsible conservative a question but I do have a question and that is do you think that anybody beyond Romney in the current Senate will develop some form of backbone where for at least between now and November they could do some controls on what the oxymoron in charge President Trump was gruing for the next six or eight months and one PS has he given you a nickname I think he's now I think he said I was fool dummy maybe or something like that during the campaign but not a not a distinctive nickname I'll be brief answering these questions as I went a little longer than expected to do in the talk as you say meandering through history and not always in a cheerful way no I'm not optimistic about the next few months I mean I think the pressures will get greater not less I've always thought people underestimated this once you got into an election year once people are even if they're not in primaries if they're meeting with there they're going to the Republican what's the Republican convention going to look like what's the reception going to be for any senator who does what Romney does I mean I don't think he personally will be intimidated from going but he may just decide what am I going to do go and get booed what's the point you know will anyone say anything like Mitt Romney from the stage at the Republican convention for those four days how many candidates running for office will sound anything like Mitt Romney so I'm pessimistic not just about the senate but in general about the Republican party and I think the pressure on conservative magazines columnists activists talk radio all these people even the ones who should know better to be part of the team sort of depends for the Democratic nominee is the pressure will be much greater or the excuse will be much greater or the rationalization will be much greater Sanders is the nominee obviously to stay on the team but still the pressure will be pretty great so I'm pretty worried about the next actually I mean think about this way we've had an awful lot of polarization an awful lot of bad behavior an awful lot of things that we want to wish not to have and now we're entering the election campaign which is when people really do get worked up really just your point about Trump what about Trump what is he going to do as president of the United States over the next six months he's shown a pretty increasing willingness to use the instrumentalities of government for his own personal political benefit that's what Ukraine was is that going to diminish over the next six months are we confident that we're not going to have money flowing I mean there's always a little bit of this in politics Nixon did this a lot swing state we've got a something in in Pennsylvania fine that's kind of routine but how much more of that kind of stuff could there be to say nothing of Russian interference disinformation so I'm I think the next this year is a worrisome year for American democracy Mr. Crystal I'm really thrilled to have you here I've been a big supporter a big fan of yours and was really cheering you on and you were trying to get other Republicans to enter races over the past few years I should also say I just switched my registration from Republican to Democrat so my wife is totally thrilled and I'm morning I'm very sad my question is the colder personality of Donald Trump he's got all these people around around him who's seemed to be somewhat intelligent saying one thing one day another thing the next and the only guy that voted for impeachment was Mitt Romney and he acted like it was the most horrible thing that he was totally fearful and I couldn't figure out what's so bad was going to happen to this guy people were so intimidated by him let's let's go with the hypothetical he loses let's say in November he's going to be wounded don't things change a lot in that case so that's a very good question so A I too will go vote in Virginia on March 3 we don't even have party registration you just request a ballot from either party but I guess for the first time ever I'll request a Democratic presidential ballot and I think I actually do think we have a little project but I might not vote for who most of you want you know maybe this isn't really a Sanders friendly crowd that's come to see me I mean I wouldn't be surprised if it weren't but the I actually do think it would be healthy for the country if a lot of independents and Republicans within the bounds of the laws of the different states do try to participate because the Republican primaries have been just shut off basically and literally canceled in some cases and unfortunately we just never were able to get a credible candidate because there never was any real support for a challenger to help the Democratic Party move in a more responsible direction would be a good be a good thing so I'm with you I'm with you on that the power of rationalization turns out to be very strong and people start off saying they don't like him but you know he's backed by the left and then that's like you know he's better than the look at the ones who are attacking him they're even worse and people get all in for Trump have gotten all in much more than I expected and for reasons I don't fully understand I think some of it is practical and fear political fear and some of it is economic interest and some of it is cultural issues and some of it is really just psychology it turns out it's surprisingly hard to hold the following view which is a totally rational view I don't like the guy kind of a jerk I don't like some things he's doing but he's a little bit better than the alternative so I'm going to support him that is a totally I'm leaving even names out of it that's a totally rational view to have about politics it's a totally rational view to have about life we all do this all the time and every institution we're a part of I'll support this guy for chairman of my department I don't think he's great but it's a little bit better than the alternative and in most of life you don't then convince yourself a year or two later that you know what he's probably still a little better than the choice I had it turns out somehow in politics especially in a kind of democratic little de-emotional psychological politics it's hard to sustain that kind of out of what would you call it kind of cautious guarded support there's a real temptation to sort of want to believe in your person and you see that so much with the Trump support in the way which individuals who were very reluctant and cautious and qualified supporters have become all-in supporters huge question what if Trump loses I don't know I mean I would like I would have said two years ago yeah I think people will snap out of it sort of there'll be a reaction to it there'll be some Trump loyalists but you know Goldwater lost in 64 and Nixon got the nomination in 68 Nixon wasn't perfect but he was not a Goldwater type and so forth McGovern lost in 72 and Carter got the nomination in 76 if an incumbent president loses maybe that I'm not so certain now that's a huge infrastructure under Trump ranging from Fox to other parts of the media politicians have invested a lot it's a little hard for them to just pivot suddenly so here's the thought experiment in 2022 let's assume Trump loses by five points but he's still active he's still tweeting the kids are still running around there's you know they're on Fox they've got some new network or something will it be better in a Republican primary in most Republican primaries to be endorsed by Trump or to be critical of Trump? I fear that the answer is going to be endorsed by Trump I'm not so confident that everything changes overnight and if it doesn't then you do have a sort of Trump inflected maybe not Trump dominated and maybe it wouldn't be the same as what he's president but a Trump inflected Republican party going forward and one could ask the same question about the Democrats what if a moderate Democrat gets the nomination and loses to Trump I do think at that point Sanders people say with some justice I suppose jeez you know that was great we nominated the more electable person we lost to this horrible president they go totally I think in a left sort of direction if Sanders loses it's a little more complicated if Sanders wins or if the moderate wins it's more complicated but you can imagine on both sides the forces of moderation are weaker unfortunately rather than stronger I think can you speak to a question in your original title was a responsible conservatism ever possible yeah I would say yes and I would say you know I served in two concern of administrations and we made some mistakes but I think we were pretty responsible and George W. Bush made maybe more serious mistakes maybe but it was also ultimately I think responsible tried to get a good immigration bill through which I do think that was a moment the conservative uprising against Bush it was on immigration against Bush and McCain and on 607 then again in 2013 when there was a bipartisan bill it turned out to be a real harbinger at the time I just thought it was kind of there were people aren't happy with Bush because of the war and I don't know immigration was getting whipped up by talk radio and I didn't take it I was unfortunate that the bills failed but I didn't take it that seriously as kind of a you know I thought okay I would get passed two years later or four years later but that turned out to be a real moment of where the party rebelled but to Bush's credit he did try to do what I would say is more or less the right thing on immigration and you know he went to a mosque 10 days after I mean think about that around 9-11 and really emphasized that this is not a religious war on all this and we some of us thought it was actually going too far but it was like a little so it was so conspicuous on most but I think it was the right thing to do in retrospect to try to it was going to be a tough few years in foreign policy but let's not have a you know cultural not making any more of a cultural war in a religious war than it has to be but again one that's quite different from the status quo of the Republican Party I have issue-oriented questions on two issues so do you why do you think that conservatives no longer talk about the budget deficit and the national debt and do you think the debt is a threat to our country and do you think the Bush I mean the Trump tax cuts were you know the prudent thing to do and then my other issue is climate change you know why don't the Republicans you know kind of believe in climate change and what's the path forward on that you know as a nation they should be serious about climate change and I think they will have real trouble getting young voters until they're serious about climate but again people like me said that in 2013-14-15 and a million people said that a younger Republican politician said that John McCain said that and then of course Trump who couldn't care less about it gets nominated and wins so like I don't know I mean I can say really you're better off being serious about climate change but who's winning and not just in the presidency but in the Senate now I would argue longer term it's still a huge problem but it's just winning arguing against a winning president and against a sort of winning party that's complicated as they lost the house and they lost a lot of governorships and stuff but a party that thinks it's kind of winning arguing that they're on a foolish path is harder obviously than if the party loses so that's where you don't know how much things would change or Trump loses in 2020 Republican senators also lost and so forth I don't rule out that things could change pretty a lot of what makes Trump strong is that he's a winner McCain lost Romney lost I can say it's on blue in the face that no Republican would have won in 2008 after the crisis in 2012 it's against an incumbent president who's a very successful good politician with an economic recovery and he won a narrow race it's not like a disgrace for Romney but it doesn't matter Trump says I'm a winner they're losers so being a loser might change things on the debt and deficit I mean two things Trump doesn't care about it and the Democrats don't care that much about it but also have no interest in like being the party of austerity so they're not going to talk a lot about it also to be fair just objectively people like me said I don't know eight years ago hey we can't just have all these trillion dollar deficits forever and there's virtually zero percent interest rates a lot of respect to the economists I believe some of them with very low interest rates and trillion dollar deficits and we're not paying much more price for it turns out everyone wants to have American you know treasury notes and we're checking along with a decent economic recovery I still think reality is going to hit and all that but it probably is the case that until we're bugged by reality you know you just kind of you sound like you're just warning about things that haven't happened you know hey Dr. Crystal my name's Sari Specialoss I'm a first year master student here I'm wondering I think my question is actually best articulated with an analogy but if the Trump presidency is a broken ankle let's say it seems like there's some scar tissue that's built up in the way of media in the way of different institutions whether that be on conservatives on college campuses and just across the board how much you think that scar tissue is a problem and how much you think that actually dissipates if Trump were to lose I mean it's the right question I addressed it a little bit I don't know I mean I've on the whole been sort of heartened I don't know it seems to me when I go to college campuses that they're not there are a lot of young conservative-ish students they don't really think of themselves as Republicans now because Republican means Trump and they're liberal that's not really a liberal position even anymore on marriage or on climate or whatever but they sort of believe in free markets they sort of believe in a strong America they don't count out dictators and ignore dissidents and human rights activists around the world so I would consider those people kind of you know Bush McCain for Republicans they may not quite ticket themselves that way and they may be voting Democratic this year so how much the party comes back to them where they come back to the party how much you end up with the third party how much the Democrats after November 2020 obviously depends on who wins who the nominee is for the Democrats but it's very indeterminate and so I think the answer is I don't know and I don't rule out though that if Trump if the economy continues to be good if he gets some I don't know maybe fake but foreign policy victory I don't know could people could talk to themselves into you know what this thing is working okay you know the economy's fine what if fake victory in October of 2020 I don't think that's out of the question he might have an interest in having Trump be president for four more years what if other foreign actors do something like that so I think it's very unclear what the SCART issue is how strong it is what the after effects of the current moment are we just haven't really gone through I can't think of that many good analogies that would give us guidance in a way about how this how this plays out hi Dr. Crystal so my question is about Michael Bloomberg and the reason I wanted to bring him up is because you are a constitutional originalist and I was wondering whether or not his complete and told dismissive attitude toward the Fourth Amendment rights of black and brown New Yorkers disqualifies him for you and the reason I'm asking that is because I don't know I'm sure you're aware but the Aspen audio tape came out two days ago so Michael Bloomberg was on Twitter the last two days on Twitter because two years after Stop and Frisk as applied in New York City was declared unconstitutional Bloomberg is on tape bragging that he could just Xerox the same MO of a young black man and just send it out to all the cops in New York City I'm assuming you still hold to a lot of conservative values how does that how does that sit with you are you worried that he would kind of scale up the rest of the country and you're saying no I hear you saying no but why not because I think at the end of the Bloomberg was a strong mayor of New York and did some things he shouldn't have done had a certain dismissive attitude certainly on that issue to what the courts ultimately decided and pursued policies that he probably shouldn't have pursued though to be fair there was a huge amount of concern about crime and some of those policies seem to coincide with a decline of crime even if they didn't really cause it but Bloomberg I don't believe I believe Bloomberg would be better for the country than Trump I don't you don't have to support Bloomberg in the Democratic primary but Bloomberg is going to point if you care about liberal judges who are open to the concerns of black and brown Americans and to voting rights issues and to civil rights issues you should prefer Bloomberg's judges to Trump's judges if you want a justice department that's going to have a civil rights division that pursues traditionally liberal and to have an assistant attorney general who pursues those policies and Trump so I have no problem with being against Bloomberg in the primary I'm not sure I'll vote for Bloomberg on March 3rd in Virginia but I don't think it's a close call honestly for me at least it wouldn't be against Trump What evidence do you have that particular fourth amendment unreasonable search and seizure? Because the president himself does not order a lot of searches and seizures Say that again it's not going to be running criminal justice it's not personally going to be running the police forces in most cities in the U.S and Bloomberg is a what is a Democrat you could have all kinds of issues with him and I think they're legitimate I have a lot of issues with them some of them different five from the ones you have but it will be a Democratic administration if you think Michael Bloomberg could take the Democratic Party and make it a party that's hostile to civil rights in that way I just don't think we'll wrap up Okay we can talk more about that after this is over because I actually lawyer a lot and I think one critical very quick point on that is that you have to look to the states because that's where most law enforcement happens not at the federal level but the judge issue is huge but my question to bring it back to your topic you touched technology earlier on and you touched it in a way about jobs and the workforce changing but I'm more concerned on this level I'd like to get your thoughts we have a phone now all our processing all our information whether it's Fox it's even beyond Fox now it's like social media and what's really scary is what's truth anymore yeah this book is advocated saying we're not going to touch it anymore so when I look at the mean when I look at video when I look at pictures when I look at sound is it real is it fake so as a voter today how do I process all of this how will voters in 2020 2022 2024 because it seems to be getting worse not better let's take the next question I can hold your hand yeah okay hi I'm a sociologist studying conservatives and it strikes me that even the never Trumpers in the Republican Party don't have a lot of outlets in terms of the community so I'm not speaking about conservatives or Republicans in office but just everyday conservatives if you go to conservative Republican events it's very pro-Trump if you listen to Fox News it's very pro-Trump so I'm wondering I don't have to explain to political scientists how important political party identification is these people are quite unlikely to switch to becoming Democrats on the whole but kind of what strategies do you see around community or engagement with folks who aren't happy with Trump but aren't necessarily going to switch over to liberal sides or causes or groups good okay I'll go with reverse order yeah no I think that's absolutely well I think what would have to happen is enough swing voters and there are some not as many as they used to be would have to vote Democratic in 2020 Trump would lose and at that point things might break open and at least in some states I mean Larry Hogan is the governor of Maryland and Charlie Baker is the governor of Massachusetts and even Ron DeSantis who ran a ridiculous campaign as a kind of Trumpy person in Florida has not governed in a particularly Trumpy way so one can imagine a pretty some movement and some opening let's say up in party circles in conservative circles and conservative media circles maybe not Fox itself but maybe at least in the general editorial page would abandon it's in my view very damaging actually rationalizations of Trump policies so I think you can imagine to move back maybe not I mean I was talking with a retired Republican senator who hasn't who was anti-Trump basically but hasn't been terribly outspoken and I was being nice but sort of saying could you do a little more could you comment on some of these things when you know Trump does something it would make a difference I think in your state and he's a person of some stature sort of like oh god whatever I do that he literally says I go to the country club and all my friends just you know beat me up and these are up this is not you know a Trump rally this is an upper middle class pretty well off country club and a well off suburb of a well off city in middle America and those people do not want to hear the criticism of Trump that really could change if he loses I think I think at least there's an opening for debate I'm not as I said I think it's foolish to be complacent that it's all going to be great but I think at least there's a chance for something like what you're doing within groups within you know civic associations that have gone in that direction I think but the mobilization now is really kind of astonishing and worrisome and so I look the technology issue is a huge issue I didn't really touch on any of that to leave aside AI and you know all kinds of not just the disinformation side of it but the actual disruption side of things beyond just job loss and all that I think those are huge issues I mean one of the worst things about Trump is that again I think as a society as a polity these are important issues we could debate them and discuss them they're very interesting debates about big tech I would say about how you know what about privacy what about who should control the information it seems like if you came down from Mars you'd think this isn't the most reasonable way to organize these are kind of shouldn't we have a little more diversity in our companies but maybe that's wrong maybe the way these things work is just it's just better you're going to have huge companies and the question is how to regulate them these are all reasonable things to debate it's pretty hard to have a reasonable debate now everyone's I'm sure we're all guilty of this to focus on Trump I mean there are people writing intelligent articles and law journals and debates get distorted by Trump so the conservative critique which is there's a lot of sensible critiques that could be made of the big tech companies is sort of a stupid critique really about you know they're discriminating against conservatives or whatever and the left also I think has now gone down kind of a rabbit hole of you know wanting Facebook to try to control the content on everyone's individual you know page which is a little not but having said that I think there are real problems and real challenges and again I really worry I kind of think we can come to grips with it but we're not ready for 2020 I'd say I've talked to people we're running with little lights all closed I've talked to people not just about the narrow election security issue but what is it going to be like for the next six day months and you can really write worrisome scenarios that are not science fiction I mean that are very much based on what people can do what have done already in terms of disinformation misinformation disruption of things fake you know pretending you know so at the I'm making this up but I mean at the Republican convention people will be paid you know Trump Trump someone out there will hire people to look as if they are left wing demonstrators and they will go and beat up some pleasant middle age Trump delegates who are minding their own business and the whole media story will be you know law abiding Trump's citizens and it will be fake or it won't be fake I mean will we know it's not so easy to discover these days I mean there's always been some of that in politics and there was always disinformation but I agree the degree of just that alone that is leaving aside the much bigger issues of disinformation is worrisome and I've experienced this personally as editor of the weekly standard we tried not to didn't I think you know propagate disinformation but I'll close this and you know to make a little money to produce that deficit and you know on these cruises it goes somewhere nice and you have panels and you have dinner with the people so these are weekly standard readers I don't know how many of you read the weekly standard but it's you know our readership was older upscale just what you'd expect you know doctors, lawyers, businessmen well informed people nice people pillars of the community responsible people actually being cared enough to subscribe to a magazine every week every week you know what the Democrats are doing wrong or anything like that in fact we got in trouble by having too much stuff about what the Republicans are doing wrong but and I remember the last couple it was really noticeable after about 2016 2015-2016 you'd have dinner with people and there were very nice people and you discuss your kids and your grandchildren and jobs and there can be cities and what's going on in Dallas or Phoenix election so well actually there really weren't 3 million and you know oh yes there were I read about it or I saw it on Fox or someone sent me an article by email from some news source actually this has been looked into pretty carefully and here's what happens there are people who are registered in more than one place my kids are still in the books in Virginia and if they live in New York but they don't vote in two places so they really aren't illegal voters there are some overlap in registration blah blah blah and people just wouldn't believe it I mean it used to be with us but they had really internalized the misinformation to a degree that it wasn't like gee okay thank you you know Bill for telling me that I see I just got some bum you know bum information there it wouldn't really change your views you don't have to become a liberal if you don't think there are 3 million you know illegal voters but the degree to which people wanted to believe what was in their echo chamber was I thought kind of a new phenomena now it's happened in the United States less so I would say and I think that is a real problem and it's how do you fix that I mean there's no obvious way to correct that yeah