From WXXI news.

This is connections.

I'm Evan Dawson.

Our connection this hour is made in an epitaph.

It's an epitaph for principled conservatism.

Lauren Hall is a political scientist and author, a professor Darity who describes herself as politically homeless.

I have found Lauren over the years to be a thoughtful defender of some libertarian values.

Certainly the kinds of values that small conservatives have long appreciated in her work.

Hall has spent years trying to appreciate the best parts of conservatism, progressivism, and libertarianism.

She finds virtues in all of them, perhaps that equally.

She educates her students on what those movements can offer.

Hall writes a Substack called The Radical Moderates Guide to Life.

Recently, she wrote a piece called An Epitaph for Principled Conservatism, and in it, she makes the case that this country needs a wise and traditional conservative ism, but such a movement is quickly dying.

She writes, quote, losing these ideas would be a deep loss for us all.

Conservative political thought has for a long time defended the truth of a stable human nature, and has used the existence of that flawed human nature to justify institutional guardrails, whether limited government to manage the autocratic part of our nature or marriage to channel our lust.

In contrast, we know that MAGA feeds off of misinformation and disinformation.

Truth has been reduced to the name of a social media platform that enriches the president while spreading deception.

End quote.

Hall rejects the idea that the modern Republican Party and the MAGA movement is conservative.

She rejects the idea that conservatism is just evolved into this form.

Rather, Hall sees and writes that the MAGA movement has rejected conservatism in fundamental ways.

She writes, quote, when love of one's own gets twisted into authoritarian cruelty, nativism, and scapegoating of desperate people looking for a better life, for harmful trade wars and alignment with dictators who share none of our values or ideals.

We're not talking about conservatism anymore.

End quote.

And for conservative Americans who dig in and claim the mantle of conservatism, at least in its modern form.

Hall writes, quote, any conservative who tries to claim that unrestrained executive power combined with total chaos and unpredictability is the way to solve the problems in our federal government.

Should go reread Jefferson.

Madison.

Lord Acton, or even G.K. Chesterton for some perspective or any history of the 20th century.

End quote.

Doctor Hall remains critical of many progressive tenets and says it will be more difficult to counter the worst impulses of progressivism without a principled conservatism.

She is my guest this hour to talk about the change that she's seeing in these modern movements.

Doctor Lauren Hall is the author of a number of works, including, by the way, the Substack I mentioned, which we'll link to.

She's a professor of political science at RIT.

Current pluralism fellow with the Mercatus Center's program on Pluralism and Civil Discourse.

Welcome back to the program.

It's great to have you back here, Lauren.

It's always wonderful to be here.

I'm so you know, I mean, I guess it starts with why now?

I mean, the MAGA movement is not new to 2025.

So why are you writing this piece now?

I think like a lot of people, I was surprised, I was surprised in the 2016 election, and then I was even more surprised with the outcome of this election.

in retrospect, I shouldn't have been.

I think the Democrats had some obvious serious strategic, you know, blind spots.

But I was very surprised at a lot of the demographic shifts that we saw people moving toward MAGA that I did not expect to move toward MAGA.

and so the and the other thing that surprised me was the the swiftness with which the Trump administration really took project 2025 and just ran with it.

and so the, the swiftness of the sort of, the chaos that, that he's been working to sort of breed in the federal government.

and so all of that struck me as, very surprising, but also just fundamentally at odds with the conservatism that I've been studying, sort of the intellectual conservatism, and principled political conservatism that I've studied over the last 20 years.

I think what I'm hearing from you is not that it's necessarily surprising that there would be people who would move toward power consolidation, authoritarian impulses, trying to use government to further their own ends.

But that many people who you considered to be principled conservatives would go along with it.

Is that fair?

Yes.

and I've actually seen this in a couple, you know, I, I went to graduate school in what would be called a conservative political theory program.

I had a number of faculty members who I respect very greatly, who were mentors to me as a, as a young intellectual.

And they were Catholic thinkers and Strauss and thinkers, and they cared really deeply about the principles of conservatism.

And I've watched a few of them become Trump supporters over the years, and it baffled me.

And I think what really struck me about this most recent election is that I think we're seeing in real time why that positioning is so dangerous.

And yet I'm not seeing some of these folks rethink their positions.

They don't seem to me to understand the danger that that we're facing to the health of a principled conservatism moving forward.

So this hour, it's a challenge for me, because these pieces that Doctor Hawley's written are pretty, I mean, they're not lengthy.

They won't take you all day, but there's a lot of meat there, and there's a lot of different parts of these that I want to work through.

Listeners, I want to welcome your feedback as well.

I already have a couple of emails, which I will read as soon as I can get, to them.

And I want to invite your phone calls at 844295 talk.

It's toll free.

84429582552636.

If you're calling from Rochester.

2639994.

If you are watching on our Sky news YouTube channel, you can join the chat there.

And again, email the program connections@wxxi.org.

We're going to post the pieces from the Substack from Baxter Hall in our show notes.

But you can find the Substack.

It is, a radical Moderates Guide to Life, which I love, is a great title for a Substack.

And and, Lauren, you say that you're politically homeless people are probably wondering, you know, so are you consider yourself a principled conservative and like, where are you?

I don't.

And part of it's that I think each of I moved in a sort of non-ideological direction over the last few years.

Growing up, I was I considered myself progressive.

I worked for the New York Public Interest Research Group for years.

I was engaged in progressive politics.

I went to college and grad school, ended up studying at this conservative, in this conservative political, theory program and, and then got very interested in libertarian thought, through some of the, academic centers that I was associated with.

And so I think one of the things that I consider myself now as sort of an ambassador for principled politics across the board.

I think more and more, especially in the age of social media politics has turned into scoring points.

Like the goal is to score points over the other side, right?

Get likes and and win in some sense.

And of course, the electoral system encourages winning, encourages the sort of zero sum thinking.

But I really do want to encourage people to think about the strengths that each of these perspectives brings to the table.

and that's part of what I'm so worried about with the current move toward, what I'm sort of calling broadly MAGA politics is that the people like me, former progressives, libertarians, current progressives, they see nothing that they can, you know, sort of, work with here.

But I think a lot of them could see things to collaborate with.

are on with, with principled conservatives.

so I think we're losing the opportunity to actually solve human problems because our politics has sort of gone off the rails.

Yeah.

And to be clear here, for listeners who think, oh, well, this is a professor who's got, you know, roots in a number of different camps, who's just going to take it to the MAGA movement.

This hour.

I mean, a little.

Sure.

But this isn't this is not a guest who is just here to say progressivism is, you know, the only city on the hill that we should be striving for.

In fact, you see a lot of issues with progressivism.

We're going to talk a little bit about that.

But one of them in, another Substack piece that you wrote about the need for pluralism is your I read it as your frustration that a movement, progressivism that has a lot of respect and reverence for diversity does not extend that that value to diversity of thought, of political thought enough or sometimes at all.

Yes.

Yeah, yeah, true.

On campus, but true in society.

Yes.

Yeah.

I see it across the board.

I see it in sort of the online progressive spaces, but absolutely in the academy, you see this very clearly in sort of deplatforming conservative thinkers.

And I'm not talking about just the provocateurs.

I'm saying, you know, people are disinvited to campus for having mainstream conservative views.

So there's been and I'll just say this, too.

I think a lot of the situation we're in right now is a result of extremes on the left that have pushed people who would not otherwise have been attracted to someone like Trump, has pushed people to that side.

So and you can see this in the demographic shifts.

A lot of the voters that that progressives thought they would have in the bag, they did not.

Latino voters, Latino vote, young voters.

Yeah.

Yes.

women, black Americans.

So I think they took a lot of things for granted.

And this goes to this broader theme that I talk about in that post, which is I think a lot of progressives think that they're on the quote unquote, right side of history.

And when you think that way, it allows you to ignore other principled positions that might have something very important to teach you about the political world that we live in and the kinds of problems that we're trying to solve.

Charles emails to say a college professor is going to comment on the state of conservatism.

Oh, wonderful.

I'm curious, will she be taking any responsibility this hour?

Will she be going back to the staff lounge to admonish the faculty for their part?

Because I'm old enough to remember when people like her insisted that even the most milquetoast or genuine GOP candidates were, in fact, evil.

I'm old enough to remember being told that I was a bad person because of my views.

I'm old enough to remember being discriminated against for my beliefs at Suny Brockport.

She may claim she appreciates conservatism, but she knows damn well the overwhelming majority of her colleagues don't.

It shouldn't be a huge shock that we stopped caring what people like you thought of us.

That's from Charles.

Absolutely.

I don't think academics have done a good job of making themselves relevant.

there was a survey recently about sort of how much people like, who are the most influential people in politics.

And I think political scientists were at the absolute bottom of the barrel.

We're just not taken very seriously because we have huge blindspots in terms of the audience, in terms of how we think about what people in the world actually care about.

I will absolutely not defend Academia's commitment to political pluralism because we don't have one.

And that, I think, is, is a very serious problem.

yeah.

There was another thing I was going to respond to, but I can come back.

Well, so so let's set that aside for now and just say you at least appreciate Charles's point.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

Okay.

so working through your piece.

Doctor Hall writes about her frustrations that principled conservatism has been sort of pushed aside, in your view, in favor of certain urges, changes or impulses.

One of them is authoritarianism.

Let me read some from some from your piece.

You write, quote, the conservative call to love one's country is not.

And this is crucial, that you love your kids or your country no matter what.

As Burke pointed out, to love our country.

It ought to be lovely.

We shouldn't defend our country or our children when they're doing horrible things and calling public servants who have risked their lives for our country traitors and pulling their security details simply because they disagree with you is not patriotism.

It's authoritarian bias.

It's not love of one's own.

It's love of oneself.

Conservatives used to call that selfishness.

End quote.

Tell me more about that.

Well, I think what we've seen and I talk about this as right wing cancel culture in other parts of the in other parts of the Substack.

And you and I, before the show started, you've been talking a little bit about how cancel culture has often been associated primarily with the left.

and it is, I think, a big problem on, on college campuses as well as the internet broadly.

but now there is a different kind of conservative cancel culture, or rather a conservative, a sort of cancel culture of the right.

And that's this.

It's a loyalty test.

If you criticize Trump, if you criticize the MAGA movement, if you don't, toe the line exactly the way that he wants you to, you're out and you're out in ways that are deeply dangerous to democracy.

polling security details from people who have done meaningful work in the national security space is is cruel.

and so I don't think that's actually a political statement.

I just think that's a real statement about incentives for people to get into politics.

If you want good people in politics, you have to protect them even when they disagree with you.

So on the subject of speech, a couple points there.

I was listening to a conversation that Jonah Goldberg had, yesterday, Jonah Goldberg, long time, I would say, small see, conservative thinker.

certainly was not a the progressives in this country were not a big fan of Goldberg when he wrote a book called Liberal Fascism, with a Hitler mustache and a smiley face on the cover.

But Goldberg has become a big critic of Donald Trump.

And he he offered, an insight that I hadn't thought about yet.

He brought up the recent example in which Trump was riffing and frustrated about Zelensky, and Trump was in a news conference, and he was saying, you know, he's the dictator.

He doesn't allow elections, and he should have ended this war three years ago.

He shouldn't have never he should have ever started it.

And so he's riffing.

And Goldberg points out that what's become this common refrain, this battle over.

I can't believe Donald Trump said that it was Ukraine who started the war, when clearly it was Russia who started the war.

Goldberg's analysis is Donald Trump didn't really mean to say it.

He was riffing.

He was kind of out of control.

And he says, why he should have ended this war three years ago.

Hey, you shouldn't have ever started it.

It's not like he thought about what he said.

But conservatives have gotten to the point or ostensible conservatives have gotten to the point where they can't even say that the emperor has no clothes.

So they go, no, no, no, he meant to say that.

And, really, Zelenskyy is the reason that the war happened and it is Ukraine's for they de facto started it.

That's what he meant.

It was a thoughtful way of describing it as opposed to being like, no, he's he's wrong.

And Goldberg sees these moments in which people he looks around and says, I can't believe this person is defending him, can't even criticize even the most basic terms because it's like a purity test.

Do you see it that way?

Yes.

I think there's two things going on.

One is a is that there is a sort of ideological purity test here with us or you're against us.

tribalism is obviously very, very strong in that movement, which is a sense of sort of these are my people and I will defend them even if I don't agree with specific aspects of what they're doing.

My job is to defend them.

it also seems to me, at least when it comes to some of the GOP leadership, that there's an element of Stockholm syndrome.

I mean, I think that there's a sort of, I don't know if there's if it's just self-serving in the sense that they see that this is the only way to maintain their political careers.

And we have definitely seen what happened to Jeff Flake and some of the other more moderate GOP members who who were Never Trumpers, and they lost their jobs.

So it's hard to tell exactly how much of this is just people trying to preserve themselves in the face of, you know, total chaos in the party.

and how much of it is people who actually are sort of spinning it internally to try to justify change that they hope will happen.

And when I'm giving the best sort of good faith explanation for the people I know, the deeply conservative people that I know, principled conservatives that I know who have moved over to MAGA.

The best faith interpretation I can give is that many of them feel that this is a terrible vehicle.

They don't defend Trump's virtue.

They don't defend him as a good person.

They don't think he's at all what they would have chosen for this job.

But he's the only one with the who's willing to do it.

And and when they are looking at the overall mission, the overall mission is dramatically reduce the size of the federal government, reduce waste, increase efficiency, and bring back some of the kinds of principled, stances regarding things like marriage.

Right.

Push back on, on LGBTQ issues.

and so I think there's a sort of sense that we'll hold our nose and be willing to make certain sacrifices short term in order to get these longer term strategic gains.

My concern is that that's fundamentally shortsighted, because the only way conservatism is going to be attractive or, or conversant with progressive and libertarians is if it's principled.

And so they're they're destroying any opportunity that they might have to create bipartisan coalitions to solve some of the really pressing problems that we have, like immigration reform.

So to me, it's it's just it's a perfect example of shortsighted thinking.

But I when I'm trying to think about it in good faith, that's the that's the best explanation I can come up.

Well, person that comes to mind and or maybe used to come to mind for me in that category is Rod Dreher, who is a, he's harder to categorize for me now.

I used to read him as a blogger back in the blog days a lot.

but Dreher now strikes me as someone who would fit most of what you just described.

This idea of.

He is very much invested in what I would call the culture wars, battles about gender, different trends and, and society that he sees as really pernicious.

but I the more I read him now, the more he seems like, you know, sort of an acolyte of Orban or somebody who really, who really feels like authoritarianism might be the only way to govern.

And I it almost strikes me that as time has passed since Donald Trump ascended to power, a growing group of people who used to be worried about authoritarianism now feel like, well, if you got to do it, you got to do it.

I mean, that's kind of, how do you feel about that?

Yes.

And I think that's actually an area that you see, the, the extremes of libertarianism lining up with the MAGA movement in some respect.

there's been for a little while in the more extreme areas of libertarian thought, a sort of suspicion of democracy.

because democracy doesn't really give you principled outcomes.

It gives you kind of short term outcomes based on what people want in the moment.

It's it's hard for democracy so that a lot of political theories think about the tension between liberal principles.

And by liberal I mean this really old, much larger umbrella term that focused on limited government, that focused on checks and balances and that kind of liberal democracy.

There's a tension there, because if you really love democracy, whatever the majority thinks should go.

But when you pair liberal limitations on government with democratic majoritarian rule, there's an obvious tension there.

And so I think libertarians, some libertarians have gotten to the point.

And I think I think you're pointing to a branch of the conservative movement that has also gotten there, which is, hey, we're not getting the outcomes we want from democracy.

Let's just throw it out the window.

But I think what, what a lot of the conservatives are also adding in is, hey, we're also not getting the results that we want from traditional liberalism.

And I mean that in this really this much older sense of the term.

Going back to British thinkers like Edmund Burke, where limited government checks and balances, right?

These are important guardrails for human life.

And I think a lot of people say, hey, checks and balances.

It's prevented us from making these really dramatic changes.

It's prevented us from tearing down the federal government or getting rid of the Department of Education.

So let's let's get rid of that.

And that's one reason why, you know, conservatives used to be deeply suspicious of the executive.

They used to be deeply in favor of checks and balances.

And having Congress push back against executive power.

We've lost that.

Okay.

So let me close the loop on speech, and then I'm going to get some, some feedback from listeners on this topic and others with Lauren Hall, who is our guest here.

Lauren has written a number of pieces on her Substack.

the Substack is, we're going to link to it so you can read the pieces that we're talking about.

One is an epitaph for principled conservatism, which is the core of what we're talking about with Doctor Hall this hour.

let me just as a kind of an aside here, you've been very critical of what you perceive as cancel culture from the left.

Yes, yes.

Okay.

You feel that off in the left, the cultural left has used social media, velocity and other tools to try to stifle speech and try to enforce their norms.

Yes, yes.

Yeah, I think there's there's a couple, you know, you hear people talking about privilege or you hear people talking about someone being quote unquote problematic, and that becomes just a way to shut them down.

Right?

Well, if they're problematic, I can't I shouldn't be associated with them.

Yeah.

But there's never or there's not always clear examples or clear evidence provided.

It's just a sort of this person has become sort of temporarily at least untouchable.

So in your piece, you indicate that the ascendant conservatism is just as guilty in similar but maybe different ways.

You write, quote, by aligning itself with internet trolls, Silicon Bros, and the worst of right wing cancel culture, American conservatism has undermined the very moral foundation that made its arguments worth engaging with.

End quote.

Tell me more about that, particularly what you mean by right wing cancel culture.

Yeah, I think so.

I talked a little bit about sort of the loyalty tests that that Trump, has brought into the, into the white House.

But even more broadly, the the kinds of, I mean, internet comment sections have always been a mess since the beginning, the worst since the beginning of the internet.

So some of this isn't new, but I have noticed that the the knee jerk responses from and this is I see this on my social media, as well as comments on pieces that I've done.

There's, there's a sort of oh, she mentioned this very specific thing.

She's not one of us.

Right.

People are looking for sort of very clear flags that tell them, you know, this person is either with us or against us.

and then there's just a refusal to engage with the, their position.

I think you also see this really clearly with people like Liz Cheney, some of the more moderate, Republicans.

even when you look at Supreme Court decisions, when you look at John Roberts and sort of, most recently Amy Coney Barrett, who have ended up being a little more moderate than people expected, the vitriol people from the right coming after, Amy Coney Barrett, this wild reading pieces with the right thing.

It's crazy.

We thought she was a conservative.

Yeah, yeah.

No.

Her out.

It turns out she's a progressive liberal the whole time, right?

She's not, by the way, I don't think.

No, she's not at all.

And in fact, people were terrified that she was going to, you know, sort of reignite some conservative Catholic, sort of utopia of via the Supreme Court.

But she won Supreme Court decision that they didn't agree with.

And now she's out.

She's out of the tribe.

So this is cancel culture of the deepest kind, right?

You can't you can't have one intellectual disagreement with someone and and you're yeah, you've broken ranks.

And then using the authoritarian tool.

So we heard countless times last year that Donald Trump and especially Elon Musk, they were running or a part of a campaign to protect speech, to protect the public square, to say that even speech that offends you is going to be allowed.

And then now you've got Musk squashing certain tweets, not just Grimes, his tweets, but others, that he doesn't like.

he has a sort of wielding control of, of one of the biggest speech platforms.

Now, you know, whenever you think about Elon Musk, certainly I think he wasn't irked by what he perceived as left cancel culture.

He buys Twitter.

And then I think he just can't resist the urge to do the same thing.

I'm in control now.

Well, the irony is that there's a long conservative tradition of noticing this.

Guess what happens when people get into power?

Human nature is is conservatives have long believed that human nature is stable.

It's imperfect.

It's fallible.

This is this is the root of conservative beliefs going back centuries.

And so it's absolutely predictable that when people get into power, they do things that are self-centered, that are selfish, that tend to preserve their power.

So the fact that Musk had different principles before he became, you know, head of Twitter and entered the white House, as sort of Doge leader, the fact that he is now espousing the same things that he rejected, I think conservatives should have predicted this.

This is not new to them.

That should be a moment for conservatives to kind of confirm that their traditional concerns, about human nature, about about what happens the way power corrupts.

You're seeing it confirmed.

And instead, many ostensible conservatives are saying, good.

Yeah, yeah, get them.

Yep.

Okay.

Brian, emails along these lines wants to know if you're following the story of Mahmoud Khalil, who was detained by the Trump administration.

once again, what does your guest think about the Trump administration's detention of Mahmoud Khalil?

To me, he says, Khalil seems pretty clearly anti-Semitic.

Well, but I mean, this goes back to the question of what I don't know.

I don't know if, by the way, Brian is saying he's anti-Semitic.

So even though he's a citizen, we should detain him, right?

Without I mean, on those grounds, I don't know.

And again, one of the one of the conservative principles of the past, at least of the founding era and many of the conservative, movements in America moving forward is, you don't get to lock people up for what they say.

You can be offensive all day long.

You can have horrible racist and bigoted beliefs, and the government can't come after you.

And so the and that's part of what we need to have a truly liberal Democrat public square.

We need to be able to confront those beliefs.

So, you know, it's this kind of, I think the the antisemitism is, is largely a blind.

I think it's being used as a tool to both terrify people and also squash speech.

it's being used against Columbia University and very clear, sort of manipulative ways.

and and it's not that I'm in favor, you know, obviously antisemitism is terrible, but it's not the role of the government to lock people up because of their beliefs, and especially when people are citizens or permanent residents, right, that the long standing traditions are that you have certain protections that the government grants you because we are a free country, unlike dictatorships, unlike authoritarian countries, and we're we're blurring that line every day.

All right.

After we take our only break this, we're going to take some phone calls.

we've got phone calls for Lauren Hall on the other side of this break.

She's an author, a professor of political science at it.

Current pluralism fellow with the Mercatus Center's program on Pluralism and Civil Discourse, and the author of a couple of recent pieces on Substack that caught our attention on the idea of principled conservatism and where it is or isn't in this country.

We'll come right back on the other side with your phone calls.

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And the series focuses on people whose stories you probably don't know, and maybe some names you've never heard of, but people who've done important work as regional, contemporary, black leaders.

We're going to talk about their stories next hour.

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This is connections.

I'm Evan Dawson Tito in Fairport is on the phone first.

Hey Tito, go ahead.

Yeah, I'm just calling in because, certainly for my whole lifetime.

And from what I've read of history, there's never been any such thing as a principled, principled, conservative is.

I mean, my whole lifetime, they've been pushing trickle down economics, and the Laffer curve is a lie.

But ultimately, conservatism was born as pro monarchy, anti-democracy as a democracy.

And it has not changed.

It has always been that.

And, this is just the natural consequence of, conservatives gaining power.

So so you see, the MAGA movement is not different than the conservatism of 20 years ago, of 40 years ago, of 100 years ago.

And just that conservatives didn't have as much power back this.

I mean, this is what they've been watching.

This is what they've been espousing the whole time.

And I mean, it.

The conservatives have all are the ultimate cancel culture party group.

I mean, they're all about holding down groups and maintaining hierarchies.

They are like quintessentially cancel, cancel culture.

So to to hang there for one second, I'm going to let Professor Hall respond to some of that.

Go ahead.

yeah.

So thanks for calling in.

Your your comment actually reminds me of a of a conversation I had with a student a couple years ago because I assigned Russell Kirk, who was one of the first sort of American conservatives, intellectual conservatives, to bring the the concepts of principled conservatism kind of back into the public sphere.

And the student came up to me after class and said, you know, I'm really glad you made us read this because I thought Prince, the conservatives didn't have any principles at all.

And he was sort of I said, well, there's actually a whole tradition.

your point, though, I think is an important one, which is that there's different kinds of conservatism.

The kind of conservatism that I'm looking at is really American conservatism, the sort of principled conservatism that started with the American founding.

And that was a really interesting kind of conservatism.

back in England, you had Whigs versus Tories, Tories were the conservatives.

They were the, the anti, they were the pro monarchy crowd.

And Whigs were in favor of parliamentary checks and balances.

They were in favor of limited government.

They were in favor of free trade.

And so when the American founders decided to, push back against the British monarchy, they were doing it in a very Whig ish fashion.

But there were many deep principles of conservatism that Whigs kept moving forward.

And those included things like a commitment to free trade, a belief in the fallibility of human nature, deep suspicion of power, and what power does to that human nature.

So there's a long list that I could go through, but I think that we've seen a continuity, and I've talked to other people who say, look, there never was a principled conservatism, and that's just not accurate.

There's a lot of really principled people in the intellectual space, in the academic space, in the political space, who have been discussing what conservatism can and should be for the last 100 years in the United States.

now, do I think that that has come out clearly in the GOP?

Do I think that the Republican Party has been a perfect vehicle for that principled conservatism?

no, I don't, and I think we've seen that that breakdown really clearly over the last ten, 15 years.

You know, you want to follow that.

Go ahead.

Yeah.

I mean, you everything that you just said was a principle of conservatism is just a general principle that the general public holds the conservatives are great at propaganda.

The great thing free markets making up the free market, making up, you know, all about freedom and America.

But there are no underlying principles.

If you get down into the philosophy, if you get into the history, there's no bottom at all.

It's just clinging on to power and money.

That is the only principle of conservatism.

Well, let me just jump in here, Tito.

I think what Professor Hall is urging us to do is to to consider the difference between the partizan manifestation of certain movements versus the actual principles therein.

But part of what Tito saying is, well, those principles should be obvious.

They're not just conservative principles, they're they're human principles.

So, professor, well, having worked with, within the progressive movement, having worked within the libertarian movement, not everyone agrees on those principles.

I've seen a lot of progressives argue that the federal government needs to be much more powerful, that we do need to restrict speech.

For example, progressives are not in favor of free trade.

By and large, progressives have deep concerns about private property, which has always been a conservative principle, something that conservatives have believed is really important to protect for, you know, a lot of important reasons.

So I think there's actually really important differences between those movements.

And part of what I've been trying to do as sort of an ambassador for different kinds of political positions is highlight the strengths of each of those positions.

But I will say this, Tito, that I think that your your response is exactly what I'm worried about because once people associate conservatism with what's happening in the MAGA movement, I think that response will become much more common.

Right?

None of these people have principles at all.

I think that will be something that more and more people, believe.

And it will make it much, much harder for any kind of principled conservatism such as it exists to to come back.

Tito, thank you.

On the subject of virtue and character, I want to read a little bit of what Lauren writes on that subject in her Substack.

You write quote, but what does MAGA offer us of virtue and character?

What does choosing to ally ourselves with an imperialistic dictator over a struggling, democratically elected leader say about our values?

How does acceptance and even embrace of grift, of infidelity and sexual misconduct, a violence against police officers when white people do it, of unabashed nepotism and of self-enrichment at the expense of the American people, relate to any of the virtues above in what way does MAGA relate to conservative calls to make the world a better place?

By starting with our individual habits and character?

End quote.

But you know what I often hear from, again, ostensible conservatives on the subject.

Every time this gets invoked, they will invoke, well, under Hunter Biden, I didn't hear enough about Hunter Biden.

So what about Hunter Biden?

Hunter Biden is like the get out of corruption free card for the political right right now.

I mean, I don't, maybe conservative listeners think that we didn't spend enough time talking about Hunter Biden on this program.

I have, this program is not about me.

It's about the community.

It's about guests and their viewpoints.

I have not hidden the fact that I think there is a very, very serious risk of abuse, of pardon power and executive orders.

that goes back before Donald Trump is certainly being abused.

Now, if you look at history, if you just look at historical norms and what the founders laid out and the framers laid out, but that's what they say.

Lauren.

Well, you know, Hunter Biden.

So come on.

So so Trump made a meme coin and made $1 billion and three days before the election.

So Trump wants to negotiate a deal with the Saudis.

So he gets more PGA tournaments on his own golf courses, wouldn't you?

Isn't that just smart business?

You know?

So that's where we are.

It's like this.

This.

What about ism?

Yes.

And that, I think, is where both sides are.

I mean, to a certain extent everyone is behaving badly.

No.

No one is governing, right?

Politics should be about solving human problems, making the world that we share together a better place, and promoting human flourishing.

And it used to be that you did that via stable institutions.

It used to be that you did that via things like protection of private property and protection of free speech, protection of free elections, free trade.

Right.

And then the word free comes up a lot in here, but, because we've lost all principles right now, each side has just turned into, well, they did it, so we should be able to do it.

And that's not.

That's not governing.

And it's also, it's my, my concern is that when we've shot principles completely out the window, there's no basis for judging anyone anymore.

Right?

And then it just becomes real politic.

It's just about who has power and who can wield power in the most destructive kind of way to scare people into submission.

That's authoritarianism.

So the reason I care about principles is not because I'm some utopian, but it's because when we engage thoughtfully with the principles of each side, I think we end up in a better place with our political conversations and the solutions that we're trying to come up with.

This is Mike in Rochester next on the phone.

yes.

I wanted to say that I was introduced to conservatism in 1980.

I was 20 years old.

Ronald Reagan was running, and I bought what he was saying, and he had me convinced that Carter was a big, spender, when in fact, Carter was paying down debt and had a but more than balanced budget.

Ronald Reagan, of course, told me that he was going to cut spending.

It was going to be fiscally responsible.

And at the end of his, tax cutting endeavor, the United States was $3.1 trillion in debt in $1,988.

So what I want to say is that the Republicans have been lying to the American people for 40 years, and the young lady that you have on there just won't admit.

Okay, Mike.

Go ahead.

Loren.

Yeah, I, I would I definitely want to make it clear that I am distinguishing between a principled conservatism that goes back hundreds of years and the GOP political parties are fundamentally self-interested.

So I don't think that the the GOP has actually aligned itself consistently with conservative principles over the last 100 years.

It's often seen as the party of conservative thought.

but internally, it's deeply fractured because Republicans have gone back and forth on everything from free trade to free speech.

they have not been principled in the way that I would hope a principled conservative movement would be.

So I am absolutely not defending the Republican Party or the GOP.

And just Mike, thank you.

Just briefly, just because it's good to reset this every so often when we're talking about principled conservatism, do you have an elevator definition of principled conservatism in your mind?

I'll try to keep it short.

the the base, I think the base line of principle conservatism is the idea that there's a stable human nature that's fallible and imperfect because of that stable human nature.

You have to channel human passions and human interests, into what we call institutions in the political world.

And those are things like, checks and balances, limited government, free and fair elections, private property.

So their, their goal, their argument is not that these things are sort of good enough in and of itself, but their argument is that these kinds of institutions help channel the worst of human nature and protect the best of human nature.

So we mentioned marriage, right?

One of the reasons that that conservatives are in favor of marriage is that it helps protect, women, for example, against, male sexuality.

it helps protect children by giving them the protection of two parents.

so what often seems kind of arbitrary is, in fact, understandable if you go back to this conservative belief that human nature is pretty stable over time, and that we have to grapple with that human nature when we think about governing.

there's there's a couple other things that I'll just mention very quickly.

The term conservatism has the term conserve in it, which is where we get and this is where I think there's a useful distinction between conservatism and reactionary ism.

So conservatism wants to conserve the best of the past while making reforms in a meaningful way.

We see this in Edmund Burke's work.

We see this in Russell Kirk's work.

those are two of the sort of intellectual fathers of conservatism.

at least, Kirk, in the American context.

and that conservation means that traditions matter, customs matter, things that have been around for a long time probably survived for reasons that we may not be able to see really clearly.

And so that's why conservatism pushed back against, the revolutions in, Burke pushed back against the revolutions in France.

the conservatives broadly pushed back against revolutions in Russia, the growth of communism.

Right.

They saw themselves as defenders of the Western tradition, and they were pushing back against movements in both the progressive world, but also the sort of broader global space, that would push us toward revolutionary politics.

And I think their fear of revolutionary politics is really clear, which is that revolutions kill people.

They they destabilize the kinds of patterns that humans need to survive and flourish.

And they leave power vacuums in a lot of situations where you end up with authoritarians at the end.

So that's a very brief primer.

Probably missing something.

Well, can I extend on this point on looking at some of what you wrote about the value of moving slowly and thoughtfully?

As a principle of conservatism in evaluating what needs to change versus what many tech CEOs who are aligned with Trump like to talk about.

They like to say, move fast and break things, which is a tenant in Silicon Valley.

Here's what you write.

Quote Kirk's third, fourth and fifth principles of conservatism all stress the importance of moving slowly, respecting norms and traditions, because many exist due to hard won wisdom that we've long forgotten.

And because predictability is what allows us to live together in peace.

End quote.

But again, won't conservatives now argue that you are defending institutions too much, that institutions have proven that they should not be defended, that they should be changed or torn down, and that Musk, while sloppy, is taking that chainsaw out for a reason.

Yes, I suppose part of the reason I'm politically homeless is that I will defend institutions against libertarians, progressives, and conservatives who want to just tear them down for no clear reason.

Going back to that predictability piece, and I think that this is something that when I talk to, especially Trump supporters, I think is really it's in some ways we're talking past each other.

I have absolutely no problem with increasing the efficiency of the federal government, reducing the size of the federal government.

These are not, I think I don't think those are problematic ends.

The concern that I have is the means by which you work to achieve political ends matter almost as much as the ends themselves.

So if you use violence and cruelty and unpredictability and chaos to achieve certain ends, the chances are really good you're not going to get that end at all.

You're not going to get the outcome that you're hoping for, but you're also going to do enormous damage to the norms and customs of the people themselves.

And in political theory, we talk a lot about norms, because that's exactly what the kinds of bulwarks against authoritarianism, against absolute power, those came from our expectations that elections would be carried out a certain way, our expectations that people would uphold the principles of free speech even if they didn't like what the other side was saying.

And so, to a certain degree, all both of our major parties have thrown those principles out the window, and they've shown themselves to be opportunists.

They're willing to do whatever it takes in the short term to get to some unclear outcome.

At the end.

But it's deeply, deeply damaging to do that.

And that's partly because human politics, human governance and human social life relies on being able to predict how other people are going to do things.

And you can see this in the stock market right now.

The reason that the stock market's tanking is because no one's going to invest if they don't know what Trump is going to be doing or protecting or caring about in six months.

I wouldn't invest in a small business in this climate.

we don't know what tariffs are going to be in place or not in place in a week, let alone a month.

So unpredictability is really bad.

It's bad for the economy.

It's bad for politics.

anti-Conservative and it's anti-conservative.

Yeah.

All right.

Back to your phone calls.

Hoover.

Pittsford.

Hey, Hoover.

Go ahead.

Hey, you get a feather in your cap for me?

This is one of your best guests ever.

seriously, I mean, ever.

This is the kind of thought we need in the noon hour in Rochester.

Thank you, ma'am, for coming out.

And thank you for articulating things.

let's start out with, Reagan, did not give the the country a 3.8 billion, trillion dollar debt.

The Congress did.

The Congress was in control by Democrats from the mid 50s up until Newt Gingrich decided he was going to invent a new conservatism that people could feel comfortable with.

And he did.

And that's when all a lot of the rhetoric about the left and right started, because for 40 years, two generations, the institutions of Washington were held and controlled by the Liberal Democrats.

Maybe they weren't liberal so much then, but they certainly are today.

And people said, enough is enough.

We're going to start taking back, clawing back and starting over again.

I'll tell you something else.

I worked as a government auditor auditing federal programs for about six, seven, eight years.

When I was in the younger part of my career, and I saw some great things being done by federal programs that were funded from, LTA, a community development block grants that 2 or 3 other federal programs, and we audited them.

And there were great things and there were crappy things that were going on.

But if nobody looks if you don't look at these programs, you're not going to know what they're achieving and what your federal money or, and your contribution of the local and the state contribution to this program.

What you're getting for that money and this this woman who's been on with you, I'm going to start reading her books because she's got everything together.

So what, Evan, do you get to actually get two feathers in your cap?

So I'm going to get off and just listen.

Thank you.

I don't even have any caps for feathers.

I guess I need a cap for feathers.

what's the Substack so people can read more of your work here?

It is.

The radical Moderates Guide to Life.

And so if you put that in the Google, the Substack should come right up.

And Lauren Hall is my guest.

Now, Rebecca says principle conservatism.

This is a joke, right?

Even with a generous dating, there's not been a principled conservatism in at least 30 years.

The fact that so-called principled conservatism of the mainstream Republican Party was, in the end, so easily co-opted by MAGA is the proof.

That's from Rebecca Lauren.

Yeah.

It's very hard for me to defend the the way in which the GOP fell, in 2016 onward.

I don't have it's I don't I can't and won't defend, the sort of the crumbling and I was a little bit I was sort of heartened after January 6th, I was hopeful because there was an initial conservative backlash.

this kind of violence doesn't represent the, the American people.

It doesn't represent the things we stand for.

and then very quickly, the story changed.

And so the spin started again.

And so you saw these same people who had initially condemned January 6th.

They all got into line and they all closed ranks.

So I'm almost all the ones who didn't basically left government.

Yes, they got out.

And I think that is, again, a really dangerous warning sign for me.

as a political scientist, when when moderate, thoughtful people from any side and I'm including moderate principled conservatives because they do exist, they do exist.

when the only option they have is to get out because they, they are either they feel unsafe and I mean unsafe in the real sense.

Their security details are stripped or their families are threatened.

If that's the only option, they can't even have a seat at the table.

We're in real trouble.

I, let me just try to squeeze in a few other points here.

because we got two minutes so short answer time.

Yep.

Does the getting in line even after January 6th indicate to you that for all the concern about identitarian ism on the left, which you yourself have expressed concern about, there is identitarian ism on the right that has become ascendant?

Absolutely.

Tribalism is a is a fundamental part of human nature.

The in-group outgroup effect.

And I think we're seeing that really clearly.

And one of the things that Trump has been very good at as a rhetorician is triggering tribalism.

Dallas says you're concerned about violence, like attacking Tesla dealerships and charging stations.

That kind.

He's kind of snarky, saying, how come you haven't mentioned violence from the left?

Yeah, everyone's behaving badly.

If violence of all kinds, it's incompatible with a liberal democratic society.

Kathy says.

The conservatives, I think the conservatives have principles.

The problem is they insist the rest of us accept and endorse those principles.

The erosion between church and state, advancing a Christian peace, the government, the abortion movement trying to force their principles on other people.

The whole war on Christmas nonsense that's been going on my whole life.

That's from Kathy.

What do you think?

Yes.

I also do think that progressives have made the same kinds of moves, the expectation that that people will fall in line, that people will.

I think both sides have fallen prey to a really dangerous assumption, which is that if we just persist long enough, people with different political beliefs will just disappear and that it's simply not the case.

And so we have to learn how to figure out how to live with political diversity, as opposed to just either wishing it away or coercing it away.

Well, you wrote the epitaph for principled conservatism.

We're down to our last 25 seconds.

Is there a future that a realistic future for, for principled conservatism in American politics?

I think it will have to take a combination of electoral reforms and and a deep courage in, within the GOP, and I'm not sure that's there.

Will you come back and talk about pluralism?

I would love to come back.

Would you do that?

This is always fun.

I would love to do that.

So we'll put that on the calendar for as soon as we can schedule it.

In the meantime, if you want to check out, Lauren Substack, Lauren will tell you one more time where to find her Substack.

Go ahead.

It is the Radical Moderates Guide to Life that again, that's a great title.

and Lauren is the author of a number of work.

She's pluralism fellow, with the Mercatus Center's program on Pluralism and Civil Discourse, and author and professor of political science at RIT.

Come back soon.

Thank you for being here.

Thank you so much.

Having more connections coming up in a moment.

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