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The host introduces the Thought on Tap series and frames the evening’s theme of rethinking conservatism. He sketches conservatism as a tradition-based response to the French Revolution and explains the tension between abstract ideology and lived political practice.
i don't know who's on the other side of that but i'll be right back
all right well there looks like the the webinar is open so we are going to kick off so hi i'm cal mingram i'm an assistant professor in the department of political science at the university of nevada reno andi'd like you to like to welcome you to the december edition of thought on tap thank you for tuning in uh thought on tap is a public engagement series brought to you by the core humanities program here atunr as well as the college of liberal arts and the good folks at lapping planet the theme of the series this year is rethinking uh we've already had the pleasure in previous months of rethinking america our tech overlordsin academia uh today we're going to be rethinking conservatism and conservative movements uh and this spring we'll be rethinking artism sports work and money and race and comedy so please keep your eyes and schedules open for those on
the second thursday of the months to come um so being that we only have until 6 30 or so tonight we'll see how you know maybe we'll flex that a little bit i'm going to jump into a briefset of introductory remarks on today's topic before well welcoming our panelists and starting the conversation uh crucially and i'll note this again later well we'll start with me asking our panelists a few questions we're going to leave hopefully15 or 20 minutes at the end today for questions from you the audience if you'd like to submit a question to a particular panelist or to all the panelists please do so through the zoom webinars q a functionuh so by way of introduction of today's topic rethinking conservatism and conservative movements uh like most words with high political stakes the only consistency across uses of the word conservatism is an inconsistency but 20 conservatives in a room
you'll probably wind up with 30 definitions of conservatism i'll note that the same thing goes for liberalism or particularly socialism today in good conservative fashion however my goal is not to try to figure out the one true enduringperfect and abstract definition of conservatism but instead to talk through the history practice and living tradition of conservatism and what it can teach us about the world this approach is consistent with much of the work on conservatism inmy own field political theory which often frames conservatism as a non-ideology or anti-philosophy best understood in contrast to the dogmas of liberalism and socialism to do conservatism requires turning to the wisdom of traditions and all their place-based peculiaritiesto guide action rather than to abstract rules utopian ideals or universal projects that claim to transcend context and circumstance history to the conservative is therefore understood as a valuable guide and a precious gift worthy of care conservation and
consultation this is the case not just in matters of policies in government but also in economics religion art culture romance family ecology cuisine athletics pretty much every realm of human endeavor and so while there's a lot of avariety of proto-conservatives and conservativisms that can be identified centuries and millennia ago for instance folks in my field love to argue like would aristotle have been a conservative i'm going to bracket those kind of nattering conversations by justsort of saying for now that conservatism gained its modern form as a set of responses to the french revolution the revolution the story goes sought to overturn traditional forms of authority and replace them with a new politics celebratingscientific administration universal human rights and the utopian utopian possibilities of human perfectability the conservative response to the revolution sought to pump the brakes a little bit what good after all our ideal schemes folks like edmund burke asked if
they bear little relationship to the particularities of the place they're being applied what are the habits deep connections and community values maybe the informed prejudgments and ad-hoc arrangements that form the backbone of our social organism all radicals mightbe able to chop the head off a king or write a manifesto that doesn't mean they know how to live life in a complex world so all this impulse to draw from the wisdom of past experience as aguide seems simple enough the real challenges come in practice after all whose wisdom is preserved which narratives of the past are we talking or not talking about how do we distinguish between guiding lessons and cautionary tales and howcan the past guide us into the future anyways these broadcast questions continue to shape a lot of intellectual conversations about the nature of conservatism to this day however if you want to move from abstract conservatism to an effective
conservative movement you've got to settle a lot of these questions for people to act in concert toward a goal it's helpful to establish a certain agreement about what those goals are and how to achieve them by getting alot of folks to work together over time getting a lot of folks to work together over time requires exactly the kind of ideological commitment and consistency that's anathema to the berkey and conservative add to that the complication oftrying to do this in the united states a country literally founded by a revolution that it still deeply identifies with you've got a really interesting set of philosophical impactful challenges so in the united states movement conservatism as i'mgoing to be calling it uh her as we might refer to it tonight uh emerged in the form of fusionism a term coined by then national review editor frank meyer to denote the 20th century marriage that's his term
marriage of libertarian economics and social traditionalism meyer's use of the term marriage here is super meaningful libertarianism and traditionalism are two ideas that cannot be synthesized into one thing but instead live in an unavoidable and productive tension capitalismdisrupts tradition tradition bounds capitals movement but the two make a good match when they commit to one another and are strengthened precisely by their differences this isn't like a romance novel this is a marriage so there's a longstory to tell here about the rise of fusionism its coronation with reagan's election in 1980 it's apotheosis and clinton's pledge that even for the democrats the era of big government is over fusionism's adoption of conservative orthodoxy can't beseparated from anti-communism in the truman doctrine from generalized opposition to the civil rights movement the interests of global capital anxiety about women in the workplace and challenges to masculinity soap opera squabbles among the national review of national reviews
editorial board questions about cultural powers relationship with political power myriad other forces all of these are things you need to talk about when you talk about conservatism but long story short conservatism carries on the anti-ideology that finds itselftrying to muddle through the sort of same weird world that we all live in today so will the marriage of libertarianism and traditionalism survive is divorce or polyamory on the horizon and how far can one metaphor be stretched
The panelists are introduced and the discussion begins with how conservative students are perceived on campus. Julian describes misunderstandings, stereotypes, and the difficulty of being taken seriously as a conservative student.
for answers to these questions i'm turning to our panel today um so i want to introduce folks um i guess you can wave when i say your name it's got your name attached but anyways just want to makesure uh our audience gets to know you a little bit before i start posing questions so first off and uh he will be receiving the first questions of warrington we have julian zabke julian is a undergraduate student atunr studying political science and philosophy his research interests are focused on private military contractors and political theory he's contributed to multiple conservative political campaigns since 2016 is active in conservative political circles on campus and around town also notethat he's a fabulous student as i've had yeah and uh he's a great friend to many of his this in action really okay next up we have mark pingle professor pingle is a member of the department of economics
at unr since 1990 having received a phd from the university of southern california professor pingles published papers books and other writings in the areas of macroeconomics behavioral economics and experimental economics since fall 2008 professor pingle is focused onbuilding an entrepreneurship program at unr which has fundraised over seven million dollars to support entrepreneurship forces and foster collaboration among community groups for the aim of fostering economic development in nevada also note uh yeah it was raised ina cattle ranching family probably lifted more bales of hay and picked up more sticks than you've ever seen but he's traded those in guitars and pianos so maybe we'll end with a song tonight um okay and then finallywe have christina la dam professor dem is a member of the university of nevada arena department of political science before joining the faculty at unr she received her mpa from the university of new hampshire and her phd from
the university of colorado professor illidam specializes in american political behavior and political methodology for their current work using an experimental approach to understand the ways in which formal deliberative events can promote beneficial outcomes she's also a fabulous colleagueuh and i should run this by it but also you baked you baked a really good pie for our department potluck yesterday that i'm still kind of uh ruminating on so thank you um anyways so that's our introductionsthat's me that's most of what you're going to hear from me today i want to hand it over to our panelists i want to thank our panelists for being here during a very busy time of year and alsoour participants and our audience for showing up today so i want to start with a round of questions in the order i introduced the panel but first i'll note again as questions come to you in the audience please
submit them through the q a so we can end our conversation with us today um so for the first round of questions i want to ask folks a little bit about their sort of takes on the state ofconservatism as it exists in the world today um and starting out with julia um i'm wondering so in your experience as a college student what have you found to be some of your peers preconceptions about conservative students andlike what have you found in your assessment that they get right or they get wrong do they get anything right go off well i think what they initially get right is the fact that it almost seems contradictory becauseyou would expect that younger people would want change in society because they identify problems as they look at the people that actually run the country whereas conservatism has a long gain for the past or at least wanting to
maintain a status quo so there's an initial contradiction in young conservative and that's part of why there's problems with preconceptions of liberal students towards conservative students and there's obvious uh ideologue statements such as branding conservatives with certain namesor certain terms to devalue their beliefs and that's just a minority but the problem is is that there are unactive political students that are influenced by their peers and so when their peers are either on the right orthe left they are influenced by their beliefs and if their friends are all labeling conservatives in one way they're going to believe that and that causes well issues because they're not being portrayed correctly on unr about a yearor two ago there was a problem with turning point usa where they were presenting outside the joe crowley student union and the liberal students came up and tossed their tables over and generally didn't engage in a civic conversation
and the problem with that is not necessarily that they're just stupid or anything like that no it's just a lack of understanding and the larger problem with that is the fact that conservative students aren't willing to engage withtheir fellow liberal peers either they come into college with their own preconceptions about college and liberals and professors frankly they view professors as generally being liberal and i had a conversation with professor griffin this morning in the politicalscience department about how personally he wants conservative students to express their beliefs and be successful but the problem i told him was that it's you're a liberal professor in the eyes of conservative students and so they're not goingto trust you when you say you're going to judge them fairly and that's a preconception that we have to fix with conservative students by just demonstrating with students such as myself where i'm able to express my beliefs and
do well because i can defend it well and that's just where we need to go we need to change preconceptions of liberal students but also change the preconceptions of conservative students that only exacerbate the problem yeah i meani will yeah speak to you know in class you you've been you're you're vocal and you are but you are thoughtful and that is something that i think brings it challenges a lot of folks like you see likea brain scramble for a second here like now how can this guy possibly be or you know you know be be thoughtful and also believe something different than me there's a kind of uh there's a there's a deep
Professor Pingle explains how economics relates to conservative thought, emphasizing values, stability, and freedom. The conversation also introduces Frank Meyer and the fusionist idea that traditionalism and libertarianism exist in productive tension.
confoundedness that's kind of a it's precious to see in some ways and very important um i want to move into a kind of a kind of similar question um at least for professor pingle now um so folks oftenand i guess this is sort of both maybe with reference to preconceptions that folks carry on campus very often in the kind of larger political discourse but also kind of connects with the opening remarks a little bit isit like folks often talk about conservatism as being nostalgic or trapped in the past but like you're an economist like you're in a field that's pulled into like partisan conversations about what we need to do right now andin the future and so i guess understanding that kind of interesting position that economists are often placed in like what is the relationship between the sort of traditional and la say fair kind of economic side like the sort
of socially traditional and the last either economic sides in contemporary conservatism okay what i teach my students is economics as a science uh is separate from say democrat and republican politics in this sense the world works how itworks it doesn't work a democrat way or republican way a conservative way a liberal way and so i think one unifying theme in economics separate from policy and i'll explain why in a moment is just the the desireto understand when people interact what happens how does the world work so we collect data that's the the fact or observation side and then we try to explain what we observe and so i don't think the politics orthe perspectives liberal versus conservative comes in there where i think it comes in is to decide what to do you have to bring in your values and so i think what separates liberals and conservatives are are those values
and then to get at your question where economics comes in when i've thought and i don't have the political science background that you all have i skimmed edward edmond burke a little bit last night to try to rememberfrench revolution stuff because i vaguely remembered it but when i think of the traditional conservatism you're trying to conserve something and your notion that we're conserving tradition sometimes that's good often it's very bad and i think i dothink the tension that you put the laissez-faire capitalism however you want to describe that pushes back on that what i would say modern conservatives should try to do is identify the traditions that are worth conserving one element oftradition that's very valuable is it provides stability if you think about common law and tradition we know what to do in a given situation because that's just the way it's always been done and there's goodness in that but
sometimes the way things have always been done are very bad and need to change and so that's the bad side of conservatism and finally to bring in the laissez faire i think and you hinted at this a lotof modern conservatives what they want to conserve is freedom economic freedom in particular to borrow thomas jefferson i know a little bit of quotes here he talked about a free exercise of industry he says that the first principleof association is the free exercise of industry and the fruits acquired by it and so i think one thing that rubs conservatives is if you work hard and you obtain and then government or other people just take fromyou that's an injustice that rubs conservatives maybe more than liberals and so we want to conserve that liberty and and i probably can comment more later but i'll cut it off there i mean that's absolutely like the core
of i don't know i'm on i'm on a frank meyer kick lately i had to work him in there kind of one of the founding founding figures and fusionism pounding figures in the kind of national review image ofthat conservatism and like oh his line is like you know virtue isn't meaningful if it's not freely chosen and like that's kind of the relationship for him between a lot of these sort of traditionalist values like you haveto have the space to be able to opt into being virtuous and without that sort of choice and without rewards that are given based on that free choice in some way like it's not virtue at all it's coolit's you know you might as well be like a rock following the law of gravity just falling down a hill or something like that very good yeah i'll have to read sorry guys i'll have to read him or
what did you say his name was i think people in the audience might appreciate that too yeah frank meyer he wrote that this book yeah in defense of freedom it's a it's a super super interesting he doesn't getenough credibility in part because he like created the water that the fish swim in so they don't really pay attention but uh you know and he's not quite as big of a personality as bill buckley but interesting character
Christina LaDam discusses what political science and psychology can say about conservative identity in the American public. She explains that most Americans are not strongly ideological and that the conservative movement is shaped more by partisanship than by consistent ideology.
yeah um yeah and anyways yeah and so i guess i want to maybe move to christina um professor oladam so your work you're a political psychologist in part by training and you you do work in political psychology andso i'm wondering like what are your kind of you know putting on we're not doing like you know freud or something like that right now we're talking about different kind of version that but like what what do folksin your field find to be sort of the defining traits of folks that identify as conservative like what are these traits that you know kind of mark the conservative mind in conservative psychology what maybe distinguishes them and arethese traits something that have been found to be fairly stable over time or do they shift yeah so thanks um the i would say that overwhelmingly not overwhelmingly but the majority of americans would identify themselves as conservative when
we ask a basic ideology question um moderate is also like a modal response as well but more people will say that they are conservative than liberal that said most americans aren't ideological at all so they aren't able toreport a consistent ideology in terms of how it would map on to political views so while partisanship looks one way um ideology doesn't map on um so in that regard trying to figure out what does conservative mean there's10 to 15 percent of americans who we could consider ideological um so as the previous speakers have mentioned there is kind of the return to status quo um or you know thinking of a good olden days that uhthere is a desire to return to um but other than that as it maps on to policy positions it doesn't so the vast majority of the american public when you ask them about policies they want to see implemented
will take a consistently liberal approach um so i think trying to understand ideology in the american public is really difficult and i'm not sure that it necessarily has a ton of value in terms of what it brings topolitical side political science because it it doesn't make sense um but the uh the tradition of it is really constant i was pulling up slides from when i teach political ideology and the number of people who identify asconservative and liberal and moderate are close to straight lines over time um so it's a consistent uh mindset that people have but i'm not sure what that means to people what it maps on to um so yeah realityreality tends to be fairly humbling for like us political theorists sometimes uh we we we like to believe that these words and these i you know ideologies and you know we go back to our burke and his reflections
on the french revolution and as you know the philosophical rigor like oh yeah that's you know you know cut and then we can come together and reason about these things kind of in clear ideological opposition it's like andthose people are surely in the 10 10 to 15 of people who haven't consistent ideology but the vast majority of americans don't yeah yeah like well i have a lot of follow-up questions but i guess i mean thefollow-up questions actually that i kind of most want to ask is fairly closely connected to the one that i actually wanted to ask you next uh professor with them so i'm going to kind of stick with you ifthat's cool um so like you're kind of spoken a bit to the kind of conservative mind or at least kind of conservative identity as it relates to partisan positions and policy proposals um but i guess the question that
falls from that then is like then what what is what does that make the conservative movement um like thinking of political discourse in the united states this is a term we hear versions of a lot um it's somethingthat is you know it's again you know kind of the water that the fish swim in this idea that there is a conservative movement but what is the state of this movement as political science as you know scholarof american politics as the discipline as a whole kind of understands it where where's the conservative movement at well i think it depends on who you're going to ask right and um in american politics in general partisanship drivesalmost everything so partisanship whether you identify as a democrat or a republican and that is about 90 percent of the public can pick their party and it doesn't map on to ideology um so where we're at right now
in terms of the conservative movement as it relates to partisanship is we have the donald trump presidency that has a strong attachment and then you know the lincoln project right you have people who are republicans people on theright might call them rhinos but they might also say that they stand for more of the historical conservative movement so i think that there is a lot of inconsistency in terms of where the movement is going to goum i think there are a lot of things to wrestle with in terms of maintaining the status quo of a country that historically withheld rights from vast parts of the country and numbers of people so i think itneeds to grapple with that idea um but yeah i'm not a pro uh i can't i can't say that i know what the um future of the movement means but i do think that it's in a stage of
uh grappling with those issues yeah and i think yeah i'm going to push you on that a little bit more later i guess the sort of prognostication crystal ball side of things probably which i don't know we canall it's sort of science fiction right we get to kind of you know we can we can speculate and have fun but uh well the american public is largely predictable actually and we see the uh ebbs and flowsof what the american public wants in terms of policy outcomes and we're a very moderate country and you know when we think of it in that way i guess oh so gosh i'm going to slow my mind downand i'm going to instead rather than me asking all the questions i'm going to prompt folks again if you do have questions please do stick them in the q a so we can uh guide the conversation as we
The discussion turns to Friedrich Hayek and the Reno-based Hayek Group, including its mission and outreach work. Pingle connects Hayek’s ideas about freedom, markets, and cooperation to local education and entrepreneurship efforts.
move forward direct them to particular people the panelists as a whole we've got some good ones coming in um and so you know throw your throw your lot in absolutely um so yeah i guess uh it's moving uhback to professor pingle i'm wondering if you could speak a little bit uh you work a lot with a group the hayek group in town um i was wondering if you could speak a little bit to speak alittle bit about friedrich hayek himself and how this works relates to the or how his work relates to your group's work in reno and maybe also factoring in you know some of the stuff that uh professor ladam hasbeen talking about too i guess is like you know the sort of like relationship between you know political political movements and sort of ideological movements or something kind of how that how your group situates in there right i
would say friedrich hayek along with milton friedman are two well-known economists well known for more than just this but especially well known for explaining why freedom works and maybe why moving too far away from that doesn't work ifyou take friedrich hayek's road to serfdom he basically was talking about hitler's rise to power and moving away from freedom and as you do that you'll end up with tyranny and an economy that won't work too well thebasic reason for that is markets extend cooperation this is a hayekian idea if if you have to know everyone to coordinate then relationships actually can mess things up pretty badly in that oh i don't want to cooperate withyou you're not of the same religion you're not of the same race but if all i need to know is the price of your product and it's better than the next person i don't care your race or your
religion or whatever and that's only part of the reason cooperation extends so friedrich hayek would say it's not merely a choice it's a mechanical thing that freedom simply will work better and then if you take somebody like bastiatand you add it to that freedom is fair um we bring in externalities so when when you mentioned laissez faire capitalism some people would interpret that as no government well you need government from a hayek's point of viewto uh define and protect property and property rights so that people then know what they own and can trade but then also when people are left free they can injure others and so still a proper role for governmenti would say from a hacky and conservative point of view is we have to manage all that so crime is obvious but then not crime it's just i incidentally hurt you but i do it badly and so how
do you manage those situations bringing that to the hyatt group there were a group of business people in reno who after an election felt freedom was underappreciated they just started meeting once in that month and it grew anda person eventually formalized it so what the hayek group the specific mission is promoting freedom and prosperity in northern nevada through education we just have monthly dinner meetings a wide variety of topics actually some you could say liberalspeakers on topics so it's not simply a conservative preaching to the choir thing but about four years ago we also took on financial literacy as an outreach and we've raised hundreds of thousands of dollars put financial literary literacycurriculum at about 25 northern nevada schools a site license for washoe county school district why do that the idea is you're more free if you can manage your finances about fifty percent of divorce well about fifty percent of
marriages end up in divorce and about fifty percent of marriages break up because people don't manage their finances well and end up fighting over that and so it's a very eclectic group uh just one last thing on thisour speaker december 16th if people want to go to the hayek website you can just look up hyatt group reno uh is a guy named peter klein he's from baylor he's associated with the mises institute so there's ahyatt von mises was hayek's advisor and he will speak to just entrepreneurship and innovation as a driving force in society and why you need freedom to have significant innovation so it's an interesting eclectic group a good place tonetwork if you're into that but a good place to learn as well and you're muted there you go yeah i got i i started thinking thinking about questions ahead and then i started uh yeah didn't even click to
start it going off but yeah i mean for one i mean the idea yeah the financial literacy divorce thing i mean that's a that kind of an interesting that that starts getting into again going back to the imageof the marriage between traditionalism and libertarianism and how acrimonious that divorce could end up being perhaps if it ends up happening and then uh who gets the house in the end and who's got the kids i don't knowum but again how far can the metaphor be pushed we'll find out but it's yeah super i'm gonna have to start i honestly i just found out about the group and i'm gonna have to uh yeah they soundlike a really really cool really cool kind of thing i'll take it for your dinner december 16th if you want to come it's cool i'm not far enough outside of grad school to uh turn down free food under
Julian describes the issues that unite and divide younger conservatives, including tech companies, family values, Trump, religion, race, and LGBTQ issues. The panel explores how generational change is reshaping conservative identity and creating internal tensions.
any circumstances so look out um cool uh so uh i guess yeah julian i guess kind of picking up on this conversation a little bit but also um maybe kind of at the risk of making you you knowpicking up and like making you speak for the youth um too much you know what are the hello fellow kids uh what do you see as some of the positions that are kind of emerging to bind uh conservativelike younger conservatives together um what do you see as kind of also being some of the more conscientious or sorry not conscientious but contentious and controversial topics among younger conservatives that might mark changes in how conservative identification mightlike realign in the future with obviously christina's point that like things are relatively stable in america in general kind of in mind i guess but yeah what what are the young conservatives up to and what are they fighting
about well i think as professor ladam was mentioning earlier there's there's a lot more differences than there are similarities between all the people that may classify themselves as conservatives but in terms of what unites them i think themost obvious and most contemporary one is tech corporations uh mainly because of the issues of freedom of speech as well as mainly just trump being banned off of social media that was a big spark for conservatives especially youngconservatives to start being worried about tech corporations uh but probably more similar to what we would expect from conservatism is family values is still very important to young conservatives and that's pretty self-explanatory but maybe almost seem contradictory isthe fact that icons are very important to young conservatives which almost seems contrary to the idea of maybe rugged individualism that conservatives kind of try to express a lot but they feel the need to latch onto an icon
whether that be reagan whether that be trump or lincoln but that's when we start getting into the divisions there is with all republicans and conservatives and especially young conservatives there is a worry about trump's influence on the partyand they would rather go back to this golden age of reagan conservatism but then those are i would argue a larger sect among young conservatives towards this trump right-wing populist ideology but i think that's when we start movinginto the concerns of social issues that are unique to young conservatives comparison to older conservatives what is what a lot of people don't realize is that trump was the first president to enter office openly supportive of gay marriagehe was open about it and frankly he just maybe didn't care but that is a pretty significant for conservatives and so what you have going on there is this division on social issues um a lot of that originates
in religion not many young conservatives aren't as religious as older conservatives and so that creates a problem of having to justify their beliefs without religious arguments do you also have the issue of minorities in the party that isa growing phenomenon there was a wall street journal poll that came out yesterday that hispanics are now evenly divided between the two parties which is significant maybe it's because democrats have taken hispanic voters for granted but either waythere's there's a problem with minorities entering the party because it causes an identity crisis for these minority conservatives because there are older conservatives as well as a history of conservatism that isn't friendly to minorities so that's something thathas to be addressed for on almost an individual basis what i think is even more contentious is lgbt issues gay homosexuals and bisexuals are being more accepted into the in conservative youth than i think in any other generation
of conservatives and it frankly doesn't seem like a problem for even some of the older conservatives they seem to be embracing it because at least there's more younger conservatives but i think when we start moving into more contentiousissues such as members of the transgender community it starts getting tougher many conservatives younger and older are not willing to accept transgenders it's a hot button political issue and frankly it's not something that conservatives seem that like they'rewilling to compromise on but all of this ends up culminating in is an identity crisis for young conservatives they are more liberal on race issues some even going as far to actually support black lives matter and other issuesbut at the core of all of it they're having to grapple with the fact that maybe they don't fit what people actually view as a conservative such as myself i'm a hispanic student college student that is a conservative
and that seems contradictory in itself to many people
oh yeah i think that that's i mean that is a there's been so much think spilled for sure i think particularly i mean not just in conservative circles but kind of all over the place and sort of likewhat what will become of like the sort of evangelical the evangelical right which has often been you know long list for a long time sort of understood as like a sort of mobilizable base you can kind of dependon in primary elections or something like that and it holds this holds a lot of sway in the party and yeah what happens with a generation of folks that don't have necessarily that same kind of set of connectionsto a particular particular form of community like the church community but also to a particular tradition and certain particular sort of social values i think it's going to be a really interesting thing to watch that space about for
sure
can may i comment on that real quick sure yeah right absolutely i i think the libertarian brand of conservative conservatism allows a reconciliation there i think many who have very strong faith understand that they wouldn't want another faiththat they don't accept pressed upon them and so i think they can separate their the faith that they would pass to their family uh and and the values that they would pass to their family from forcing those onothers so basic question is what should you be willing to force on others and it's not necessary to i may not think homosexuality is is right or transgenderism or whatever but why should that matter if i employ youit has no bearing on your productivity or or whatever and so i think the conservative movement has moved a long way toward that perspective even people who are hardcore evangelical they're not interested in pushing their religious values on
people they're more interested in a world where their religious values aren't pushed out the door and so they actually are willing to embrace a wide variety of people because i think there's more of a recognition that if you'regoing to push one way people can push back the other what i think that's an important caveat is a lot of the times when people view say these divisions and conservatives where it might be disdain or maybe justnot full approval of certain groups that's often associated with just originating from hate and that is a misconception the disillusion with say certain lgbt groups or certain social issues i don't think originates from hate but rather from thefocus on family family values they still value the family and they see these as either threats to the family or just things that aren't traditional to them and i don't think it comes and that's an important caveat that
i think liberal students need to remember is it doesn't come from hate although you can't still find hateful people it's not always and for the majority of people it is not yeah i mean this really gets to i
The panelists speculate about the future of conservatism in the United States, especially under Trump’s influence. They debate whether fiscal conservatism is fading, whether populism will dominate, and how the next election may shape the movement.
mean so i guess i'll move on to the like the last question we'll kind of do a quick round of answers to that and then turn it over to some really great audience questions that have been coming andi'm really stoked on these and you know we could stick around for a few hours and answer them but uh um yeah i think yeah a lot of the really initial conversations like kind of going back to youknow 50s and 1960s and the kind of emergence of this movement there was such an anxiety that if the libertarian strain ends up winning out over the traditionalist sort of strain and conservatism and kind of american sort ofyou know if those two if ultimately libertarianism kind of trumps conservatism as the sort of core commitment of the particularly the republican party that that would undercut the sort of ties of community that there's something about the free
market that kind of inherently undoes the sorts of connections and attachments that are so essential to i mean somebody who already jim and as these questions already bringing up like tocqueville those sort of like deep rooted connections toone another that are essential to democratic functioning kind of worry about a kind of rootless atomized economized society actually destroying the sort of bedrock of democracy and national identity was like something like this one of the reasons thatlike russell kirk was angry at everybody in the 1950s and 1960s because that was his sort of big anxiety with all these dang libertarians coming and calling himself conservative i don't know there's a lot to get into niceokay so i want to ask one last question at the risk of making folks prognosticate a little bit too much pretend to be you know punditry is i don't know i i find punditry tedious but i'm still going
to do it and then gate asks people to do it a little bit i just kind of want to ask ask all of our panelists the same question which is like what and we sort of got into thisa little bit like what do you think the future holds for conservatism in the united states um i think uh yeah and i guess i i didn't really pick an order but if we go uh let's say christinachristina mark julian on this i guess like what what does the future hold what do you see what do you see in the crystal balli think it's going to largely depend on what we see in the next election at least on the political science side um i think president trump has made it pretty clear that he is going to run again andthe more that the republican party dominates around trump um i think that is um it does present kind of an existential challenge to conservatism because trump doesn't align with so many conservative values and i think that could prove
problematic for the movement moving forward um other than that i you know i started out saying this country isn't ideological so i'm pretty confident that the uh 10 of people who identify as either liberal or conservative won't changethat much um i you know partisanship runs the day in terms of elections and how things play out um the movement in general i think does need to figure out um some identity questions for themselves in terms ofwhat types of rights that are wanting to be pursued if it is a more libertarian push towards freedom um then that does need to reconcile some of the social issues that um are kind of in conflict right nowthe cases before the supreme court right now um from where we look the conservative bench is going to go are going to be stripping freedoms from people so i think there is kind of an existential crisis in the
movement and i think the next election will tell us how things turned which out i think particularly important because uh yeah so many of these conversations have to do with voting rights too right and so it's gonna benot just a chance to sort some of these things out but it's gonna be a chance to sort of see how a lot of these partisan kind of pushes by a lot of particularly sort of republican republican statestate representatives secretaries of state governors to restrict voting rights will actually impact folks capacity for democratic participation and and what districts look like after the census so yeah yeah it's funny everything is changing and everything is staying thesame that is basically political sciences uh mock like analysis almost everything from what i can tell that's why i love our field um i don't know if mark or julian would one of you want to jump in a
little bit i guess mark i think there are two perspectives there are the ideas and then there's the next election i think the next election bodes very well for conservatives because of a number of events afghanistan the borderthe rule of law in the cities homelessness all of these things i think from the average person a more liberal approach has not worked so i'll mention that but then from the idea perspective i think there will alwaysbe a liberal conservative bent because there's a more government versus less government bent there's also a family is the core unit in society versus a broader government allegiance kind of bent and there's a there's a freedom versus theindividual freedom versus not going you know to the federalist anti-federalist kind of thing so i think there will both of these perspectives are healthy for the future the last thing i want to say is for our nation i
think what's most important is that people can change their minds they can listen to something like this and say that mark tingle guy's an idiot and and so i've become more liberal because everything that came out of hismouth was really dumb and so as long as we can discuss these things and get uh you know and we're adaptable as individuals and if we're not adaptable as individuals as long as we can keep adapting as anation i think that's really the most important thing for political success the failures are north korea cuba russia china where there's such a dominance that you can't change go aheadwell i think what's going to drive most of the change is the fact that physical conservatism is on the decline since the reagan era it's been on the decline and frankly it's in 20 years or so i doubt
it's going to be present in congress or policy much at all besides maybe a few loud people like a new version of rand paul or something but beyond that i think this conflict between the reagan-era republicans and trumpair republicans i think the populists will pull out and take over the party and i think part of that is because the rhetoric is so strong and because fiscal conservatism is on its way out these more populist socialideas where basically welfare is becoming more acceptable for conservatives but it's with a caveat it's welfare for the american man not the illegal immigrant or the other and so that's where a lot of that's going to come fromis that change of fiscal conservatism is going to drive the rise of populism but what's also going to happen i think is we're going to enter an era of republican politics at least in terms of the presidency there's
usually periods of republican presidents democratic presidents i think trump although he failed in a sec to get a second term i think he's a transitional candidate for these more populist republicans and i think eventually we will get astronger and probably more influential populist republican and what's going to drive that is the fact that minorities such as hispanics are increasingly joining the republican party and conservatives and on top of that democrats aren't that great at legislatingor getting their goals done as conservatives are conservatives to seize the supreme court when they're in congress they're usually more effective in most measures whereas democrats are struggling a bit more or unwilling to make changes that they sayrepublicans are blocking when in reality they really aren't it's it's themselves but i think that's that's just where we're heading towards it's going to be this conservative age of politics in the next 10 or 20 years
Audience questions shift the conversation to climate change and conservative responses to environmental policy. The panel discusses scientific consensus, economic tradeoffs, motivated reasoning, and the difference between scientific facts and policy choices.
i i i'm gonna i think we've got some really good follow-up questions actually from the audience on some of these themes so i'm going to turn it over to i think we've kind of we've sort of gotten towardamanda's question but i maybe want to get christina to maybe reaffirm an answer to it or sort of reframe that maybe that'll kind of connect with some of this prognostication stuff so like amanda asks do you feel thatthe rnc's policy preferences fit under or align with the ideological label of conservative do conservative preferences fit under the partisan label of republican or is conservatism much more uh much more than just an ideology or policy framework wellit's hard to evaluate that because the republican party didn't issue a platform in 2020 they maintained their 2016 platform so the majority of their platform um goes off on obama and so um the republican party under trump i
think we see a lot of leaders of the party not sure how to handle the situation right now and we did see multiple failed candidacies of more moderate republicans right we watched john mccain lose we watched mitt romneylose and then trump wins so i think a lot of republicans are thinking that that is the model to um follow uh i don't it's it's really hard to say whether a party can map on to anything ithink the people who are in charge are setting the setting the agenda right and so trump four years in office he set the agenda for the republican party and now we are until another republican is elected trump isstill kind of the head of the party so um yeah does it map on to conservative ideologies as we would think of them no but trump never did right so it's um it's hard to know you know is
i mitch mcconnell is he who we should consider the head of the party or um yeah i think it's difficult to say but if they had released a party platform that would have been more helpful yeah it isa really interesting thing i mean most parties most parties when they lose a presidential election like do i remember was it romney they did like the post-mortem like we're gonna take the corpse of the party out we're gonnalike poke it and prod it with sticks a little bit and try to figure out what's not working in there but i mean i recently had a long conversation with uh sort of uh the republican gubernatorial candidate whojust like just insists like you know that there's no postmortem to do the party doesn't need to change because they won it's just a fraudulent it's a fraudulent loss you know they need to double down on this kind
of particular yeah 90 of votes in nevada or for trump according to this guy and like um that's what you think yeah i guess there's no real reason to edit what you got right like you know we umbut yeah i do think that you know some of the points that we've gotten at least is that you know there are trump does represent a really interesting shift in the party in some ways in terms of likeyeah how do we think about fiscal conservatism the nature of money where it comes from how we use it who ought to benefit from it how and julian's point also about yeah like kind of the rise of maybelike a certain version of wealth like welfare or i don't like the word entitlements but i'll use it like entitlement conservatism or something what does that start looking like um i guess well i've got a couple of questions
that i really like but i think um i'm gonna i really i'm gonna ask one that's kind of on a pet question of mine before moving down um this one's from an anonymous attendee and then maybe i'll dotaska dave rondell's question but the question you'll see it up in the queue is uh with all the science available why don't most conservatives at least believe that climate change exists let alone work together on climate change policyi think this is a really interesting question in part because it's philosophically interesting it's logistically interesting it's interesting in terms of partisan politics coordinating economic actors climate change gets at everything it's a juicy one and so i guessi want to maybe throw it out to i don't know who on the panel would like to sort of respond to this but what do you see as a kind of conservative response to this very new very new
kind of uh issue that is of urgent global concern assuming you believe the science which if you don't that's your problem but like at this point you know okay anyways so i guess i don't know if folks wantto speak to that julian i'll let julian go and then i might comment yeah yeah um i think it goes back to the preconceptions there you of course find some conservatives that genuinely don't believe in climate change justas you can find some conservatives that think the vaccine gives us bluetooth signals in our arms you're going to find some more extreme people that maybe don't listen to all the science with all the facts but mostly debatewith climate change for conservatives at least is not whether climate change exists but rather to the extent of that we're causing it or more philosophical questions like what can we even do about it conservatives will point towards well
look at china india and russia as we've decreased our carbon emissions they've just significantly increased theirs so what's the point of us ruining our economy and that's something they'll point back to as well is especially probably why hillarylost pennsylvania in 2016 talking about shutting down the coal mines conservatives are taking this blue collar stance protect the jobs as well as just kind of defending uh why should america have to suffer in their eyes economically ifwe implement policies that combat climate change but i think as we transition towards this populist republican area era you might start getting more people that can that care about climate change because they'll start viewing it as a threatto america's national beauty i've started seeing that in some conservative circles where they have this pride of american natural monuments so i think there might be at least some change in the future in terms of conservative perspectives on
it yeah i think that's good what i'll add there's a guy named bjorn lomborg who actually has i think economics background i forget if he's from denmark or sweden but he's an interesting guy who i would say hasa conservative view on climate in that he accepts that there's warming i think it's more questionable about whether that's dire in fact it it is obvious if you look at the science that there are benefits to more carbondioxide in the air for plants for example i think many plants will grow better with 5 to 10 times the carbon dioxide and so the question is more of an economic question if you look at bjorn lomborg andothers so i think maybe a conservative position that's evolving is not denying whether the say there's warming and there's rising water levels especially in certain areas but the question about what to to do about it uh here here's
an interesting thing there are trees in both lake tahoe and deer lake above lake tahoe and and those those lakes had to be way lower than they are today in order for tree stumps to be in there thatare hundreds of years old and so we know that way before uh human beings started emitting carbon into the air there was significant climate change and we adapted to that why not adapt to this rather than accepting hugecosts and and so where i personally what what i'm very much for is the kinds of research in electrical energy solar energy that can move us in that direction but i think a conservative position is to take allthese drastic actions that have been proposed when we don't have much certainty on the effects of the warming is not smart it's just an economic trade-off so it's not a science
The final discussion examines why Americans remain divided over freedom, government, and political values. The panelists argue that disagreement persists because of different priorities, historical racism, and affective polarization, but they also stress the importance of civil deliberation.
trade-off so some of the research i've done um this really speaks to effective polarization in this country where the better educated i mean i shouldn't say better educated educational attainment has a different effect for democrats and republicans interms of climate change beliefs so people who have more educational attainment who are democrats are more likely to agree with the scientific consensus which is overwhelming that we are causing this and we are doing this and um republicanswith greater educational attainment are less likely to endorse those views so it's just a striking example of effective polarization and motivated reasoning where people are motivated to reach that conclusion based on their partisanship and that's what we endup with and media consumption has a very similar effect so people who are consuming more liberal news are more likely to endorse um climate change beliefs held by scientists and republicans who consume more media are less likely to
endorse those views but most of these views are vastly held by what are the beliefs though are the beliefs simply that the climate is warming or and that we're causing it or are the beliefs that we should dosomething about it uh all three those are different in my mind yeah it's all three actually so the climate is warming it's caused by humans and we need to act immediately on it and all of those are vastlyheld by climate scientists and i i'm not a climate scientist but um those are almost universal efficiency opinions taken by the scientists who study it well i would say doing something about it is not a science a scientificuh that's a policy choice and that's where you bring in values and that's why it's not a science matter it's a science matter is the climate warming and are the seas rising and it's a climate matter to model
what might happen but it's a political social science matter in terms of what to do about it so the climate scientists may have their opinions but their opinions are no different than a psychologist on whether we should dosomething about it this gets into all sorts of very interesting conversations that really aren't really ones that we're talking about too much nationally just yet about like the role of technical expertise as it relates to democracy right andlike how does these decisions ought to get made whose voice and how we ought to weigh certain prescriptive maybe prescriptive propositions against one another based on who was who's speaking them and what kind of information they have andhow what is that relationship between science and politics i guess i'll i'm gonna ask one last question that tries to tie together quite a few of the questions and it's not gonna be great um because i'm trying to
tie together like four or five questions that i think are all fabulous in their own right so like you know kind of building off of the question from uh david rondell like conservatives and liberals i'm gonna also i'mjust gonna turn this into like a real pig's breakfast i'm also gonna say you know republicans and democrats like they'd agree disagree on all sorts of policy questions and i guess you know this connects to maybe you knowstephen's question on uh like arguments about what the nature of freedom is like marx understood himself to be a philosopher of freedom uh you know democratic theorists do conservative theorists who economists do sociologists do there's so many differentunderstandings of freedom there's understandings of the role of government that are deeply deeply rooted sources of like conflict partisan identity ideological identity things like that and so like i guess i'm just wondering like to build on like the
one last one last questions like you know we're really divided in the united states like i not maybe more divided than we've ever been or something we did have a civil war um but we are a very dividedcountry like why are we so darn divided about this stuff and is there ever any hope i mean i guess professor pingle already said like there's going to be big government people and small government people but like whycan there not be a consensus or why is there no possibility of it seeming to like move toward like common definitions of like what freedom is or how we go about achieving it like why are we all sowhy don't why can't we all just get along and uh like actually see eye to eye on stuff i know that's an incredibly naive frame of some really really sophisticated questions but i'm just wondering like is there like
as kind of a last one like is there any hope for consensus and like getting getting stuff done at all i don't know who wants to jump in i guess julian sure yeah well i think the path toconsensus is realizing that maybe we're capital l liberals or capital c conservatives but at the end of the day we're all lower case liberals as well we all agree that we should stay with democracy we're there's there's obviouslyfringe groups on both sides that will try to push it whatever way they want it to be whether left-wing authoritarianism or right-wing authoritarianism but we're ignoring the fact that we really do agree on many premises we agree thatwe should stay with democracy we agree that congress sucks we all agree on that we agree that yeah presidents can sometimes suck as when presence in office public opinion usually shifts away from his opinion his or her opinions
so i think what needs to be done is just tackling that perception that we cannot agree that over there are evil people that want to abort babies and worship marx and over there are fascists that want to justmake a homogenous society that's not the case and that's not what's going to be reflected when people vote on a national scale and i think that's just what we need to move towards is understanding that we really dohave a lot in common
may i'll speak to two things one thing we could agree on if i use the climate science or i use economic science even though scientists disagree is how the world works but if two people agree on how theworld works they still may not agree on policy because they have different values or priorities and so i think that's why we'll always have differences i think just developing we've had a civil discussion here i actually like itthat people could get heated but not ugly and and make arguments rather than devolve into ad hominem attacks uh i wanted to speak to the freedom thing though because there was a question there about it i like thejeffersonian notion of freedom that um if you're going to associate with someone what do you what do you want to be guaranteed a free exercise of industry to me that means you get to choose how you want to
improve your life how you want to live your life and you get to keep the fruits acquired by it so i think a conservative notion is is heavily tied to property if you take bastiat bastiat basically said thereare two ways people get things work or plunder and so the basic role of government is to prevent plunder i would say from the conservative perspective whereas another notion of freedom is you're not free if you don't haveenough income well if you aren't earning enough income through your work and you have to take it from someone else there's a national natural tension there and so i think a natural tension between modern liberals and conservatives ismodern liberals are more willing to take from others to see that there's a everybody has a certain amount of freedom in terms of what resources can provide and that tension will always be there so i think it will
always provide that division but hopefully we can learn to be a little more to civil in our discussion and learn from one another and understand why we're different i think it boils down to values and priorities
uh christina if you want to jump in you're a theorist of deliberations so his last thought i guess i don't know about it i promote deliberation and respectful exchange of discourse all the time just as a note forwhy we are so polarized in this country a big reason is racism and the fact that we've only been a fully uh realized democracy for 60 years and um now that seems like it might change which is notgreat but um that's where a lot of these conflicts emerge from and our views towards government and services and policies so i think to me that's kind of the big answer but um polarization affective polarization where we wantto attack the other more than we even support our own group is really terrible and i hope actually talking to one another because i think we are nice to one another when we do interact day-to-day uh can help
you know heal some of that
The host closes the event with thanks to the panelists, organizers, sponsors, and audience. He ends by encouraging viewers to rewatch the conversation and wishing everyone a good night.
i love cautious optimism every once in a while like a good pessimistic background for some caution to caution like cautionary optimism is a lovely thing uh cool well i guess that about does it for tonight's conversation those ofyou stuck around an extra seven minutes we're grateful and for the panelists who stuck around extra seven minutes we are grateful i want to go through a little gratitude list just to close out i want to thank ourpanelists so we got julian zadke professor mark pringle and professor christina ledam thank you for sharing your time and insights with us during a just horrendous time of the semester and so super super grateful for that thank youso much for being here um i'd like to again thank the core humanities program the thought on tap committee the college of liberal arts and laughing planet for their continued support i'd like to offer a special thank you
to bretton rodriguez for doing the otherwise thankless job of orchestrating the technical and q a aspects of tonight's conversation i'd also like to thank dean debra model mog lisa mcdonnell and chris stancil for their invaluable support uh andfinally i want to close out by thanking y'all the viewers for tuning in tonight during this busy time of the semester and year uh you know this is worthwhile if y'all don't tune in we're so grateful to haveyou here so have a great night if you want to rewatch this