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…I mean there’s a lot of fascinating things there on the unfairness of life that could be the inter-person unfairness, so one person getting more money than another person, or more skills or more natural abilities and another person. And then there’s just the general unfairness of the environment, the luck of the draw, the things that happen. All of a sudden you cross a street, and the car runs a red light, and runs you over and you’re in the hospital. So, that unfairness of life. And in general, I guess the left sees there’s some role or a lot of role for government to help you when that unfairness strikes. And then maybe there’s also a general notion of the size of government. I think the left is more comfortable with larger government as long as it’s effective and efficient, at least in its idea. That’s certainly true in the last 200 years. It was new deal liberals who enlarged the government in the 1930s. It was Republicans who acquiesced to that larger government in the 1950s. And then starting the 1970s, 1980s, it’s typically been conservatives who’ve tried to constrict governments. Sometimes they failed while liberals have typically tried to expand, certainly taxing and spending. But one thing that I was thinking as Ezra was talking, and I was just writing this down because I thought Ezra’s answer was really lovely, but at a really high level, I thought… maybe you disagree with this. I thought about distinguishing between liberals and conservatives based on three factors, what each side fears, what each side values and what each side tolerates. I think liberals fear injustice, and conservatives often fear cultural radicalism or the destruction of society. And as a result they value different things. Liberals I think tend to value change. And at the level of government that can mean change in terms of creating new programs that don’t previously exist. It’s typically been liberals, for example, who’ve been trying to expand health coverage, while conservatives have tried to cut it back. Just in the last few years, it was Biden who tried to add a bunch of programs, whether it was infrastructure, the Chips and Science Act, the IRA, and then Trump comes into office and is unwinding it. And then I also think they tolerate different things. I think liberals are more likely to tolerate a little bit of overreach, a little bit of radicalism in terms of trying to push society into a world where it hasn’t been. Well, I conservatives are more likely to tolerate injustice. They’re more likely to say there’s a kind of natural inequality in the nature of the world and we’re not going to try to overcorrect forward with our policies. And so, I think that even at a layer above what Ezra was articulating with the policy differences between liberals and conservatives, there’s almost like an archetypal difference between what they fear, and value and tolerate. Liberals fearing injustice, seeking change, tolerating sometimes a bit of what people might think of as overreach, while conservatives fear that overreach, value tradition and often tolerate injustice. The only thing I would say is that I do think this sort of the left likes big government, the right like small government oversimplifies. The left is pretty comfortable with an expansive government that is trying to correct for some of the imbalances of power and injustices and imbalances of luck I talked about earlier. The right is very comfortable with a very powerful police and surveillance in national security state. for some of the imbalances of power and injustices and imbalances of luck I talked about earlier. The right is very comfortable with a very powerful police and surveillance in national security state. I always think about the sort of George W. Bush era, although right now with ice agents hassling all kinds of green card holders, you can think about this moment, too. But the right’s view that on the one hand the government is incompetent. And on the other hand we could send our army across oceans, invade Afghanistan and Iraq, and then rebuild these societies we don’t understand into fully functioning liberal democracies that will be our allies, was an extraordinary level of trust in a very big government. I mean that was expensive. That took manpower. Compared to we’re going to set up the Affordable Care Act in America, that took a lot more faith in the US government being able to do something that was extraordinarily difficult. But the left is more confidence in the government of the check and the right has more confidence in the government of the gun.…

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