Lex Fridman: evaluation

Transcript context

…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. You’re right, there’s some degree to which what the right, when the right speaks about the size of government, it’s a little bit rhetoric and not actual policy because they seem to always grow the size of government anyway. They just say small government, but they don’t… it’s in the surveillance state, in the foreign policy in terms of military involvement abroad, and really in every program, they’re not very good at cutting either. They just kind of like to say it. Cutting is really hard. Government spends trillions of dollars and if you cut billions of dollars, someone is going to feel that pain and they’re going to scream. And so, you look at defense spending under Reagan, you look at overall under Reagan. Reagan might be one of the most archetypally conservative presidents of the last 40, 50 years. He utterly failed in his attempt to shrink government. Government grew under Reagan. Defense grew, all sorts of programs grew. So, I think that one thing we’re sort of scrambling around in our answers is that at a really high level, there are differences between liberalism and conservatism in American history. But often at the level of implementation, it can be a little bit messy. Even Bush’s foreign policy that Ezra was describing from a big sense of American history, is very like Wilsonian, this sense of it’s America’s duty to go out and change the world. Or to use a current example, McKinleyan. Or McKinleyan. Right. And a lot of people compare Donald Trump’s foreign policy to Andrew Jackson. This sense of we need to pull back from the world. America first. We need to care about what’s inside of our borders and care much less about what’s outside of our borders. Sometimes the differences between Republican and Democrat administrations don’t fall cleanly into the lines of liberal versus conservative because those definitions can be mushy.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.