Speaker unverified: belief

Transcript context

…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. All right. So, to descend down from the platonic ideals of the left and the right, well, who’s actually running the show on the right and the left? Who are the dominant forces? Maybe you could describe and you mentioned democratic socialists, the progressives, maybe liberals, maybe more sort of mainstream left, and the same on the right with Trump and Trumpism.…

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