Jennifer Burns: evaluation

Transcript context

…Just one follow-up question on that. Many of us observing history have the sense that the intellectual tradition within the American right has been in decline for several decades. (A) Do you agree? (B) If so, what, most fundamentally, is driving that change? I think it’s a less vigorously intellectual culture. One thing I sometimes face with undergraduates is, they’re genuinely surprised when I say, “Well, yes, the conservatives had all the ideas in the 20th century. The conservatives really made an impact because they came up with all these ideas that were really powerful and important.” It doesn’t really compute because the conservatism they’ve grown up with is not driven by ideas in any meaningful way. I think that’s certainly true. I would say one of the reasons it’s happened is that conservatism became an establishment, and then you have a set of greatest hits, and you have a variety of ways you can make your living within this establishment, provided you adhere to the greatest hits. There’s not a ton of incentives to do things differently. I do think there’s a lot of ideological ferment on the right or amid conservatives right now. It’s heavy on ideas. It’s often in internet forms that are not deep engagement with ideas, I would say, in the same way as when you’re reading books and magazines. I think it’s faster and more rapid. It’s really interesting. There’s much more competition in the realm of ideas than there was. Besides reading a book or going to college, you can get ideas — they’re coming out of everywhere, coming out of the ether. I think that’s going to lend less coherence. You can have a lot of people who are intellectual leaders of smaller tribes rather than having a couple of the big leaders that everyone’s heard of — Friedman, Hayek, this and that. I just think we’re in a more fragmented place. I tend to attribute it to the media environment we’re in, which probably isn’t going away anytime soon. So the question is, can we live and thrive in this fragmented-attention ecosphere, or are we going to recreate something akin to the three big networks [laughs] to filter and manage all the information we have? I think we’ll see that evolve, or not, over the next 50 years. Again, everyone, the book is Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative by Jennifer Burns, B-U-R-N-S. Highly recommended. Jennifer, thank you very much.…

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