In this episode of The Future of Liberty, Governor Mitch Daniels sits down with longtime strategist and writer David Keene for a wide-ranging conversation on the evolution of the conservative movement. From his early mentorship under Frank Meyer and work with Barry Goldwater to leading the American Conservative Union and the NRA, Keene reflects on fusionism, ideological shifts within the GOP, the rise of populism, cultural realignment, and the importance of civic virtue.
In this episode of The Future of Liberty, Governor Mitch Daniels sits down with longtime strategist and writer David Keene for a wide-ranging conversation on the evolution of the conservative movement. From his early mentorship under Frank Meyer and work with Barry Goldwater to leading the American Conservative Union and the NRA, Keene reflects on fusionism, ideological shifts within the GOP, the rise of populism, cultural realignment, and the importance of civic virtue.
Intro (00:00:02):
Welcome to the Future of Liberty, a project of Liberty Fund hosted by Mitch Daniels.
Mitch Daniels (00:00:17):
Greetings everyone and welcome to the latest edition of The Future of Liberty Podcast, a production of the Liberty Fund here in Indianapolis, Indiana. An organization devoted for 60 years to the protection and the promotion of the freedoms we cherish as Americans. Today's guest is someone I’ve looked forward to avidly joining us for one of these conversations. David Keene is unique in my judgment for several reasons. He is among the great figures who have championed the values and principles that we are gathered to discuss today. He's deeply steeped in the thought, literature, and philosophy of what we think of as conservative thought, but he's also been a skilled, practical politician who is sought after and active in campaigns of people who want to advance those principles. His experience in conservative thought and politics spans almost the entire post-war era. He is known, as we’re about to discuss, almost every one of consequence in that movement. He led the American Conservative Union for 27 years, something like that. The original conservative organization formed way back in the fifties or sixties. And then finally, David, very unusually, has maintained through that whole extraordinary career, personal respect and friendships with people across the spectrum, including those with whom we might disagree the most strenuously. So really nobody will have on this set of programs, has more to offer, more to say, than my friend David Keene. Thanks for coming.
David Keene (00:02:11):
Well, I’ve heard some of your guests and they've got more to offer on a lot of things than I do, but I’m happy to be here.
Mitch Daniels (00:02:16):
Let’s just test that thesis. David, you have, and I don’t think it’s a stretch to say this, you have walked with legends. In other words, you have named people who were actual mentors, people you had a chance to know both when you were probably very young and when they were already legends. But talk about, for instance, Frank Meyer.
David Keene (00:02:40):
Well, when I was, people don’t remember now, but at the beginning, the conservative movement didn't consist of very many people. And Bill Buckley at National Review and the Bill Buckley National Review crowd, were trying to shape and build a movement. And there were so few of us then, that we all had mentors. So my mentor was Frank Meyer, who, for those who remember him, Frank was not only the architect of Fusion, which brought the various economic national defense and social conservatives together. He used to say, we don’t agree on everything, but we ought to fight it out in the White House rather than out here. Frank was also the highest ranking American communist to defect, and he lived on a mountaintop at Woodstock, New York next to Bob Dylan, and they became great buddies over the fence. So Dylan would critique Myer’s book reviews and Meyer would critique his lyrics. So he was quite a character, but he was my political mentor. And when he had defected from the communists right after this hit Hitler Stalin Pact, they were serious in those days. There was a contract out on it. So he took to sleeping with a pillow next to his bed at his farm in Woodstock and working during the day. And as a young conservative, I'd be called out there every once in a while. I'd have to fly to New York, take a bus to Woodstock, and they'd pick me up. His wife would, right as he was getting up. And then he'd rang me all night and he was famous for calling you at two o'clock in the morning and asking what you'd done to save freedom that day. He was quite a character.
(00:04:27):
And as I say, I had two mentors, really, three, I guess you'd say. Frank Meyer from National Review. Walter Judd, who was a congressman from Minnesota and was almost Nixon's vice presidential pick in 1960, had been a missionary in China. Actually, during the long march of the Communist had saved Zhou Enlai’s life because he had been a medical missionary in China and Zhou Enlai had come down with something. So the communist crossed the lines and went to Dr. Judd and said, you have to come out. And he went into these caves where they were hiding and treated Zhou Enlai. I said, you know doctor, you could have let that one slip. He said, well, we take an oath.
Mitch Daniels (00:05:12):
It's reminiscent of the, recently deceased, terrorist in Israel who the Israelis saved, whose life they saved.
David Keene (00:05:22):
That's what a doctor is supposed to do. But those days, I was in many ways, I guess typical of the people that were at the beginning of the modern conservative movement. My father spent most of his life as a union organizer. My mother was the five term president of the, I don’t even know if they have these anymore, but the Women's Auxiliary of the United Auto Workers, which was a very left-wing operation. My first political experience was in the 1960 Wisconsin primary passing out literature for John Kennedy in the primary there as a kid. And by 1964, I quit college for a semester to campaign for Barry Goldwater. So the shift took place pretty quickly in those days.
Mitch Daniels (00:06:08):
Was there an epiphany? Can you think of a moment or an event? You didn't have the Nazi Soviet Pact to wake you.
David Keene (00:06:17):
But if you talk to conservatives of that era, many of them were influenced by Friedrich Hayek and by The Road to Serfdom. I was influenced by a different book. My high school library had purchased a book of The Constitution of Liberty, which is another book that Hayek wrote, and they thought it was a book about the Constitution, which it wasn’t. And so the librarian wasn’t going to put it on the shelves. She knew I liked to read stuff and she said, Dave, would you like this book? And that was the formative book of my early thinking. I still have the book that she gave me. I can claim Hayek too, but with a different work.
Mitch Daniels (00:06:58):
Well, the nation owes a real debt to that librarian, whoever she was, because of what it all led to. So David, you have enough stories alone and enough history here to fill 12 hours. We only have one. So I’m going to–
David Keene (00:07:15):
I won’t filibuster.
Mitch Daniels (00:07:16):
Well, feel free. You just talked about 1960 being a turning point for you. Was Richard Nixon a conservative by your definition? In what ways was he or wasn’t he?
David Keene (00:07:31):
Well, he was anti-communist, and of course he made his bones in the Republican Party during that whole period with his case and all of these things. He was perhaps during that era, once he became president, maybe the most liberal operational president that we had. He was not a conservative. We were in the White House in those days. And I was in the Nixon White House working for Vice President Agnew, but Nixon had something. This tells you the strength of the conservative movement we had in the White House, something they called the committee of six, which was to be the people that liaisoned with conservatives, never had six members because they never had six people in the White House.
Mitch Daniels (00:08:21):
And six was an aspirational number.
David Keene (00:08:23):
That's right.
David Keene (00:08:24):
Well, this really sums up Nixon, politically, better than anybody else. It is a story. But Bill Timmons, who was the congressional liaison from Tennessee, he was the chairman of the Committee of Six, and the political director was Harry Dent. And if you've probably met Harry, Harry was an enthusiast about whatever he did. So having a meeting one day in Bill's office and Harry was late and he comes rushing into the meeting and is always excited about something. He said, I was with the old man, President Nixon, on the Sequoia last night. We had drinks. And I’ve got to tell you something guys. He is one of us and he's a conservative. And Timmon’s said to him, Harry, sit down and be quiet, that was after working hours. So the private Nixon was a conservative, but operationally he was not.
Mitch Daniels (00:09:20):
Yes, well, he was practical. If nothing else, it was at least hard to second guess him.
David Keene (00:09:27):
You, well, he was so smart and did many good things and some not so good things, but he was a conservative after work.
Mitch Daniels (00:09:43):
Correct me if I mistake the history, but I believe that during your long-term leadership of the ACU, the organization voted to endorse Pat Buchanan.
David Keene (00:09:56):
Well, they did.
Mitch Daniels (00:09:59):
I’m talking about ‘92 now.
David Keene (00:10:01):
I thought that was a mistake, but it was in the New Hampshire primary. Pat Buchanan brought me to Washington during the Nixon years. I came to Washington. I was the chairman of Young Americans for Freedom, this was during the Vietnam War. Pat got me a meeting with the president. I was 23 years old. We had a meeting in the Oval Office, a45 minute meeting, and unbeknownst to me there had been a big fight about whether some right wing nut should be allowed to meet with the president. And in typical Nixonian fashion, he said, I'll have the meeting and I won’t put it on the schedule. Which as you know, is absolutely the worst possible thing you could do. And it went on and on. It was Pat and Nixon, and I, I won’t go into the language or the details, but Nixon was trying to be one of the boys that day. Afterwards Pat said, the vice president's looking for somebody, would you be willing to interview with him? So I went up there and he hired me. That's how I got to Washington. So Pat was a good friend, bright guy, really good guy.
Mitch Daniels (00:11:04):
Impossible, not to like.
David Keene (00:11:07):
Oh no.
Mitch Daniels (00:11:07):
We're going to talk later about how rare it is these days for people who might not–
David Keene (00:11:12):
Yes, we live in a different world than we did back then.
Mitch Daniels (00:11:14):
Pat Buchanan is someone who was personally, I think, liked by folks who completely disagreed with him. I sat next to him for three years in another administration, an incredibly engaging guy. So here's my question. Was Pat Buchanan all those years ago a precursor or a forerunner of the Republican Party or the dominant strain, let's say in the Republican party today, or are those two phenomena disconnected?
David Keene (00:11:47):
They're not totally disconnected because in many ways he was echoing the sort of cultural populism that’s much more prevalent in the party today than it was then. It's interesting because in the years that I ran the ACU and the Conservative Political Action Conference, we each year took a survey of the people that were attending and it got attention because there was a straw poll, but that’s not why we took it. We were asking questions to find out what was their base belief and it broke down. As we talked earlier about fusionism, it broke down into economic conservatives, defense anti-communist conservatives at the time, and what we then called traditional conservatives would be social conservatives.
(00:12:33):
The issues that dominated the news changed over time. Sometimes it was abortion, or taxes or etc, but all through those years, economic conservatism was the major strain. It was always in first place. And then defense and the social issues were in that rank and it never changed. The superficial storms could change what these people were talking about and what issues they were engaging in for political reasons, but their basic beliefs didn't change that whole time. I am not sure that they've changed that much since then. The Republican party and the conservative movement went through many adjustments over that period of time. Critics talk about how populism is something bad and new. Reagan was populist. I mean, that’s part of what conservatism was. Buckley had famously said he'd rather be governed by the first thousand people in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard. That's a populist kind of sentiment. Pat brought those issues to the forefront more than a lot of others had and really did provide some sort of a bridge there.
Mitch Daniels (00:13:59):
Some have suggested over time that those who were advocates of free market economics, were not sensitive enough to the effects that economic dynamism can have on communities and on culture. And in a way, I think Pat sensed that and was giving early expression to it.
David Keene (00:14:30):
Pat was a native of Washington. He lived on an Irish block, and if you were Italian or Black or whatever, you didn’t go on that block. He tended to look at the world the same way, you got along with other people, but you basically had your own tribe. But that’s all been sort of put in and mixed into the movement. And over time, we’ve gone through various changes, and you have to adjust to the people who are your constituents. We can still see this today. One of the problems in today’s politics is that the two parties, over the course of the last decade and a half, have switched constituencies.
Mitch Daniels (00:15:24):
It's an amazing thing, isn't it? You and I can't think of a counterpart to it other than the switch of the south, back in the late sixties and seventies.
David Keene (00:15:37):
If you trace the Republican party, you go back to when I was a kid growing up in the Midwest, and you two, if you wanted to be influential, you had to do your sort of apprenticeship with the guys at the country club that ran the companies, the managers and all this. Then the Goldwater election took place and all of a sudden the guy that ran the factory wasn’t as important as the guy that ran the cleaning establishment down in the corner. It shifted not just geographically, but it shifted in terms of demographically, of the kinds of people that dominated the party. And boy, they fought that. I mean, every club that’s ever existed, political or nonpolitical fights change. It's just the way it is.
(00:16:16):
So when the evangelicals came in, you remember they described Pat Robertson’s followers. One of the national committeemen said it was like visiting the bar scene in Star Wars. Each time, some of them get socialized and some go home. By then, the people running the party were the Goldwater people the old establishment had fought. I remember in 1976, when I worked with Reagan, I ran the South for him in his challenge against Jerry Ford. One of my best friends on the national committee was the committeeman from New Mexico. That year we were able to run over everybody, because in the states where you have no choice or are going to win regardless, things get dangerous. I said to him one night, there’s nothing I can do about it, it’s not my area, but they’re going to drive you out and toss you off the national committee. He looked at me and said, I know, what took them so long? I came here in 1964 by throwing the other guys off. That just goes on, and then they become part of it. When Reagan ran, I worked for him in 1976, and then I worked for Bush in 1980.
(00:17:34):
And so Bush had me meet with these people that were northeastern Bush people. It turned out most of them were more conservative than Reagan, but Reagan was from the west and he wore brown suits and he didn't go to Harvard, and so therefore he was objectionable. And a lot of times, and Pat was onto this I think, it’s culture and not ideology that drives these things. It's when they come into sync that it becomes powerful.
Mitch Daniels (00:18:01):
I think this is an east coast or a coastal perception, but as they saw the transition you're talking about and the rise, the sudden switch of people who they had assumed were sort of habitual Democrats suddenly showing up in the Republican party. They thought it was economic dislocation, free trade and all this business, which clearly there were.
David Keene (00:18:24):
Charles Murray said once that free trade, for example, has delivered all the benefits in a macro sense that we knew it would. It obviously works and it obviously builds economic wealth and it makes all the boats rise and all that he said, but we didn't think about the micro effects. We treated it like it was a paper. And I think there was some of that, and not just conservatives, but people tend to think this is my idea and it'll work.
Mitch Daniels (00:19:00):
The average is obscure.
David Keene (00:19:01):
Yes, right. Although I think it’s overstated these days. I remember when I was young and went to Washington and then I'd come home to my little town in Wisconsin. I thought that I was a big shot in Washington in my own mind. So I was making good money and working like we did in Washington 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And I'd come home and my younger brother worked at General Motors and he made a third as much money, he had a better house than I did, a new car, and he only spent eight hours a day worrying about things. And I thought, what's wrong with this picture? Well, if you go across the country today, you get the picture mostly from eastern elites or western elites that these people must be in terrible shape because they don’t want to go to Harvard. They don’t want to be hedge fund managers. They're down there really suffering in these little towns because all they do is have barbecues on weekends, hang out, cling to their guns, and go to church. That's what they want. One of the things is that they have different values and I forget her name, but she wrote a book recently. She toured small towns and said they’re not in as bad of shape. Sure, they have drug problems in these towns just like they do in big cities and all that. But in fact, these people are largely pretty happy. They like the fact that they can hang out with their family and do all these things.
Mitch Daniels (00:20:28):
Yes, what a surprise. It’s been described as an anthropological dig when somebody from New York ventures out into the promises.
David Keene (00:20:40):
After the 2016 election, they actually sent safaris out. Just to see what these people are.
Mitch Daniels (00:20:46):
I think that’s the misconception. The economic factor is certainly part of it and has propelled some of this, but it was distinctly secondary to the defensive reaction against cultural aggression — the kind that was expressed openly and seemed to ooze from the people who dominated the airwaves and other places.
David Keene (00:21:08):
Because they are visiting their inferiors.
Mitch Daniels (00:21:09):
Yes, that your values are inferior. They're not just different, they’re inferior. And I think finally that’s probably what has been the number one source of energy.
David Keene (00:21:20):
Part of it is all of this, the change in the parties began in the sixties and it began as the McGovern wing of the Democratic party began to take over, and they had been able to count on factory workers. Now we’re talking mostly about the Northeast and the upper Midwest. And the pollster at that time called these people peripheral urban ethnics. What they meant were Polish, Italian, Catholic, Irish Democrats who started to leak away and they were leaving and voting Republican, not because of the economics, but because they found the new Democratic party sort of culturally obnoxious.
(00:22:03):
Now, the Republicans were happy to get those votes, but they didn't do anything for them. Fortunately for the Republicans, the Democrats kept getting more culturally obnoxious, so they continued to vote Republican, by 2016 when Trump was elected, they were out there still having to vote Republican, but thinking nobody really cared about them because nobody listened to them. The Republicans accepted their votes. The Democrats had decided that they were deplorable and they decided to break the furniture. So they elected Donald Trump, nominated him and elected him. And what's got the Democrats so shocked now is that the same thing is happening in the Hispanic and Black communities. It starts as a trickle. My wife and I live in Prince George's County, Maryland. They advertise themselves as the highest per capita income majority black county in America. That's because each couple has government jobs, so they make a lot of money. They're not liberals, and the younger ones are starting to drift away, and that's thrown panic into the party. It happened to them once before they lost the white working class, and they’ve been losing these folks for the same reason for years. People were telling us that Hispanic voters should be Republican because of their cultural values, religious work ethic and all that but we never attracted any of them.
(00:23:32):
It wasn’t until the Biden administration came along that they finally looked at them and said, oh my God, we can’t vote for those people. The challenge both parties face, and the Democrats have handled better, is that even though it’s a losing hand, they’ve managed to identify with their new constituency and are now largely run by it. The Republican Party is still coming to grips with what to do. We don’t want to give up our values, and we don’t want to appeal to these former Democrats by becoming what they ran away from. So you have to hold on to your values but also see how they relate to the constituency you want to reach. I believe that’s what’s happening right now. I mean, you’ve got people–
Mitch Daniels (00:24:17):
My sense is yes. My sense is that watching freedom from the bleachers, where I sit, and have now for quite a while, is that the Republican party is rubbing its eyes. Many of them, they’re thrilled suddenly about these voters, but they really haven't earned their votes.
David Keene (00:24:35):
No, that’s my point.
Mitch Daniels (00:24:36):
They've been driven into their ranks by cultural disdain.
David Keene (00:24:38):
Exactly. And how do you keep them?
Mitch Daniels (00:24:39):
So if Frank Meyer were here today, could he fashion a new sort of fusionism?
David Keene (00:24:45):
Yes.
Mitch Daniels (00:24:46):
I think what I see in the Republican Party and some of its leaders, is that they don’t know what to do with these folks.
David Keene (00:24:51):
He always found that there was overlap. That’s what we always found. If you look at the old conservative movement, the libertarians and the social conservatives, you saw that they overlapped. That’s what I had designed CPAC for originally: to focus on those areas of overlap, the sweet spots where they overlap, and then get them to work together on that. Then, as I used to say, they can argue about their differences when they’re in power. So I believe what’s going on now is natural. What’s more dangerous, from the standpoint of the country and society, is the way the civic fabric of the society has deteriorated. And that has happened for reasons that go beyond politics. We live in a different world than we did back then.
Mitch Daniels (00:25:37):
We do. Well, maybe we'll come back to that. I just want to ask you, we’re having this conversation two weeks to the day before we'll know, or maybe we'll know maybe not, but anyway, from the election that we'll decide a lot about the next four years. So just go ahead and speculate, David, if he wins, what's most likely to happen and what is most likely to happen if she wins?
David Keene (00:26:06):
Well, he's mostly bluster. He's not as different when he was governing as other Republican presidents but he talked a lot. The difference today, and this is partly the fact that he and his White House didn't have much discipline, but every White House is a mess. As you know, everybody's trying to kill each other and roll them out onto Executive Avenue and take their jobs and fight for the time with the President and all that. But in the old days, they did it in the dark. Now, every misstep is a huge national story, which fuels all kinds of things and makes it more difficult, frankly, to govern or to run an executive department. He is not the radical that he's pictured as. There’s some things that you can like or dislike about him. I don’t think he's done anything to upgrade the level of conversations.
Mitch Daniels (00:27:12):
Well, we can agree on that. No, I mean for all of his flaws, the idea which we'll hear if he should happen to win is, oh God, the dark ages are about to fall and he's a dictator. It’s nonsense. He was stymied.
David Keene (00:27:28):
Well, I was, as you know, I’m a civil libertarian in many ways, and I was a part of a cross ideological bipartisan group after 9/11. I was very critical of some of the things that the Bush administration was doing, and the Democrats were very happy that I sided with them. And I remember at one meeting I said, I’m siding with you because what they’re doing is wrong. Now when the next administration comes along and does more, because these things are always ratchet, they never go back. Are you going to stand up and criticize? And a New York Times reporter who said he thought that was partisan dribble called me up and he said, you were right. Now all the things that you thought were evil, they think is good, what they thought was evil. And that’s part of the problem. You've got a situation in which both parties are not a hundred percent wrong, but both parties see the other party as an existential threat to everything.
(00:28:32):
And that justifies in your mind things that you wouldn’t do. You can’t be nice to them. We used to talk about getting along. A mutual friend of ours, Ken Bode, who was a journalist and prior to that was a McGovern organizer. He and I ran a poker game for many years in Washington, and we had some simple rules. There were seven players, three of them had to be Republicans, three of them had to be Democrats, and one could be a reporter. And they all had to either have worked in or covered a presidential campaign to participate. And over the years, you'd know most of the names of the people that played in this, it just sort of petered out after eight or nine years. I was talking to one of the old players a couple of years ago, and he said, we couldn’t do that today. He said, because you couldn’t get seven people like them to sit at a table and be civil with each other. And that’s the problem. You remember Lyn Nofziger, who was indicted by a special prosecutor, and I was one of the co-sponsors of a fundraiser for his defense–
Mitch Daniels (00:29:42):
I was one of the contributors.
David Keene (00:29:44):
And the two other co-sponsors, there were four of us, were Sam Donaldson and Jack White, who was the chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Imagine that today for somebody in either party. And I remember Sam said, isn't it just like Washington? There's so many people here that belong in jail, and they get the wrong one. But I thought that Jack White's comment was best. He said, when you're on the outside and you read this all superficially, you think that Washington and the country is divided between Democrats and Republicans and conservatives and liberals. He said, that’s not it. It's divided between us and them. And Lyn's one of us. You couldn’t say that today. Things have changed. My friends were Republicans and Democrats, journalists and others. We didn't break it down by ideology. We agreed to disagree, and we agreed on things that we could agree on. And in that sense, it was a much more pleasant place to be than it is today.
Mitch Daniels (00:30:48):
Is the Republican party and conservative thought better off if Harris wins or worse off?
David Keene (00:31:00):
Well, we have to worry about the country.
Mitch Daniels (00:31:03):
I specifically didn't ask about the country. That's too easy a question.
David Keene (00:31:07):
I don’t think it matters because if Trump wins, then everybody's looking to the future and he'll either fall–
Mitch Daniels (00:31:16):
Instant lame duck.
David Keene (00:31:17):
Yes. You know from day one, one of the problems, particularly with young people who haven't thought these things through, is that they’re attracted to individuals. You had the Reagan Republicans, the Gingrich, all these conservatives, and a lot of them hadn't thought through it. Now you've got the Trump conservatives. Well, the next guy's going to be different. Those base values will come to the forefront. Trump likes to talk, for example, tariffs is one thing. Well, remember the steel tariffs, the steel quotas. Well, there aren't that many people that are pure.
(00:31:59):
And most of them aren't in public office. Trump talked a good game, but he didn't if you were a protectionist. He wasn’t the great protectionist that everybody thought he was. So they've adopted that rhetoric because it’s his rhetoric. But that’s going to change. And I believe that what's going to happen is that as these new people are going to come into the party, and conservatives will have to think about how to appeal to them. You remember Jack Kemp, supply-side economics, and his big tax-cut plan, all of that? That was not a new proposal. All he did was phrase it differently to appeal to a different constituency. And it caught fire. I’m not saying it’s all just PR, but I am saying that you have to be able to communicate and talk to the people whose support you want, if you've got a real movement. One of the problems that we have today is, as I say, the lack of civic discourse on the one hand and tolerance of the others.
(00:32:56):
In a republic or a democracy, you have to be willing to accept that you can win or lose. You have to believe it’s not the end of the world if you lose. If you think it is, that belief justifies all kinds of things. But we’ve had “the end of the world” dozens of times, and it always turns out the world goes on. We survive, and things straighten themselves out. You have to have that perspective. The problem is, we don’t have a sense of history anymore. It’s like everybody shows up new, and we’re busy relearning lessons we should have learned fifty or a hundred years ago. I once wrote a column saying that people claim Trump is sui generis and that we’ve never had anyone like him. I said, have you ever heard of Teddy Roosevelt? Teddy Roosevelt was Donald Trump. He was thin-skinned. He ran as an independent because the fellow he had chosen as his successor, Taft, insulted him, at least in his mind, in a letter. Then he decided he had to destroy him. He claimed he had to run as an independent because the Republicans had stolen all the votes. It was the very same thing. And we survived that too.
Mitch Daniels (00:34:13):
Well, up to a point, Teddy Roosevelt read two books a day and wrote books.
David Keene (00:34:17):
Well, yeah, but he's different. There's a political appeal.
Mitch Daniels (00:34:18):
I understand.
David Keene (00:34:19):
His view was that if the Supreme Court disagreed with you, you should be able to appeal publicly and say, ‘We’re going to do it our way. Teddy was a hero in many ways and a great president, but he wasn’t your next door neighbor. Andrew Jackson was not somebody you wanted as your next door neighbor. So we survived all that, and things come back, but you have to have some understanding of how you got there and not just say, it’s for power. I recommend young conservatives to read Hayek. I also like them to read a book that Daniel Yergin wrote years ago called “Commanding Heights.” He makes the point in there that successful political movements begin with ideas, not with politics. He made the point that this goes back to Hayek. He said the most important publishing decision of the mid 20th century was the decision by the Reader's Digest to publish “The Road to Serfdom.” And he said that was the most influential thing that anybody did, and that was the most influential book, because there was this actor out in California who became a conservative, and had been a liberal democrat from, “The Road to Serfdom.” There was an undergraduate in London who carried it in her purse and grew up to be Margaret Thatcher. What more do you really need?
(00:35:51):
Whether it’s a left-wing or right-wing movement, it begins with ideas and then turns into something political if those ideas have appeal. Then it lives a natural life. That’s what conservatives are going through. All of a sudden, everyone becomes one if they win. I remember after Reagan was elected, George Bush’s brother was going to run against Lowell Weicker because they lived next door to each other and didn’t like each other. He called me and said, Dave, I need your help. As a conservative, we have to do this. I said, Prescott, you’re not a conservative. You’ve never been one. He said, Oh, we’re all conservatives now that Reagan’s been elected. I said, Prescott, you’re a Republican. Ask me for advice as a Republican and I’ll give it to you—but let’s be honest about what we are. That’s one of our weaknesses: the tendency to personify and forget. You don’t have to know what the ideas are, because the leader says what the ideas are.
Mitch Daniels (00:36:54):
I think that’s really central. I suppose regardless of the outcome, two weeks from today, the question in front of the country will be, is this a cult of personality or can someone fashion, which I don’t think is evident yet, the fusion or the set of ideas and principles that hold this newly emergent coalition together.
David Keene (00:37:27):
Yes, you need both. You need to have somebody. And this is what the Buckley people did with the early conservatism or the modern conservative, they bound it all together. It was there. And then along came the leaders, the Reagan, obviously Goldwater before that,
(00:37:46):
and they popularized it. You really need both. If you have one without the other, if you’ve got the greatest ideas in the world but no one to carry them forward, it doesn’t go anywhere. I ran for office once and lost. It was very early in my career, and Ronald Reagan even did some commercials for me. At the time, I said the voters thought we were both nuts. Later, they learned maybe they were wrong the first time. You can have the greatest ideas in the world, but if nobody’s going to buy them, it won’t get you very far. Or if you’ve got a leader with no ideas, and we’ve had some of those, that doesn’t get you very far either. Ultimately, if you have faith in your ideas, they’ll work. The world has a way of coming around. Two things are amazing. It’s amazing how fast things can go to hell and how fast they can recover.
Mitch Daniels (00:38:40):
I’m with you. What’s essential, certainly if you want to create a movement that can move the country, is that it must have a core of ideas. Then someone will emerge as the best person to give expression to those ideas. It doesn’t work the other way around. You’ve mentioned him a couple of times, and I thought he became harder and harder to predict later on, but what do you think Barry Goldwater would say about our current situation if he were here today?
David Keene (00:39:12):
He'd be beside himself, of course. He was quite a character. He really was. When I talk about real conservatives, Goldwater people, he stood up when there wasn’t any conservative movement and he created it. We talked earlier about two of my favorite people, and they were very similar, Barry Goldwater and Eugene McCarthy.
(00:39:41):
They both were, essentially, hoisted up to lead a movement they didn't want to lead. Then both of them got mad when anybody else tried to lead it. They both became cynical. Goldwater was a libertarian conservative, and that brought him into direct conflict with a lot of the social conservatives. He was an anti-communist and a libertarian. The difference between Barry and some of the others was he wasn’t political in the sense that he would just go along and get along. There was McCarthy, who I thought I had a great relationship with, up to when he died. They were in many ways the same guy. Now, Goldwater never supported Reagan. He supported Ford over Reagan because in the back of his mind, he resented the fact that this guy came along and took it all from him, even though he didn't want to lead it. He sort of resented Reagan from that point on and McCarthy was cynical enough, he resented all of them. I think the two of them, if they'd lived next to each other, would've gotten along pretty well.
Mitch Daniels (00:40:57):
So David, I pointed out that you're one of the few people who can talk with equal authority and eloquence about both the most practical politics, but also some of the philosophical questions. I just want to ask you a couple of those while we have a few minutes left. Many of the founders, in many senses, have asserted that religious faith is a prerequisite to democracy as we practice it. If that’s so, first of all, do you think that it is and, how much cause for concern should we have that religious practice, religious church attendance, every measure has dropped pretty sharply in the last 20 years.
David Keene (00:41:40):
I think we should be very concerned about it. Whether you're religious or a churchgoing person in the traditional sense, the founders pinned it on religion. What they were saying was, in order to be a free people, you have to have basic values. If you don’t have that, there’s no reason for anything to hold together. And the deterioration of those values can be calculated by looking at the deterioration of religion. It is important in people's lives. Hayek was a libertarian. He believed that it was necessary for people to be free to have that grounding in values. That’s what’s missing in many ways. It's not taught and it’s not absorbed.
Mitch Daniels (00:42:31):
To some extent, antithesis is taught.
David Keene (00:42:33):
That's exactly right. The foundation of a society in the first instance is the individual, the family, and the social institutions that make it up. If you've got those, those are all ameliorating kinds of things that take away the conflict that can exist. They make a civil society possible, take them away, and you've got a bunch of people that have no reason not to attack each other. I mean, it just doesn’t work. We see that, and it’s why the people who want to remake man want to get rid of all those things. That’s always been a goal of those folks who think they can make the communists, and not just the communists but others, into what they want. They believe you have to beat people into being what you want them to be. And the problem with that is that they might beat you. So you've got to have beliefs. I believe that’s vitally important. I’m not a doctrinaire, churchgoing, religious conservative, but without that, the rest of it doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Mitch Daniels (00:43:39):
Yes. In the long list of leadership capacities you've had, you were head of the NRA, the National Rifle Association for a good stretch. It's in the news a lot these days. You'll know this quote, I actually didn't until somebody gave me a little book of Jefferson's quotes, the other day. I love this one that came new to me. He said, “The beauty of the Second Amendment is it will not be needed until they try to take it from you.”
David Keene (00:44:06):
That's exactly right.
Mitch Daniels (00:44:08):
Which is interesting to me in a couple ways, including, who did he mean by “they?”
David Keene (00:44:13):
He meant…
Mitch Daniels (00:44:13):
Yes...I think we know.
David Keene (00:44:15):
Well, the last national politician, you would think from the discussions, now you've got the growth in gun ownership because of fear of crime and dissolution of all that. The last national politician to argue the original reason for the Second Amendment was not to protect hunting. It was in case the government went wrong. It was Hubert Humphrey and he said, that’s why we have the Second Amendment, because they might try to do that.
Mitch Daniels (00:44:46):
So how do you assess the health of the Second Amendment right now?
David Keene (00:44:50):
Well, I think there’s two things. On one hand, at the top political level, there’s sort of an unprecedented attempt to try and restrict Second Amendment rights. At the popular level support for the Second Amendment is broader than it’s ever been. There was just a study that showed that now 30% of people who identify themselves as progressives or liberals have a gun. 10 years ago, only 20% of them did.
(00:45:29):
40% of new gun owners are women and minorities. Those people didn't buy firearms before. At the NRA, we've always understood the importance of all of that. I was asked years ago to speak to the ACLU convention because they wanted to emulate the NRA. And I said, the difference is that you have a lot of people who rightly believe in the First Amendment. One, you have to stick to that core and not break it because that’s why they’re there. But secondly, the difference is that the NRA is a family. I mean, people came up through as kids, competitive shooters, hunters. They learned their safety courses, they did it all. They’re really bound to it. I went around the country, when I was president, and still do when I can to thank these people. I say the reason the Second Amendment lives is not because it’s ink on parchment. It's because millions and millions of Americans benefit and live with it. I mean, you're a Midwestern. Back in the day, as they say in Wisconsin, half the factories closed on the opening day of the deer season. There's no reason to try and force people to come and do something when they are off deer hunting. When I was a kid in school in Wisconsin, I could take my shotgun to school and put it in the locker and then go out and shoot pheasants on the way home. We live in a different society today.
Mitch Daniels (00:47:08):
We have some service clubs. I’m thinking of Rotary Clubs up in Northern Indiana. I saw more than one. The big annual fundraiser is they sell flowers on the first day of hunting season, so all the guys can take them home to mom and head for the woods.
David Keene (00:47:28):
If you can think back on the history of the NRA, it was formed in 1871 by Union Generals because the North was recruiting people from the newly industrialized cities of the Northeast for the Union Army. Many of those soldiers never fired a gun until they got into battle because they came from Europe where there were no firearm traditions. The saying then was that a Confederate soldier who was rural was the equivalent of three union infantrymen. Unfortunately, for the South, the North had five, the first presidents of the NRA were Ulysses S. Grant and Philip Sheridan, Union Generals. Who believed that America was losing its firearms tradition because of all the urban people, and we had to bring more of them in, that's been the fight ever since. It’s between urban and rural, not as much as it was 20 years ago but I think ultimately, if one side on any of these issues gets the upper hand and can close out everything on the other side, they can win it. I don’t think that’s going to happen. The voters ultimately make the decision. With the Second Amendment, I’m convinced that the voters are not going to accept that sort of thing. In Stalinist days in the Soviet Union, they disarmed the cities, but Russia has a big hunting tradition, maybe second only. They didn't disarm those people out in the rest of the Soviet Union. Even Stalin was able to figure out that you wouldn’t send the US marshals to Idaho, and you just have to accept that this is part of the culture of the United States and always has been. We try in schools to blot it out. When you and I were in school, we knew why those people confronted each other at the Concord Bridge because the British were coming for the ammo because they thought they couldn’t defend themselves. They don’t teach that part of it anymore.
Mitch Daniels (00:49:39):
Or much else about and around that time. A couple last questions. Once again, you're uniquely suited to comment on the political media. You've been a friend and certainly a source and a frequent interlocutor with political media over a span of time. It's very, very different today.
David Keene (00:50:04):
Oh yeah.
Mitch Daniels (00:50:05):
Talk about both the organs of news media that we now deal with and the individuals who make them up.
David Keene (00:50:14):
That’s a whole other hour.
Mitch Daniels (00:50:15):
Yes, I recognize.
David Keene (00:50:16):
When the parties broke down for a period, if you wanted to run for president, the first thing you had to do was you had to go to an explicit number of dinner parties in Washington to convince journalists that you were worth mentioning. They played into it, and they liked that, obviously. In those days, the press and the media were always biased. Even the most biased reporter claimed he wasn’t, or she wasn’t.
Mitch Daniels (00:50:48):
It might occasionally want to demonstrate that.
David Keene (00:50:51):
They tried to demonstrate that. I never had a leak or a confidant, in 40 years, that was broken, partly because the only people you had to be careful of were some of the local reporters who would kill their grandmother to get to the Washington Bureau. Once they were in Washington, they had to have a symbiotic relationship and that’s something a lot of politicians don’t understand.
(00:51:18):
They need you and you need them and there’s no reason to be fighting about it. The only rule I had was you never lie to them. If you don’t lie to them, they never leak. Today, you can’t do that. A producer called me maybe a year ago and I forget what the issue was, but we’re now in all these cultural wars and everything. He said, Dave, I need some guidance on this story I’m doing. Could we sit down and have coffee and you could tell me? I said, if this were 15 years ago, I'd do that but I’m not going to do that now because nobody can be trusted anymore. There was a pause and he said, you're right about that. He said, we'll get together for a drink after it’s over but that’s the fact. I mean, today you've got these journalists at war. The journalists, I mean, they’ve always been partisan to some degree, with journalists and columnists alike taking sides. But most of them, in my experience, are hardworking people who may have disagreed with you. I had a very good friend you may remember, Eric Engberg from CBS,
(00:52:32):
he was a fishing buddy of mine, and he was a cut and dry liberal, mostly because he had only ever lived within that bubble. I'd take him fishing, we'd go fishing all the time, and I'd pick out some issue and I'd talk to him about it. Then at some point, this light would go off and he'd say, oh my God, there’s another side. He wasn’t vicious. He wasn’t mean. He was that way because that’s all he knew. Now of course, it’s not just journalists, but we live in neighborhoods. One of the reasons that Republicans think Democrats steal elections and Democrats think Republicans steal elections is neither of them have ever met anybody that voted for the other side. They live in gated communities and all their neighbors think just the way they do. In the old days, it wasn’t like that. I really think that the media has a problem. A recent poll, I think it was either Gallup or Pew, shows that the media now has even less credibility than Congress. Do you know how hard you have to work to get your credibility lower than that of the Congress? It’s hard to see how they come back but there’s been this deterioration in any kind of value. The political journalists that I knew for all those years and worked with, they'd be appalled by most of these people today. I’m sure there are good reporters out there, but they don’t dominate.
Mitch Daniels (00:54:02):
Some of it can be explained. I don’t want to say excused, but explained by the change in the business model and in the incentives that they had.
David Keene (00:54:12):
Yes, that’s one of the parts. We lived in a period when press objectivity—well, the history of it is interesting, because the early press during the Adams and Jefferson era was very partisan. Vicious stuff. Most of the papers were owned by partisans, and presidents were out getting guys to dump the other side. God knows the things they said.
Mitch Daniels (00:54:41):
Jefferson was the master of that.
David Keene (00:54:42):
Right. Makes today's discourse seem actually civilized. Then when things developed and all of a sudden newspapers became the conveyor belt for advertising, it was the advertisers who said, we don’t want to be advertising in this polemical rag. We want you to be on the box.
Mitch Daniels (00:55:05):
They want the broadest possible audience with all kinds of people in it. Walter Cronkite’s audience had every kind of person in it.
David Keene (00:55:11):
That’s what led to the objective press. The thing that destroyed the newspaper business was Craigslist because the most profitable part of any newspaper was the classifieds. You don’t think about that, but they’re gone.
(00:55:28):
Then all of a sudden you had these papers that couldn't convert to the new technology. A journalistic corporate mindset, next to the law enforcement, may be the hardest one to change. So you had papers that just couldn’t adjust, and the only ones that were successful were ones who picked out a boutique audience. Now, you could target the New York Times, which was losing money, only being bailed out by this Mexican billionaire, was one of them. Then the Washington Post existed because of a college that you bought when you were at Purdue. Then when the Obama administration went after those colleges, they decided, we better sell this paper because we can’t make any money.
(00:56:18):
So you had to pick out a boutique audience. For the last five years of my working career, I was the commentary editor for the Washington Times. Before that, I had been the editor of the Tennessean, and John Seigenthaler was the first editor of USA Today. I went down to see him. He was a good friend, and he thought I was coming for advice, but I wasn’t. He said, your paper can survive because you have a boutique audience. Unless you screw that up and drive the conservatives away, they'll continue to cry. He said the New York Times can exist as a newspaper because there are people that think they have to have it on Sunday morning with their muffins. He said, but most papers don’t have it. And the Times was losing money and decided to become basically the spokesman for progressive America. So when the Trump thing ended, things got bad. So then they converted to racism and they actually had meetings with us. You have to do it because once you've developed a boutique audience, that’s the audience you have to satisfy.
Mitch Daniels (00:57:26):
You got to feed them things that ratify their point of view.
David Keene (00:57:29):
Exactly.
Mitch Daniels (00:57:30):
That’s where we are and people still self-select into journalism who come in with a bias. The business model you just so accurately described, I think sort of cements that in place. Well, David, if we had another hour, it'd probably be more interesting than this one. This has been fantastic as I expected it to be. I got to ask you one last question. I like to end all these conversations with the same question. In 2050, will the United States of America be more or less free than today?
David Keene (00:58:05):
I’m an optimist, and I think that if we can come to grips, first of all with technology so that it can’t be turned on us, that's step one. Then the second step is that our politicians, regardless of party, have to come to grips with the fact that we’re on the edge of fiscal disaster. I think I said earlier though, it’s amazing how bad things can get and how they can get better pretty quickly. And I think things can get better, and I believe they will. I believe that the politicians of both parties, whoever they are, somebody we don’t know
(00:48:45):
is going to say, we have to fix this. I remember when George W. Bush made an attempt to come to grips with entitlements on his second campaign. And one of my good friends, as you'll recall, was Conrad Burns, a senator from Montana. He'd been a former cattle auctioneer, and he was flying on Air Force One, and he said to Bush, Mr. President, you know why that plan of yours is not going to work? Bush said, why is that? And he said, well, Mr. President, you've got that piddling little ranch down there in Texas. And he said, let's say you're down there and somebody knocks on your ranch door and says, I’ve been looking at your barn, and unless you do something, it’s going to collapse in 17 years, but I can fix it for a lot cheaper right now, and your barn will be fine. He said, Mr. President, you're going to throw them right off the ranch. He said, Americans don’t fix things until the roof falls in but fortunately, and this is where Conrad didn't continue, Americans, when the roof falls in, somehow managed to fix things.
Mitch Daniels (00:59:51):
Well, we may have to again, but I join you in your optimism because I don’t know another way to look at the world.
David Keene (00:59:56):
We have to live here.
Mitch Daniels (00:59:57):
Yes. Well, David Keene, thank you so much for this hour. Thank you more than that for a lifetime of just unparalleled leadership, intellectual, and in the most practical of ways on behalf of principles that we hold dear. So on behalf of Liberty Fund, thanks for being here.
David Keene (01:00:18)
Thanks for having me. Thank you for what you do.
Outro (01:00:20):
And thanks for what you do. The future of Liberty has been brought to you by Liberty Fund, a private educational foundation dedicated to encouraging discussions of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.