Coauthor john clark. Good evening gentlemen, welcome to gibsons. Thank you, its an honor to be a part of one of americas greatest independent bookstores. Thank you for saying that. I will mention, as one of americas great independent bookstores this book is available from gibsons we happily shipped books all over the country, all over the world or if you are local, we offer instore browsing and curbside pickup. Tell me a little bit about this book. I knew i always wanted to write a book i have a lot of ideas for books but i had to have the first book in the first book if you dont like this book i wont be writing any others but if you like this book i have a lot in my abin my head. I wrote different proposals for the publisher and got rejected by lots of publishers like a lot of authors do. I have one publisher who came to me from st. Marks press and he worked for Thomas Newman books his name is Stephen Power and if it wasnt for steve and i dont think this book wouldve began because he was unheard of in the publishing industry. He actually edited my proposal, critiqued it, and send it back to me. Literally, normally that does not happen he said a break if you write this book i will publish it. I said i dont have the stature to write that book. Just because i thought it was a really to me at such a weighty heavy topic and so many people are so educated on conservative thought, i didnt put myself in that category. He said you can do this book and im going to help you do it. Put together a draft and i wanted to take this opportunity to introduce john, john clark, hes joining us from sunny florida. John is someone we normally meet in a coffee shop so meeting in a bookstore is appropriate. We always discuss ideas and we have robust to date and collaboration. We normally meet in the bookshop but when i got the idea for the book i approached him and said, what you think . He really just was engaged. John has been a partner in this whole book. I felt, as i said, i felt intimidated, there isnt a chapter here that john didnt help me shape. I wanted to write it for two reasons, one is, conservativism is often bashed in the media, particularly to the centerleft and liberal left likes to bash conservativism. That always hurt my feelings. Because they things they say about it i knew they were to. I wanted to sit down a marker of conservatism is a rational governing front often like philosophy which is an attractive governing from philosophy. I would extend an olive branch to my left friends and say ab its not my philosophy my philosophy philosophy is conservatism. I dont know what serves anyone well to trash each others philosophy when in the end we have so much to agree on. Our country is a Constitutional Republic week to get anything done at all we have to compromise with people who have different ideas than you. The same way that if you want to look for somebody who you agree with 100 of the time you should run. Thats one half of the outing if the other half actually people who self identify as conservatives but seem to be more and more embracing policies that are just antithetical to conservatism and i want to lay down that marker as well. And of course people unfamiliar with conservativism at all because they are young or just havent paid attention to governing philosophy i think this book lays it out pretty well. I define conservatism the way john does he says its order of liberty ordered liberty in the sense that if you take away the order you just got liberty and thats a libertarian philosophy which is not my philosophy, its ordered liberty, we dont automatically reject ideas because they are new, we test the ideas against established ideas and if they are better, we can migrate to them but if they are not, we wouldnt go out something working very well for something that might not work very very well or isnt working very very well. I make that case on immigration, on trade, on healthcare on the Second Amendment and many of the other issues in the book. That was my motivation for writing. By the way, still right, john picked the title. We couldnt think of a title we had all these ideas and he said youve got to call it still right, the reason why is because on msnbc political analysis so i get accused often of going to the enemy. Im on msnbc, although i daresay there are more conservatives that appear regularly on msnbc that appear on any other cable news network. One of the reasons i like to be on msnbc as i had to learn how to present the conservative case to a liberal left wing audience. Over time its been pretty successful, while i havent convinced everybody who watches the network that they should embrace conservatism, i get a lot of comments that i didnt really know what conservatism was and at least now i understand it as a rationale. Being accused of being a lefty and im a trump critic and being a trump credit they say youve gone to the left i say, no, im still right. I thought the title for. That migrant loving hybrid driving composting work which is all true i think we should be a proimmigration country i do actually drive a hybrid and i love technologies to protect the environment i wrote a chapter on the environment. And we compost here at the tyler household and with 223 a ai never thought of that as a liberal idea i thought it was actually a conservation idea. I will say, our local town operates on a pay as you throw garbage removal where you pay per garbage bag and composting has reduced our household garbage output by 1 3. I will take this moment to say, you just given us your credentials, john, tell us a little bit about yourself and conservatism. Just briefly, rick and i actually met working on a campaign and i worked as a speechwriter for a few candidates everywhere from local level to the National Level we were working on the campaign and Work Together my background i would agree in Political Science and economics and ran an Investment Firm for 18 years. I sold my company about 10 years ago, my Business Partner i wanted to get into the writing side. Im hoping what this book can accomplish as we start a conversation because we used to try to win the hearts and minds, we want to really know what it is we believed, i think one of the fun things to me about writing is sort of stress testing my ideas, do they work . But im hoping what this does is start the conversation because i think right now the political environment is such that we just shout each other down. That doesnt help anybody. I dont claim to have all the answers by far. I think over time i think my ideas have changed and i think thats a healthy thing. I think its a positive sign. Im hoping that doesnt start a conversation. What im abpeople that are saying, im a lifelong democrat but i dont really see much, i disagree with in this book. I think its a good sign that its starting a conversation. Being willing to have a conversation is a very good thing, whereas shutting yourself off and making your choices emotionally on a rational subject are problematic. Rick, did conservatism need to be redefined . And for persons who might be joining us seeking to learn, can you briefly define conservatism for people who may have had a different idea about it. In a nutshell, William F Buckley never actually define conservatism. We can go back to the writings of William Burke and a lot of great conservative writers, which i mentioned before is a little intimidating to write this book i didnt feel the stature to be in the zone but i wanted to lay down and i dont define conservatism per se, conservatism as we talked about earlier is ordered liberty, the idea that freedom individual freedom matters. Its in our declaration of independence, jefferson wrote life, liberty, and the pursuit of happyness and puts them in that order because liberty is a precious to people who dont have life and its hard to pursue happiness if youre not free. That combination and that government was supposed to protect those things in those order in that order, life, liberty, the pursuit of happyness. That protection and particularly the pursuit has made america by far one of the wealthiest most prosperous nations in the world. We are having an argument about that, what does that mean . I think conservatives do an okay job of explaining the academics. We dont always explain how conservatism addresses some of the problematic sides of our american society. For instance, people in need, we often get people who live in dismissive, pull yourself up by your bootstraps the independent, work hard, all those things are true but there are people who are just never going to be independent and always need help. We dont often explain the idea of decentralized government could actually help people. In a nutshell, i will tell you a story its about Franklin Delano roosevelt, probably the greatest politician of the 20th century, i dont think he really had a rival. Roosevelt was running right after Woodrow Wilson, Woodrow Wilson was a democrat and he was loyal to Woodrow Wilson. He was going to run as a democrat, his fifth cousin he modeled his political career after was teddy roosevelt. Teddy was progressive. Fdr was also progressive but he had a problem. He couldnt run as a republican because hoover was a republican and hoover was in the middle of an economic collapse. He couldnt run as progressive because under Woodrow Wilson, progressives have taken a really ugly turn. It stems from eugenics, which was the socalled settled science we could actually decide who gets to procreate and who didnt and that was a very ugly time. Progressivism also brought us the womens right to vote so that was a good thing. It also brought us popular elections of u. S. Senators and awas a bad thing because it cut the responsibility, or the leverage, the state legislature is used to have over the u. S. Congress just eliminated it. State legislatures congress can pass all these laws and state legislatures continually have to deal with. In the old days they wouldve said senator, you keep passing back to us we will bring you right back home. Thats not the case anymore. Finally, they passed prohibition right in the middle of prosperous times. The roaring 20s a wonderful time and they passed prohibition. Fdr couldnt run as a progressive as you really wanted to end wilson was progressive, in fact, teddy and Woodrow Wilson ran against each other, both with competing progressive agendas but from different parties. Wilson claimed to talk, he got his clock cleaned. Fdr did something really interesting what he did was he put out a progressive agenda, he didnt call it progressive, he called it liberal. Which is interesting because up until that point the word liberal and liberalism have been associated with what we now recognize as conservatives. Thats where the word classic liberal comes from, john and i would identify ourselves as classic liberals in the preroosevelt sense. He called it liberal and it stuck and conservatives ended up calling it conservatives and thats been the monitors of Major Political philosophies a a unfortunately many people who follow him call himself conservative and they are not, consider the Republican Party just at the convention and for the First Time Since 1856 in which nine of the six planks in the original Republican Party platform civil rights claims the next hundred years the Republican Party was procivil rights party they lost that and this year they didnt put a platform at all just to say that we dont know what we believe. They simply pass the resolutions that we are with the big guy in whatever he says we are behind. I think its a really sad thing because parties cant sustain themselves on abif 89 yahoo were to pass from the public stage is party would collapse because theres nothing under it except for benjamin netanyahu. The republic and party is now the trump party and when he moves on one way or the other it will collapse because we its based on one person. Parties need to be based on ideas because when we went, i spent my career helping them republicans when when we win, my question now is, what do we win . What do we actually get . If the answer is, higher deficits, traded tariffs, mismanagement of a National PublicHealth Crisis that ends up costing us trillions of dollars and millions of lost jobs, thats not winning to me, i would like to return to tried and true philosophy of governing and conservatives have always been sort about the kids table even if they were ever invited to dinner they got to sit at the kids table and when reagan came in they got to sit at the adult table and drove the agenda for quite a number of years. Now we dont even get underwriter to dinner and bunch of what i would call imposters sit at the dinner tables and call themselves conservatives while people like john and i are talking to them to come to dinner. Thats kind of where i think we are in a nutshell and why conservatism i think really needs to revisit it. Even if you read my book and dont become a conservative thats okay my goal is accomplish that you say, at least i understand why hes a conservative and i understand his thinking on how it works whether i believe it works or not, thats one thing. At least you will know that its a rational theory. You mentioned earlier that your work as an analyst on msnbc forced you to examine your own beliefs in depth and they do say that two teachers to learn. For yourself as well john, does teaching people, did that definitely reinforce your own belief or did it change them . Its funny because i have nine children, amazingly enough, i homeschooled all of them, whats interesting is that probably one of the greatest reparations for writing speeches is teaching my children and explaining concepts to them. I think there is that but i think you are absolutely right thats the principal its impossible to separate teaching from learning and when we have these conversations, the thing for me from a conservative perspective as much of what we believe is that the private sector is able to come up with many of these solutions they did an amazing job in the environmental chapter because hes explaining, thats his life. Thats the way hes living his life. The reality is hes not saying, hey, conservatives are painted with the brush of we dont care about the environment, thats clearly not the case. We are making the argument that conservatism, the private sector might simply be the best way to address this as opposed to leaving it in the governments hands. I think that many of the areas in the book a essentially make that claim is that things may be better addressed, its not that we dont care about these things, of course we do, we are just trying to figure out the best way to get there. We are trying to achieve the common good, presumably the same as political progressives, we are just arguing about maybe that math in terms of how to get there, if that makes sense. Rick . I was so enthralled with johns answer i forgot what the question was. Reexamining our own beliefs abdoesnt help reinforce your own beliefs . Absolutely you have to explain to other people what you believe. I will give you two examples when i first went on msnbc i started really going on the Chris Matthews show, john and i have been watching Chris Matthews, weve been watching Chris Matthews as literally as long as theres been cabletelevision. Hes a legend. Chris matthews worked on the hill he worked three separate congressmen. He was actually a Capitol Hill Police officer before he worked on the hill and politics. I always have respect for chris because he doesnt pontificate because he just pontificates, he pontificates because he actually worked for speaker of the house and the speakers office. Thats the experience you cant trade. Was invited on the show hardball for the first time and its very intimidating so my goal with Chris Matthews on hardball was to get invited back to survive it. Chris is very generous and over the years i kept getting invited back more and more but when i first started on msnbc i was the person on there that people love to hate so we all have those people, we cant take our eyes off of them because we hate them so much. [laughter] they are enjoyable and entertaining because they are nuts. That was me i would argue and loved to argue but i wasnt very likable. Over time i decided, i worked on a president ial campaign, several president ial campaigns that if i was ever going to be effective in promoting the conservative philosophy i was going to have to learn how to convince people that it was reasonable. So i had to learn how to speak to people who didnt believe what i believed. And find common ground. I think its worked very well and as john said, he read reviews and talking to people who read the book and they are very surprised thats been very gratifying and its all about starting the conversation. I also taught people how to run for elected office, to thousands of people all over the world, israel, rome, greece, most canada, mostly the United States. He really got to think it through and when steve power, the one who wrote my failed proposal, when i sent him the initial manuscript i cant remember he had 7000 words of questions. Like that to lincoln at Cooper Union Speech length number of questions. That as long. It was hard because i really had to think very deeply about healthcare, people who dont have insurance, people with preexisting conditions. How to reconcile my Second Amendment rights with fred guttenberg, who i write about. Who endorsed the book by the way. Fred guttenberg, if you dont know who he is he lost his daughter at Parkland High School in florida. I read about him. In every chapter i try to think, i was once already accused of putting out straw men, that wasnt my intention i did not want to put out straw men, i wanted to answer questions that have been asked of me so i tried to take what progressive ask as really hard questions for conservatives to answer and i want an answer to them and i want to start there and it was also