John Hood on the Freedom Conservative Principles

Join Roger in this week's Liberty + Leadership Podcast as he speaks with John Hood, President of the John William Pope Foundation. Roger and John discuss John’s transformation from journalist to think tank president to philanthropist. They explore John’s leadership in rejuvenating the core concepts of American conservatism and the importance of Freedom Conservativism principles and the statement that he was instrumental in formulating. John also shares his insight about the importance of personal responsibility, civility and the critical role of arts and cultural programs in American society.

John Hood is President at the John William Pope Foundation and serves on the board of the John Locke Foundation, a state policy think tank he founded in 1989. As a journalist, John wrote extensively about politics and public policy for several North Carolina newspapers and penned a syndicated column that appeared in more than 40 papers across the state. John authored seven nonfiction books and two historical-fantasy novels, “Mountain Folk” and “Forest Folk.” He is also a contributing editor at Reason Magazine.

John was previously a Bradley Fellow with the Heritage Foundation and currently teaches at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy. He received his undergraduate degree at UNC Chapel Hill and his master’s degree at UNC-Greensboro.

The Liberty + Leadership Podcast is hosted by TFAS President Roger Ream and produced by kglobal. This episode was recorded at Reason Magazine’s podcast studio. If you have a comment or question for the show, please drop us an email at podcast@TFAS.org.

To support TFAS and its mission, please visit TFAS.org/support.

• Forest Folk – John Hood
• Mountain Folk – John Hood
• The Soul of Civility: Alexandra Hudson
• The Theme is Freedom - Stan Evans
• In Defense of Freedom – Frank Meyer
• M. Stanton Evans: Conservative Wit, Apostle of Freedom - Steve Hayward

Transcript

Roger Ream: 0:00

Hello and welcome. I'm Roger Reem and this is the Liberty and Leadership Podcast a conversation with T-FASS alumni, supporters, faculty and friends who are making a real impact in public policy, business, philanthropy, law and journalism. Today, I'm excited to be joined by John Hood, president of the John William Pope Foundation. We'll be discussing several topics, but especially a project aimed at clarifying and revitalizing the principles of American conservatism during a time of intellectual and political upheaval on the right. One outcome of this was a statement of freedom conservative principles. This document offers a vision of how our country can come together behind a shared vision that promotes human flourishing and individual freedom. John, I'm looking forward to exploring this effort that you're helping to lead that would restore a commitment to individual freedom and limited government on the right. Thank you so much for joining me today.

John Hood: 1:05

You're certainly welcome. Thanks for having me.

Roger Ream: 1:08

Why don't you start by giving our listeners a little background on your career? You've been what I would probably describe as a public intellectual and a journalist, and now you serve as president of a large private foundation located in Raleigh, north Carolina, I should add. I think that's a fair and accurate description, but could you tell us a little more about your career prior to your current position?

John Hood: 1:32

Sure, when I went off to college, I have a identical twin brother and we went off to college and we had vague notions of what we were going to do, but primarily we had an interest in the performing arts. We quickly realized there was no money in that. So my brother wisely went into the law and I unwisely chose journalism as the alternative, which paid even less. But anyway, while I was in college one of the things I did was work on some student publications. I started my own. This was at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and in that context I started to interact with the larger movement outside of my home state of North Carolina. For example, when I was on the debate team and we were traveling around the country, I was looking for good arguments to make and I was scouring the library. And it happened on a magazine I hadn't read before, which was Reason Magazine. I'd grown up reading national review and human events, but I had not been exposed to Reason until college. So all of these things came together. I actually ended up doing a tour at Reason Magazine as an intern and became a contributing editor. While I was in college, I also worked for newspapers in my home state I liked working more than I liked reading about someday working, and so I sometimes would even cut class to cover city councils and county commissions and things like that. So I spent a little time, even when I was in college, working in newspapers, started a syndicated column for a couple of newspapers that I was writing news stories for, and I still write that syndicated column to this day. So I've been writing it since 1986. It runs in about 40, 45 newspapers in North Carolina.

John Hood: 3:15

And when I got out of college, my first job, I went back to Washington where I had done some internships and educational sessions and went to work for the New Republic. This was when Fred Barnes and Morton Condrac you were among the senior editors and those were the two men that I worked for specifically. I did some reporting for them for their magazine piece and other things they did, and I also worked with the to prep them for their appearances on the McLachlan group, which was the first time I got into television, something I did later in life. So after I spent some time there, went back to North Carolina, helped start a state policy think tank called the John Locke Foundation in a magazine called Carolina Journal, started doing TV shows in in North Carolina TV and radio shows. So you're right, I spent most of my career as a think tank president, as a radio TV print commentator about politics and policy, wrote a fair amount for national publications like National Review and Reason, and wrote some books, but I spent much of my career in that thing.

John Hood: 4:22

Almost a decade ago, though, I started talking to the head of the John William Pope Foundation, which was a grant making foundation that had been instrumental in founding the John Locke Foundation and some of the other projects that we had founded since in North Carolina and beyond, and Art Pope, who's the chairman of the foundation, asked me to come around the other side of the table. So I spent most of my career begging for money, and now I write checks, but I still do a lot of the other things that I still write my column, and I still work in a toil in some of the vineyards of the free market and conservative movements. So that's kind of my short version of my story. I've never quite got the performing bug out of my system. In addition to the fact that I still speak and do performative things, I also continue to teach tap dancing. So that's pretty much me in a nutshell.

Roger Ream: 5:19

All right, that's great. You mentioned a few things there that I want to just mention in passing mostly, and that is, you mentioned Fred Barnes, who's a longtime trustee of the Fund for American Studies and a good friend. I had lunch with him just last week, great journalist, and I should not hesitate to mention we're using the studios of Reason Magazine today and their new offices off DuPont Circle. So I want to express my gratitude to Reason Magazine for letting us use the studio here, and the Carolina Journal. I should say I get the Carolina Journal and see your column regularly, so I enjoy reading it, even though sometimes it's focused very much on North Carolina but not ours, often not, and it's great you've kept that up and continue to write.

Roger Ream: 6:07

Now just a question too about the John William Pope Foundation. I guess, in the interest of full disclosure, I'll mention you support our education, some of our educational programs, that the Fund for American Studies, which we're very grateful for. But I had the opportunity to go down now it must have been a dozen years ago to your great anniversary Gala in Raleigh, and I learned a lot more about the foundation that I knew at the time. The great work you do not just in supporting the ideas of a free and prosperous country. But the work you do in North Carolina in the area of social philanthropy, of working with nonprofits in that area, it's just remarkable as well. I think that that dinner you donated the proceeds to help people coming out of prison, as I recall, and finding getting job skills to find jobs. What is the John William Pope Foundation focused on today?

John Hood: 7:03

Well, we were founded in 1986, the Pope family John William Pope, the patriarch of the family, and then our Pope, his son, who's currently the chairman, are in the retail business and so they came out of a very competitive business. They have stores hundreds of stores around the country, and they also have a passionate interest in North Carolina and in the places specifically where they're from. So our philanthropy is appropriate, fulfills donor intent by directing our funds into four different categories real quick, their public policy, north Carolina and beyond. Their education, particularly higher education. It's largely in the carolinas that we also fund organizations like the fund for american studies that do work on many campuses across the country or draw for many campuses to washington or other places where programming occurs.

John Hood: 7:56

Our third category is entirely restricted to just a few parts of our state that we're from. That's human services. So you're right, we find soup kitchens, homeless shelters, addiction treatment, job training, a variety of other programs aimed at Rectifying the the difficulties that people have to succeed in a free and open society. We believe that Everyone is benefited when we have the right policy infrastructure. We protect Freedom and delivery of basic public goods and all the things that we talk about in our policy grantees work on. But we also believe that human beings have agency, they have choice, they have make, they make choices. We can help them make better choices. We can help people who make poor choices learn from them and do better, and we look for programs that Mary Belief that everyone has value and worth and dignity and something to contribute With personal responsibility. Ask people for something, need help for something in it as part of that process isn't just a handout this is the traditional shibboleth, but it's true. You don't just want to give a handout, you want to give a hand up. In fact, that organization that you refer to, that was the beneficiary of our anniversary event. It was called step up and it is indeed a program aimed at providing a variety of interventions to help people make better decisions, be able to Present themselves, learn skills, practice those skills.

John Hood: 9:28

We think virtue is something that isn't just a singular choice, it's, it's a series of choices, it's a behavior, isn't it? All the things that we learned from our, our mom and our grandma and society in general about being responsible and productive adults has to do with habits, practicing things over, and, over and over again. So we think that that's what's one of the principles that guides our human services giving.

John Hood: 9:54

And finally, our fourth category, which I, as I mentioned, particularly have a personal interest, is the arts. We give to arts and cultural programs, from the Carolina Ballet to the Museum of History or the Museum of Art to a variety of other institutions in our state. We believe that we are better public policy grant makers Because we also come in alongside organizations that work in the trenches and making people's lives better. And we think that we are better grant makers to humanitarian, relief and human services programs and arts programs because we have a certain set of principles that we believe should guide Not just private life but public life and as we do good work and our grantees accomplish things in the public policy sphere, we think that helps us better understand some of the problems we're dealing with as a grant maker closer to home.

Roger Ream: 10:47

Well, that response to my question could be transcribed and appear as your next column, john, I thought that was just.

Roger Ream: 10:53

That was such a great Recitation really, of the Tocquevillean role of civil society, of nonprofit organizations, of the voluntary sector and stepping up and dealing with problems effectively, so that people aren't turning to government agencies which don't have that same approach of trying to deal with the underlying cause of a problem and instead often just dish out money. And I think this brings us to the statement of principles that has been called the freedom conservative statement, because that too tries to stress the importance of not just political freedom, freedom act, but also the importance of a virtue, of moral habits of civil society, of the kind of the synthesis of two that are needed. Sometimes the word fusions use, some people would say maybe there's a tension between the two, but let's talk some about that. As far as I know you can tell me if I'm wrong, but you kind of really coined that phrase freedom conservative in a piece you wrote and could you illuminate a little bit about kind of what you are hoping to capture with that phrase freedom conservative, before we talk about the actual principles?

John Hood: 12:13

Certainly, it's certainly the case that we are at the Pope Foundation. A lot of my allies around my state, around the country, are unabashed about calling ourselves fusionists. Not sure it's a useful political label. That's why we chose freedom conservatives, and I'll explain that in a moment. But we do believe, although the term fusions not so great, the concept is really important.

John Hood: 12:39

One of my mentors I did the National Journalism Center program back in the eighties when I was a college student. So one of my mentors was Stan Evans, and Stan Evans, who I'd first gotten to know his byline is like 10 year old, reading his columns and human events Eventually got to meet him at many points in my early career. I asked Dan first for advice, most of which consisted of don't ever come back to Washington, which I wasn't going to anyway. But I mean he was, as you may know, he was very, very strongly an advocate Of conservatives coming perhaps to Washington, like to his programming or other organizations, and learning things, but then going and doing what he did be the editor of a newspaper in Indianapolis or, in my case, doing journalism in North Carolina. That was what he advised me. But the other thing that I got from Stan was an understanding of this, this concept of the politics of freedom and the politics of virtue or order, not just being two separate things that you have to build a coalition out of, but actually being mutually reinforcing, in fact, if you. If you allow me out, let me just quote something Stan said. He wrote the traditionalist and libertarian strands in conservative thought are congruent instead of contradictory. It's one of the reasons he didn't like the term fusion, because it suggests you take these two different, separate nettles and you kind of meld them together, and his argument is that's not really what liberty and virtue are about. They're really mutually reinforcing. And similarly, another intellectual hero of mine obviously I never met him would be Friedrich Hayek, and he wrote that to be a libertarian in America means a respect for a tradition of rules that we only imperfectly understand, and this would include not just rules about government or or abstract society, but actually rules about families and community organizations and how businesses really work at the ground level. In other words, civil society took the value and, as you say, understanding the people that I've been right, be it Bill Buckley or Stan Evans or Friedrich Hayek or Frank Meyer of course these are people who didn't see American conservatism is some sort of strange collection. You know it's part of a dragon and part of a lion and part of a griffin and they're kind of does it looks like some otherworldly creature.

John Hood: 15:01

And I saw American conservatism as about conserving classical liberalism, because that's what the American founding was drenched in in part, and also one might call classic republicanism civic virtue, and I appreciate these ideas abstractly. I'm not a philosopher but I've employed philosophers as, like I say, I'm not an economist but a higher economist. But for us, as you may be able to tell from my previous answer, this isn't just about theory, this is about practice, this is about living in the world and yet also trying to understand how that world works. Our board members, myself we have not just been commenting about public policy. We served in office or served in public boards and agencies or gotten our hands dirty writing bills, very much being involved in the government process, and similarly we're very much involved in civil society, directly giving money, serving on boards, volunteering. There's not, there's no substitute for experience and that is what led us to come up with this concept a couple of years called the couple of years ago called the future of freedom initiative, to grant making initiative.

John Hood: 16:17

We articulated some of these ideas we had about American conservatism, what it's trying to conserve. We make no bones that I don't really fully understand English conservatism because I don't live in England. I don't understand Hungarian conservatism or Chinese conservatism. But in America we have certain things we're trying to conserve and they are particularly our notion that we're a creedal nation, that anybody, regardless of ethnicity or family background or whatever, is an American, if that person, except certain rules of living in America and contributing to America. That that, that creedal nation concept. And also a real historical tradition of people getting together, like the Continental Congress or the Constitutional Convention or other kinds of bodies that people get together. And they didn't agree.

John Hood: 17:10

There were huge differences of opinion about how to set up the federal government and the result was not Brought down from by Charlton Heston. You know, down a hill and take a look at this. It was a compromise, it was hashed out. It wasn't perfect, because you can't be perfect if you're human being, so no human institution could be perfect. So we think this combination of Basic principles that apply around the world but also specific political and civic institutions that were built in America by Americans and tinkered with and experimented with, and some parts were bad and we tried to fix them and I got a little bit better. But there were trade-offs. That's the tradition of American conservatism that we wanted to Reinforce, perhaps to some extent reinvigorate, and so we started this process of a request with proposal. We got a lot of different ideas from different organizations and institutions and made some initial grants and In in parallel to that I had done a series of focus groups with various journalists, think tank leaders, academics, political actors on the center right, asking them their concerns about the movement of which there were many and what we could do about them. So these two things together Interacted, led to some conversations between some like-minded conservatives, classical liberals and libertarians and what became the freedom conservatism statement of principles.

John Hood: 18:34

That name Was something I had pitched about a year ago in a national review article. I argued that Fusionism is that, for reasons I just said, really doesn't work. Really it's not metals being fused. Conservatism in America is more like a molecule that you share electrons. I made this elaborate chemical Chemistry analogy and said but that's not, that's no good, we can't use that as a name either. And when we came down is it really distinguishes the brand of conservatism we're talking about from some of the other things that are happening on the right in America right now, the rise of nationalists and populists and other kinds of what they sometimes themselves call post liberal thinking. And If they want to say that their ideas, which I mostly disagree with, are post liberal, post classical liberalism, then I guess I don't want to go past Classical liberalism.

John Hood: 19:30

And what is one of the core values that kind of sums up the distinction, its freedom, that some of the People in the populist camp use the term national conservative. There is an organization, there's actually a national conservatism statement of principles that came out last year and we think it's. We thought it was mistake. We thought some of the particulars were mistaken. We also have a basic concept that what distinguishes the American right is the nation, not really. I mean that lots of cultures have nations, and we think that you should start with the individual, the individual's rights, the individual liberty. Obviously we believe in nations. We live in a nation. When we protect our nation with a garnation is itself a Reflects, a reflection of certain values. One of them certainly it's not the only one one of them is liberty, one of them is freedom, and so that's why we chose freedom, conservatism and actually issued a statement of principles that is entirely fairly understood to be a response To the national conservatism statement of principles. There are some shared concepts and a lot of distinctions.

Roger Ream: 20:39

Well, there's a lot in what you just said that I'd like to talk about, the. I will say first enough, I'm old enough to have met Hayek on a number of occasions. You're making you're dating me by saying you weren't old enough to have met.

John Hood: 20:52

Actually was old enough and I did see him across the room one time. That's not the same thing as me.

Roger Ream: 20:57

No, no. Also, you name some you know great people that we need to be reading today. Still, Frank Meyer and, of course, Stan Evans didn't write a lot. I mean he did. He wrote some excellent books.

John Hood: 21:10

People ask me sometimes well, why do you insist on freedom, conservatism? I mean, they suggest other ideas which I don't, for various reasons, including advertising and marketing reasons. I reject because they just don't. You can't shorten them to free con as easily as this one. There are other kinds of labels, just don't work. But one of the things I pointed out is we are obviously in the Frank Meyer and Stan Evans tradition. One of the major works that lay out this tradition, well, Stan's was called.

Roger Ream: 21:39

The theme is freedom, which we sponsored, we gave Stan a grant to write that book. It was.

John Hood: 21:44

David Jones, david Jones idea. What's the most famous of Frank Meyer's works in this area? Yeah, freedom, freedom, freedom, freedom. I hear a theme, I hear a common name.

Roger Ream: 21:55

Yeah, our, our, our, found, one of our founders, david Jones. We had a portrait done of him and it's in our lobby and he's holding a copy of In Defense of Freedom by Frank Meyer. And, of course, stan Evans was an important part of our organization over the years and sometimes we should do a show just talking about Stan, because there's a lot of material there and if anyone's listening to this and wants to learn more about him, steve Hayward wrote a biography of him a few years ago.

John Hood: 22:22

Yeah, so, and I think all, I could have added to it was a little bit more specifics about which Motown songs he really liked best to play at the parties which I kind of remember, most of those.

Roger Ream: 22:34

Yeah Well, I've got some extra copies of Steve Hayward's books. If anyone's listening and wants a copy, I'll be happy to send one out. There's another figure I wonder if you know about before we dig into this statement is Richard Cornell. He was a great inspiration to David Jones and Jay Parker on my board and ties in so closely with the work you do at the John William Pope Foundation, because he really urged conservatives to get involved in civil society, to volunteer in their community, because if we failed to do that, government would come in and take over in so many of these areas. He wrote about the student loan program. It used to be privately. Private student loan programs were very well managed. Students could get loans from banks through private organization out in Indiana and then the government took it over. And it's Gresham's law applied to charity the bad charity drives out good charity and we see that over and over again. But let's dig into the statement. Some, first of all, have you been getting attention to it?

John Hood: 23:44

Why, yes, we have. So the statement was released. It was developed over several months and it was a group effort. It wasn't even like a dra—it wasn't Tom Riche, jefferson and John Adams and some other people going off as a draft committee. It was a pretty large group of people and I made a conscious decision. I had certain—I would have written the statement.

John Hood: 24:04

If it just been my version of American conservatism for the 21st century freedom conservatism, I would have written it a little bit differently. I suspect anybody who was involved in the process if it had been solely a one by line kind of thing, it would have ended up a little differently. But in particular, I wanted to include some younger voices. I mean, I've been around a long time and some of the other people have been around a long time. So we included some people in their 20s and 30s in the drafting of the statement itself and also in the recruitment of signatories. So we did both things together. We drafted the statement and started chopping it around Eventually. When we went public in July July 13, we had 83 signatories. They're now over 200. And one of the things we really wanted to lean into when we recruited people for the statement is to reflect our movement broadly. It is noticeable that the National Conservatism statement and just separate from the statement and a lot of the voices that are associated with populism and nationalism, while they talk a whole lot about the heartland getting outside of elite bubbles and this and that and the other, a suspiciously high percentage of them live in elite bubbles or maybe in other countries, which we thought was a little odd. So we leaned into recruiting people who believed in these principles and are willing to spouse them and advocate them.

John Hood: 25:30

I think in almost every state we have at least one signatory. We have lots of organizations whose leaders signed the statement that work at the state level or at the local level. So we certainly have some very familiar names. George Will signed the statement, carl Rowe signed the statement, top flight academics like the Hillsdale College historian Wilfrid McClay, duke University political economist Mike Munger people like that. We have some well-known people in the political world, the think tank world, the media world, the academic world. We also have younger voices, people who are the next generation, representing either institutions or as they're pursuing their careers. We'll probably see them in two or three other roles as they get older.

John Hood: 26:19

So we leaned into, when you look down that list of signatories, you will see a wide variety of backgrounds, of interests, of policy specialties. We have people in the signatory list who are healthcare experts, school choice experts, constitutional law litigators, professors who teach literature, people who have served as members of Congress, as governors in the United States, members of the legislature, people who've been mayors. So people have practical experience and we think that it is valuable to mix people who could quote Hayek or other lengthy discourses on Plato, but also people who have actually managed a budget, who have had to decide whether to keep the service maintaining public building. Should that be done by employees or should we contract it out? It's not a very Plato versus Aristotle question, but it is a really important question if your goal is to preserve a free society and how it works, including states and localities, having more power and then exercising that power wiser.

Roger Ream: 27:34

Well, now in the statement I should mention for those who haven't read it, of course it's available on. You have a website, correct? We do?

John Hood: 27:40

freedomconservatismorg is the site. You could go there, read the statement, look at the signatories. We also put out updates every week or so. We chronicle, as you said. You asked if there's been a lot of coverage. There's been a lot of coverage. There's been media coverage, there've been articles that FreeKons and their allies have written and we try to put all that together for people at FreedomKonservatismorg.

Roger Ream: 28:03

And are you still looking for people to sign? Are you looking for people from the general public to sign or are you looking more specifically toward leaders of organizations?

John Hood: 28:12

We're looking for leaders, people who have been, people who are working in this movement in some capacity. It doesn't have to be those or anything. We certainly welcome anybody who will endorse the statement and we've had, you know, between the different platforms, social media, and hundreds of thousands of people have read the statement and liked it or something. But as far as people adding people to the signatory list, we're looking for people who work in this movement writ large. It could be people who work in politics or journalism or academia or public policy organizations or litigation shops. So we try to keep it fairly broad, but we also are trying to focus on people who are really working in this movement in some capacity.

Roger Ream: 28:58

So the statement itself is an affirmation of the idea of individual liberty, of the importance of the people being able to pursue their happiness.

Roger Ream: 29:09

You've got a point on the importance of free enterprise as a direct cause of our prosperity in this country and a statement on expressing concerns about sky rock, getting federal debt that risks bankrupting our country.

Roger Ream: 29:27

The importance of the rule of law, the quality under the law, is part of that.

Roger Ream: 29:33

This idea you've touched on already of us being a creedal nation that welcomes immigrants who accept our values as a country and I won't go through all their 10 in total Freedom of conscience, I think is a very important one. There's one that touches on America's national security and foreign policy, about us being a shining city on the hill. What I found interesting is, when I first received it from you and read it, that you could put together a statement of this broad statement of principles that, while sure I could take issue with a word here or the way this sentence was worded, there was very little of that where I would say, oh, this isn't quite how I would word it, but maybe one or two instances, but it really was well-crafted, in a way to as I read the signatories that are on it now. They're not all in line on every policy choice that's out there, but they can all agree that this is a very well-written general statement of principles about freedom and about the American experience really.

John Hood: 30:47

Well, I appreciate that it did take a lot of thought to try to accomplish that end. In particular, can you in fact write a series of statements, statement of principles, that clearly distinguishes what we're talking about from other kinds of understandings of the American right that we think are either philosophically or politically problematic or even dangerous I mean, there are some clear distinctions but at the same time have language that is capacious enough to include people who may disagree about particular applications. I mean, one of the things we have a lot of statements in the principles that you say that there aren't so many that we specifically say we commit to. But, for example, one of them is you mentioned earlier the debt, the deficits in debt, which, for example, the National Conservatism Statement makes no mention of at all. But if you think about American conservatism, certainly post-war I teach a course on this at Duke University, so I sort of steep myself in the history of the post-war American conservative movement and it would be impossible to imagine any of the major characters of that drama who wouldn't have cared a great deal about the size of the federal government in particular, but government per se, the implications that it has for the tax rate and if you're running deficits if you're spending more than your revenues coming in. But that wouldn't have a tremendous effect, not just on sort of business or the inflation rate we assume relationships there or something but also that a country can't, would not have the capacity to defend itself militarily if it's running up these huge debts because you just don't have enough fiscal capacity for that or that. It would actually harm communities to make them dependent upon a faraway federal government that's borrowing money and putting money down into local governments or even into nonprofits. That a government that big would corrupt free enterprise because businesses would see it as a great opportunity to try to use government to block their competitors out or subsidized and that it wouldn't affect the family, which it clearly does.

John Hood: 33:01

We have used this borrowed money in part to supplant functions like taking care of parents and grandparents when they get older or infirm, taking care of children.

John Hood: 33:12

We have supplanted the roles of families, nuclear families and extended families with bigger government paid for by making the next generation pay back the principal at interest. We thought that was essential and we commit ourselves taking action. But you notice, roger, we don't say and therefore we should be instead of medicare, and it should be set up the following way and the means that should kick in in 2032. We don't have a lot of those policy details and I'm confident that if we brought together and we have and will continue to bring free kinds together to talk about these kinds of things, we'd have disagreements about what should we do on the spending side and the tax side to, over time, get rid of these deficits and pay down the debt, but we all commit to do something because the alternative isn't tolerable. That's an example of pretty specific distinguishes us from other kinds of people on the right who don't seem to care about this but at the same time, broad enough to encompass differences of opinion about the details which, of course, you're always going to have.

Roger Ream: 34:14

Well, I mean, I think you're talking about an existential threat to our country as we know it. Yes, the ballooning national debt, I mean it's just. It could very well threaten not all, as you said our ability to defend ourselves and for government to provide the basic functions that it's constitutionally obligated to provide at the federal level. And we're in an environment now, as we're recording this today, about potential government shutdown and efforts being made around the edges to try to trim the growth of spending. But it's certainly out of control.

John Hood: 34:53

It's very far edges. Government shutdowns are just exercises of theatricality that they're not anything real. People should never assume that there's anything real beyond behind any of that. It's all just political gamesmanship. A real solution is going to require some sorts of compromises, unless you're going to get like the party of freedom is going to have two thirds of all the US senators and a president and a US house, and then that do exactly what my perfect budget plan is. They're just implemented. I mean that's a wonderful fantasy to have, but then you got to wake up in the morning and go to the real world and in the real world these are tough. The reason they haven't been done yet is because they're challenging. They mostly involve entitlement spending. I mean everything's got to be on the table. You have to have entitlements in the story, and shutdown theatrics have very little to do with the heavy lifting.

John Hood: 35:49

One of the things that I point out about the statement and in another commitment we make here is just how important it is to get the right levels of government doing the right things. We need to decentralize. No-transcript. There's a familiar sort of federalism as good laboratories of democracy, subsidiary, any sort of case that you and I could make, and I agree with much of that but also we simply point out that states are better run. Almost every state has to balance its operating budget. That doesn't mean states don't borrow money. They can borrow money for capital needs, but they can't borrow money to pay salaries of teachers or police officers or pay Medicaid bills. That has to be done with current revenue.

John Hood: 36:32

Well, obviously, the federal government has had something like that. There should be a requirement. I don't know how we get from here to there, but one of the solutions is to decentralize, have states have more power because they operate under better rules than the federal government does. It's also closer to the people and all the other arguments we can make, which is, quite literally, states are better run because their constitutions are better written to handle fiscal matters. And until we do that at the federal level which I believe we need to do, and in addition to doing it at the federal level, we need to push responsibilities back to where they're supposed to be at states and local governments which, frankly, are less likely to be corrupt at this point Maybe not in our past, but today. They are less likely to be corrupt and they're more likely to have sensible rules to follow.

John Hood: 37:22

Well then, that seems like an area, this area of federalism, that isn't talked about enough, among others here Sure, part of what has happened to our debate about the future of America, but also the right, is this intense and increasing nationalization. I mean literally the term national conservatism makes me quiver, because we're not supposed to be national everything. We're not supposed to be nationalizing things, and I don't just mean government programs, roger, I mean our conversations. I mean, why is everything about something I just like happened in Indiana or Idaho and I'm very angry and I want to do something about it? Now, I don't actually live in Indiana or Idaho and maybe people who live in those places could probably handle it. And if they can't handle it and it continues to be really dumb, I guess I won't move to Indiana or Idaho.

John Hood: 38:15

So this constant making everything nationalized and being really, really focused on Washington and really, really focused on presidents and the national political debate is unhealthy. It's not the way America was set up. It's not the way we operated our system of self-government for most of its history. Obviously, we know the media has changed. How we get information has changed. There are some real challenges here. But conservatives, be it in the 18th century or the 21st century, one of the principles we need to stand for and one of the principles that freedom conservatives do stand for is localism. Let communities solve their own problems. Let regions solve problems that communities can't solve. Let states solve problems that regions can't solve. Let Washington at least attempt to solve problems that only a national government can solve, which is, of course, primarily national defense and a few other matters that are really beyond the appropriate role of states.

Roger Ream: 39:15

Well, very good. I appreciate that discussion and congratulate you on the statement. I'd like to also ask in the remaining few minutes about you as a novelist. John, could you give our listeners a little background there, because it shows you as a man of many talents, not just a tap dancer, but a….

John Hood: 39:39

I will also say this also has an origin story that involves reason magazine. I wrote a column a couple of years ago for reason about if you're going to fight for freedom, it's not enough to have the facts, it's not enough to have a good graph, it's not enough to say well, the latest journal of public economics has a paper of its sales. We need to do all of those things, but human beings are not calculating machines. We're not robots. We're storytelling creatures. Our history involves sitting around the campfire at night and telling stories about who we are and where we came from, and what we should be doing and what heroism consists of.

John Hood: 40:18

I've always loved to read fantasy and science fiction. In particular, I decided to start a series of novels. The first one is called Mountain Folk. It came out a couple of years ago. It's set in the French and Indian War and American Revolution period. Several characters include Daniel Boone, George Washington, some other historical figures, a Cherokee heroine Her name was Non-Yahee a real person who was very important in the interaction between white settlers and Cherokees. But there's also a sea monster and other kinds of monsters and creepy crawly things and dwarves and elves and other fantasy creatures that exist parallel to the real world. This is what is called historical fantasy. It's not like high fantasy, like Lord of the Rings or Chronicles of Narnia, where it happens in some other place. This is happening in America.

John Hood: 41:13

All of my stories are set historically in America. The first book, as I said, ends in the 1790s. The second book, forest Folk, starts around 1800 and takes you through the War of 1812 and the Trail of Tears and some other events on the frontier. The third book, which will come out next summer, is called Water Folk and that will depict the Texas War of Independence, the Mexican War, westward Expansion and Adventure on the High Seas. So I'm having a lot of fun with it.

John Hood: 41:46

If you really sat on me and tried to make me fess up, I would admit that there are some philosophical themes about freedom and community and virtue in these stories. But first and foremost, I think that if you're going to try to tell a story that will be meaningful to someone, it has to be fun, it has to be exciting. These are adventure tales first and foremost. Daniel Boone, in the very first scene, is a young man. He's going up the mountains hunting for something for his family and he encounters a giant monster cat with lightning eyes and a fairy. What happens next, you'll just have to read for yourself.

Roger Ream: 42:28

Yeah, well, that's a great setup, because the next Liberty and Leadership podcast guest is a graduate of our woman who got a Novak Fellowship from us, alexandra Hudson.

John Hood: 42:42

Oh, this is Lexi's book, which I have read and very much enjoy and I'm about to review.

Roger Ream: 42:47

Yeah, yeah, and it's about. You know, I'm going to be talking with her about storytelling and the importance of that, so I believe that book is entitled the Soul of Civility. Yes, that is correct. That is correct and her Novak Fellowship was along those lines and helped spark that book so well. Thank you very much by guest John Hood, a friend and supporter of ours. We appreciate you taking your time to be with us today.

John Hood: 43:13

Thank you.

Roger Ream: 43:14

Thank you for listening to the Liberty and Leadership podcast. Please don't forget to subscribe, download, like or share the show on Apple, spotify or YouTube or wherever you listen to your podcast. If you like this episode, I ask you to rate and review it, and if you have a comment or question for the show, please drop us an email at podcastattfastorg. The Liberty and Leadership podcast is produced at K Global Studios in Washington DC. I'm your host, roger Reem, and until next time, show courage in things, large and small.