In the end, all the beautiful, elegant things in life, the things that I care about, the things that matter, depend on getting the politics right. Because in those societies where they get it wrong, everything else is destroyed, everything else is leveled.
America is the only country ever founded on an idea. The only country that is not founded on race or even common history. It's founded on an idea and the idea is liberty. That is probably the rarest phenomena in the political history of the world; this has never happened before. And not only has it happened, but it's worked. We are the most flourishing, the most powerful, most influential country on Earth with this system, invented by the greatest political geniuses probably in human history.
Anything done at a high level of excellence always intrigues me because it's the ultimate expression of being human, that you do something, something you don't have to do.
I was a Great Society liberal. I thought we ought to help the poor, we ought to give them all the money we can. And then, the evidence started to pour in. The evidence of how these grand programs, the poverty programs, the welfare programs--everything was making things worse. I didn't have a dog in that fight. I was willing to go where the evidence led. As a doctor, I'd been trained in empirical evidence. If the treatment is killing your patients, you stop the treatment.
[Playwright] Tom Stoppard once said the reason he writes is because every once in a while you put a few words together in the right order and you're able to give the world a nudge. And sometimes I'm able to do that.
I've calmed down a bit from where I thought: this is it, it’s the end, we're done. I’ve sort of accepted the fact that there's an organic evolution to society, and as long as we keep civil society strong and in constraint to some extent, we're going to do okay. So I guess you could say I've become a mellow conservative.
In our sophisticated historical analyses, we tend to attribute everything to these large underlying currents, to certain political ideologies, or social changes like industrialization or the growth of women's rights and all that. But that’s missing the obvious—there’s usually a person who influenced things in a way that all the underlying forces cannot account for. In American history, (there’s) Washington, Lincoln, FDR, Reagan--they all stand out. It’s a way of looking at history that's less abstract, and is more recognizing the individual, which we tend not to do.