Hoover Book Club: Equality Of Opportunity: A Century Of Debate

>> Bill Whalen: Hello I'm Bill Whalen. I'm the Hoover Institution's Virginia Hub's carpenter distinguished policy fellow in journalism. And I'd like to welcome you back to the Hoover Book Club, where we bring Hoover fellows and friends together to discuss their latest writings. Our guest today is David Davenport, David's research fellow emeritus here at the Hoover Institution.

Specializing in constitutional federalism, civic education, modern American conservatism, and international law. He's also a senior fellow at the Ashbrook center and former president and professor of public policy and law at Pepperdine University. With his writing partner, Gordon Lloyd, David Davenport has authored the following three books, 2013's the New Deal in Modern American Conservatism and defining reality.

2017's Rugged Individualism, Dead or Alive, and 2019's How Public Policy Became War. He joins us today to discuss his latest collaboration with Gordon Lloyd. And the book's title is equality of opportunity. A century of debate. Dave Davenport, welcome to the Hoover Book Club.

>> David Davenport: Thanks, Bill. Good to be with you.

>> Bill Whalen: So the first thing that strikes me, Dave, is that you've written now four books in this thread. Explain exactly what the thread is. Are you trying to sort of give people a civics class or a history class or a politics class? What are you and Gordon Lloyd up to here?

>> David Davenport: Well, if you take that, it's fine with us. But really what we felt we had uncovered a number of years ago was how important the Franklin Roosevelt Herbert Hoover debates of the 1930s really were and how they foreshadow really today's debates. We're having the same debates today between a more radical, certainly more liberal need that Roosevelt saw to basically reinvent the American system.

And Hoover's view was that the american system was working fine. I, and it didn't need to be completely revolutionized in order to address the economic emergency of the Great Depression. So we have found now four books, and I think this is probably the end of the line in that theme, which is, how did Hoover and Roosevelt frame modern debates between liberalism and conservatism?

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, well put. So in the book's title, a Century Debate. Actually, the book begins with Woodrow Wilson and the question of Woodrow Wilson and James Madison. We'll get into those particulars in a moment. But, Dave, Woodrow's reelection, Wilson's reelection would have been in 1916. That would have been the 140th birthday of the founding of the republic.

Why did it take such a long lead up, Dave, 140 years to get to this point with Wilson and this sort of fork of the road between Wilson and Madison?

>> David Davenport: Well, of course, until at least 1890, the American frontier was still open. People who wanted more opportunities tended to move west and populate new territories.

Free land was available to people. And so there was a sense, even among progressives, that individualism still made a lot of sense and that equal opportunity was available to people, with free land being sort of attached to that. As of 1890, which is kind of when the progressives began, like Wilson, began to rise in influence.

The US government stopped counting immigration to the west and said, the frontier is basically closed, and now we have to live in a closed country. And so progressives, I think, saw that as their moment. I think they already had this theory in mind, and they were waiting for a moment to apply it.

They had this idea that, okay, now we can't really look to the west to create opportunity. Government is gonna have to be more involved now in creating equal opportunity for people. We're gonna have to look more to Europe for how to govern because people are living in cities.

The industrial revolution, I think, accelerated all of that, where business became powerful. And again, it was felt government needed to intercede on the behalf of people. So several things were happening kind of in that same timeframe that really brought progressives and their ideas to the fore. Including their idea that we don't really have equality of opportunity on the natural anymore.

Government has to create it.

>> Bill Whalen: Right, and I think in 1912, Dave, I think the southwestern states, Arizona, New Mexico, they're coming into the union. So we now have the 48 states at that point later to be 50. Let's start with the first of the three matchups, for lack of a better phrase, that you have in this book, and that is James Madison versus Woodrow Wilson.

I had a flash of deja vu as I started reading this day, because years ago, and you might have been at this event, too, at Hoover. It was a speech given by George Will. And for George Will, this is a very big topic. Why? First of all, it's very princed personal.

Mister Will is a graduate of Princeton. I think he's the class of 1968. Well, so too is James Madison. He was the class of 1771, I believe, Dave and Woodrow Wilson, who was a class of 1879. And I remember will standing up in front of us for about 45 minutes and just getting somewhat red faced.

The more he talked about Woodrow Wilson, who he is not a fan, but let's talk about Madison and Wilson. Wilson's a fascinating character in lottery guards. He obviously has suffered very much the last decade or so. Go as revisit these politicians and their views. For Wilson, that was slavery in particular, and opinions toward African Americans.

Wilson, though, long story short, Wilson basically has this belief of progressivism, that idea that a strong executive has to come through and really channel progressive passions into government. Whereas Madison correct me if I don't have this right here, Dave. Madison's approaches lack, for a better word, much cooler.

The idea that you sort of filter ideas through institutions before they become laws.

>> David Davenport: Yes, that's a good summary, Bill. The founders didn't really use the phrase equality of opportunity, but of course, right in the Declaration of Independence is their belief that all men were created equal. And so the founder's view was, equality is something you already had if you were an American.

That America had turned its back on the class systems and the caste systems of Europe, where you were born into opportunity. And the founder's view was, no, that's what America is all about. We all are equal, and we all have opportunity. And really, it's the role of government primarily just to protect that.

And so Wilson favored a limited government and a great deal of protection of individual rights and liberties. In fact, he feared the power of government to undercut opportunity more than he welcomed it as creating opportunity. The progressives had the view, certainly, including Wilson, that, no, if that was once true, it's no longer true.

With the industrial revolution, with the rise of great business powers and combinations, Theodore Roosevelt, another progressive. With the closing of the American frontier government, now has to get active in creating opportunities for people. And Wilson's particular contribution was, the way we will go about that is we will have a very strong executive branch.

And we will engage in greater social and economic regulation in defense of the american people.

>> Bill Whalen: Yeah, it's interesting, David, in the 1912 election, Wilson is something of an accident in this regard. He is sort of backs in office in that the republican party is split. Theodore Roosevelt tries to get the nomination in 1912.

He's denied. It's very much an inside job. He decides not to get mad, but to get even, he runs a third party candidate. That splits the vote, in comes President Wilson. But if you look at politics back at that time, David, it's very wide open in this regard.

You have Woodrow Wilson as a different kind of Democrat, to borrow a phrase that Bill Clinton will pick up years later. You have Roosevelt as this very activist Republican. Taft is a very traditional button down Republican. You have the likes of William Jennings Bryan, who had been a perennial candidate for the past couple decades, Eugene Debs, who I think ended up running for president from jail in 1920, a socialist on his ticket.

Just more options for voters back then. Now, is this part, Dave, also the Republic just trying to find its footing in the early part of the 20th century?

>> David Davenport: Well, I would attribute it to the fact that the political parties were not as strong and unitary, perhaps in those days.

Today, the political parties are not just a filter. They're almost a barrier to anything that would be outside of the leaders thinking. Back then, the political parties were not as strong, and it was possible to create, as Theodore Roosevelt did, a new party and to be on the ballot and to be an active candidate.

And even though Roosevelt didn't win, his progressive ideas were very much at the fore of the conversation in that election. So I would attribute it more, I think, to the relative weakness in those days of political parties, the greater openness that parties had to candidates with different points of view, all of which, of course, has radically changed by today.

 

>> Bill Whalen: Right, so Wilson is elected in 1912, and then 20 years later, Dave, we have another watershed election, and that is the election of 1932 and Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt. This is a fascinating campaign for people who like politics and maybe haven't studied this one. I think maybe people overlook it because it was a landslide.

But if you go back, and you look inside the language of the campaign, David, let me try this out on you. Franklin Roosevelt attacked Herbert Hoover, I kid you not, for, and I quote, reckless and extravagant public spending. The democratic platform in 1932, David, had called for a 25% cut in government spending.

John Nance Garner, who was FDR's running mate, as first vice president, the one who famously called the vice presidency not worth a bucket of warm spit, I think, was the phrase, and different liquids besides spit have been interchanged. But anyway, he said that line he accused Hoover of, and I quote, leading the country down the path of socialism.

So this is maybe once you learn more about this election, it's not what you might think it is, but hanging over this election, David, I want you to talk about this is the idea of equality of opportunity.

>> David Davenport: Yes, I'll say first of all, Herbert Hoover, I think, is misunderstood in a number of respects.

And one of those is that during his time as secretary of commerce in the 1920s, he was very proactive in terms of the role of government in commerce. He's viewed as one of the strongest secretaries of commerce that we've ever had. And even when he ran for president, he was viewed as a progressive Republican.

And so that left him subject to some of those kinds of attacks that you quote from Roosevelt. His real conservatism, Herbert Hoover's real conservatism came when he saw how radical the New Deal really was. And in fact, both Gordon and I in our books have pointed out the crusade that Hoover was on to point out the radical ideas of the New Deal.

And George Nash found a wonderful book in the Hoover archives that Hoover had written but not completed, and so George Nash published it about that crusade. So all of that really began in the 32 campaign. And then as Hoover continued in his post presidency, the division between those two views became much, much clearer.

 

>> Bill Whalen: At one point in the 32 campaign, Franklin Roosevelt utters these words. He says, quote, equality of opportunity as we have known it no longer exists. So 1932, David, what is FDR defining as equality of opportunity?

>> David Davenport: Well, let me say, Bill, when my co author Gordon Lloyd first told me of that quotation, I thought, surely he didn't say that.

 

>> Bill Whalen: A lot of Mark Twain quotes, they sound great, but they never actually happened. But he actually said that.

>> David Davenport: In his famous Commonwealth Club San Francisco campaign speech in 1932, which is kind of, if listeners want to go to one place to kind of see Franklin Roosevelt's philosophy in this regard, it is that Commonwealth Club campaign speech in 1932 where he lays all of this out.

We argue that Franklin Roosevelt was a predecessor of what we call the Rahm Emanuel School of Public Policy. You may remember, Rahm Emanuel was.

>> Bill Whalen: Never let a crisis go to waste, right?

>> David Davenport: Chief of Staff And said, you never want to let a crisis go to waste because it's a chance to do things you couldn't otherwise do.

That is our view of the Roosevelt presidency and of the New Deal that, yes, we had a great depression. There were varying views from economists on how it should be addressed. But the progressives, including Roosevelt, were kind of looking for their chance, in our view, to implement a much broader role for the federal government and for the executive in particular.

And so, not wanting to let the crisis of the Great Depression go to waste, Roosevelt moved forward with just a far more aggressive federal government in both economic regulation and in social programs. A much stronger executive created the Alphabet soup agencies, as we call them these days, because those would be under his thumb.

Unlike cabinet officers who might get a wander off on their own, the king of executive orders is Franklin Roosevelt. Nobody did more executive orders than he did. And so that was really the whole Roosevelt program in our view, which is, let's not let this crisis go to waste.

This is a chance to really implement the progressive ideas that we've been developing for the last 30 plus years.

>> Bill Whalen: It's a curious approach, David, in this regard, that he wants equality of opportunity, and yet Roosevelt famously does not want to go near civil rights legislation. He is very concerned about his own party staying together.

He does not want to alienate some of the Democrats. So he is really overlooking looking past conditions in the deep south. So to me, it's just a very curious way to approach equality when you're.

>> David Davenport: It is, Bill, he had his famous forgotten man, and he wanted policy to be reoriented toward the forgotten man.

And by the way, his use of the term forgotten man is not consistent with the origin of the term. But that's another story. But you're right, it did not for him or for Wilson include race. The forgotten men were not necessarily racial in orientation. They were power and economic well being.

Those were really the criteria that defined the forgotten man. And it was his view that we just, we had to do something about the fat cats, as he called them, the Wall street bankers, who, in his view, had undue power and economic advantage. And we needed to reorient the federal government to protect the forgotten man.

 

>> Bill Whalen: Right now, let's fast forward from 1932 to 1964, and this is the convergence of Ronald Reagan and Lyndon Johnson. And I say convergence in this regard. The high watermark of Lyndon Johnson's political career, Dave, is arguably 1964 to 1965. He's reelected in the landslide in 64. In 65, he passes a transformative agenda.

The Great Society is realized. Ronald Reagan's political debut likewise is 1964, when he gives, quote, the speech in October, I believe, of that year, a supporter of Barry Goldwater. Two years later, Reagan is governor of California. We know. The rest of that story plays out. Let's talk a little bit about LBJ.

Maybe you wanna contrast LBJ and FDR in this regard. It's very tempting to lump the two together as just wanting to throw government into societal programs. Is it as simple a comparison as that, Dave?

>> David Davenport: Well, I would say there are reasons that that does make sense. LBJ himself called himself a Roosevelt New Dealer, and as a young congressman, he was one of Roosevelt's people in the US Congress.

And so he aligned himself with Roosevelt in many regards. But LBJ felt very strongly that Roosevelt didn't go far enough. And of course, Roosevelt was having to, he was both fueled by, but also limited by the Great Depression. But by the 1960s, it was a time of economic plenty in the country.

And so Johnson felt he was free now to really go all out and to create the great society that progressives always, always wish they could create. You could even say, Bill, as we do in our book. If you went back, the biggest thing that Roosevelt did for the forgotten man was Social Security.

But you could even argue that that was a form of insurance that people were paying into, that it was nothing technically welfare. So Johnson was gonna go well beyond any kind of insurance or any program people pay into, and he was gonna declare wars on poverty, and he was going to do all kinds of social and policies and so on.

We argue in the book that maybe we could think of Roosevelt as John the Baptist sort of foreshadowing the great society. But if so, Lyndon Johnson wanted to be the savior and he wanted to really build the great Society, which, of course, was the moniker of his administration.

So-

>> Bill Whalen: Are you willing to confer such holy status on Ronald Reagan?

>> David Davenport: Well, no. Our argument is that Reagan is the one president, and maybe in some ways the only president, who tacked back toward the founders idea of what it was to create opportunity.

>> Bill Whalen: Is the Reagan movement, Dave, as simple as saying that it is a revulsion, a pushback against the FDR and LBJ legacies?

I'll give you an example. California right now is having, here's an example. California is having a very active debate over reparations for African Americans living in California, and California is looking at it statewide. And this has to do with descendants of slavery, San Francisco's looking at it. Dave, and this has to do with injustice.

There's also, if you looked inside what the state is doing right now, tucked inside a very complicated set of ideas, there is a request that the legislature denounce Reagan's use of the term welfare queen. Which Reagan used in 1980 to push back against where welfare had gone. So in that regard, easy to say, well, Ronald Reagan was just pushing back against LBJ and FDR.

But I think it's a little more complicated than that, isn't it?

>> David Davenport: Yeah, first of all, in Reagan's mind, there is a distinction between FDR and LBJ. He said in his diary, we went back and looked at his diaries, Reagan's diaries, which are very fruitful for a number of reasons.

And he says in his diary, people think I'm against FDR. But he said, I voted for FDR four times. And he said, my problem was not FDR, my problem was LBJ. He doesn't specify the distinction, but as you kind of study the history, it seems clear to us that, again, that what he really opposed was the social planning that LBJ thought the federal government could do, that the government could become a player in equality of opportunity and create more equality through government programs for some people and not so much equality for other people that he could pick winners and losers in government policy.

And our view is that that was Reagan's primary problem, is that was not a role for the government, in his view, to be deciding who could win and who could lose and how we would plan people's lives through the great society. But instead, we needed to go all the way back, not to Roosevelt, but all the way back to the founders, and say, no.

What the opportunity society is about, which is a phrase Reagan used often, what the opportunity society is about is giving people freedom to have more of their money back, less taxes, more freedom, less government regulation to find their own opportunities. So that would have been his view.

>> Bill Whalen: Did Reagan succeed?

 

>> David Davenport: Well, not as much as, of course, he would have liked. He did cut taxes, but he couldn't go probably as far as he wanted to because he didn't have a Republican Congress backing him up. He cut regulation, actually, a fair bit. And I would say that his main success in terms of tacking back toward a different kind of equality of opportunity, was as much rhetorical as it was actual programs.

Reagan really recreated the notion that people ought to be free to make their own decisions. He argued that poor people, and of course, a lot of the great society was about helping the blacks. He said, they want the same thing everybody else wants, which is they want jobs, they want a good education for their kids, they want to live in decent neighborhoods.

And so Reagan, I think, yes, he did cut taxes and give people more of their money back. Yes, he did cut government regulation, and he was proud of that. But I think maybe the main thing he did was sort of a rhetorical reset, that it was okay in this country to allow the government to step back and let individuals decide what their opportunities ought to be.

 

>> Bill Whalen: I'd also point out, Dave, that he set two things in motion, perhaps. One, if you look at the 1992 election with Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton has to really steal some pages from Ronald Reagan to get elected nationally. What does he do? He shows he is tough on crime.

He is all in favor of executions in Arkansas, he's in favor of tax cuts. He wants to reform welfare. He's picked up the fact that Ronald Reagan won, what, 44 states in 1980 and 49 states in 1984, and then George Bush comes on and wins 40 states. So my party has a problem.

I need to imitate the other one.

>> David Davenport: Well, and he famously said, the era of big government is over, which would have been music to Reagan's ears.

>> Bill Whalen: And then the second way in which Reagan might have won, Dave, is that the Republican Congress comes along in 1994, the Republican Revolution, 1994.

And what do you see in 1995? We're having a debate over welfare reform. In other words, finally, the warnings that have been in place from Daniel Moynihan going back to 1968, finally, which Ronald Reagan picked up, they finally come to fruition in the 1990s. So maybe he doesn't win all his battles in his eight years, but I think it sets in motion events that go beyond his presidency.

 

>> David Davenport: No, clearly. I mean, our argument would be that. The argument of our book would be that the first classic debate about equality of opportunity was Roosevelt and Hoover. The second classic debate would have been LBJ versus Reagan. And where is the debate today? I imagine we'll get to that in a moment.

That's the last chapter of our book, and frankly, it's not as great a debate today as it was in those days, but at least it's still there.

>> Bill Whalen: Let's talk about the debate today. We have talked about three things that happened in the 20th century, the emergence of Woodrow Wilson, the the fork in the road in 1932, and the fork in the road with Johnson and Reagan.

But these are, again, 20th century conversations, Dave, here we are now not quite one-fourth of the way through the 21st century, and the first thing I've noticed, Dave, we have had wild fluctuations in the presidency. You wanted to get together some. Some very different characters. I could not put together a more different group than presidents 42, 43, 44, 45, and 46.

These guys don't have a lot in common, but voters have just vacillated to them for reasons I don't always understand. Secondly, Dave, what you notice is that you don't have really strong messages coming from voters. With the exception of the Obama landslide in 2008, we have close elections.

Now, compare that to the people we were talking about. In 1928, Dave, Herbert Hoover gets 58% of the vote. 1932, FDR gets 57.4% of the vote. Lyndon Johnson in 1964, Dave, he goes over 61%. Reagan only gets 50.7%, but John Anderson is taking away 6.6% of the vote.

Reagan still gets 44, 50 states. These are statement elections, Dave. And we could look at the results from 2020, 2016, even 2012, and confusing statements by voters. So why are we in this era now, where just voters are not being as decisive, for lack of better word, as they used to be?

 

>> David Davenport: I should be questioning you about this, because you are the campaign and election expert, not me. But-

>> Bill Whalen: You wrote the book, so you're on the hot seat, my friend. So explain a little bit, let's talk about 21st century politics.

>> David Davenport: My own personal view is that a huge line of demarcation was when Karl Rove convinced George W Bush that the way he could win election and reelection was not by going to the center and fighting for the center votes, which had historically been the case.

Richard Nixon famously said, he had to run to the right in order to win the Republican primary, but then he had to run to the center in order to win the election. That's the way elections had been. And I think that's why you got some larger percentages, because people were running in the center, trying to persuade the undecideds.

Karl Rove convinced George W Bush that the way he could win was by mobilizing his base, not by running to the center. And I think campaigns ever since then have taken some measure of that strategy, which is the way we're gonna win is by mobilizing our base, making more extreme statements that appeal to our base.

What could be a better example of that than Trump? My sister, who's not a big Trump fan, texted me that Trump was being indicted in Florida. And I said, well, that's right, but that will only energize his base. So that would be my view, is that I think we've moved to an era where winning presidential elections is more about energizing your base than it is about running to the center.

And it's pretty hard to build a 58% majority when you're running that way.

>> Bill Whalen: Let me throw another theory at you, Dave, and that is the emergence of populism, the reemergence of populism in presidential campaigns, which Trump's. I almost sound like a very much a pointy-headed intellectual here, a pointy-headed academic.

You want policy-based campaigns, you want big ideas, and populism doesn't allow that. What did Donald Trump run on in 2016, Dave? Three word slogans, build the wall, drain the swamp, lock her up. Well, those are all great phrases to chant at a campaign rally and may get your base excited.

But you know what? That's not really an intellectual debate, is it?

>> David Davenport: No, I'm not coming up with the title of the book at the moment. But a couple of years ago, Yuval Levin wrote, I think, a very important book in which he pointed out that, unfortunately, politicians are now running for office in order to have bigger and better platforms for themselves rather than to govern.

We're not electing people because they have the best governing ideas. We're not even electing them to govern. We're electing them, and then they basically use their platform to raise more money and try to win again and give more speeches and make more extreme statements. So we've moved into this unfortunate era that I think Yuval Levin has identified correctly, as people and politicians using politics and governance to platform and make statements rather than to govern.

And for policy, people like you and me and think tanks like the Hoover Institution, that's a tough change, too.

>> Bill Whalen: There's always been this, as long as there's been the Internet and social media, there's been this presence. You can count in every cycle, somebody who's gonna get lucky to get 1, 2% of the vote, and he or she will flame out by Iowa, New Hampshire.

But you know what? They'll get noticed, and they'll get a talk radio show, or they'll get a speaking gig on one of the cable news networks. Or start a blog or write a book or do something like that, or sell medicine on Fox News, whatever they end up doing.

But it's alarming to see it actually permeate all the way to the top of the two political tickets now.

>> David Davenport: Right, yeah, no, I mean, politicians, I think, choose their positions now based on how it will affect their base. And the funny thing is, if you really wanna govern and get something done for a number of years, you had to put together the, quote, gang of 12 or the gang of 8.

And a handful of Democrats and a handful of Republicans would meet in a closet to see if they could hammer out something that would allow the country to move forward. And if you cooperate and collaborate with the other party, then your party leadership may well run somebody against you in the primary and you may be gone.

So those kinda things are enforced again at the party level.

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, Dave, so here we are walking into the 2024 presidential race now, even though it's only June of 2023, but the race is underway. Candidates keep piling in, there'll be a presidential debate in August, and away we'll go.

What is the great debate of our times? Is this 1932? Is this 1964? Is it 1912? Is 2024 shaping up as a paradigm election?

>> David Davenport: I doubt it, to be honest. I think we're still in some kind of transition phase. I think, frankly, Biden was largely elected as the anti-Trump.

And if Trump runs again, then we're gonna kinda have the same thing over again. In my view, DeSantis is kind of Trump lite, or maybe not even lite, but Trump medium, and he seems to be the next front-runner. So I guess my fear is we're gonna have just another kind of Trump-Biden or Trump-lite-Biden election again.

I'm not hearing a lot of new ideas, I'm not hearing a lot of policies. The debate is, are they too old? Are they too woke? So I doubt that. Now, I have some views, and I recently wrote a column, I don't know if you've seen it, about what the candidates have to say about equality of opportunity, the theme of our book.

 

>> Bill Whalen: Let's talk about that.

>> David Davenport: In the larger election, I'm not sure this is gonna be anything more than a kind of Biden-Trump or Trumpism revisited.

>> Bill Whalen: So let's talk about that, Colin, for a minute. What do some of the candidates, Ron DeSantis and others, what do they have to say about equality of opportunity?

How do they define it?

>> David Davenport: Well, backing up to Biden, who's obviously in office, he has been very big on equality, and he's kind of taken it to new frontiers, transgender rights, for example. And he's kind of restored some of the racial questions. And as you say, some of the Democrats in cities like San Francisco are revisiting this through reparations and the like.

So Biden and the Democrats are very much still behind the old LBJ idea that government needs to be creating equality. I note in the column that, quite importantly, I think in the debate. Kamala Harris in the last campaign said some things that lead me to believe that she's actually in favor of shifting our policy priority from equality of opportunity to equality of outcome.

She said it's not enough to just bring people together to the starting line of a race, which is kind of how a lot of people have thought about equality of opportunity in the past. It's a race, and everybody's welcome to run and run at their own speed and get what they want out of it.

 

>> Bill Whalen: Right.

>> David Davenport: She said It's not enough to just bring people to the starting line of the race, but some people have too many advantages in how they can run the race, and we need to do something about that. That began to sound more like equality of outcomes than equality of opportunity.

And Americans historically have not liked the government deciding outcomes. So in my view, potentially, she hasn't said much since. That's a more radical view than even Biden's. And then, as you point out, reparations and all that is, and we argue in our book that Thomas Piketty and his ideas about how you fix income inequality, that's kind of the far edge of new ideas about equality.

Then you have kind of at the other extreme, the Donald Trumps, the Ron DeSantises, to a lesser degree, the Nikki Haleys, the Mike Pences, who say that Democratic efforts are some version of woke politics that we can't support, and they undercut American values, so they kind of stake out the dangers of that.

The one candidate that I think fits our book the best so far is Tim Scott, the senator from North Carolina, who has favored creating opportunity zones in American cities, who talks about equality of opportunity as an American, an important American value. So he's actually kind of going Reaganesque on us, if you will, trying to create a rhetoric and a set of policies around equality of opportunity as a good thing, and so I'm pretty intrigued by that.

As I said, it fits the theme of our book nicely, for one thing. But obviously, I also believe in that. But otherwise, the debate has kind of become maybe a slightly more radical version, if it could be, of Roosevelt and Hoover. And by the way, one thing I didn't get to say about Hoover, he rightly said in 1932, this is not a race between two candidates or two parties.

This is a race between two completely different sets of ideas.

>> Bill Whalen: Yes.

>> David Davenport: So that's really what we have about equality, is we have the Biden-Harris reparations income equality view, and we have the Trump-DeSantis, this is all woke, these are not American values view. So it's a pretty wide separation.

And then we have, I think, a little more constructive and a little more in the middle of the Tim Scott approach.

>> Bill Whalen: Yeah, so there's one way that equality of outcome could come landing into this presidential election, Dave. And by the time people are seeing this, the Supreme Court may have already acted, and that is issue of affirmative action.

The court is right now considering two cases having to do with admissions policy, one at University of North Carolina, the other one Harvard. We could be about to have a big conversation in this country about what exactly affirmative action is. What are the pros and cons? So maybe that's one way for both parties to kind of revisit the idea of equality of outcomes.

 

>> David Davenport: I mean, I think you're right. I think the argument in favor of affirmative action in earlier times was that it was kind of a temporary policy to make the starting line a little more fair. And I think we've always viewed education as a reasonable way for the government to put a thumb on the equality scale.

But by now, you know, the question arises again, well, you know, 50 plus years later, do we still need that crutch? And of course, as you know, we have scholars at Hoover and elsewhere who argue that affirmative action is actually by now doing harm and not good. And although it creates fairness for certain people, it creates unfairness for other people who also pay their taxes and want seats at the university.

So it's probably an important time to revisit that because I think it was originally viewed as a sort of temporary thing, but it's become permanent, more or less, and now it'll be revisited. And unfortunately, when we rather than letting democratic processes work, what Madison called in the Federalist Papers, the cool, deliberate sense of the community over time, we have these kind of dramatic five to four votes by the Supreme Court that changes the whole ballgame, and it creates more ill will in the country.

So I guess that's one of my fears, is that the decider is going to have to be the Supreme Court again, and it's going to be highly controversial.

>> Bill Whalen: It's not exactly the way the founders saw this thing shaping up to begin with. But permanence is a very interesting concept here.

If you go back to welfare, for example, the 1930s, welfare was meant to help, at first, women who had been abandoned by their husbands, temporary aid. When Republicans renamed welfare, they called it what? TANF, temporary aid for needy families, so temporary is the key word there. You could look at the New Deal, Dave, and say, well, the New Deal should have been temporary in terms of boosting America out of the Great Depression.

So maybe 10 years, but no, here we are 80 years later, still New Deal programs in place. So maybe this is one way to look at the difference between the left and the right in this regard. Ronald Reagan famously said there's nothing more permanent than a temporary spending program.

So perhaps it's as simple as the left looks at government as just a permanent means of changing society, whereas the right does not see it permanent.

>> David Davenport: Yeah, I think that's a very interesting political trend to follow because a number of Republicans and conservatives, I think, expected Eisenhower in the 50s to roll back parts of the New Deal, but he didn't.

It just moved forward. I think there was an expectation that after the Great Society, that Nixon in the late sixties and early seventies would roll back parts of the great society, but he didn't. In fact, he grew them. And so one argument is, you know, the argument is in favor of that, that, well, conservatives feel like they should conserve what exists, you know, and they shouldn't make big, radical changes.

But Reagan was the one president who was willing to challenge the old assumptions, and that, I think, was part of the power of Reagan is that he did hearken back to the founders, not to the last great society or the last new deal as the harbinger. The Supreme Court, by the way, now is in some trouble in public opinion because they have begun to revisit old decisions that they thought were wrongly decided.

And there is a school of thought with, well, but we've lived with them for 50 years, and it's not really right to change Roe v Wade 50 years later. Probably the same argument, not really right to change affirmative action 50 plus years later. But if they were wrongly decided, Reagan said we ought to hearken back to the founding, not back to the latest political success of the other party.

Those are tough parts of our body politic, as you well know.

>> Bill Whalen: They are, Dave, so conservatives for decades have been arguing which came first. It's the chicken or the egg question. Which came first, Reagan or Reaganism, if you will. Goldwater supporters in 1964 will say, well, Ronald Reagan was certainly mesmerizing, but you know what?

Barry Goldwater was talking about this stuff before Ronald Reagan. So if you're looking for a godfather, go to Barry Goldwater. Look at 1912 when Woodrow Wilson, we look at 32 with Hoover and Roosevelt, we look at 64 with Johnson, 80 with Reagan. Dave, are these cases where it's a historical fork in the road for the country, where just the country has reached a point where it's time for a paradigm shift?

Or is it a matter of a man coming along and making the shift, or is it convergence of both, the man and the moment?

>> David Davenport: Well, certainly there have to be the ideas and the man and the moment, all of those things. So in my view, Herbert Hoover unfortunately, was applying the economic Policies to the Great Depression that economists of his day thought made sense, but the people weren't patient enough to continue with that.

So that was kind of the moment, if you will. Goldwater in 1964, I mean, he had the misfortune of running against a guy who had just taken the place of a martyr, John Kennedy, as president a year earlier. And so it pretty had to be heard, I think, when a guy is entering the arena, as Johnson did, carrying the mantle of a martyr, John F Kennedy.

And Goldwater was not the best political candidate in the world. He was more in the nature of a prophet than he was a candidate. And we now think that a lot of the prophetic things he said turned out to be true. Social Security was in trouble, nuclear weapons were a problem, but he said them in kind of a frightening way.

So I think it's all the above. You got to have the right ideas, you have to have the right moment in history, and then you have to have the right candidate to carry those ideas forward. Reagan was kind of unique in that way.

>> Bill Whalen: I think about it a lot, because in 1912, America was not arguably at a crisis.

It would get involved in a national war in a few years, but the country itself was not in a crisis. 1932, certainly in the midst of a great economic crisis. 1964, not in a crisis, this would come along later, in the sixties. In 1980, yes, a spiritual crisis, I would argue.

So if you look at these various turning points in history, and it's not as easy to say, well, America just was absolutely in a bad spot, along came someone, it's just an instant confluence of men arriving at moments.

>> David Davenport: Right, men, moments and ideas sort of converging. And as I said, I'm not sure that that's gonna happen in 24, but it's gonna have to happen at some point.

I mean, these ideas that we've been debating have now been in the air for a number of years, and there's gonna become a moment and a candidate who's gonna be able to bring those together. As I said, I'm not sure 2024 is the moment.

>> Bill Whalen: We have but a few minutes left.

Dave, let me appeal to the professorial side of you in this regard. You and Gordon Lloyd have written four really terrific books here. This, to me, would very easily be the backbone of a class. What sort of class would you teach? So this goes back to how we started this conversation.

If you were at Stanford or Pepperdine or some other university, how would you package this, and what would your course be? How would you try to appeal to kids with this?

>> David Davenport: That's a really good suggestion. And I think what I would do is, I would call it the conservative liberal debates of the last 100 years.

And I would take some snapshots. Obviously, Hoover, Roosevelt as a snapshot, Johnson Reagan as a snapshot, today as a snapshot. And I really do think we are still building on the great society in domestic policy. I don't think we've moved from that to a new paradigm. I think Herbert Hoover really called out quite well the conservative principles about the great society, same with Johnson and Reagan.

And then today kinda go into the muddle and the mess and help students kind of sort that out. So I think I do liberalism and conservatism, a 100 year debate, and I think students might find that interesting. I'm not gonna teach it, I just retired.

>> Bill Whalen: And if I put that book in a 20 year old's hands, a 20 year old who's very smart, but he or she is probably not as smart as they think they are, and you need to tell them, you need to read this book.

Why do they need to read this book, Dave Davenport?

>> David Davenport: Well, because that's still the debate that we're having today. I mean, the debate between Democrats and the Republicans, the debate between people who would like the government to go and fix everything, which is kind of an inclination of the young, if you will.

More and more young people interested in socialism, interested in expanded welfare states. Those are the debates of the day. So I don't think it'd be that hard to convince them that they might wanna study the antecedents of today's debates.

>> Bill Whalen: And final question, Dave, you've written for these books now, do you feel like the writing a fits in this series?

I know Gordon Lloyd is no longer with us, but do you feel like you guys have said all there's to be said after 4? What would you like to do next?

>> David Davenport: If Gordon had lived on and if I weren't retired, we might find another theme or two.

Kind of what we do is we go back to Hoover, Roosevelt. Gordon's phrase is go back to come back. Let's go back into history to find things that will help us understand today's policy questions. So we went back and found Herbert Hoover's individualism. We went back and found equality of opportunity.

I bet there's more there to mine. But with Gordon no longer with us, he was our go back man. And with my recent retirement, I am finishing a book with a different co-author on the civic education crisis, and then I'll call it a day. But I think Gordon's and my four books do a decent job of kind of framing the Hoover, Roosevelt debates and why those are still relevant today.

I'm happy to let them stand for that.

>> Bill Whalen: Well, if you could do me a favor, Dave, don't stop writing. Keep writing columns, at least, because I've always enjoyed your writing, and it's an important voice to have out there.

>> David Davenport: Well, you're very kind. I'll have to think about that.

I'm currently trying to help nonprofits with growth and strategy, which is kind of my administrative career. But I haven't quite figured out what to do about my scholarly career.

>> Bill Whalen: Yeah, and you know we went 45 minutes without me asking you the most important question of why in God's sake did you ever leave Pepperdine in Malibu?

 

>> David Davenport: Well-

>> Bill Whalen: Gotta admit, first time I met you, that's the first thing I heard. He left Pepperdine, really?

>> Bill Whalen: I didn't think anybody ever left.

>> David Davenport: Yeah, and then why would I ever retire from Hoover? We certainly have fellows older than me who continue to do productive work.

I guess you have to march to your own drummer. And I felt like after 25 years, I'd kind of done what I could do at Pepperdine. And I thought it was time to retire and pursue some other things. So I've enjoyed chapters of a career, and I thought it was time to close a couple of those chapters.

 

>> Bill Whalen: Well, Dave, I like to think of Hoover as the Hotel California. You can check out any time, but you can never leave. So please don't leave us, keep running, okay?

>> David Davenport: Well, I am an emeritus fellow, so I haven't completely checked out of the hotel.

>> Bill Whalen: Well done.

Dave Davenport, thanks for visiting the Hoover Book Club, and congratulations again on the book.

>> David Davenport: Thanks, Bill.

>> Bill Whalen: Book's title, again, is Equality of Opportunity, A Century of Debate. It is published by the Hoover Institution Press. You find that by going to hoover.org, where you'll also find a nice biography about one David Davenport.

You can also sign up for the Hoover Daily report, which comes to your inbox weekdays. It means every time my friend Dave Davenport is in the news, well, his colleagues makes news, you'll be the first to find out about, it shows up in your inbox five days a week.

For the Hoover institution, I'm Bill Whalen, we'll be back soon with another installment of the Hoover Book Club. Until then, take care. Thanks for watching, and by all means, pick up Dave Davenports book. It's terrific. Take care.