Progressive Conservatism with F.H. Buckley
2022-07-24 · Guest: F.H. Buckley (Law Professor at George Mason University) · 52:45
Progressive Conservatism and the Republican Party Future
Bob Zadek interviews F.H. Buckley about his book Progressive Conservatism, which explores the historical roots of a political philosophy that combines social conservatism with a nationalist, pro-worker economic agenda. Buckley argues that by embracing the “Western” progressive traditions of figures like Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt—focusing on economic mobility and direct democracy—the Republican Party can move past the “dead end” of modern libertarianism and the “woke” left to become America’s natural governing party.
Topics: Progressive Conservatism, Republican Party, F.H. Buckley, 17th Amendment, Student Debt Relief, Healthcare Reform, American Nationalism, Frederick Jackson Turner, Frontier Thesis, Economic Mobility, Teddy Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower.
Speakers:
- Bob Zadek: Host
- F.H. Buckley: Guest; Law Professor at George Mason University and author of Progressive Conservatism.
Introduction to Progressive Conservatism [00:00]
Bob Zadek: Hello everyone, welcome to The Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running libertarian talk radio show on all of radio and podcasting. Thank you so much for giving us an hour of your time today. We hope we will make your hour worthwhile.
As libertarians—and most of you listeners are, but if you’re not, of course you are welcome—as libertarians, all of us welcome labels: left and right, especially left and right. For us, the political spectrum is far more colorful than merely two colors. This morning, to expand upon that, I’m delighted to be joined again by Frank H. Buckley. Frank has just written, just off the presses, Progressive Conservatism. And to that I add, “Huh? Progressive Conservatism?” But stay tuned, we’ll learn. Progressive Conservatism: How Republicans Will Become America’s Natural Governing Party.
Progressive conservatism—it sounds rather oxymoronic. However, Frank argues that progressive conservatism could represent the very future of the Republican Party. Frank has been a law professor at GMU, George Mason University, since 1989 and is a keen observer of American politics as seen through the lens of his Canadian birth. He’s written in recent memory American Secession, The Republican Workers Party, The Republic of Virtue, and The Once and Future King, all of which can be found in my show archives at BobZadek.com.
This morning, we’re going to summarize many themes from Frank’s earlier books, but we will focus predominantly on his new book, Progressive Conservatism, so we can remove my label of oxymoronic, that is contradictory, and we will understand Frank’s thesis, born of many years of astute political observation about the future of the Republican Party and, subtext, the future of America. Frank, welcome again back to our show, and thank you so much for sparing some time and, of course, for writing the book. It’s a pleasure to have you back.
F.H. Buckley: Hey Bob, thank you for having me. It’s great to be here again with you. Yeah, the title Progressive Conservative will puzzle some people, and I’d like to argue that if it seems odd, it’s because one has an imperfect understanding of what a progressive is, and what a conservative is, and what the GOP was all about, and what America is all about, and what libertarianism is.
So let me get on with that. Firstly, the word “progressive”—it’s been adopted by the left. Right now, the people who call themselves progressives are anti-moderns who want to turn politics into a battle of race against race, ethnic group against ethnic group. Nothing modern about that; that’s pre-modern, that’s Neanderthal. I mean, the whole point of America was to get away from all of that. So there’s nothing progressive about those people.
But there’s an important history of progressivism in the GOP. You’ll find it in Lincoln’s internal policies, you’ll find it big time in Teddy Roosevelt, and you’ll also find it in Eisenhower. And if I can reveal my age, you know, as a kid, I think I had a coonskin cap, so I kind of go back to the ’50s. That’s when I was a kid. And anyway, so yeah, the ’50s were a good time to be a kid, and the ’50s were a good time to be an American and certainly a Republican. And Eisenhower called himself a progressive. At one point he said the Republican Party must become progressive or it’s going to die.
The Frontier Thesis and Geographic Mobility [03:55]
F.H. Buckley: And so I think what I’d like to do is invite people to wonder what progressive conservatives like Ike or Teddy Roosevelt were about. And I’m going to argue that that requires a different understanding of American history. We tend to see American history in terms of things like North versus South, but that’s played itself out. And I’d invite people, libertarians particularly, I guess, to think of American history in terms of East versus West.
And here I’ll pay tribute to the great progressive historian, you know, Frederick Jackson Turner, whose Frontier Thesis was, I think, the greatest analysis of American history. And Turner should be a hero to libertarians as well as to progressives because he’s the guy who invented jurisdictional competition, right? Which is something as libertarians we want to understand. We like the idea that states compete for people. Right now, there’s a competition between Texas and California where Texas is winning big time and California is losing, and that’s a penalty California is paying for being ultra-woke. So states are disciplined by that competition.
And back in Turner’s time, in 1890, Turner saw it as West versus East. So what was the West and what was the East? The West was democratic and egalitarian, and the East was aristocratic. The West was the home of Republican virtue and the East of corruption. And the West was the home of nationalism, of people simply being proud of America, versus, you know, cosmopolitan types in the East who suffered from a bit of cultural cringe with respect to England and Europe generally. So that was the West to Turner.
Because we’ve become so immobile as a country, we’ve never had a greater need for a desire for mobility as opposed to aristocracy. We’ve become aristocratic. When I moved here from Canada, I was immediately struck at how this is a class society, right? And where people don’t move up the ranks as opposed to other countries. And I think if you’re a libertarian, you should be on the side of that kind of mobility. And you know, if you look at the data and you see how we’re less than mobile—not only less than mobile, we’re aristocratic, you know, as aristocratic pretty much as England is. And in the mobility sweepstakes, we’re way behind countries like Denmark and Canada. And that’s, you know, that was used to be called the American Dream. The American Dream, something invented by Abraham Lincoln, was wherever you are, wherever you come from, whoever you are, you can get ahead and your kids will know, or you know your kids will have it better off than you did.
Bob Zadek: Frank, I just want to jump in for a second, if I may, in support, in passionate support of what you have described as geographic mobility—that wasn’t quite your phrase, but that’s what you meant. Regular listeners to my show will recall that I have had one of your colleagues, Ilya Somin, who has written extensively on what he called “foot voting,” which is far more democratic than ballot box voting, where people vote for a system of government by leaving one and joining another. He has written more than one book on the subject. So we, I, have been a passionate observer and supporter of just what you say about geographic mobility. Indeed, that’s one of the ways our country was built, as immigrants voted with their feet in the millions. So of course, that’s as American as pizza—I was going to say apple pie, but I prefer to have a food that perhaps came here with the immigrants, perhaps. So my audience, I dare say, recognizes the concept and would, I dare say again, support what you have said about geographic mobility. So thank you for pointing that out.
F.H. Buckley: Yeah, well, my colleague Ilya Somin invented Tiebout sorting, as it were. That is to say, he channeled what people like Tiebout said about how people sort themselves out by their jurisdictional, their geographical choices. And importantly, what Frederick Jackson Turner said. Now here, you know, pay attention to what Turner said. Turner said states compete, and we in the West are offering free institutions and mobility as opposed to an aristocratic East. And then he said something really fascinating. He said, realizing it was losing people, the East found that it had to democratize as well. And he said that this trend carried itself all the way back to Europe, which had to democratize itself because people were moving to North America, right? In short, he offered a history of the world, of the Western world, of the triumph of Western ideas.
American Libertarianism and Direct Democracy [10:28]
F.H. Buckley: But I think, you know, not to leave it there, I think we have to dig a bit further and understand the mindset of people like those Westerners and the way in which they were progressive. I mean, and here what I want to do is talk about a way of understanding libertarianism which is authentically American, which isn’t derived from a bunch of Austrian economists, bless their hearts, but which is specifically American.
So let me give you one for instance: the initiative and referendum movement originated in the West. The 17th Amendment, the direct election of Senators, was a Western initiative. The Westerners, who are the source of American libertarianism, were in favor of direct democracy and those kinds of issues. Some of us puzzle ourselves, or some right-wingers puzzle over things like the 17th Amendment. It’s important to know where it came from, and it’s important to know that which is progressive in libertarianism. I mean, the libertarianism is in favor of things that work, right? And so these were things that the progressives thought would work.
I’ll give you another for instance: on corruption, the Republicans looked at the “Money Trust,” that is the influence of money in politics in the 1890s, and they were against it. And they said, you know, this is Eastern big business and, you know, they’re not on our side. So when people talk on the right, or when people on the left, I should say, talk about the Gilded Age and the Money Trust, and when libertarians reflexively say we’re, you know, we’re against all that, I think what you want to remember is it wasn’t bigness that, for example, Teddy Roosevelt was opposed to. Teddy Roosevelt said bigness is natural, we’re not going after big business. What we’re going to go after is the influence of money in politics.
Well, I, you know, I’d like to argue that that’s something that should strike a positive chord with libertarians and with Republicans generally. Not for nothing is the Republican Party called the “stupid party,” because it gave away the issue of corruption in politics to the left. But it’s a real live issue for Republicans. I mean, you know, for example, the left has been able to claim ownership over the dark money issue. But dark money, which I have no problem with—dark money supports Democrats much more than it does Republicans. That’s not the issue here. The issue in terms of corruption and government reform goes to things like the influence of lobbyists. So there’s work to be done by a progressive conservative/libertarian government that will rein in the power of K Street. For example, the revolving door between Congress and K Street. I mean, people say that Congress is a farm team for K Street. So what happens now—I mean, when you read about politicians who make tons of money from insider trading based on their knowledge of legislation they’re proposing, you know, what you’re talking about is a relationship between politics and money. And you find the same relationship with people who leave Congress and become lobbyists on K Street. And that’s half our congressmen at this point. You know, the term limits people wanted to limit congressmen; they didn’t want them to stay in office all that long. I don’t have problems with that. My problem is they never leave Washington after they served in Congress; they just move over to K Street, right? And that gets—that’s corruption.
The 17th Amendment and Small-D Democracy [13:56]
Bob Zadek: One point—you mentioned a word that whenever a guest that I have uses the word, I perk up. The word is an innocent word. You used it—the word is “works,” as in a policy works. And you referred to it specifically or in the context of the 17th Amendment, 1913, which my listeners will recall that was an amendment that changed the indirect election of Senators, who were elected at that point by state houses, to the direct election by voters directly. And I think you expressed support—I couldn’t tell for sure—I think you said that that as well as other measures were good ideas because they worked. And if I’m—if I recall what you said, what did you mean when you said changes such as the 17th Amendment worked? Because I, by standards that I set, I would say the 17th Amendment was probably one of the more damaging amendments to the Constitution. So let me see if we agree or disagree, and help me understand. You seemed to be supporting small-d democracy or the growth of democracy, town halls and the like. So help me understand the point you were making a second ago.
F.H. Buckley: Well, I don’t think I said that the 17th Amendment worked. I said something different. What I said is if you want to understand the small-d democratic instincts of the progressives, which were expressed in initiative and referendum laws and the 17th Amendment, recognize that they came from Western progressives. And I’d argue that initiative and referendum laws have worked pretty well. I wouldn’t make the same claim with respect to the 17th Amendment. I guess what I’m asking for is a measure of charity to those old progressives who didn’t realize quite how the 17th Amendment would work itself out.
I, by the way, am not one of those people who think that the 17th Amendment made a heck of a change, because even before that point, when you were—when states appointed the Senators, who you voted for as a state representative was a function of who you thought they’d support for the Senate. That’s the history of the Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858. People weren’t voting for the Senator; they were voting for state representatives, but they were voting for a slate that would support either Douglas or Lincoln. So it already was democratic in that sense.
But my broader point is that what was specifically progressive was the sense that we needed more democracy, we needed people represented better, that you could trust the American people to get it right and you couldn’t trust politicians to get it right. So that which made politicians more amenable to the wishes of the people was basically a good thing. That was why the 17th Amendment was supported by the same people who supported initiatives and referendum, and they were Westerners. So this is part of our Western heritage, which you can’t—which if you can’t understand that, you don’t understand American history too well, and certainly you don’t understand the GOP, and you certainly don’t understand the progressive conservative element as expressed in Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower.
The Future of the Republican Party [18:00]
Bob Zadek: Now you have—your book is entitled Progressive Conservatism, and it focuses on how you believe the Republican Party should readjust, be remade, whatever verb you want to apply. You are—seem to be selectively—and this is a positive thing, this is a compliment, a positive observation—you’re taking—you’re starting with the Republican Party today. And I’m going to ask you to focus on particularly what’s—there’s lots of ways to answer the question, but I’ll ask you for the most salient one—what’s wrong with the Republican Party today? I’m going to come back and ask you that. But then you’re going to start with the Republican Party, and you’re going to adjust it by borrowing progressive values, progressive theories of governance. It seems to me you could just as—and I’m going to ask you an intellectual question—you could just as well, couldn’t you, have started with the Democratic Party and adjusted the Democratic Party to fit the ideal you describe in your book? Why one approach and not the other approach? Not because the other approach is better, but it will help our audience understand the core point of your book.
F.H. Buckley: Well, with respect to the Dems first of all, I could have started with them if I could travel back to the 1930s and ’40s and talk about FDR. FDR said he was the best friend that capitalism ever had because he thought he was trying to save it. And if you go back to that period, you’ll recall that it was a time of enormous economic distress, of great unemployment, everything was collapsing around, and people were tempted by the kinds of ideas presented by fascists and by communists. And we didn’t go there. But if we didn’t go there, we can thank FDR and not the Calvin Coolidge Republicans of the time. So he was a crisis manager who threw a lot of things on the wall, and some of them weren’t great ideas, but there was an enormous turnaround in his first administration, quite spectacular—growth of 10% per annum per year for four years running.
But the current Democratic Party is not salvageable. And the reason why I said the GOP can remake itself as a progressive conservative party and become the natural governing party is because the Democrats are on a suicide watch, in my view. I mean, they have so far dug into their extreme that I don’t think they can rescue themselves, right? I’m not talking about mere socialism, by the way. I’m not talking about Bernie Sanders. I’m talking about the race and gender party. I’m talking about the people who have gone absolutely mad on the subject of abortion or on the subject of race. And I don’t think the Dems are capable of pulling back from that, right? So I think in the end, what we’re looking at, until there’s a recovery of the Democratic Party, which would be maybe decades perhaps in the future, you’re looking at sensible Republicans to take over.
Trump and the Sweet Spot of American Politics [21:38]
F.H. Buckley: Now why—why the GOP? How do I tie in Lincoln and TR and Ike with the present party? Well, I do it because I worked on the Trump campaign. And the Trump campaign in 2016 was alive to all of these themes. I know because I was the pitchman, right? I mean, I, for example, pitched to Jared Kushner the idea that the big issue here is the rise of aristocracy and the decline of economic mobility, and that became a great theme of the campaign, right? So were a number of other issues I was pushing.
They went nowhere with Trump. Quite apart from the fact that Trump quite, I think, disgraced himself on January 6th, he was even before then a failure as a president by virtue of his inability to cut deals, right? To do that which we’d elected him for, to get things done. In the first two years, basically domestic policy was run by the Paul Ryans. And for two years thereafter, we had the madness of the Russian collusion, right? Which was absolutely horrible for America. I mean, it prevented us from cutting a deal with Putin, and we can see how tragic that failure is now and how much it’s cost America. So, you know, even prior to January 6th, Trump was that which he said he hated most, i.e., a loser. And the Republican Party had better cut its ties with him as an individual.
But at the same time, it needs to attract those 74 new million people who voted for him, many of whom were new GOP voters. And to do that, you have to recognize what it was in Trump that amounted to a repudiation of the prior 60 years of the GOP. And that was a party which was socially conservative and economically middle-of-the-road. It was nationalist, but it recognized that nationalism has a gravitational force that brings you over to the middle of the road on economics. Up to that point, Republican parties were right-wing social values, right-wing economic policies against a Democratic Party that was left in both cases, and the GOP always lost. And so Trump discovered the sweet spot in American politics, which I just described. It was actually the subject of an op-ed by David Brooks in the New York Times yesterday, but I wrote about it in 2017 in the Wall Street Journal. I said, you know, here’s where people voted and here’s where the ducks are. And it’s called progressive conservatism. It’s not Ted Cruz and it’s not simply the social conservatives of the religious right. It’s a middle-of-the-road movement, last best expressed by Dwight Eisenhower, but in which we saw important elements in 2016 in the Trump campaign.
That was the winner. And you know, I worked at this, I helped craft the message, I wrote speeches. I also did outreach to important groups, notably Catholics, who are the great swing voters in American politics. So yeah, so I was there and I quickly realized it was going to go south. I was asked to write an inauguration speech, if I can digress a bit. And I, when before I did that, I bought a book of the inauguration speeches of US presidents. And if you did that and read that, it would blow you away. I mean, we’re talking about noble speeches by impressive people. And so I drafted a speech that was Kennedy-esque in a way, a kind of “let’s come together” type of effort. And for the inauguration, I, you know, I happened to be at the Canadian embassy looking down and I heard the speech and it was obviously not mine. It was written by Steve Bannon. I realized at that point this is nuts, right? This is just anything but what a Dwight Eisenhower would have done. And thereafter, Trump surrounded himself with incompetence in office and with cronies who catered to his monstrous ego and to sycophants and a sleazy group of people, many of whom were distinctly illiberal. And the one thing I talked about, Trump as a nationalist—if you’re a nationalist, I think you have to follow, you have to adopt the values of the Founders of the country. That’s something that Lincoln expressly did in a speech on July 4th, 1858. He said, you know—he was talking about immigration—he said, you know, all honor to the people who fought in the Revolution, and some of their descendants are here in front of me in the audience. But even if you can’t establish a direct blood tie to the Founders, it’s enough if you subscribe to their value. The electric cord of the words of the Declaration unite all Americans. So that’s what American nationalism means. And right now we have a bunch of nationalists who are illiberal. And if you are illiberal, you are not American.
Applying Progressive Conservative Values [27:48]
Bob Zadek: Now, in your book, you offer very strong, persuasive exposure to values. The book is a lot about values. Is it also—as the application of those values, there are many issues that are up in the air in America today, unresolved. If you could pick any issue you wish and show us, apply the value you yearn for in your book and the style and the value that you urge the Republican Party to adopt—take if they did and took your values you long for and applied them to an issue. Show us, the listeners to your talk today, show us how those values would approach any unresolved policy issue today, whether it’s abortion, immigration, equality, First Amendment rights—pick an issue that’s up in the air today and apply the teachings of your book and show us how it would work.
F.H. Buckley: That’s a great challenge. I end the book with a chapter on specific reforms that a progressive conservative would support. So let me suggest something firstly which is progressive and then something which is conservative. So I argue that what would be progressive would be debt relief for students burdened by educational loans. And I say it’s something that an economist might like because, you know, really bankruptcy reform is key to the American spirit of, you know, you have a failure, you dust yourself off, you start over again. Most of those loans are not going to be ever be paid under any circumstances; they’re already bad debts. But, you know, if you give people a fresh start, they’ll be more willing to buy into America and into our economy. But if you’ve made them debt slaves, don’t be surprised if they turn into socialists.
By the way, I couple that with something which is more conservative. I suggest that if you’re worried about paying for that, as you well should be, the burden properly should fall on the universities themselves. I mean, we did something really stupid, something—we made a tremendous gift for the left in our educational loans. We said we’re going to subsidize the loans, right? We’ll take the carrying charges, we won’t charge the students until they graduate for them. So it looked like cheap money to the students. The same kind of promise was made in every first-world country. But the difference is in those other countries, they realized that that’s going to be an invitation for the universities to run up the tab. So they said, “All right, we’re going to do that, but then you, the universities, have to cap your tuition.” We didn’t do that, right? And so now we have tuition in the vicinity of $60,000, $70,000 a year in many places. So I propose that we cap the support, the federal support, at something like $25,000 a year. If you want to charge more than $25,000 in tuition, you know what you do? Fire your diversity officers and, you know, get rid of some of the stupid courses and you’ll be able to manage. And if not, let daddy pay.
I also suggested that if the university bears the tab for bad debt, watch how quickly all the crazy courses will disappear, right? The universities will say, you know, we’re kind of like pollutants right now. We’re issuing students with degrees—we’re issuing degrees to students in crazy subjects that make them unemployable. And if we’re going to pay the cost of that ourselves, we’re not going to offer those kinds of degrees. We’ll offer sensible courses, right, that train people for the real world. But watch how quickly the gender study courses will disappear under what I proposed. So I like bankruptcy.
Bob Zadek: I do too. I accept your answer as thoughtful and it’s consistent with a value structure that I can embrace. So it’s probably the perfect answer to my question, and so that I thank you so much for that.
Reaching a Voting Majority [37:00]
Bob Zadek: Now, applying again progressive conservatism, how would tomorrow, next month, look different to political observers to the extent that Republicans adopted—and by the way, I want to just go back for a second, I’m sorry about that. In putting together the book and the concept that drove the book of progressive conservatism, you are doing what one would expect political parties always do, which is figure out how to adopt a platform package which will attract 50.01% of the popular vote—I’m being facetious, of course, but you know what I mean. It’s a collection of discrete positions which collectively will give you a voting majority, which is the Holy Grail, which is the brass ring on the merry-go-round. So what you are doing is you’re encouraging Republicans to make such adjustment as is necessary to achieve victory at the ballot box. That seems to be what you’re doing, which is after all a perfectly appropriate, if not the only sensible approach that any political party ought to adopt. You want to survive; you don’t want to be irrelevant in political life.
So the left has gotten lots of mileage over the absurdly amorphous concept of equality, of equity and the like. They seem to have—and maybe I am overstating the value of that position—but if we start with that concept, whatever it means, is recognition that the supporters of that are an important voting block? Is that sufficient to invite an adjustment in Trumpian Republican politics in order to acquire more voters? Where does equity fit into all of this? Of course, it’s so misunderstood and so misused. I was curious how the application of the principles of your book would approach that.
F.H. Buckley: Well, first of all, the progressive conservatives, the Westerners—and I’m a Westerner—likes the idea of democracy and things that things will work out, you know, if people are permitted to vote their preferences, because the alternative is worse. And the alternative is what we see in Washington: blockage and domination by interest groups on the left particularly. Yeah, so it is equitable to allow people to voice their preferences in that particular way.
And a Republican Party that competed along the lines that I’m suggesting would be reaching out for more than 50.1% of the voting population, but for far, far more than that. I mean, I think it’s generally recognized that the Democratic Party has become the “monster raving loony party” on the subject of so many narrow issues. I mean, they’re just tied to their most extreme constituencies. You know, the greatest example in the news this morning, by the way, is the Times and the Post are vilifying Joe Manchin for objecting to more spending, as if the inflation we see before us doesn’t exist. I mean, they’ve simply lost touch.
Another example of what I’m talking about is the move of Hispanic voters to the GOP. I mean, I’m an immigrant and I like immigrants, and I think they will be natural supporters of the GOP. My example, by the way, is Canada, where the immigrants voted majoritarian Tory a couple of elections ago, right? The GOP is still lousy at going after ethnic groups, new immigrant groups, but they’re there and they’re low-lying fruit. So a more democratic in spirit Republican Party would be a progressive conservative party and a winner.
Constitutional Limitations and Healthcare [49:05]
Bob Zadek: Would your approach fit comfortably within constitutional limitations as they presently exist, or would it require, to fulfill the hope that you mention in your book, would it require cooperation by the Supreme Court or a change in constitutional interpretation?
F.H. Buckley: I spoke earlier on of my debt to Frederick Jackson Turner—something Ilya Somin never did—and said that a libertarian will like the idea of devolution of some powers to the states because that would permit, promote jurisdictional competition. So to the extent that the Supreme Court returns powers to the states, I think that’s a good thing. It’ll produce the kind of sorting I’m talking about and the competition. And if you were referring to the abortion decision as well you might have been, I would say I liked it because I think it brought back an element of moral seriousness to the debate. I think there are people on the left who are moral lepers on the issue, utterly uncaring about the moral issues. But on the right, there have been people who’ve been saying for years, “You know, if we were in Europe, you’d discover that abortion restrictions are stronger there than they are here.” Well, you know, that’s roughly where we’re going to go, probably. I think that states like Virginia, for example, will find that they won’t abolish or try to abolish abortion completely, but they’ll make it illegal after 17 or 20 months, right? That there’s that kind of debate that will have to happen if it returns to the realm of politics and away from the Supreme Court. So being a small-d democrat, I like the idea of diffusing the culture wars by making people talk to each other.
Bob Zadek: I couldn’t agree more. This is Bob Zadek. We’ve spent the last hour with my friend Frank H. Buckley, who has written his most recent book, Progressive Conservatism: How Republicans Will Become America’s Natural Governing Party. It is a great read, both for what Frank proposes happen to the Republican Party, but also—and this is a great contribution—he puts the discussion in an historical context. So it’s not just a book which is standing alone, but it is written in the context of America’s political historical past, and he refers to the best parts of that past in supporting his proposition. It is a must-read even if you have a passing interest and curiosity in American politics, where it was and where we are going. Frank, thank you so much for your book. Thank you for your wisdom this morning. And to all my friends out there, thank you so much for giving us an hour of your valuable time. And of course, thank you to Frank for giving also us an hour of his time. Thank you so much to all my friends out there, and enjoy the rest of your day.
F.H. Buckley: Thank you, Bob.