This is thinking in public a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about

front-line theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them.

I'm Albert Moller, your host and president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville,

Kentucky.

David French is a senior writer for National Review, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, an attorney

concentrating his practice in constitutional law and the law of armed conflict, and a veteran

of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

He's the author or co-author of several books, including most recently

the number one New York Times best-selling Rise of ISIS, a threat we can't ignore.

He's a graduate of Harvard Law School, the past president, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Education,

and a former lecturer at Cornell Law School. He lives and works in Columbia, Tennessee, with his wife,

who is also a New York Times best-selling author and their children.

David French, welcome to Thinking in Public.

David, I think it might be helpful to begin with something of a topography of a conservative thought in the United States.

And I say that, I guess, the background of the fact that if you were to go back to the early decades

of the 20th century, there really wasn't much conversation about conservative thought, much conversation about a conservative mind.

All that began to change, especially in the period after World War II, and you are right now sitting at something of the epicenter of that development.

Lay out a bit of the topography for us.

Yeah, you know, I think that a lot of people would say that the development of sort of this coherent idea of a conservative movement, of a general consensus of what conservatism meant, really, you know, and I'm not, of course biased in favor of the founder of our magazine at National View

William F Buckley Jr but it really did I believe begin around him and around the intellectual efforts that he began.

And, you know, broadly, you know, there was this sort of it developed through many years into by the

Obama era I think a kind of a broad consensus variations within issues of course and disagreements about any given

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