This week on Conservative Crossroads, what is conservatism's core principle?

John Hood says it's freedom. Josh Hammer says it's virtue.

Freedom or virtue? Coming up on Conservative Crossroads now.

Welcome back to Conservative Crossroads, the program where conservatives lean into their

differences rather than deny them. I'm Henry Olson, senior fellow at the Ethics and Public

Policy Center, and your host and moderator for this program. This week, our discussion is over

first principles. Is freedom or virtue the main principle underlying American conservatism?

I'm joined by John Hood, president of the John William Pope Foundation

and co-founder of the Freedom Conservatism Project,

and Josh Hammer, host of the Josh Hammer Show

and senior editor at large at Newsweek.

Each person will have five minutes to make an opening statement, followed by 40 minutes of mutual discussion and Q&A.

Each will then have two minutes in reverse order of the opening statements to offer concluding remarks. We mutually decided prior to the

program that John will go first. John, you're up. Well, thank you very much, Henry, and Josh. I appreciate

the opportunity to speak to you today and talk a little bit about the past, present, and future of American conservatism.

I got involved in the movement in the 1980s, the tail end of the Reagan era, and spent many decades

running organizations, funding organizations, building organizations, and training people.

And there has never been a moment when everyone agreed

on every aspect of what it meant to be an American conservative, much less going international and

trying to come up with some sort of non-country specific definition of conservatism, which I think is

probably doomed to futility. So just in the

case of American conservatism, I would submit that you cannot have an American conservative

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