I do wonder if you think that this is worth talking about because of that sort of strategic advantage

and what you make of an argument that it's strategic to be able to cite to socialist, self-described socialist forefathers,

when again the idea of liberalism has been such a fig leaf for the right.

At what point is there diminishing returns for appealing to these touchstones like the Constitution

that have been held up by conservatives in recent history,

or originalism, the founding text,

as reference points to justify a kind of conservatism.

What is the point of doing so when it seems clear today

that so much of that was done in bad faith?

And that the constraints of the Constitution

are not constraints that conservatives themselves are willing to abide by.

I think it really depends on the extent to which you think ideas matter in politics.

There are people all across the spectrum who will give you different takes on this.

No surprise, intellectuals tend to think that what intellectuals do matters a great deal.

John Maynard Keynes once famously said that politicians were ultimately just the echoes of something

that an intellectual scribbled in a book a long time ago, even if they weren't aware of that.

Now, on the other end of the spectrum, F.A. Hayek, the famous arts defender of capitalism,

said that people often underestimate the importance that intellectuals have in society. In fact, he said, usually intellectuals

are the one that essentially dictate what society is going to do. There's just kind of a 20-year

gap between what somebody writes down in a university article and what it actually gets

enacted in politics downstream. On the other front, you have some hardened Marxists and some

hardened political realists, including on the right, like San Francis, would say, ideas don't matter

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