All Reagan, all the time

Mr. Adesnik (I refer to him thus, so as to distinguish between him and myself and David Donadio; also I think Adesnik is older than I am) has a fine post up on how to think about Reagan, based on which I look forward to his forthcoming column.

At the risk of violating Mr. Adesnik’s caution against hagiography, I wanted to post this fascinating 1975 Reason interview with then-Governor Reagan. A sample:

REAGAN: If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism. I think conservatism is really a misnomer just as liberalism is a misnomer for the liberals–if we were back in the days of the Revolution, so-called conservatives today would be the Liberals and the liberals would be the Tories. The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom and this is a pretty general description also of what libertarianism is.

A few things become clear straight away: Reagan’s intelligence, erudition, and historical knowledge; his political sensibility, with which he schools his more ideological interviewer on at least two occasions; and the ways in which he appears to be a political, rather than a philosophical, conservative.

Read the whole thing.