Bill Kristol shocked me with some of the answers he gave me on Medicare for All and Redistribution. He is not anathema to the concepts.
Bill Kristol, less conservative than he was several decades past
Who is Bill Kristol?
Bill Kristol is a long-time devoted conservative stalwart. He is the director of Defending Democracy, a Fellow at Harvard’s Institute of Politics Kennedy School, and the editor at large at The Bulwark.
We all recognize Mr. Kristol is and has been a reliable defender of conservative positions on every TV and radio network and at conferences throughout the nation. When someone with those bona fides decides to speak out against his party, it is time for his Republican cohort to listen.
The first part of the interview covered Kristol’s deep concern about the direction the Republican Party had taken. He pointed out that subsequent elections in these times are a binary choice. And his choice in these times is to vote Democratic even though he is not a fan of their policies that gives the government a bigger role,
Kristol is putting country before party and ideology. In this second part of our interview, it was his ideology and flexibility that I wanted to probe. I asked him to define his definition of conservatism. His definition was the classic definition we are all used to.
It was encouraging that Kristol did not display the Ayn Randian inhumane rigidity that many conservatives have been known for quite some time, especially since Reagan’s supply-side economics.