The Radical Incrementalist

Award-winning journalist Jonathan Rauch on the need for--and impossibility of--reducing the size and scope of government.

Nick Gillespie | April 20, 2007

(Page 7 of 9)

Rauch: I hope that that's the case. I'm not yet convinced it will be the case because I'm not quite sure there are enough electoral votes out there yet. And I'm not quite yet convinced that those states are going to go all the way from trending red to true purple or even somewhat blue. But that seems to be the trend and I hope it's the case. I'm amazed that the two parties continue to be having this turtle race to be slowest to understand the potential of that part of the country.

reason: You went to Yale for college. What was your experience?

Rauch: I ended up there because I wanted to get out of Phoenix, which I thought was a hick town when I was growing up there. I didn't discover what a Westerner I was until, of course, I left the West. I wanted to go east to college. Yale was everything I hoped it would be. Some people are not well matched to their colleges, but I was very well matched to Yale.

It was intellectually very serious. The students were really interested and there was a pretty strong emphasis on classics. I spent a lot of freshman year reading things like Plato and Shakespeare and those turn out to be very important. It also had a very good History Department and history is great preparation for journalism. I majored in history.

reason: How was it a good preparation?

Rauch: It's fundamentally an empirical field. If you're a good historian, you don't start history with a grand theory and try to cram everything into it. Some people do, but most people don't. That's not true of a lot of other fields. Journalism is the same way. Or it could be. It's fact-driven and it's fundamentally narrative-driven. You're telling stories about things that could've happened in very different ways. You've got to understand why they happened in the particular way they did.

One of my strongest guiding beliefs in life is the moral duty of empiricism, of actively checking, of actively trying to discover where you're wrong. And then correcting your beliefs and not letting your preconceptions interfere with that to an undue extent. I think history and journalism both try to teach that.

reason: What did you do after you graduated?

Rauch: Two years at the Winston-Salem Journal in North Carolina. I will tell you I voted against Jesse Helms. That's the only vote I'll tell you.

Then five years as a staff correspondent with National Journal, covering the budget which is where I learned about federal programs that last forever. Then covering economics, which is where I learned that decentralized networks, which are really what markets are, work incredibly well. Then I went off to Japan, wrote a book on it, wrote a book on free thought, free speech. Kindly Inquisitors is still my best book.

reason: Why do you say that's your best book?

Rauch: It's extremely innovative intellectually. It's very hard working philosophically. To try to root a criticism of political correctness not just in the Constitution and in free speech, but on where knowledge comes from--an epistemology-- is trying to strike an anchor right on the ocean floor. It's very ambitious for someone in his late 20s or early 30s to sit down and write that kind of book. I should have never gotten away with it so I still marvel at its ambition and ultimately its surprising success.

I went back on the job market after writing a series of books, worked for The Economist, and then became the columnist for National Journal in 1998, as well as writing for The Atlantic and other places. Wrote a book on gay marriage.

reason: Why did you become a journalist?

Rauch: I wanted to be a writer and I discovered that journalism is the cleanest path into writing. I didn't have it in me to sit down and become a novelist and I also discovered that a lot of the writers I admired most--including Dickens, Orwell, George Bernard Shaw, H.L. Mencken--considered themselves journalists to a large extent and began in journalism.