On the whole, I find Yoo's loyalty to his own ideology and convictions are clouding his capacity for cogent analysis. But I have some disagreements with what Long and Robinson are saying too.

Conservatives have in fact "won" on many issues in the last 40 years. The United States, and the Democratic Party in particular, are a lot more market friendly now than they were back then. A lot of industries have been deregulated -- isn't cheap airfare great? -- and the country is improved in all sorts of ways. Does it matter that not all of them were "conservative" victories? The air is cleaner. Race relations are better. People are living longer. Violent crime is way down. Even hula hooping, which I understand was very popular in the 1970s, is quite improved:



Along with losing on a lot of social issues over the years -- many of them issues where today's conservatives agree with yesterday's liberals -- conservatives do seem to have lost the argument about the social safety net. The Republican Party has gone through multiple campaign cycles advertising itself as the side that won't cut Medicare. (You'd think, given his rhetoric, that at least Mark Levin would be calling for Medicare to be abolished as unconstitutional abomination, but no one with an audience as elderly as his has the courage of his convictions on the subject.) And yes, Obamacare probably is going to significantly change America's relationship to the federal government -- not in the way that I'd prefer, to be sure -- but the conservative presumption that repealing it is obviously the highest priority for a freedom-loving people isn't grounded in anything but dubious predictions about how it'll end in imminent tyranny**. (As Noah Millman writes, we'd actually be lucky if it ended in Europeanization.)

Improve on the left's health-care policy, by all means.

But perhaps there are bigger affronts to freedom that deserve more attention from the right -- things like warrantless spying on millions of innocent Americans, extrajudicial killings, and incarcerating a higher percentage of the population than any other Western nation by a wide margin. Those are aspects of liberty that don't tend to be aired when you're always talking with Yoo.

That doesn't make them unimportant, given that the transgressions are happening right now. Conservatives worry so much about stepping onto slippery slopes that they often don't even notice when they're already at the bottom of one. (Just ask Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley).

I'll leave Robinson and Long, both of whose arguments are always worth considering, with some questions about what they actually think about the entitlement state. I know they regard it as financially unsustainable in its present form. I agree. I'd like to means-test Social Security. For high-net-worth individuals, I'd like to cap Medicare at what they paid in during their working years. I'd like to reform medical torts too.