Starts at about 33 minutes into this stream (thanks, Elliot!).

To the extent that I still think of myself as a conservative, it’s in the Bacevich-Reinhold Niebuhr mold. Bacevich gets at what I take to be the heart of this conservatism in the interview: it’s the recognition that world exists prior to us and doesn’t conform to our ideas or wishes. Ironically, conservatives used to lambaste progressives for allegedly wanting to remake the world according to some abstract, utopian scheme. But contemporary U.S. conservatism seems to have embraced a similarly magical worldview (or what Matthew Yglesias has called the “Green Lantern” theory of politics) where sheer willpower is sufficient to make the world the way we want it to be.

Not coincidentally, Bacevich has just written the introduction for a new edition of Niebuhr’s The Irony of American History. Of course, Niebuhr was in many ways a man of the left, which leaves open the possibility that a broadly “conservative” worldview–one that emphasizes human sinfulness and finitude, unintended consequences, and the need for limits–might lead to what we would consider progressive policy prescriptions, something which I think has a lot of truth in it.