Some people that I very much respect, like (Weekly Standard editor) Bill Kristol, disagree with me on that, but there we are.

Q: You’ve said that President Bush is not a true conservative -– if that’s a fair repeating of what you said -- primarily because of intervention in Iraq and his extravagant domestic spending.

A: I have distinguished in the past between somebody who “is conservative” and somebody who is “a conservative.”

By somebody who is “a conservative,” I’m referring to people like Ronald Reagan and Milton Friedman, the totality of whose respect for those ideals is such as to say they are guided by them. But if you say of someone, “Well, he’s ‘conservative,’ ” by no means could it be said that he is guided by conservative lodestars. That would include President Eisenhower and President Bush.

In the matter of the incumbent Bush, the challenge is very keen because of the central role that Iraq is playing. It’s a challenge not only in that we are being asked to turn toward neoconservatism in our foreign policy but also in that the acid test is coming in an area of the world in which we haven’t, in my judgment, devised an arresting and persuasive stance.

We don’t really know whether Islam is a consolidated challenge to Western Christianity and, as such, we haven’t, in my judgment, come up with the persuasive weaponry with which to press our own field and deny theirs.

Q: Has conservatism made a bargain with the state or with government power that it should not have made over the last 50 years? Has conservatism forgotten the message of Albert J. Nock’s seminal book, “Our Enemy, the State”?

A: The answer is, “Yes, it has.” Accommodations have been made, the consequences of which we have yet to pay for.

Albert J. Nock, although he could express himself fanatically on these subjects, would certainly have pronounced these as major, major mistakes. So, the answer to your question is, indeed those excesses have been engaged in and they affect the probity of the conservative faith.

Q: You know who Ron Paul is -- the congressman. He’s derided and discounted by many conservatives and his fellow Republicans as a kook. Yet his strong stands in favor of limited constitutional government, lower taxes, more personal freedoms and nonintervention overseas make him in many ways sound like a conservative of old -- a Robert Taft, or a Coolidge kind of conservative in some ways.

A: I agree, yeah.

Q: Is he getting a bum rap?

A: I think that people who cast themselves as presidential contenders are almost universally derided on the grounds that they don’t have manifest orthodox qualifications.

In the case of Ron Paul, he doesn’t have a broad enough or huge following and under the circumstances he becomes rather a quaint ideological aspirant than someone who is realistically seeking for power.

Q: You’ve always had a visible libertarian streak …

A: Yes.

Q: … whether it goes back to your admiration of Nock or your opposition to the war on drugs. Yet you and libertarians have always been feuding. Is there a simple way to summarize the most important argument between you and libertarians?

A: I suppose the most important argument is the dogmatic character of libertarian conservatism.

I once wrote an essay on the subject in which I said that if I were at sea on my boat and saw a light flashing I would not worry deeply whether the financing of that light had been done by the private or public sector. This became a kind of playful debate with the (University of) Chicago (economists). By and large it has to do with the tenacity with which some libertarians tend to hold on to their basic (principles).

Q: Is conservatism compatible with a welfare-warfare state that consumes so much of our national wealth and controls so much of our daily lives?

A: It’s incompatible with a state that overdoes it. If the demands on the state required a devotion and a preoccupation with it to the point of standing in the way of people’s devising their own preferences and their own order of preferences, then you could say it was a mortal enemy.

I don’t think it’s fair to say that given the percentage of the national income that’s being pre-empted by the state at this time that we have lost that war. But I think it is correct to say that it’s a war that we need to continue to fight and concern ourselves with.