In addition to major events on campus and in Washington, DC, the Hoover Institution regularly brings fellows and other policy experts together with its friends and supporters for more intimate regional conferences. Those events provide a forum for speakers to bring participants up to date on new Hoover research and discuss the latest domestic and international policy developments in a conversational setting.
We’ve received permission to release two excellent talks from this January’s Southern California Conference. In her talk, Research Fellow Kori Schake outlines national security challenges based on her work with Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis and Annenberg Distinguished Visiting Fellow admiral James O. Ellis Jr. in Blueprint for America. Research Fellow David Davenport discusses an integral thread of the American ethos based on his new Hoover Institution Press book, Rugged Individualism: Dead or Alive?
We invite you to share these presentations and hope you find them informative.
Kori Schake, National Security Challenges for the New Administration
The international security climate may be volatile, but according to Research Fellow Kori Schake the most serious threat to the United States is domestic policy failure. Drawing on her work with Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis and former commander of the US Strategic Command James O. Ellis Jr. in the Blueprint for America project, Schake explains a number of key insights for strengthening the domestic institutions and policies underlying US national security strategy. After turning outward to explore what she and her Blueprint coauthors identify as the most serious external threats to US security, Schake closes by identifying a new challenge to cohesive strategy that is emerging in 2017: lack of consensus within the Trump cabinet and between the new administration and Congress.
David Davenport, Rugged Individualism: Dead or Alive?
Based on his new Hoover Institution Press book, Rugged Individualism: Dead or Alive? co-authored with his longtime Pepperdine colleague Gordon Lloyd, David Davenport discusses our unique brand of individualism that dates back to the American founding. Davenport begins with the articulation of American individualism in the Declaration of Independence, following it through its safeguarding in the US Constitution, its flourishing in westward expansion, and its declining in the face of progressive ideology and New Deal politics. He also discusses the ebbs and flows of our “rugged individualism” through the decades since, from the great society to the Reagan revolution, as well as Herbert Hoover’s role as one of that philosophy’s most ardent champions.
