Bill Clinton's Lawyer Just Admitted Libertarians Are Right
This isn't a gotcha.
Lanny Davis was Special Counsel to President Clinton. Legal advisor to Michael Cohen. And the only Democrat George W. Bush put on the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board — the panel that watched the government's surveillance programs from the inside.
The invitation came from Karl Rove himself.
So what makes a lifelong Democrat go straight to George Orwell's 1984?
Flock cameras. License plate readers. Every car in America logged and shared between departments.
Davis looked at all of it and said the quiet part out loud: "the bigger government is, the more I feel shared wisdom with libertarians."
🎧 [Listen to the full episode (TBNS 1092)](https://www.briannicholsshow.com/bill-clintons-lawyer-just-admitted-libertarians-are-right-tbns-1092/)
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Inside the Spy Room
Davis sat on the oversight board that was supposed to be the guardrail.
Then the guardrails slipped. The board emptied out. Cameras multiplied on every corner. License plate readers turned driving into a searchable database shared across agencies.
Big Brother stopped being a novel and started being a procurement order.
You don't need to agree with Davis on taxes, healthcare, or elections to hear the alarm. When a Clinton lawyer and a Bush appointee both flinch at the same surveillance stack, maybe the problem isn't left versus right. Maybe the problem is power without friction.
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Only 3 Out of 585 Said Yes
His new book, *Finding the Third Way*, tackles the civility crisis head-on.
He and Joe Lieberman once asked 535 members of Congress and 50 governors to sign a civility pledge.
Three signed.
Three.
Davis names his own party's labeling problem — the socialist-label trap that turns disagreement into excommunication. He pulls a Harry Truman warning from 1948. And he makes the case that Democrats and libertarians agree on more than either side admits... especially when the state starts treating every citizen like a data exhaust pipe.
Civility without courage is just manners. Courage without civility is just a fight club. Davis is trying to rebuild the middle — and admitting that on surveillance, the libertarians got there first.
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The Scorecard
Then I did the thing we do on this show.
Three things Lanny got right. Three where he lost me. One of them pointed straight at our own side.
One standard.
That's the point of having a Clinton lawyer on a liberty-minded show. Not to cosplay bipartisanship for the clip. To pressure-test the overlap — privacy, oversight, speech — and refuse to rubber-stamp the rest.
If your coalition can only hear from people who already agree with you, you don't have a coalition. You have a choir.
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Why Voters Snapped
Davis walks through why voters snapped on empathy, labeling, and elite distance.
"The heck with your civility" isn't an abstract slogan when people feel watched, priced out, and talked down to in the same week. Surveillance culture sits on top of that resentment like gasoline.
Libertarians have been yelling about this for decades. Hearing it from Lanny Davis doesn't make us right because he said it. It makes the warning harder for the center-left to dismiss as fringe.
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The Empty Oversight Board
Davis's Karl Rove phone call story still lands because of who made it. A Republican White House putting a Clinton Democrat on the privacy board was supposed to mean the watchdogs had a bipartisan spine.
Then the board hollowed out. Guardrails that exist on paper don't stop Flock cameras and plate readers if nobody's in the room with authority and spine. "Big Brother Is Watching You" stopped being a high-school essay prompt the day your commute became a shared departmental log.
Davis's curveball close on the show matters too: he didn't come on to convert libertarians into Democrats. He came on to admit the surveillance state made libertarian instincts look less like ideology and more like pattern recognition. My scorecard still dinged him where empathy politics and party branding undercut the civility pitch — including where our own side fails the same test.
Agreement on cameras isn't a fusion ticket. It's a firewall. Build that first.
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The Bottom Line
America's privacy crisis is happening right now not in a thought experiment, in the camera on the corner and the plate reader that never forgets.
Lanny Davis came on The Brian Nichols Show and admitted that bigger government pushed him toward libertarian wisdom on that fight. His book argues for a third way on civility. My scorecard kept one standard for both of us.
Watch the conversation. Then ask yourself how many cameras you're okay with before "public safety" becomes a searchable life.
Educated. Enlightened. Informed.
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Listen to the Full Episode
🎧 [Bill Clinton's Lawyer Just Admitted Libertarians Are Right!? | TBNS 1092](https://www.briannicholsshow.com/bill-clintons-lawyer-just-admitted-libertarians-are-right-tbns-1092/)
Guest: Lanny Davis — author of Finding the Third Way
Book site: [lannyjdavis.com](https://lannyjdavis.com)
Purple Nation column: [RealClearPolitics](https://www.realclearpolitics.com)
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Show site: [briannicholsshow.com](https://www.briannicholsshow.com)
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Host
I'm Brian Nichols... and I spent years watching the liberty movement lose arguments it should've won.
Not because the ideas were wrong. Because nobody knew how to sell them. That's where I come in.
I come from the world of sales and marketing - helping businesses communicate better, close more deals, and actually solve real problems. Somewhere along the way, I realized those same skills translate directly to politics, policy, and culture. So that's what TBNS is.
Sales. Business. Politics. Health. Taught like a real human talks. No partisan cosplay. No debating obscure philosophy. Just practical conversations about what actually works - one episode at a time.
1,100+ episodes in. Still going.
Also: unapologetic Cowboys fan. We don't need to talk about it.
