It’s definitely worth your time to listen to all five parts of Peter Robinson’s interview with Paul Rahe at National Review Online’s Uncommon Knowledge.

But I was particularly struck by Part Two, where Robinson and Rahe talk about the appeal of a nanny state to take care of you, writes TAC contributor Jim Lakely.

"Segment Two: The danger," begins with Robinson, asking Rahe, the author of Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Tocqueville, and the Modern Prospect, that while it’s easy to see how political leaders would succumb to the temptations of soft despotism, why would the people?

Rahe quotes John Locke, who says there is a "natural bias to our minds." And that bias is "that we think we know better than other people." So the "tyrannical impulse, the desire to run other people’s lives — for their benefit, of course — is in there for all of us." And it’s "easily transferred to the larger world." So it’s easy to explain the nanny state, because there is a nanny inside all of us … [but] it’s not so easy to understand why somebody would want to be under the nanny."

Rahe goes on to explain how Toqueville and other great thinkers of the 18th and 19th centuries had puzzled over how in "liberal societies" — in the social and economic sense — there is anxiety, "a sense of not knowing what to do, of feeling just a little bit lost." He explains how in a liberal society, you decide things like your religious destiny. And you do not, generally, simply inherit the life of your father. What you do, and what you are, "largely depends on you."

Robinson, trying to get at the larger psychological point, recounts a story of ex-Soviet friends who would visit an American grocery store and "could not process" the cornucopia of plenty that Cold War Americans took for granted. One friend stood in an American produce aisle (a shadow of what a Whole Foods is today) and simply wept. That represented, Robinson said, what Rahe was getting at: "The anxiety of freedom."

Rahe takes that prompt, and runs with it — talking about how in a free society, created and envisioned by our Founders, it is the burden of a free man to fashion his own life. He does not have to do what the church says, as in "pre-modern" life. And in a modern life in America, he does not have to do what the state says — at least not yet, anyway. Yet the pull, the comfort, the siren’s song of falling into line is deep inside human nature. To be free, one has to work at it, work against a strong pull of human nature.

To take a humorous contemporary example, Rahe — the Charles O. Lee and Louise K. Lee Chair in Western Heritage and Professor of History at Hillsdale College — offers up the life of college seniors. They get a bit anxious, he says, around the autumn of their senior year. They realize that for the first time in their life, they are no longer controlled — the bells of high school are long past, and the structure of achieving college credits and going to scheduled classes will soon come to an end. They realize, for the first time, that soon they will be completely responsible for their own lives. And the are afraid, "because there is no one to take care of them." Robinson jokes: That’s why they enroll in graduate school.

What Rahe said, Robinson continues, explains the appeal of the New Deal (and, in my mind, the enthusiasm the "youth vote" had for Obama — which Robinson also notes). So why, Robinson asks, did America turn to Reagan — who advanced individual responsibility and smaller government — after Carter’s version of the nanny state?

Rahe notes that there comes a time when the public looks at the government that has been trying to take care of them and finds it incompetent. Because it is almost always incompetent. And the good news? Rahe believes we will come to that point in 2012 when Obama and the Democrats are through with us.

Go here to see all five versions of this great interview with the author of a very important, and timely, book.