George Will: American Happiness and Discontents

become a sustaining member of the commonwealth  club for just ten dollars a month join today hello everyone welcome to today's virtual program  at the commonwealth club of california my name is   jonathan last i'm the editor of the bulwark and i  am honored to be here with you for today's program   and pleased to be joined by george will  a columnist for the washington post and   author of the new book american happiness  and discontents the unruly torrent 2008-2020   george has been a columnist since 1974 and if you  won't mind me saying so he is the great essayist   of his generation uh what writers would call a  five tool player he hits to all fields with powers   uh i and i mean this totally sincerely george  is the only sas in america who can give you a   column about electoral politics on monday uh the  revolutionary war on thursday and then baseball   on sunday and have each of them be fully formed  and cogent and then beautifully rendered to boot   uh this is there is there's one of his essays in  in this book which literally begins with brian   wilson of the beach boys and then transitions  smoothly to james q wilson the sociologist and   i i am not aware of any other writer  living or dead who can pull that off   uh american happiness and discontents is a  collection of his columns from 2008 to 2020   and it is both as energetic and felicitous as the  first book of his i picked up when i was 15 years   old which was the pursuit of virtue and other tory  notions we're going to talk a lot over the next   hour and i'd like to ask george your questions too  if you're watching along with us please put your   questions into the text chat on youtube and we'll  get to them later on in the program george thank   you for joining us well thank you for doing this  i'm glad to be with you so the the screenwriter   william goldman used to say that every december  he would write a column and say this was the   worst year in the history of movies and next  year will be worse do you feel the same way   about the america you've been chronicling for the  last 50 years this is a pretty bad year leaving   aside the pandemic the man-made contribution  to the badness of this year is pretty severe   and it's i'm never a little ray of sunshine but  it's particularly hard now to be uh optimistic so   what what is the progress of america look like  i mean i i'd like to i'd like to ask you both   with different time frames the overall progress  of america from 2008 until where we sit today   what does that curve look like to you what  happened in 2008 is barack obama was elected   and the nation began to be infested with  terrible crazy rumors he's a muslim he's not   born in the united states he's ineligible  to be president and the period covered by   this book from 2008 to 2020 of course is what  happens through the successor to barack obama   and america seems to be have a kind of unfocused  furiousness there are a large number of   americans not by any means a majority for most  americans politics is a peripheral distraction   we tend to forget that there are 331 million  people in this country and at any given moment   325 million of them not watching cable  television and not listening to angry   talk radio they're fixing the screen door and  cleaning the gutters and getting on with life   but the tone is set of our public life by  some of these new technologies and it's a it's   i'd like europe and i used to believe that the  quantity of stupidity relative to the size of   the population was one of nature's constants  i'm not so sure anymore there just seems to be   more stupidity around now it could be that the  social media gives such velocity to stupidity   because the social media are made for stupidity  that is short brief explosions of vitriol and   insult and indignation still it's it's hard not  to think that we're brains are being rewired   by these technologies and certainly habits of  discourse are being changed by these technologies   so again as i said it's hard not to be  discouraged yet you know the book is not   a book of discouragement i mean the the book  itself is american happiness if i was going   to to really press you on this what would be the  bullish case for america what would be the case of   look what we've seen recently you  know the arc we've seen over the last   10 years 20 years may not look great but actually  things are going to be okay the bullish case for   america begins with the fact that millions of  people around the world are fighting to get in   the bullish case for america is  it works the record of success   of sheer increase of human well-being on the  part of this country and in this country is   one of the stunning achievements of world history  the institutions which are constantly said to be   fragile are not fragile this is a country that's  been through much worse uh and survived you've had   january 6 of course was unpleasant so was  shiloh and antietam and fredericksburg   big big problems so that's the case for  america is the institutions are durable   that the founders knew what they were doing when  they produced this constitutional architecture against that you have to say  if you believe as i do that   as has been said politics is downstream from  culture there are problems with the culture   they infest our campuses but what  happens on campus doesn't stay on campus   and we are a nation that cannot reproduce  elites that believe in and love the country   is information with with problems and  i think we're such a nation right now   so uh good i'm glad we've got the optimism out of  the way i i don't plan on returning to that we've   before we hung that bill now before we leave  optimism entirely in our rear view mirror   i think my columns are funny i'm not considered  a barrel of laughs but if if i write a column   that doesn't cause someone to either laugh out  loud or at least smile at some point i've failed   i i you know i have in my notes  here uh i literally i wrote down   sniffian comstockery which is one and when  i when i stumbled on that one i just i just   thought to myself of course george will wrote  this phrase and it's it's perfect we'll we'll   get to picnic and come stockery in a moment so one  of the things i was going to ask you um because   you talk a lot one of your recurring themes is  how bumbling and sclerotic government can be   if you combine that with uh a culture which  is less serious than it used to be and   a society which in which perhaps perhaps the uh  once constant level of stupidity is increasing   uh has this combined to make you more  libertarian than used to be yes it has uh   i stand by statecraft as assaultcraft i stand  by the fact that virtue is indispensable and   is a touring notion that said uh 50-some  years at the center of washington politics   watching the transaction costs of democracy  log rolling the additive nature of legislative   bargaining you support my projects a b and c  i'll support your projects d e and f i understand   all that i understand the messiness of it uh so  it's not as though i had a sentimental view and   have been disabused a woman giving her maiden  speech in the house of commons a few years ago   said democracy is like sex if it isn't messy  you're not doing it right the lord knows   we're doing it right yeah yes it's messy uh but  that's not what disturbs me what disturbs me is   the fact that as the government  becomes more interventionist   more deeply involved in the allocation of wealth  and opportunity to the degree that government   edges aside the market in allocating wealth  and opportunity the stakes of politics become   dangerously high the distributional  conflicts become dangerously central   the cost of losing becomes dangerously  scary for people and politics becomes a   more enveloping and bitter and that's why  as a the libertarianish side of me says   you've got to confine the state to certain  essentials bad enough that they aren't filling   the potholes but leave that aside um it is it's  just dangerous when the government undertakes to   envelop the citizenry but isn't the problem  that we now have something close to a bipartisan   consensus on the size of government which is  that it should be bigger you have one of your   columns in this is a wonderfully scathing attack  on the nationalist conservatives which uh which   i i felt deep in all of my erogenous zones and uh  this is this is it seems to me one of the places   where we have a great deal of bipartisan overlap  now and there isn't a lot of of room left for   for people who who would like to as you say lower  reduce the size of government lower the stakes and   lower the temperature right and this is one of the  reasons we're getting to the place where we are   now i think as a political culture you're quite  right my conviction is that for all the discord   and it's real enough that we hear about  the most frightening thing in washington   is the consensus that extends from left to right  deep is the grand canyon broad is the republic   and it is that we should have a large expensive  ever more generous entitlement state and not pay   for it everyone's agreed i think the political  class is more united by class interest than   it is divided by ideology a class interest is  an incentive for a permanent deficit spending   to fob oh 25 20 of federal spending off on the  unconsenting because unborn future generations   we used to borrow money for the future fought  wars built bridges roads harbors airports for the   future now we're borrowing money from the future  in order to support our current consumption of   government goods and services it is unsustainable  everyone knows it's unsustainable paul ryan when   before trump was nominated that after he clinched  the nomination he sat down with him in washington   intending to give him a thorough briefing on the  the unsustainability of the entitlement structures   shortly into paul's disposition trump said yeah  yeah yeah but when all that bad stuff happens   i'll be gone now that's everybody's view trump  simply says it with a characteristic crudeness but   uh you know it is an old saying the first rule  of economics is that scarcity is real the first   rule of politics is to ignore the first rule  of economics and that's what we're doing today   so i i to be honest i think i maybe have had my  feel of talking about politics already because   one of the things which i i think people who do  maybe people who don't read you closely is that   for a political columnist you've always written  very sparingly about politics as people broadly   understand i think american happiness it covers  2008-2020 and i believe the number of mentions of   barack obama and donald trump can probably be  counted on two hands and one foot now you are   much more i've always joked about this with my  friends when we talk about you which is a thing   that happens all the time um that you are like  a doctor of applied political philosophy which   is to say you go out and look at the world and  see political philosophy in vivo and and so you   wind up talking about history and culture and law  and the academy one of the subjects which you've   always covered and and talked about and continue  to in american happiness is race and i'm curious   as to how you've seen america's challenges with  race changing over the years the most stunning   change to me is the denial of the obvious which  is the extraordinary improvement in my lifetime   i was born in 1941 into a country in  which jim crow was not just down south   how many americans when you say brown b board  of education think well that must have come from   mississippi no no came from topeka kansas  where they had a segregated school system   the supreme court acquired a  tremendous infusion of prestige   from brown v board of education precisely  because it went against public opinion   people say oh this the supreme court and  judicial review are anomalous institutions   in a democracy because they they pose  the counter-majoritarian dilemma nonsense   majorities are a necessary component of a  republican system but they're inherently   problem and you have to police with  judiciary have supervision of our democracy   in 50 years of writing this i've made one a number  of changes but one major change in my thinking   i was in 1973 and for a barkian bob pork was a  good friend of mine bork was an oliver wendell   holmes man in the sense that he thought the  most important thing was majority's rules   and i thought the same thing however my doctoral  dissertation of princeton's title was beyond the   reach of majorities it comes from justice  jackson's great opinion in the second of   the flag salute cases when they took back the  first one said actually you can't force jehovah's   witnesses children to violate their conscience  by saluting the flag and justice jackson said   the very purpose of a bill of rights is to place  certain things beyond the reach of majorities   so whereas i used to say as conservatives  reflexively did that i was for judicial   restraint reacting against some of the more  high-flying improvisations of the warren court   i now believe that the court is not active enough   not engaged enough that deference to majoritarian  institutions be they city councils or congress   is often a dereliction of the judicial duty to  defend individual rights against majorities can   i give you my little survey of where i come from  in illinois sure i grew up in champaign urbana   lincoln country downstate according to local  lore it was in the champaign county courthouse   great midwestern scene there's a square in urbana  illinois in a great red sandstone courthouse   lincoln a prosperous traveling railroad  lawyer was in that courthouse when he   learned that illinois senator stephen douglas  had successfully passed the kansas nebraska act   douglas said the question rending the country  is what do we do about the question of expanding   slavery into the territories his solution was  popular sovereignty have a vote vote slavery   up vote slavery down it's a matter of moral  indifference because the great moral principle   is majority rule lincoln's recoil from that  began his ascent to greatness lincoln said nope   america is not about a process majority rule it's  about a condition of liberty conceived in liberty   and still that's what we are about so i have come  round to a large role for the judiciary and one of   the things that surprised me as i was putting  the book together is how often i write about   the duty of the court to step in and uh  supervise the excesses of our democracy   so this is this is one of the one  of the interesting tensions so   you write a lot about the law and yet at the  same time we make the point one of your essays   when you're talking about baseball that the most  important laws are always the unwritten ones   right the un the unwritten rules and it seems  to me that both in government and in society   those rules and laws are all disappearing  is that is that wrong and if it's not wrong   what's to be done about it i mean it does seem  to me that we are entering a place where you   know rick santorum god love him of all people  uh used to have a whole rap about this about how   you know a democracy that is not virtuous  cannot remain in democracy for long because   you can't legislate everything you can't write  down every single law that you need you need   people to intuit the the things which are  unwritten and you which can't be codified   what's happening with this what's  happening is when the big unwritten rules lapse and are ignored what you get  is a profusion of small written rules   the attempt but to micromanage the citizenry  to substitute for spontaneous habitual virtue   virtue is a habit aristotle was right and when  you lose the habit you have to be governed by   uh rules which annoy people and  are no substitute because they are   you can't substitute for habits you  get you get a kind of simmering anarchy   of willfulness on the part of people who  resent the fact that there are all these rules   what do you do about it i don't know i  mean because it's arguable that once the   habits are gone they're gone and the basis of  re-inculcating them just isn't there anymore   what happens though right it just it  happens in these black swan events like the   the great awakenings right i mean you know society  devolves and then all of a sudden uh an event   happens something happens which shakes things the  problem is that you know like monty python nobody   plans for an inquisition nobody plans for a great  awakening you can't you can't make it happen by   wishing it so irving crystal and roger starr and  some others used to be fascinated by what happened   in england when distilling came along the science  of distilling and jinn became plentiful and cheap   and it took a horrible toll on families on the  social fabric of the burgeoning cities of the   industrial revolution they tried to pass some laws  they said hours laws on how long the pubs could be   open and all that but that's not what took care of  jen john wesley took it again he gave about 20 000   talks over his lifetime and he create converted  the women and the women disciplined the men   and things got a lot better it wasn't laws it  was the equivalent of a great awakening no one   planned john wesley he's just one of  those forces of nature that happened   so we needed john wesley before everything falls  apart it's the problem we needed john wesley   several john wesley's we had one in martin  luther king uh we need some more for what we   now rather grandly and foolishly call our  racial reckoning that we're going through   here's why for all the talk about how seriously  we're taking our racial problem we've gone   through the last year and a half two years of  obsessing about this with people scrupulously   avoiding the elephant in the room we know  what it is it's family disintegration we know   abundant social science proves that family  structure is a predictive factor of great   power and we know that when 69 of african  american children are born unmarried mothers   we know that's a problem it's not just an  african-american problem it's particularly   severe for that community but a majority of  american mothers all mothers all races colored   a majority of american mothers under 30 are  not living with the fathers of their children   forty percent of all american first births are to  unmarried women we know what the cost of that is   when pat moynihan in 1965 he was a young social  scientist in lyndon johnson labor department when   he first raised this issue with his his famous  moynihan report he said the lesson of history is   clear from the wild irish slums of the east coast  in the 19th century to south los angeles today   when you have a large cohort of adolescent  males without male parents you have chaos   the high of a parent of four children i know  that civilizing adolescent males is what   life is about civilization depends on  that because they are unruly and dangerous   and this is the subject no one wants to talk  about it's sex it's race and we've had this   outpouring this niagara of words for  the last two years avoiding the subject i want to talk a little bit about  writing in the writing life if i can   can dress pass on your tolerance for that um  so i you know i was as i was reading through   this book and thinking about how you've been  able to do this at such a high level from   from the start to today with honestly no drop  off in quality which is not something you see   people who pay attention to writing if you  follow a newspaper columnist by year 20 they are   they are not the writer they were at year one most  of the time almost all the time uh and the secret   i've always thought to be a good columnist is  being a good reporter which is what your columns   mostly are i think people don't quite get that not  only do you go out about you actually go places   and you know interview people and talk to people  uh but you read books and you know i think people   who aren't writers sometimes don't understand  that reading books and then writing about them as   a form of reporting yeah i if i don't if i don't  i write 100 columns a year if i don't write 15 of   them on books i'm not doing my job henry kissinger  famously said when you come to washington you   start running down your intellectual capital  because you don't have time to replenish it   well in my business you better replenish it  that is the truth thing in the world i read   three four five hours a day i get up every morning  at 5 20. at 5 21 i'm listening to an audible book   as i shave shower groom exercise commute to  work two and a half to three hours a day in   otherwise wasted time spent spent ingesting stuff   people say what's your what's your profession  are you a writer yeah i'm actually a reader   the writing is the distillation of the  reading now it helps to like to write   and i love to write that putting sentences  together is almost a tactile pleasure   a lot of writers hate to write they t.s eliot  once said that henry james wrote as though it   was a painful duty uh i just enjoy it the great  sportswriter red smith said nothing to writing   you just open a vein and bleed nonsense writing's  fun i'm paid to do something i would pay to do   that's sort of indicates that one of the my  basic propositions of life is that the price   system works because it's rational it's irrational  in my case it shouldn't be paid having written   is what we all like is what all writers  enjoy having written the actual process   of writing varies from from practitioner  to practitioner uh so i get one of the i   one of the big questions is is reading because  this is i again i think people who aren't   writers don't quite understand that reading is  two-thirds of what we do at you know at the least   uh how many books are you reading and what how  do you divide that up between books that you're   reading reading the internet which is hard to  do uh and keeping up with what i think of as   real journalism which is to say uh you know  not just the day-to-day goings-on but then   reading magazines reading long-form journals and  that's what how do you get that mix right because   it's very very hard to do even one of those  three disciplines well as a reader well uh i   read the aggregator's rook clear politics rooker  policy brooklyn defense real clear world that   aggregate this tremendous amount of really good  writing going on in this country often by young   writers and you collect you connect with them  there i read wall street journal washington   post new york times financial times economist et  cetera et cetera all that stuff but essential is   the uh books we come back to that books are still  in my judgment the primary carriers of ideas   ideas have consequences famous title of uh  weaver's book that was a kinetic canonical   text of the early conservative revival in  the united states after the second world war   i would just change that to say only ideas  have large and lasting consequences so read   books i'm right now i just uh i'm reading a book  by greg easter book on called what is it called   the blue age it's about the role of the united  states navy in producing tranquil oceans so that   globalization could lift 4 billion people  from subsistence poverty in the last 40 years   uh i'm reading that because next week i'm having   a breakfast with a congresswoman who knows more  about the navy than anyone else and i want to be   able to talk to her and then i'll write a column  so the column will come out of reading a book and   talking with this intelligent woman and reading  a file of clips on the navy all for 750 words   so how many with your process how many of  these balls do you have in the air at one time   right so you you've already played out  this column your writing how many other   you know semi serious ideas semi concrete ideas  columns are you working on at a given moment uh   counting the reading that i clip and  put in the files for those columns   five to ten i know well i now know there's  never been a day honestly that i didn't   have five things i wanted to write about  never when i first got into this business i   asked of phil buckley a question that i now know  to be the most frequently asked question of the   columnist which is how do you come up with things  to write about bill said the world irritates me   three times a week well the world irritates me or  interests me or peaks my curiosity or amuses me   constantly you know it was said of napoleon that  he could not look at a landscape without seeing   a battlefield a columnist should be incapable of  looking at the world without seeing column topics   they're everywhere they bombard you they grab you  by the lapels and shake you as they write about me so aside from the aside from the big think  substance of this uh you seem to have a   a gigantic magazine a gigantic art  uh arms depot where you have stocked   interesting facts or phrases or bun motts uh i  i've jotted just like three of them down here   which i was particularly tickled by uh one being  that in january 1942 in the philippines the us   army performed its final mounted cavalry charge  and then 12 months later underground at the   university of chicago scientists took the first  experimental step towards the creation of nuclear   weapons that's astonishingly interesting uh two  american socialists equals three factions which   made me laugh out loud uh and then pics niffy and  come stockery are are you putting these things   down on index cards and just keeping a file of  thousands of them that you can just reach into   five times a column i can't understand  how one brain can keep all this straight   one brain can't but one drawer can uh i when i  come across in reading history which is a constant   a really interesting fact i  said that really interests me   i say to myself that'll interest a lot of  other people too and i will find an occasion   to make that fact germane i just a few moments ago  i was writing a column that will go out next week   and i said what biden is doing is  he's ignoring and this came back to me   jefferson's warning not to undertake  great endeavors on slender majorities   wonderful phrase slender majorities so that'll be  in the column because i heard it a long time ago   i don't know how look i i i don't know how  the brain works it's the most mysterious   thing in the universe but i mean why is this  phenomenally exciting thing why does it store the   information that william t williger played for  the cubs in 1952. what a waste of synapses but   there it is but it also stores stuff  from jefferson which is kind of fun   you have i want to make two observations uh about  american happiness and then ask you to sort of   extrapolate on them for me one of the themes of  american happiness is that what we think of as the   past and the present are much more cheek by jowl  than the popular imagination would have them and   another of which is that you have always always  really had a fondness for writing obituaries   which is kind of a lost art in journalism i  think we don't we don't have nearly enough   obituaries the ones we do aren't very good yours  are sterling can you talk a little bit about   just that nearness of past and present and  why it's important to be able to look back   yes at this point when quotes  faulkner the past isn't even passed   more to the point we i will quote you orwell from  1984 to explain why we're fighting about the past   not just monuments but the 1619 project and all  the rest orwell says in 1984 he who controls the   past controls the future and he who controls the  present controls the past that's what the new york   times is trying to do by reframing as they put it  american history to say no no we weren't founded   on liberty in 1776 we were founded on sin and  slavery in 1619 when the first slaves arrived that's why orwell's formulation goes right  directly to what you just said they're mixed up   the past the present and the future you can't pull  them apart you shouldn't want to pull them apart   if history is philosophy teaching by example we've  got a lot to learn from what we've been through   and it also helps to immunize us against the sense  that radical things are happening all the time   everything 9 11 happens and people say everything  has changed no no certain constants same nations   human nature laws const nothing changes everything  so it gives you it gives you a little perspective   the nice thing is if there are two nice things  i'll find another one but the nice thing so far   about turning 80 is you you acquire at least  i acquired a kind of mellowness in the sense   that i said what was it that had me so  excited during the carter administration   i was always excited i can't remember any of  the things that i thought were earth shaking i   know i think i now realize the earth doesn't  shake that often you uh you mentioned bill   buckley uh a number of times in in the book uh  who are some of the liberal writers who you've   really profited from and found valuable over  the years well murray kempton to begin with   murray was a columnist in new york uh i  say in the introduction of my book that   i came east to go to college at trinity college  in hartford four months after my 17th birthday   and did what a boy from central illinois  would do i went down to new york   to see gotham and i got off the new york new haven  and hartford railroad as it then was went into   the magnificent main terminal of grand central  plunked down a nickel for a tabloid new york post   opened it up and encountered mary kempton and  i said my lord what fun this is fun to read   fun to write um that nickel may be why i'm  a columnist today well spent i must say uh well that i mean it it murray to begin with um uh ej dion is always fun uh some of the people at the at the nick lemon  when he writes in the in the new york are   very good but there are a lot of people  on both sides writing intelligent stuff   yeah yeah it's funny you are my murray kempton uh  this is this is it is literally true the reason i   i have a my middle initial in my byline is  because of you you're the first first person   i started reading who made me want to be a writer  uh so let's okay so i'll i'll stop my my precious   artiste writerly questions and we'll move on to  some some more substantive things uh you and you   have a column in which you talk about jonathan  rouch uh and it is maybe the darkest moment in   all of american happiness uh which is that you say  that uh you know perhaps now that you know rauch   has said that perhaps now we've hit rock bottom  we will go about the business of defending our   liberal institutions you i think your rejoinder  to that is uh wouldn't that be nice to think so   will's law is there's no such thing as rock  bottom so that's what i was going to ask you   i i just want to push you a little more i mean  how much of this is just the the willian you know   tendency to see the world in the conservative  fashion which is to say that imagine the things   can always get worse and probably will uh which  is the conservative persuasion more than you   know the ideological view of conservatism um  how much of it was that and how much of it   do you really think that uh we may not be  prompted to defend our liberal institutions   well i think there's a very good chance we  won't i mean liberal institutions are not   natural they don't spring up like dandelions in  a suburban lawn liberal institutions take work   and they presuppose habits and they're  supposed to encourage sustaining habits   and i don't think we're doing that now again  i come back to what's going on on campuses   800 years of evolution through thickets  of ecclesiastical and political   interference we have evolved these  great ornaments of western civilization   our great research universities i've had the  wonderful blessing to get degrees from two of   the best oxford and princeton and it strikes  me that we can kick it all away in one or two   generations of people who just don't believe  in them who think that it's too much work to do the things that sustain the essence of  democracy which is a culture of persuasion   and that's certain culture on campus these days  but again we're we're we're inching towards some   bipartisan consensus on this right i don't know  if you've paid attention to gallup has a running   series of polls on first amendment ideas you know  and free speech and criminality and uh we have   seen some convergence again among both democrats  and republicans on the idea that maybe free speech   isn't so great we need to have restrictions  uh there you have an essay about castro your   your castro obituary towards the end where you  you talked a little bit about tyranny tourism   and we have that happening now on the right with  conservatives flocking to hungary to fete victor   orban and talk about how wonderful it all is  it seems like it's like student radicalism all   all over again but from the other side does  this end well to figure out how to end it   it doesn't just end of itself you have to  realize the momentum behind this for 70 years   almost all the jurisprudential writing and law  journals about the first amendment have been   arguments about justifying how you balance first  amendment rights against other competing and   so we're told equally important values  congeniality communitarian spirit comedy etc   well once you reduce the core freedom  of a free society and freedom of speech   to just another value to be balanced against  others you're halfway toward losing it   because there will always be someone saying  the first amendment's fine but we ne really   want people to be happy and we want them to feel  safe and we don't want discord etcetera etcetera   uh what you do then is you have to you have to  argue for institutions we used to not have to   argue for because we assume we can't can't taken  the taken for granted portion of life is shrinking   what you do is you argue for it you make the case  where they came from why the founders thought it   was important and then you pay attention to the  judiciary because the judiciary is all that stands   between us and a congress that will not limit  its own powers a congress that at the same time   is so eager to give powers to the presidency to  the executive there's always a lot of careless   talks and the president has usurped congress's  powers if only it had to congress hands those   powers to the executive on a silver salver because  they get rid of responsibility that way in steps   the court i hope and the court says no we have a  non-delegation doctrine you're not allowed to do   that you're not allowed to delegate essentially  legislative powers to non-legislative bodies again my in 50 years the big change in  my opinion is about the role of courts   which i i want to be much more active  and much less deferential than their   conservatives used to urge them to be regarding  democratic and majoritarian institutions   so this is we're going to go to questions  from the audience in a minute here uh two   two things before we get there the first  is you wrote a whole book about term limits   yeah uh many moons ago and i i don't think i  saw anything in uh american happiness about them   in term limits the whole it seems like an idea  whose moment has passed this was a very large   discussion throughout the 1990s and i feel as  though nobody's talked about it since then do   you still think that's a valuable idea or i think  it's a valuable idea i'd still vote for them   six house terms two senate terms 12 years quite  enough the reason we don't talk about it anymore   is in 1994 5-4 decision from the supreme court  justice kennedy of course being the swing vote the   supreme court held that term limits are adding a  qualification to the office of uh the legislatures   and therefore it has to be done and frankly i  think the court was right about this and therefore   you need a constitutional amendment to happen  therefore it's not going to happen because the   political class in congress is never going to  send to the state legislatures for ratification   an amendment limiting their careers not going  to happen that's that just killed it yeah   all right so let's let's wrap this up before  we go in uh i mean i i don't want to seem   like i'm i'm simply puffing up what wonderful  what a wonderful book american happiness is   it does have one significant defect which  is that there is not nearly enough baseball   in it uh and in fact you you devote almost  as many essays to football as to baseball   which again if i could just gently suggest to  you is is a problem so can i just can i just ask   three quick questions because we've seen a lot of  change in baseball over the last couple of years   uh the the extra inning manfred mann on second  which is seems to me an abomination particularly   as it has been scored as an error to the team  in general uh i would like to ask about that   the idea of legislating against the shift which  seems to be contra the idea of small government   uh and then the universal dh yeah and so if  i could just put those three in front of you   you could please answer them in turn and then  we'll go to go to the audience my basic stance   toward life often is that of the duke of cambridge  who is in charge of the army that had the disaster   in the korean war crimean war he said all  change at any time for any reasons to plural   the problem with that is the basic principle  of ethical thinking is if you will and end   you have to will the means to that end the  end that i will is more action in baseball   it's been overwhelmed by velocity these  very large pitchers throwing 98 and up   uh therefore people say look how we have to score  get three hits off the grom or one home run maybe   so it's all launch angle hit the ball out of the  ballpark they have shifts hit it over the shift   here's the problem in the most watched  game of 2020 game six of the world series   final game the ball was put in play on  average every 6.2 minutes in the last   25 minutes of that game the ball was put  in play twice now something has to be done   i hope we don't have to ban the shift but we might   uh you know sports have to change the nba  changed the configuration of the court because   of wilt chamberlain it happens all the time  i hate changing baseball but i can't we can't   just sit around and wait for rod carew and tony  glenn to come back and teach people how to hit   i i have to say that i believe i  have read more than one george will   column which which expressly say that no words  in english have ever caused more mischief than   something must be done this is something therefore  we must do it i know it's a syllogism okay uh so i   want to go to some but you know i will allow one  one baseball question from the from the room uh   mr will how did the chicago cubs late season fire  sale affect your world view uh confirmed it bleak   cubs win the with metronomic regularity that  comes with the world series every 108 years   that means hang on until 2020 uh 2024. well here's an interesting question what are  the biggest challenges facing each of our two   political parties the challenge for the republican  party is to become a political party again   remember in 2020 at the convention  to remember the republican   platform no you don't because there wasn't one  they said in about two sentences essentially this   we're going to do whatever donald  trump thinks we ought to do   next that was it so they're not a political party  in the normal sense they're a party terrified of   their voters which means they don't like their  voters which means they don't respect their voters   uh that's they they have to decide whether they're  a political party or a a kind of vehicle for the   communication of resentments and not unfocused  furiousness that defines happiness in terms of   the unhappiness of the other people or are there  going to be a political party the democrats   have a problem and that is they are going where  the country did not tell them to go they want to   envelop the american people with a an extremely  expensive costly attempt to have the government   allocate wealth and opportunity to an unusual  degree which will embitter our politics with   distributional conflicts in a way that the  market allocating wealth and opportunity doesn't   so the democrats have to pull up and say oh  that's right i remember 1964 lyndon johnson wins   huge majorities by a landslide  against my man barry goldwater   he goes stark raving mad with his large  congressional majorities for two years   and the republican party which was pronounced  near dead in 1964 wins five of the next six   presidential elections that should be a warning  to today's democrats uh one of the people in the   in the chat asks what books are you reading right  now and who is your favorite author or book let   me narrow that a moment and say of the books that  you have written about in the american happiness   are there one or two that stand out to you as  being really valuable that you would say you   know look go read this it'll it'll really it'll  really pay dividends to you as a person you know   off the top of my head think of which ones i've  been reading and i'll tell you what i've i just   read a book called supreme disorder it's about  the history it's uh ilya shapiro's history of   judicial confirmations i'm gearing up for the  coming firestorm whenever justice breyer retires   i've just read the words that made us  akiyo amar of yale law school's latest   800-page tome on early constitutional  uh troubles i've just read a   amazing book called all the frequent troubles  of our days about an american who was active   in berlin and the resistance to hitler during the  third hike she was sentenced to 11 years of hard   labor and hitler himself was so aware of her that  he intervened to make sure she was guillotined again history just wow that's amazing yeah  uh here's a question do you have a favorite   us president and why uh well lincoln uh a  central illinois guy and he he did the most   important thing a conservative can do which  is reconnect us with the american founding   uh again saying we are not about majority rule  we're about the founders premises which are   three a there is a constant human nature  we're not just creatures who acquire the   impress of whatever culture we're situated  in b therefore there are natural rights   natural in the sense that they are essential  to the flourishing of creatures with our nature   third first come rights then come to government we  have a need a government to secure the language of   the declaration to secure our pre-existing rights  so first link and then washington's not even close   the third most important american was never  president and that's john marshall in my judgment   the great chief justice i i would put franklin  roosevelt who led the american led america through   a dispiriting uh depression and terrifying war   and i think fourth sort of at the front rank  of the second rank would be ronald reagan   who uh presided over ending a very dangerous  cold war without a shot being fired so here's a question about we we talked  a little bit about family disintegration   uh which and i i i don't know did  you do a column about the uh uh   uh coming apart the charles murray  book coming apart with fishtown yeah so the this this person asks what realistic  strategies could be identified to solve or   even more you know uh humbly and just improve the  family disintegration problem that's tough do you   remember how dan quayle was ridiculed by saying  you know murphy brown this television show in the   80s about a single woman candice bergen played an  unmarried mother he said there's a cost to this   it's not romantic in most instances it's hard and  it's there's a terrible cost on mother and child we have to tell people again  the tremendous predictive   force of family structure uh that raising  children is hard enough with two people   and uh how you bring this back  again we sort of needed john wesley i sort of wish barack obama had every weekend gone  to an african-american marriage and said this is i   mean because he was a wonderful is a wonderful  father beautiful family responsible man uh i don't know how you get there from  here again this is another one of the   as we were talking a moment  ago once the habits are gone   they're no longer habits and virtues are habits  yeah you know i've always i wrote a book about   demographics and i talked about this a little bit  in it and i i've always thought that part of it is   removing the moral component and talking about  it much more along the line of outcomes right   because again you you just see this i look i grew  up i was raised by a single mother i you know i i   turned out god knows look at me i'm a writer who  idolizes george well but uh i think but but uh   you know this is this is not meant to say you know  this is not meant to to denigrate anybody this is   not meant to paint anybody's second class but is  looking at just when you look at the outcomes of   it you look at things like uh average earning  potential incarceration rates drug use race   et cetera et cetera uh that you do get just get  better outcomes when when the parents are married   so maybe that's you know an answer to the the  question in the comments maybe that is one of   the ways that we can we can talk about it  uh here's a question what is your opinion   this is interesting what is your opinion on  the current state of anti-trust enforcement   ah that's an acute question because the great  argument of the 2020s is going to be antitrust my old friend robert pork wrote the  famous book the antitrust paradox   in which he established and it got embedded in law the idea that the the overriding criterion  on in antitrust should be consumer welfare   does a combination in business  does a successful business   conduce to consumer welfare if it does leave it  allowed so ergo leave amazon alone for example   uh what the progressives want to do is sever  any trust from that so that there can be a kind   of free floating use of eddie trust to pursue a  whole rainbow of other objectives full employment   worker empowerment uh creativity  of some sort in other words to use   antitrust as a thin end of an enormous  wedge of economic planning by the government   uh amy klobuchar the senator from minnesota  has written a very good book by the way   about andy trust she's all for getting rid of the  consumer welfare standard and having a more free   floating nanny trust but it's quite a good book  this will be the great argument of this decade   i want to throw something in here too that  there is a national security component to this   especially when we're talking about technology uh  you know i i had a off-road conversation with some   people from uh one of our three big tech companies  and was talking them about china about china's   rising tech sector and one of the arguments they  made to me which is admittedly very self-serving   was uh you know instead of instead of breaking  us up you ought to be thinking about how it is   better to have uh a very powerful player in this  sector be an american company and so there's   there is i just feel to me like globalization  technology introduce all sorts of secondary and   tertiary considerations on top of the consumer  stuff when we look at antitrust that may be   new i don't know maybe maybe there's nothing  new under the sun or maybe this is different   that's one of two real considerations here's  another one we should avoid monopoly fatalism   that is the belief that these companies get so  big they're unassailable do you realize in the   1970s the u.s justice department was worried about  ibm's monopoly on office typewriters remember what   a typewriter was i do forbes magazine in 2007 and  i think november 2007 had a cover story it said   a billion customers can anyone challenge the cell  phone king apple nokia yeah four months earlier   this had come along a smartphone no good when's  the last time you went to an amp grocery store   in 1932 in 1935 people were worried  about the monopoly they had they had   15 000 amp stores about one for every  9 000 americans unassailable gone so   do not believe i don't think anything lasts  forever and certainly not facebook or all   this other stuff here's a question what are your  thoughts on term limits for the supreme court uh i'm willing to discuss that it could either be age or a number of years   certainly the number of years served has  radically increased as longevity has increased do you know i just read this in shapiro's  book two years ago there was an important   lower court decision rendered by  a judge appointed by linda johnson   so when you get that's one of the reasons we fight  so much over these appointments is they really go   i mean ronald reagan is still governing through  some of these judges so uh i'm willing to discuss   that do you think we have had judges who were  overtaken by decrepitude oliver wendell holmes was   william douglas stayed on the court in a  wheelchair after he'd been incapacitated by   a stroke so that it's discussable do you think  there would be benefit to regularizing just the   sequence of vacancies i mean with that because so  so much of what here i'll ask my own question here   it seems to me that a good deal of the problem we  have is what you said earlier in our conversation   the stakes are too high right the stakes we have  elections it is the opposite of the old joke about   faculty life right that the you know the the  fights are so terrible because the stakes are   so low the fights are so terrible because the  stakes are too high and part of one of those   components is supreme court because you never  know when somebody's going to get to do three   appointments in four years or something like that  yeah would regularizing the retirement schedule   be helpful in that sense do you think or no i  don't on balance because to do so is to say we   want to give both political persuasions in the  country regular access to this that encourages   the belief which i think is profoundly false and  pernicious uh that indeed these are political   justices i don't think that's fair to the justices  i think they're remarkably free from and i i mean   sotomayor and kagan to alito and justice thomas  i don't think they're political and i don't want   any reform that encourages people to think  that there are democratic judges and others   all right so we have time for one more question  and then i'm gonna i'm going to take moderate   moderators privilege and ask you a quick set of  lightning round right questions which i think you   will quite enjoy uh but the the last question  will be i'm sorry to say a pretty serious one   and uh somebody asks what are the chances that  20 years from now we'll still be living in a   liberal democracy is it possible that we  are headed towards an illiberal democracy   it's an excellent question because it puts into  our vocabulary a phrase that is not an oxymoron a   lot of people democracies are inherently liberal  that is respectful of rights and individuals   as rights bearing creatures i think there's a  chance it's not yet a probability but a chance   that we will be an illiberal democracy in the  sense that rights will be said to endure in groups   individuals will be defined by group membership  talking about identity politics obviously   and that our rights will be understood as  spaces of autonomy granted by the goodness   of the heart of government and therefore  we will be heavily regulated state broken and not nearly as free as we are  i think there's a 30 chance okay   so uh that's that's that's a pretty point thirty  percent i was gonna say that's an optimistic   answer but thirty percent is is pretty high uh you  wouldn't get on a plane that other thirty percent   i would not i would not all right so a very  quick lightning round i'm going to present   you with two options i just need a  one word answer of the two options   books or magazines books jefferson  or hamilton hamilton tolstoy or wawa whoa typewriter or longhand uh typewriter brian wilson or bruce  springsteen brian wilson help me rhonda mike trout or barry bonds oh trump that's uh that will have to be the last word  uh thank you george for joining us today uh   this was just lovely your book is  american happiness and discontents   the unruly torrent from 2008 to 2020 i'd also  like to thank everybody in the audience for   participating and for watching and spending time  with us if you'd like to watch more programs or   support the commonwealth club's efforts in virtual  programming please visit commonwealthclub.org   online i'm jonathan last thank  you stay safe stay healthy you

Channel: Commonwealth Club World Affairs of California

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Keywords: CommonwealthClub, CommonwealthClubofCalifornia, Sanfrancisco, Nonprofitmedia, nonprofitvideo, politics, Currentevents, CaliforniaCurrentEvents, #newyoutubevideo, #youtubechannel, #youtubechannels, GeorgeWill

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Length: 65min 23sec (3923 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 17 2021