George Will: Brace Yourself for the Authoritarian Moment

all right thanks very much thank you for coming out student for liberty I know I spoke at one of the first conferences I know matt has been speaking at these for a couple of years thank you guys all for coming out and for giving us on the stage at the very least some hope for the future okay so what we're going to be talking about is the libertarian moment over or did it never exist Matt and I in 2008 coined the term the libertarian moment to describe what we talked about as a time of increasingly hyper individualized hyper expanded choice over virtually every aspect of our lives we were talking about at the depths of the financial crisis hopefully a world in which it was more possible than ever to live on your own terms because of Technology because of change happening in politics globally a technological innovation and whatnot and since then the idea of the libertarian moment captured the public imagination in 2014 for instance the New York Times Magazine wrote a cover story has the libertarian moment finally arrived and as we all learned and it was on the heels of Rand Paul's ascendancy he had been called the most interesting man in politics by Time magazine and we of course know what happened to Rand Paul's candidacy and we were told just starting almost immediately that Rand Paul and the libertarian moment never existed the libertarian moment wasn't really happening the false rise or the false rise and fall of Rand Paul what we're going to talk about tonight is the ways in which the libertarian t' is or is not happening and whether or not we're going there and with george well we're going to be talking about whether we should be actually confronting the authoritarian moment rather than the libertarian moment and what i want to do just to set the scene and the mats going to chat for a bit is a tiny do not adjust your eyes that's a a quote that you won't be able to read but in 2013 Matt and I interviewed George well for Reason magazine and we talked about him having written again this is a few years ago America is moving in the Libertarians direction not because they have won an argument but because government and the sector's it dominates have made themselves ludicrous this has open minds to the libertarian argument and we asked mr. will dr. will whether or not he still thought that in 2013 and you answered sir yes for several reasons the first is that I've lived in Washington now for 44 years and that's a lot of folly to witness up close whatever confidence and optimism I felt toward the central government when I got here January 1st 1970 has dissipated at the hands of the government and second you said I participate although I'm in my 70s and too old to learn too much in the changing technological assumptions give you an example when I was growing up and wanted to hear the songs of the day Bill Haley and the Comets the platters and all that stuff I would turn on the radio and hope the disc jockey would play three or four of the songs I wanted to hear in the next hour when my daughter and other children want to hear songs they just go to the Internet and have 50,000 at their fingertips so before we get into trying to convince you George that the libertarian moment is still happening what is your sense of things are we past the libertarian moment and have we entered the authoritarian moment and if so what are the what's the leading indicator of that well the leading indicators at the moment the leading Republican candidate for president that is the leading candidate of the party which if there is a party with a libertarian streak it would be in let's say we name this man or will he appear he's like Voldemort yes by last August he was pledging to have a new federal police force that that was on 11 the libertarian moment a new federal police force charged with fulfilling his promise to deport 11 and a half million people in two years that's about two hundred and twenty five thousand a month he will need a new police force for that five six hours ago he was on Fox network at Fox television which would cover him eating breakfast Steve if he would allow it and he said that he wanted to open up the libel laws to make it easier to sue people for writing negative things which is by the way how I earn my living he in the debate the night before the man that we were thinking of giving the nuclear codes and Lincoln's chair said that his sister who's a brilliant lawyer we have his word for this she said she's a judge actually that she signed the same bill that Justice Alito signed now we have a man who was the leading candidate of one of our two major parties to be President United States who thinks judges sign mills in other words this candidate would flunk an eighth grade civics exam you think this is going to be the if this is your libertarian moment you can look at the other party okay the other party is has a socialist Ronnie now he's of course nothing of the sort time was socialism meant the public ownership of the means of production distribution in exchange you can understand that then they watered it down a bit particularly the post-war British socialist to say no socialism is government ownership of the commanding heights of the economy heavy industry steel the railroads commune Asians of the minds then they watered it down and this is Bernie Sanders socialism it is heavy government regulation of the private sector and ambitious redistribution of wealth which is what we've had for at least 40 years in this country today 60 67 percent of the federal budget is transfer payments that is the the sky is dark with money going back and forth between client groups served by an administrative state that exists to do very little else but regulate the private sector and distribute income where's the libertarian moment fit in here well that is Matt Europe so why don't you talk a little bit about some of the signs of good time I'm gonna defend a headline here we're getting a lot of guff now that Rand Paul kind of stalled out at 3% and never went any further and everyone everyone loves to proclaim libertarians to be full of Dookie because we don't fit normally into the political categories of Democrat Republican and so they're having a lot of a sport at our expense as Nick mentioned this piece that we wrote in 2008 we wrote this 40th anniversary of Reason magazine which like all great revolutions started in May of 1968 and we were we were coming up with various things to put in this in this issue and right as we were writing this essay the financial crisis happened and george w bush head of the republican party on september 24th i think it was 2008 stood in front of the world and said normally I'm in favor of free-market capitalism but there was no hope John McCain the Republican running for president at the time the roopa Republican who in a way influencing George will hear very strongly was someone who believes in censoring political speech that was the major achievement of his senatorial career he suspended his campaign so he could go back to Washington to support the bailouts there no hope in September of 2008 so when we wrote the headline the libertarian moment what we were telling people was like look we know it's super super dark right now just as it was in many ways as we lead the essay with in 1971 there's a lot of dark business happening in America in 1971 there's wages and price controls which we can't even fathom right now was happening in 1971 and yet if you looked in the right places you would notice that there were glimmers of Hope happening and by the end of that decade there's all kinds of very interesting very explicitly libertarian action happening not least of which was the abolition of the military draft which is a pretty amazing accomplishment so I so we said we said this it was it was to defend it as a moment this moment isn't a moment to despair we're actually in an era going forward in which good things happen so in September 2008 no one in America was talking about legalizing recreational marijuana it wasn't even on anybody's radar going forward that wasn't happening we heard earlier today - great congressman I hope they're here they're probably not Justin Amash and Thomas Massie very funny very principled people those people were not in Congress in September 2008 there was a popular revolt against large government known as the Tea Party movement and that produced people like Rand Paul produced these things criminal justice reform which is on the verge of happening and I hope still can happen wasn't done anyone's lips in 2008 so even though we're living in this dark moment in an authoritarian and scary moment as George will rightly points out a lot of very promising great things happen including things that were unfathomable to some of us older people going for years for decades the fact that guns were recognized now recognized as the Second Amendment is an individual right was not something that a lot of people were thinking about back then so all of these things have happening and this is something that I that is worth thinking about since you are younger than me out there and I heard questions earlier with congressman Amash and Massie of like well how do you affect change and these kinds of things a lot of these changes happened with some politics in it and some of the changes happen because people were rooting all around politics politics is not major party politics is not the only game in town to try to make these changes happen this slide here talks about something which I want to spend this into a question for you George which is that we live in this really weird moment where in the last 25 years a historical number of people 1 billion people have been lifted out of extreme poverty even the United Nations says this is because in large part to globalize reductions in tariffs and barriers to trade it's an amazing human accomplishment and yet we are living in America at a time when Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton increasingly although her heart's not necessarily in it are running as heavy protectionist how is it that America in your judgment lost the plot about what is literally the most tremendous story in modern times which is the liberation of the individual and the deep poverty is a ssin around the world by people using policies that have absolutely nothing to do with Bernie Sanders one quick time ago before actually asking the question when Barack Obama went to Sweden a couple of years ago three Swedish Social Democratic trade unions asked to meet with him in order to tell him please President Obama this is Sweden this is Bernie Sanders is Sweden please President Obama can you make sure to reduce trade barriers because that's the best way for trade unions in Northern Europe to work so why do we have Americans lost the plot of what made the prosperity that's helping us the world I don't think they have I think the put the political class has clearly lost it Donald Trump thinks the way to make America great is to retaliate against Oreos being made outside of the country did you watch it he said that last night yes and he believes it well as much as he believes anything it look it is a fact that for non college educated white males their wages have been have been stagnant not yours I'm sure but their earnings have been stagnant for 40 years you'd be irritable and you would be weary and you would be anxious about immigration and you'd be susceptible to protectionist arguments too if you felt that you were treading water and making no progress that saying I don't think the American people are that open to protectionism the last time we went through one of these was 1980 when John Conway running against Ronald Reagan decided that he would take a stake out of protectionist position he won one delegate for all his some woman from Arkansas for his his efforts in 1984 I believe it was it was an 88 Gephardt decided to be a protectionist and he got nowhere I think the American people understand this I mean Donald Trump is waging war on China which is to say he's waging war on Walmart which is the biggest importer of Chinese goods and is by the way with 1.4 million employees our largest private sector employers where a lot of Donald Trump voters or supporters presumably shop so that there's a kind of madness in the air but I don't think the American people are really swept up in it well why is it happening why is it expressing itself politically is it just that stagnant the last 15 years have been lousy for private sector job growth for everybody and the aforementioned 40 years of badness for my fellow college dropouts I think so there's nothing wrong with this country in a major way that can't be cured by the difference between 3% and 2% growth I think the political class believes that the difference between 2% and 3% is 1% it is of course 50% and that makes an enormous difference any institution in this country anyone on the board of a school a museum with Symphony Orchestra that has an endowment knows that at three or three and a half percent growth America is happy because we don't have the politics of allocating scarcity about which our institutions are not very good but at 2% growth everyone is sour elbows are thrown and government becomes a matter of carving with increasingly sharp elbows and nastiness a stagnant pie you I think George you were saying or implying if not outright saying that Donald Trump is an effect of the breakdown of the way the political class or the way the economy is working he's not the cause of it or his people say well we're mad because nothing's getting done in Washington then you say what do you want to get done and you get a blank stare right I think it's entertainment I think there's been a kind of rage machine cranked up in this country and people get addicted to rage and the kind of whatever part of the brain is is engaged for that we'll call it the Trump Imam well before before there was Trump in politics it was Bill O'Reilly in journalism and it's the kind of constant sense of indignation we're not quite clear about what but indignation becomes its own pleasure I cannot disagree greatness story and I hear that you are trashing your own partial employer aren't you with Fox News yes so here is one of the things that I want that maddening are booked a declaration of independence which grew out of the libertarian moment I said one of the things that we were looking at was that over the past 40 years or so the number of people who are willing to tell random strangers on the phone that they belong to either the Republican or the Democratic Party has been shrinking and we're not just belonging to a party started mob it's it's general affiliation like do you feel like a Democrat you feel like a Republican do you identify with one of these parties not necessarily if you're registered with them or if you vote and one of the things that is fascinating that Gallup does a couple of polls once a year and in their governance poll one of the things that they found recently is that there is a record recent record low number of people who call themselves Democrats it's that 29% it had been in the high 30s just a few decades ago Republicans are at 26% which is one point up from from their lowest point also over that same period and you can see this in the chart independence people who are either unaffiliated or say I'm independent has been growing people who are willing to talk about being a member of the GOP or the deaf nor the Democratic Party have been failing on top of that they also do a thing where they use two questions to key in on people's perspective about the role of government and they and from that they create topologies for typologies you're either a conservative or libertarian a liberal or a populist and they ask these two questions the first says some people think the government is trying to do too many things that should be left to individuals and businesses others think the government should do more to solve our country's problems which comes closer to your view so that's one question the other is some people think the government should promote traditional values in our society others think that the government should not favor any particular set of values which comes closer to your view and if you look on the the chart here for the first time lip the libertarian group which came in at 27% based on that index is the highest there's 26% who call themselves conservatives 23% call themselves liberals 15% populist and 10% for any other category that fits into that so I guess my question then to you George is where where does the Trump and in an odd and interesting way the Sanders anger element where is it coming from or how does that counter the idea that government or a strong man is going to solve all our problems very authoritarian how does that fit with some of the developments that Matt was talking about both in US politics and globally and then with attitudes that we're seeing in the American population where they're leaving the parties and they seem to be moving towards libertarianism I think the explanation is cognitive dissonance that is a fancy way of saying people hold in their minds with equal fervor and sincerity flatly incompatible ideas the American people have always talked like Jeffersonians but they have almost invariably wanted to be governor by Hamiltonians by a large omnipresent omnipotent state now Hamilton he's that rap artist on today I think 42% of Americans identify his independence first of all most of them are behavioral Democrats or behavioral Republicans it's opposed they may really think their independence but they're always going to vote one way or another the Pew Research Group recently did a survey they gave a huge sample of Americanism a list of 19 things lissa do you want spending on them increased held the same or cut most of the categories they said please increase a few they said hold the same the one thing they said to cut was foreign aid which is 1% of the federal budget so limited government with Americans is a rhetorical position its avowed but not constraining I'm afraid just wait until you mean again Donald Trump said in South Carolina at a town hall he says I am the only one of the Republican candidates it won't cut the hell out of your Social Security of course no one can even get either party to move on the chain CPI which would be a miniscule reduction of the inflation adjustment of Social Security and everyone acknowledges it would be more accurate measure of inflation but no one will go near that and Social Security of course is the small problem compared to to Medicare here we have 10,000 baby boomers every day becoming eligible for Social Security and Medicare they vote they vote increasingly for the Republican Party which means the Republican Party is least apt to make a serious attempt to reform the entitlements and Donald Trump again he's no longer unmentionable Donald Trump's social policy in a few words is we're gonna take care of everybody that's a quote that's his view and then it's gonna be great it'll be beautiful and be used yeah they said you never fix will be huge yeah Matt how do you respond to or where do you think Trump what is the interplay then I guess between that dimension we're going to take care of everybody but first we're going to remove 12 million people or 11 and a half million people from the population and does that actually play well I think that it's very interesting when you look at exit polling or entrance polling in the first primary states they asked in Iowa New Hampshire what issues you cared about and the biggest issue in Iowa I believe was the size of government no one really was campaigning on that in Iowa we're talking about that wasn't driving media cycles partly because Republicans control both houses of Congress so that conflict between Republicans and Democrats over spending is out the window Republicans just put things in omnibuses tear up the sequester we're no longer talking about spending anymore the debt ceiling remember when we had that yeah we don't have one anymore no they got rid of that in October it will have we'll talk about it again in March 2017 so that political conflict is gone but yet that thing which animated a lot of the early Tea Party movement still a large concern for voters GOP voters in Iowa and New Hampshire immigration was not so what does that tell us about Donald Trump I think and this is just a postulate here but people saw immigration for him as a kind of threshold or a signaling issue not necessarily that they want to deport illegal immigrants actually I think majority of Republicans don't generally want to yeah actually I've been together all surveys are subject to you know phone enus but Gallup has found among others that a majority of Republicans favor a path to legalization they are not citizens I think they favor path to citizenship even so so and then it's among the general population that's even higher so I think what's going here more is that it is a cultural situation Donald Trump god bless him god damn him whatever every single day several times a day he says things that you're not supposed to say that the people who have been talking about politics who've been making the written and unwritten rules about what's between the 35-yard lines and all that kind of stuff they've all just decided there's a way that we do this there's more raise that you have and you can see some candidates do have those mortgage Marco Rubio has those morays he has always declared the winner of every debate by journalists because they can recognize themselves in him he talks about policy with a certain kind of mastery he wants to bomb a lot of countries journalists love that um sadly it's true but Donald Trump breaks those rules he broke the rule when he said the Mexicans were rapists he broke the rule when he said he's gonna deport Syrian refugees who were already here he's gonna deport the four million kids but it's not only that it's also just the use of language you know repeating someone calling Ted Cruz a you know every little thing like that is a rebuke to those who have looked down on everybody who speaks in a way that the elites find to be kind of unwashed and hanky so I think it's more that so it's not necessarily that this is rising tide I mean you look about Republicans had a pretty good election in November 2014 right they they retook the Senate that's a kind of a big thing they had record gains in state houses and and and everywhere.i Democrats have no bench because of this did they do that because of trumpism this may be one Trump --is-- politician in this country the the governor of Maine right LePage Lapage whatever his name is he's kind of this crazy character like Rob Ford up in Toronto it wasn't because of trumpism so so I think it's because he broke through those thresholds and people respond to that culturally yeah he's saying stuff that's wrong and that I personally disagree with people will tell you and but he's saying it and he has the the Hutt's but to say that that is more important than the actual content of his policies i and george do you think if we go back actually to the you know party identification and recognizing that there's limits to this data is are we in a place where if Trump proceeds to the nomination of the Republican Party that the Republican parties you know they become the Whigs of their day where and they came out of the Whigs which disappeared before the civil war I mean can the can the Republican Party withstand Trump actually being their standard-bearer no well they'll still be a husk of the Republican Party but there would be I think a third party candidacy if it's still possible at that point to get on enough ballots and the sore loser laws would preclude some of these candidates from holding the banner for that party and furthermore if he is the nominee this will be the first election in a very long time when there was no one remotely conservative at the top of the ticket should he run he will run I think to the left of Hillary Clinton because he'll be after the Bernie Sanders about and he'll get a fair amount of it and he'll be running against one of the most unlike candidates the Democrats have put forward ever and therefore it's conceivable he would be elected now are elected he would run presumably for re-election in 2020 which would mean that it would be at least until 2024 that there would be a conservative choice for president how are you defining conservative in that because an issue-by-issue Trump is you know he says he's anti-abortion which is a big issue he's super anti-immigrant National Review now says that your attitude on immigration is the key issue for conservatives he talks about bombing foreign countries very identified with conservative foreign policy in the 21st century how is Trump not conservative he's an authoritarian he believes in an inordinately have today is not big enough and that particularly the concentration of power not just in Washington but Washington power in the executive branch has not gone far enough conservatism it seems to me as in the article one project that Mike Lee and others are fostering is congressional supremacy it is to tame the executive power particularly the prerogatives the royal prerogative that is crept back into our life from George the third now it's with George the third or George W all three okay and it's free markets there's no free market dimension to Donald Trump who's if we ever see his beautiful his words his beautiful tax returns we're going to see that he is a crony capitalist through and through but is that and can I just a so on the free-market issue the conservative Republicans when you look at somebody like Ted Cruz Marco Rubio I'm not sure about Ted Cruz's against the trans-pacific partnership which is more or less the inheritor of NAFTA you can you know there are questions about it and whatnot but it's clearly a free trade agreement and it seems the Republican Party is against that as long as as President Obama is going together that is part of it and yeah they're terrible I'd said there's there's problems with TPP I'm not but still it's a free trade agreement in a way that is recognizable the way these things got trust and and the crews who do his great credit became the first person in modern history to run against the ethanol industry in Iowa and carried Iowa knows better than this would have to know better it's part of the depressing response of the political class to the needs of the nominating season well if we can go back to the slides for a second you know I had quite honestly expected this conversation to go differently and I thought we were going to be talking about how libertarian it is and you know come on kids catch a rocket ride here so if you can put the and I had put together three recent issues of Reason magazine I'm sorry can you put those slides back up thank you so after talking about how great now how with libertarian everything was getting you know free ponies and all of that kind of stuff we were going to talk about threats to the libertarian moment but I think instead what we're seeing are the people who are vying for the authoritarian moment here well let me try and cheer you up Roy Rand Paul did the country and the Republican Party a favor by making foreign policy heterodoxy possible within the Republican Party and to cause a rethinking that is you can see it in in Ted Cruz Ted Cruz is not quite as bellicose as as Marco Rubio Rand Paul's campaign died the day the ISIS released the first beheading video it was over because he was going to stake out a rethinking that we much need because of Libya particularly which do you think that it it died because he did not double down on his position or explain why even if freelance journalists are being killed we should not invade people or chess that was over people you most lindsey graham's the only guy I know who really wants to invade who has had the courage of his convictions know it died because people didn't want to hear that anymore because instantly national security went above all other issues there are there are good signs underway for example your colleague Damon root who's written a wonderful book overruled I believe is the title everyone here ought to read it the the most interesting argument in American governance today is not between Republicans or Democrats it is between conservatives using the term inclusively here who believe that we need that we need as conservatives have been saying for years a deferential judiciary passive and and deferential to the works of the majoritarian branches of government oh and on the other hand those who like Clarke Neely you wrote a wonderful book of terms of engagement that he's a lawyer at the yes for justices Damon rout me others Randy who argue on the contrary that what we need is an engaged you dish are' asserting the fact that the essence of America is not majority rule it is Liberty and that it is a dereliction of judicial duty not to swat down not to presume that government has a burden of proof that when it acts it has reason to act the libertarian premise as I understand it is that before the government interferes with the liberty of the individual or the liberty of two or more individuals contracting together voluntarily it ought to have a good reason and it ought to be able to demonstrate that to a court which says you are violating not only the enumerated rights of the Constitution but those unenumerated rights affirmed in the ninth amendment and therefore we need a more robust judiciary what are the two decisions that we most enjoy in the 21st century so far from the supreme what one with one that we hated the most was kylo wherein the court behaved the way conservatives have urged the court to behave which is deferential to an elected body which in this case was the city government of New London Connecticut when it stole the property of the people in that neighborhood the other good decision the good decision we like most of citizens united wherein the court overturned for our decisions and overturned certain clear principles enunciated by that by the elected officials around the country by saying that when Americans band together in corporate form they do not for the purpose of advocacy they do not forfeit their First Amendment rights we need a more engaged judiciary this is and this is a rising intellectual force in this country with a libertarian purpose and libertarian consequences so on the one hand in foreign policy we now have its discussable that you can say Libya was a mistake second only to of Iraq and perhaps American yes certainly in recent American history domestically there is an understanding that where our first duty is not to preserve majority rule which is just another way of saying might makes right but indeed to protect the enumerated and unenumerated rights which is what America is about in that sense we have a new vocabulary a new intellectual movement and that's why if I could say parenthetically why I think it's a shame we're not going to have a hearings and a floor vote and a full debate on an Obama nomination a because that would educate the country as to what the issues are in be it would force the Republicans to decide what they think most of them have no clue on this subject so we are just about out of time what I wanted to just as a final moment Matt could you talk George talked about some of the ways to break the authoritarian tendency in American politics that's rising through the judiciary when you look at you know three three major candidates Trump Hillary Clinton Bernie Sanders in different ways all have authoritarian tendencies they're majoritarian or they're authoritarian in in the way that Trump where where do you look for a moment of optimism my I mean granted I'm in the business of arguing and of not supporting politicians but I find that it's it's very valuable especially this moment where there's no one to really think about rooting for in any tangible way is just okay great let's talk about every single one of these issues let's talk about a $15 minimum wage imposing that in Columbus Ohio in addition to Seattle Washington and how absolutely utterly bonkers that is from a let's it's a this is this election is a great chance to talk about Keela versus New London which Donald Trump totally supports great decision why not love it so it's it to have these kinds of discussions about what these people stand for Hillary Clinton has one of the worst track records on free speech in the country if not the worst great so let's talk about that on an individual base and also always recognize that political change happens in many cases outside of politics not inside of it and taking some comfort in that thank you we are we're gonna leave it there thank you very much for listening to us I want to thank Matt Welch my recent colleague and George Will of the Washington Post and maybe a Fox News on Sunday thank you thanks so much and remember also I want to I also want to thank students for liberty this is a group that is young and vibrant and you you are the change not that Obama wanted you to be but whatever you want the world to be and do it in politics do it outside of politics but for God's sakes do it thanks so much

Channel: ReasonTV

Views: 74,758

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Keywords: Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, George Will, libertarian moment, Nick Gillespie, Matt Welch, Reason Magazine, Reason TV, 2016 election, Trump Authoritarian, Students for Liberty, ISFLC, International Students for Liberty

Id: jQkxryu8UQM

Length: 37min 19sec (2239 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 16 2016