- George Will, on behalf of the Institute
for Humane Studies, welcome. - Thank you. - "The Conservative Sensibility"
is a very full work. It weighs in at 538 pages of text. In the world of political philosophy, that's not an especially rare feat, but what is rare, is when you find a book of this length and depth in which every single word counts. So just let me begin with
this note of appreciation for the discipline and concision
you bring to your craft. - Well, thank you. I'm taught to think in 750 word chunks after 47 years as a columnist. - I think that's a discipline
that makes one a good writer. - Well, concision is not an option. It's a necessity. - So in that spirit, I'd like to focus in on one sentence that appears early in the book and really kind of unpack it 'cause I think there's a lot in it. You describe the American
conservative sensibility as a perpetually unfolding response to real situations that
require statesmanship, the application of general
principles to untidy realities. So let's begin with the
phrase American conservative. What work is that modifier American doing and what is it that conservatives are attempting to conserve? - Well, conservatism in Europe became conscious of
itself with Edmund Burke and in general it is a
reaction against change, particularly the French revolution that had been comprehensive in intent, abrupt in methods and
disappointing in results. So Burke made the case for suspicion of grand political ventures and the law of unintended consequences which always attends. The law being of course that the unintended consequences of vast interventions in complex societies are often larger than and contrary to the intended consequences. When conservatism
crossed the United States and got rechristened as it were conservatism became an embrace of change. It's been said that the Bible, the story of the Bible
reduced to one sentence is God created man and woman and promptly lost control of events. American conservatives say good, we know what events controlled. That's the source of many of
the problems of the world. There is however, an intersection between the Burke conservatism and the American
conservatism and it is this. When Burke said that these vast
attempts to remake society, have comprehensive
plans for a new society, were doomed to fail, he did not use the phrase, but
could have used the phrase, they are guilty of the fatal conceit. And the fatal conceit, of course, is the phrase from Friedrich Hayek who warned against the fatal conceit of assuming that we can know
more than we actually can know, and hence that we can control more than we actually can control. So there is a considerable tangent between European conservatism and American conservatism
in that particular way. When I use the word sensibility, I mean more than an attitude
but less than an agenda because agendas have to
be shaped by prudence, by adopting to situations we did not, will and cannot control. So it requires flexibility. It requires the kind of statesmanship that I think Lincoln exemplified because Lincoln had to maneuver within a very complex American setting, full of beliefs that he
found A, unattractive, but B, durable. And therefore he had to
maneuver around them, maneuver being I think that
perhaps the central word for prudent conservatism. - So let me dive into that
word sensibility here a bit. So the sensibility being
not quite an agenda, but a posture or at least
in part an attitude. What is that attitude? One of the things you say in the book is that you see the
conservative sensibility as possessing a sort
of wholesome skepticism of power, for example. Now I look at the world today and I see a lot of
cynicism, a lot of snark. And so I think that there
one might describe this as a kind of skepticism of power, but I'm wondering if you see
those two things in parallel or if there's some important distinction between cynicism on the one hand and a wholesome skepticism
of power on the other. - Cynicism famously described as knowing the price of everything
and the value of nothing. That's not cynicism
that I'm talking about. I'm talking about realism. For example, to take a
very current example, the current president speaks and those of his utmost ardent supporters constantly speak of
transforming the United States as though the United States were the construct of tinker toys to be pulled apart and
reassembled at will. The great viscosity of society, it's wholesome, often saving
inertia has to be respected. It has to be not deplored. It has to be understood to
be a wholesome impediment to the willfulness of the
ever-changing political class with its ever changing agendas. So that's what I mean by sensibility. It's a kind of general recoil against the vocabulary of overreaching because the vocabulary of overreaching is usually the precursor to overreaching. - So let's think also about
the populous sentiments that this attitude adopts. If we have real passion
amongst the vast numbers of a society, that they want something transformational, as you just described. You described the conservative sensibility as something that sort of tamps that down, that intentionally filters
that populist passion. Does that suggest that the
conservative sensibility is an elite sensibility? - Yes, yes. - Want to defend that? - Of course. The question in any society at any time is not whether elites shall rule but which elites shall rule? And the challenge to democracy is to win consent to worthy elites. When the public says, or some large portion of the public says, we want transformation,
fundamental reordering of society, it's fair to say, A, you probably don't because you don't know what that entails, both in measures taken and
again, unintended consequences. And B, even if you do want
it, you can't have it. There is an entire
structure of our government, the constitutional architecture that Madison and others beqeathed to us, plus a properly engaged judiciary exists to give us what Madison
called in a lovely phrase, mitigated democracy. That is democracy that is slowed down, that is governed by what Greg Weiner in a great book of his with this title called "Madison's Metronome", the attempt to give change, time to breathe, time to be thoughtful, time to be reflective, time to be chastened and changed on the way to implementation. So if people want radical
fundamental change, the chances are there are
political, institutional and constitutional impediments to that, all of which are worthwhile and not to be lightly jettisoned. - So I want to unpack that phrase worthy elites for a moment. One of the authors that I
think is really important in the current context
is Martin Gurri's work where he's talking about
the democratization, the radical democratization of information that we have had over the last decade. And there are many, many wonderful things that come with that. And yet also one of the
things that he laments is that it becomes much
easier to tear down, to break down elite structures that served a valuable purpose. So a principal example that he would use would be the the rules of
the game for journalists, that it used to be that we
would go to some standard venues for what was happening in the world. And that was kind of a, a set of guard rails that allowed us to kind of know what was
going on in the world. And there were certain principles that we trusted the
journalists would follow and that there's been a
radical democratization and breaking up of that elite structure. Again, some of which is good, but but he also says that
there's a real problem here. Is that a similar point that you're making in terms of describing the
conservative sensibility as an elite sensibility? - Yes. First of all, there is an
abundance of information in the society, in which everyone now has a super computer in his pocket or her purse. So we have this Niagara of information. And we tend to think information
is a synonym for knowledge, which it's not. It can be essential to knowledge. It can be knowledge, but it is not necessarily knowledge. It can be just data, information. In fact, it seems to me that the biggest challenge
America faces at the moment is to create elites who actually
believe in their country. We have a higher education system now that is dominated, particularly
in the liberal arts, not in the stem sciences, because if they were woke,
the bridges would fall down. They actually have to know things. But we have in the liberal arts portion of our higher education, which begs the question
higher than what exactly, but in the liberal arts section, there is a feeling that what traditionally was
considered the fundamental, not the exhaustive, but the
fundamental task of education, was transmission of the best that had been
thought and said over the ages to use Matthew Arnold's phrase. Today, it's not transmission, it is indoctrination. It is to set people into an adversarial
stance against the society into which they will be graduating. A nation that cannot replenish its elites with other elites who
are fundamentally devoted to the wisdom of their
nation's founding principles and the general goodness of the country for all its flaws and disagreeable events in its past. A nation that can't
replicate such an elite is not going to be a great nation or perhaps even a nation for very long. - And one of the things that you want these worthy elites to do is to apply general principles going back to that opening sentence. So applying general principles. What are some of those principles? Give us some examples of those principles. And why general principles as opposed to known concrete ends? - Well, let's set up the
argument that exists in my book between two Princetonians, James Madison of the class of 1774 and Woodrow Wilson,
Tommy, as he was known, Thomas Woodrow Wilson at
Princeton of the class of 1879. Woodrow Wilson, the
first American president to criticize the American founding. He did not do so
peripherally, but (mumbles) and he rejected the
Madisonian architecture that flowed from the Madisonian and the founders natural rights doctrine. The founders said A,
there is a human nature. Therefore it follows that
there are natural rights, that is rights that are important to the flourishing of people, of our human natures. And that third, it being natural they precede government. in Randy Barnett's phrase, "First comes rights,
then comes government." Woodrow Wilson's attack was thorough. He said, first of all,
human nature is a fiction, that we are actually creatures
who acquire the empress or whatever culture we're in. Therefore, control of the culture becomes not just a political objective, it becomes the overriding
political objective, to control the consciousness
of the rising citizenry. When consciousness became
a political project in the 19th century, we became, whether we knew it or not, on a path to the great
struggle of the 20th century which is against totalitarianism, which aims to be total so that it can totally
shape the consciousness. So Woodrow Wilson says
human nature is a fiction, it is a cultural artifact. Hence, there are no natural rights. Hence, there's no need to
have limited government strong enough to defend our rights, but not too strong so that
it threatens our rights. Therefore, fourth point, said Wilson, the doctrine of the separation
of powers is pointless because it gives us hobbled government. And government has this
great mistakenly jurisdiction to shape our consciousness
and make us worthy creatures. And therefore we must get rid
of the separation of powers. And fifth, the consequence of that is we must have a
plebiscitarian president, that is a president who can intuit, interpret to use regular Wilson's phrase, the mood of the country, and translate it into policy
as directly as possible. None of this nonsense about filtering and
refining public opinion that the Federalist papers are full of. None of this nonsense,
as Woodrow Wilson saw it, of medicine's desire to slow things down. When the framers went to
Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 they did not go to produce what Woodrow Wilson wanted, an efficient, nimble government. The idea would have horrified them. What they wanted was a government safe, a government competent to its duties as the Articles of Confederation weren't, but again, not so strong and nimble as to slip a firm constitutional leash. To which end, the framers in Philadelphia devised a government with
three branches of government. Two branches in the legislative branch with their own electoral
rhythms and constituencies, vetoes, veto overrides, judicial
reviews, super majorities, all kinds of ways to slow things down, not to prevent action. I can think of nothing in American history that the American people have wanted intensely and protractively
that they did not get from a reasonably
responsive political system, but they often had to wait and they often had to compromise and they often had to think it through and they often had to
surmount their own impatience. Too bad. - It strikes me that if
Madison were alive today, he might be a game designer. When we think about society as a game, there are two principal threats. There are lateral threats where we're concerned
about predatory behavior from our fellow citizens against us. And we also see the vertical threat, the concern about predatory behavior from the state to the individual or majorities to minorities. And so how is it that
the constitutional design addresses both of these
threats simultaneously? - Well, it requires majorities to be assembled across regions. The electoral college helps with that. It requires majorities to be produced by legislative bargaining. There's a problem for those of us who believe
in limited government with legislative bargaining because it is inherently additive. Someone will say, if you
will support my projects, A, B and C, I'll support your projects, D, E and F. And thus government grows. That's a transaction cost of democracy and there's not much to be done about it. But the most important thing is, the question is what is America about? Is it about majority rule
or is it about liberty? Majority rule is a process. Liberty is a condition. The fundamental argument of my book is that America is about the
condition, not the process. I grew up in Champaign, Illinois, Champaign County Courthouse, the big red sandstone
thing in Urbana, Illinois is, according to local lore,
where Abraham Lincoln was, he was a very prosperous
lawyer traveling the state, when he learned that Stephen A. Douglas, the Illinois Senator, had succeeded in passing
the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Lincoln's recoil against
the Kansas-Nebraska act was what propelled him to greatness. The Kansas-Nebraska Act said we're gonna solve the vexing problem of what to do about the question of slavery in the territories, such as Kansas territory
and Nebraska territory. Stephen A. Douglas said,
"Here's the way we'll solve it. We'll vote on it. Vote it up, vote it down, popular sovereignty is what's important. The outcome's less important. It's a matter of moral indifference to me because America is about
majority's having their way. Lincoln said, "Nope, that's
not what America's about. America's about liberty and
majorities can be problems, particularly if they are
translated directly into policy on the fallacy of (speaking
in foreign language), the voice of God is heard
through the voice of the people. Lincoln knew better as did John Marshall, because to me, one of the great, arguably the greatest American
contribution to governance is judicial review, which of course is not
mentioned in the constitution. But it's why I believe that the most important American never to have been
president was John Marshall. Probably my top four would
be Lincoln, Washington, John Marshall, Franklin Roosevelt. People say, "Well, judicial review poses the counter majoritarian difficulty to which my kind of conservatism says, what's the difficulty? A constitution is inherently
counter majoritarian. It says, this is the way
you have to do things even if you don't want to. And there are certain things
that you may want to do that you can't do. First amendment says,
"Congress shall make no law." It didn't need to say it, but it could've said, Congress shall make no law even if you want it to, even if a clamorous majority
is clamoring for it. Congress shall make no law
abridging freedom of speech, the press, assembly, all the rest. Constitutions are ways of
putting bridles on ourselves and saying, no, we're going to voluntarily restrain our freedom of action because, to repeat, majority rule is not
our fundamental value. The protection of liberty is and majorities can threaten liberty. - Now I'm gonna make a confession to you. I have not read your PhD dissertation, but I'm guessing that you
haven't read mine either so I think we're even on that score. But your title of your
dissertation at Princeton was, "Beyond the Reach of Majorities: Closed Questions in an Open Society". Is this the point that you were getting at that you were just describing that there are some things
that are just closed questions in a free society? - Yes, the closed questions are the defense of natural rights. We'll argue what our natural rights are. If you don't like to argue, you picked the wrong country 'cause we must argue about
these things all the time. But the phrase beyond
the reach of majorities comes from the second of
the flag salute cases, West Virginia being the first. The first flag salute case in 1939 with war clouds lowering over Europe and a great desire for Americans
to feel national unity, the Supreme Court held that
the state of Pennsylvania had a right to compel
Jehovah's witnesses children to salute the flag, which they considered blasphemous. Just four years later Supreme Court reversed that. Now that 39 opinion was written by a Jewish
emigre from Austria, Felix Frankfurter, who had seen Jewish children treated differently and invidiously and he didn't want other
people treated differently, didn't want that. So he had a good reason for coming to, I think the wrong conclusion. In west Virginia, V. Barnett just four years later, the Supreme Court reversed
itself and Justice Jackson, who later would have the
American judicial (mumbles) at the Nuremberg War Trials, Justice Jackson said, "The very purpose of a Bill of Rights is to place certain things
beyond the reach of majorities beyond the vicissitudes of politics. They are closed questions." And that to me gives the judiciary in the United States, particularly, of course,
the Supreme Court, a permanent engagement in
the supervision of democracy and supervising the majority
rule that we are committed to with limits. And it is part of the court's
duty to define those limits. And often when the court says, well, we're going to
defer to the legislative, the popular branches of government, that is deference, but it is
also a dereliction of duty. That's always been one
of the great arguments on the conservative side. Actually many of the most
interesting arguments of our time are not between progressives
and conservatives, they're between one brand
of conservative and another. And for many years in recoiling against the
activism of the war in court, particularly in criminal justice matters, conservatives said we're
for judicial deference to the popular branches. Today, the I hope ascendant
position on the right is no, we're not, we are in
favor of judicial engagement, actively policing the borders
of permissible majority rule. - So this is a book
about ideas and this is, the Institute for Humane
Studies is all about ideas. And not just because of the fact that hanging out with really smart people and dwelling in the world of ideas is fun, which it is, but also because ideas have consequences. The ideas we hold in our heads, the ideas that shape our public discourse and policy discourse shape the world. And so I want to dive more
deeply into Wilson's ideas here. You know it's not always the case that the ideas that have
consequences are good consequences. So can you talk a little bit about how you see the consequences of Wilsonian progressivism
in our context today? How does that filter through society as we go decade by decade? - Well as I said earlier, progressivism comes out
of the 19th century, which decided that consciousness
was a political project, that therefore comprehensive government, eventually it became
totalitarian government, was necessary and that emphatic, nimble
government was necessary because of one of Woodrow
Wilson's great nonsequitors. He said the following, "Limited Madisonian
government is just fine as long as there are only
four million Americans, 80% of whom live within 20
miles of Atlantic tidewater on the fringe of an
unexplored continent but" said Wilson, and here's the non-sequitur. He said, "Now that we are
a great continental power, a nation United by steel
rails and coppered wires, complex, fast moving society, now we need a government
commensurate in size and scope with the dynamism of
the American economy." That's of course exactly wrong. The more complex society gets, the more government should step back and let the dynamism work and understand, A, that dynamism should
work because it's creative, but B, what's the alternative? The alternative is government in the grip of the fatal conceit that it can do more and know
more than it actually can. That is the way to folly and waste and inefficiency and in the end oppressive government. So for that reason, you might say, well what's the appeal of progressivism? Well first of all, progress. Yeah I'm for progress, aren't you? There comes with that the assumption, and it's no more than an assumption, that social change is
inevitably improvement. In one of his opinions, this was having to do
with capital punishment, Chief Justice Earl Warren talked about the evolving
standards of decency that mark the change of a mature society. Now indeed there are
evolving standards of decency and they often are improvements. They are not however,
necessarily improvements. And part of progressivism's appeal is that it gives people
the sense that they are, drum roll here, another 19th century phrase, that they are on the
right side of history. History with a capital H, history as a proper noun, history as a an autonomous
force with its own teleology. It knows where it's going and it's best to get it
on the right side of it or you'll either be
left behind or trampled. So the appeal of progressivism
is progress is good. I want to be on the right side of history, et cetera, et cetera. The problem is that once you sever rights from a fixed view of human nature, to which end, I would recommend President Calvin Coolidge's magnificent talk on the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, once you sever the idea
of rights from that, then rights become dispensations
from the government. They are zones of autonomy that the government grants to us, that the government agrees to respect as part of a bargain. We'll grant you these spaces of autonomy so long as you enjoying your rights, exercise them in a way that the government deems
socially beneficial. That's simply not the
definition of a free society as I understand it. - So let me push back on this point about the progressives are
putting forward a notion of human nature that we are perfectible and that human nature is
plastic in this sense. And the conservative sensibility pushes back against that notion that goes along with the point that when we talk about transformation, social transformation, that that's problematic because it's not taking into consideration the sort of permanence of human nature. And that's the argument that
you lay out in the book. So the challenge I have to that is well does that mean that
we should not expect progress? Does that mean that the project
that the founders laid out is not an optimistic project? And I would say that in fact
it is an optimistic project, that there was not a sense of which we've got it all right now, we've got everything perfect now. In fact, there were many, many things that were highly
imperfect in the founding. But it's established a sort of baseline, a kind of platform for improvement. And that if we think
about the liberal project, broadly understood as individual liberty, a focus on constitutionally
constrained government, economic freedom, if we think of that as
the liberal project, there is an optimism in liberalism. And the way you're describing
the conservative sensibility it might seem as if it's
opposed to that optimism. Is it? - No it's wary optimism. Indeed, they were optimists. They were creatures of, products of, and enthusiasts
for the enlightenment. That is the belief that
knowledge was cumulative, ever expanding and applicable
to society's problems. The framers of our constitution included an amendment provision because they said, "We
didn't get it all right and we're gonna have to adjust this." I mean, think about it, they didn't need to put
an amendment provision in. They could have said, "We got it right and that's
that, live with this." But they understood that
things were imperfect, including their own handiwork. But when I say wary optimism, there are lots of ways
things can go wrong. Bad leaders can arise. "A good statesman will not
always be at the helm", said James Madison in something of maybe an epic making understatement. So they were wary about the fact that although they had
done their level best to provide institutional guard rails, to use a phrase you used a moment ago, against people driving the
national wagon off the road, they couldn't count on it. Hence, the impeachment provision. There are all kinds of ways in which their realism came through. But remember, the great
catechism of the founders. It went something like this. It's the Madisonian catechism. What is the worst outcome of politics? Tyranny. To what form of tyranny
are democracies pray? Tyranny of the majority. Solution, Madison's solution,
don't have majorities. That is don't have stable, potentially tyrannical majorities. Have shifting complicated
coalitions of minorities that produce evanescent majorities that won't last long enough to be forever adorable and oppressive. Hence, he said in the
Madisonian revolution and democratic theory was before Madison, everyone who thought
democracy was possible, and there weren't that many, said it's only possible in
a small face to face society like Russo's Geneva or Heracles Athens, you can walk across it in a day, because a small homogenous
polity like that will not have factions and factions are the enemy of liberty. "Exactly wrong", said Madison. "A saving multiplicity of factions will produce conditions where you won't have stable
tyrannical majorities. So therefore," he says, in Federalist 10 about praising an extensive Republic, "we want to have a large arena for government to protect the different and unequal
capacities of acquiring property, because they would be different factions. And the saving multiplicity of factions will save us from tyranny. And in government", he said in Federalist 51, and if you want to have
a very short crash course in American political thinking read those two, Federalist 10 and 51. In 51 he says, "We see throughout our
system of government the process of supplying by
opposite and rival interests the defect of better motives." He did not say we don't need good motives, but we need something to supplement perhaps the absence of good motives. And that would be the separation of powers and the rivalrous relationship between the branches of government, which he thought was wholesome. The absence of which today in my judgment is most unwholesome. The fact that the Congress, the president's party in
Congress views itself, that faction as loyal
not to their institution with its dignity and its own
rights and responsibilities, but as people who do the blocking and tackling for the president, which is the Madisonian, dissolution of the Madisonian assumptions. - So let me return to
Hayek here for a moment because there's a parallel
of the rivalrousness in Hayek's thinking as well. And you've already alluded to his argument about the fatal conceit, that if if government doesn't
have this kind of humility, this epistemic humility, about what it's capable of doing, we're gonna march down
the road to serfdom. And the emphasis on spontaneous order, that there are these
self-correcting mechanisms within particularly a market society that Hayek describes as part of the ordering
principles of a complex society. So you've clearly indicated that Hayek has been
helpful to you in this. But Hayek also famously said
that he was not a conservative at the end of the
"Constitution of Liberty". He writes this essay that says
"Why I'm Not a Conservative". So help us understand, help us to square this juncture between
what Hayek said of himself but you're wanting to claim him for the conservative sensibility and that intellectual tradition. - I think what Hayek said, he just left a word out. I am not a European conservative. I think he wrote that probably, at least at the University of Chicago, where he was for a while in the Committee on Social Thought, it was published in the English language and by the University of Chicago press at about the time, by the way that Milton Friedman published
"Capitalism and Freedom" and George Stigler published "Intellectual in the Marketplace", all luminaries at the
University of Chicago. Hayek was quite right. He welcomed the world. He welcomed the uncertainties. He welcomed the constant
learning of a market society. And therefore was not a conservative as he had in his European context come to understand the term. We just needed to sit down with him and slap an adjective in
the title of that paragraph. It would have saved us
all a lot of trouble if he just simply said I'm
not a European conservative. Then he could have gotten and say, look, I'm an American conservative. They're really classic levels. Fine, no harm done. - So in your description of welcoming the world, you are clearly not cleaving to the past. You are embracing that sort
of Hayekian sensibility that there is something optimistic about the openness of our future and that this is something that the conservative
sensibility embraces. And it causes me to ask this question, is the conservative sensibility a project about description
or a project about aspiration? Because I think that if
I look out into the world and I were to do an
ethnography of conservatives, most of them would have some sort of idealized view of the past that they want to cleave to and reassert as the direction we ought to go, or at least put the brakes on away from that past. And so my question is, does this distinguish you from your peers, from your conservative peers, in a substantive way? And if so, provide the
defense as to why conservatism really does have this
intellectual grounding in welcoming the world? - It has a conservative grounding first of all, in the (mumbles), that is in the premises
about natural rights, rights essential to the flourishing of people with our kinds of
stable unchanging natures. In that sense, the conservative sensibility
is firmly rooted in the past. Now Margaret Thatcher famously said that European nations were made by history and the United States was made by ideas, which the Institute of
Humane Studies is all about. And the ideas we're all about are the ideas at the basis
of classic liberalism, that the individual is real, the individual has agency. He's not a mere reflection of society or a play thing of history. And the flourishing of the individual is the objective of government. So the conservative sensibility
is A, rooted in the past, not just indifferent from the past but rooted in it. It takes its bearings from
something that happened almost 250 years ago. And therefore the conservative sensibility is prescriptive on the basis of the past. It says, we know certain things. One of the interesting
things about the constitution is it says there'll be no
establishment of religion because we don't know what
the truth about religion is, but there's a guarantee
clause in the constitution. You're all guaranteed a
Republican form of government because they said we don't
know enough about religion, but we know firmly enough about governance to know that a Republic, meaning representation and all the rest, is to be guaranteed. So they were perfectly
capable of confidence. - So I want to turn to the conversations that are really shaping the
course of our current century and liberalism is under attack. It's being critiqued from
the left and the right. And by liberalism, in the sense, I mean the founding principles that we've just been describing, individual liberty, the rule of law, constrained democratic
institutions, economic freedom. So if that's the liberal project, it is the recipient of critique from both the left and the right. On the right, we have a sense of, let's start there with a sense of wanting to reassert a notion of the common good with an advocacy for using
the levers of government to, like industrial policy, restraints on trade, more paternalistic social policy, to achieve or to reassert that right of center
notion of the common good. Is this part of the
conservative sensibility? If it is, how do we reconcile that? Or is it something that we need to resist if we're on board with the
conservative sensibility as you described it? - Resist. People who say, well I'm a conservative except that, we need to say I'm a
common good conservative. We have to say, well what
is it about conservatism as I outline it in the
conservative sensibility doesn't accommodate the common good? The common good I'm talking about is what emerges from the spontaneous order of freely contracting individuals cooperating together in a society. That's common and they think it's good 'cause that's what
they're trying to produce by voluntary action together. You know the advocates of
common good conservatism say no, the market doesn't really do it. We know what the common good really is. That is to say we are
going to use the government to impose a common good, because we think the
spontaneous order of society doesn't get there. And what that inevitably involves is a sentimental view of government, that is government as
a disinterested arbiter with A, no interest of it its own, that government is not
a faction among others, to use Madison's favorite word, a faction, but also that government
is uniquely benign, that it is uniquely, as I say disinterested. What the common good conservatives need is a seminar on public choice theory. They need to be acquainted
with Professor Buchanan's essay against the sentimental
view of government, the romantic view of government. Understand government has its own motives, its own interests. I'll give you an example. It seems to me Elizabeth Warren has a firm grip on half a point. Elizabeth Warren says, there's something wrong with the fact that five of the 10 wealthiest
counties in the United States by per capita income are
in the Washington area. Washington has no natural resources. It doesn't make anything but laws and regulations and trouble. Why does it get so rich? Well she's right, good question. The answer is that trillions of dollars slosh through government and it attracts people the
way a picnic attracts ants. And therefore it becomes the
play thing of interest groups because the government can't
leave well enough alone. It can't leave society
to its spontaneous order. It has to come in and say, no, we're gonna correct the way society sorts these questions out, gonna impose a common good. The problem is, this is the part that Elizabeth Warren and other progressives do not understand and neither do the
common good conservatives is that government inevitably, inevitably becomes the
play thing of factions. That is, it becomes the play thing of those who can understand
the opaque pulleys and levers and processes of a
complicated modern state. Now, the people who can understand that are going to be wealthy,
confident, articulate, educated and well lawyered, and they will know how to
manipulate the government. That's why more often than not, the government redistributes wealth upward because they are, it is responding to people
who are already wealthy. - And we have then a somewhat
surprising phenomenon where the arguments for
industrial policy on the right are almost identical to the policies favoring industrial policy and top-down government control over the economy on the left. - Yes, the people advocating an industrial policy from the right, common good conservatives say, well, globalization's been
hard on manufacturing. Never mind the fact that manufacturing as a percentage of our
gross national product has been remarkably
stable for some while now. It is the fact that it
now takes one man hour to make a ton of steel rather than 10 man hours because of productivity improvement, nevermind all that. The common good conservatives will say, we need industrial policy
because we just know, and here's the first departure
from epistemic humility, we just know A, how many people ought
to be in manufacturing, what percentage of our
economy it ought to be in. This of course is inevitably a bias in favor of the status quo, a bias in favor of
existing economic entities. It's there, it should exist forever. It's there, protect them against imports and competition from abroad. It's there, it should always be there. I would like to send my common
good conservative friends to where my family came from, the Monongahela Valley of Pennsylvania, ground zero for the steel industry that was established for awhile and then got obliterated by
more efficient competition. Common good conservatives say, well, we're gonna conserve
the Monongahela Valley. We're gonna rebuild it. We're gonna bring the jobs back. No, you're not. What these people need
to be acquainted with is "Grapes of Wrath", the great depression era
novel by John Steinbeck. When Oklahoma was hit by the double whammy of the dust bowl and the depression, the Joad family of his novel
did not just sit there. They got on their jalopy and
went to Southern California and arriving about at time, as it turned out, to work in the aerospace
industry in Southern California. That's what happens in a free society as you move around, geographical mobility. You don't try and freeze the present because that way is stagnation, that way is the slow leeching away of American dynamism. And with it, the possibilities for the constant churning
and upward mobility that makes a free society fun. - So before turning over to Q&A, I want to ask also a question
that comes from the left in terms of the left's critique
of the liberal project, the founding era principles, is that we look around the world and we see unequal still, unequal treatment under the law, mass incarceration, over-policing of communities of color, disproportionate costs of the drug war born by those same communities. And I believe that the classical liberal
intellectual community and conservatives as you described them need to take these kinds
of challenges seriously. And the charges that the liberal project from the progressive standpoint is those founding principles
of the declaration and the Bill of Rights are simply not up to the task of addressing these kinds of concerns. What is the conservative
sensibility response to this or the classical liberal
response to this charge? - Which is what better way, what better grounding to take on all the defects of
our society that you mentioned that I accept as defects, then a political philosophy grounded in the understanding of the individual as a
rights bearing creature, often threatened by government. First come rights, then comes government. Now we provide the vocabulary, we classic liberals, we provide the vocabulary to attack qualified immunity for police who get away with sometimes murder. And often lesser crimes,
but serious crimes. What better to say that a society respectful of
rights bearing individuals would not have the kind of
drug war that we have had, that would be less punitive, less eager to punish, less eager to incarcerate, would be less given to
the mad proliferation of criminal statutes. Wonderful book written a few years ago by Harvey Silverglate,
I believe his name is, called "Three Felonies a Day". Took the title from the fact that the average American given this impenetrable
web of criminal statues probably commits about
three felonies a day without even knowing it. Who is possibly better equipped by philosophy and by the
vocabulary of freedom and rights to address these than conservatives? And indeed, who is making the run in and the attempt to get
rid of qualified immunity? Conservatives, classic
liberal conservatives of the Cato Institute type. So I think A, we know how to do this, and B, we have nothing
in our current posture to be ashamed of. - Thank you for that. And let's turn it over
to Brad Jackson, again, who's gonna be moderating our Q&A. - Thank you very much Emily and thank you both for a really
fascinating conversation. We've had a number of questions
come in from the audience. Thank you to the audience for
so many wonderful questions. I only wish we had time to be able to get through all of them. I'll be trying to group some
of the common themes together and hope to address as
many of them as possible. I'm going to begin with
a question for Dr. Well with regard to his own, or your own, ideological movement over time. So one questioner points out that in your classic book
"Statecraft as Soulcraft", there seems to be a very
Burkian, Hamiltonian sort of feel to the arguments in that book, whereas in "The Conservative Sensibility", the heroes seem be Madison and Hayek. And does this represent
a shift in your thinking? And if so, could you
describe how that occurred? And if not, could you talk a little bit about the ways in which these things are actually coherent with one another? - Yeah, I'm so glad that someone's read "Statecraft as Soulcraft." I refer to it in my new
book as read by dozens. They came out of the Godkin lectures I gave at Harvard in 1981. Yes, there's been some change. Since then, I have lived
in Washington for 40 years and I have a more jaundiced, a more Buchananite, if you will, choice theory view of the
dynamics of government. So yes, I have less confidence
in the Hamiltonian project. I also understand better than I did then that the American people suffer
from cognitive dissonance as they hold in their mind with equal fervor and sincerity flatly incompatible ideas. They are ideological Jeffersonians and operational Hamiltonians, that is the problem. That said, there's less change than some people say between "The Conservative Sensibility and "The Statecraft as
Soulcraft" in this particular. The subtitle of "Statecraft as Soulcraft" is "What Government Does". Not what government should do, what government can't help but doing. Any government will favor certain values and will by the structure of its laws and its education system and its economic arrangements will produce certain kinds of soulcraft. So we have a choice here. What I did not realize, "A Conservative
Sensibility" doesn't abandon that soulcraft dimension of conservatism. It makes a correction from "Statecraft as Soulcraft" in that I did not sufficiently understand that capitalism is soulcraft. That is capitalism doesn't
just make us better off, which it manifestly does, it makes us better. It does so by requiring politeness, by requiring cooperation, by requiring spontaneous order, by enforcing certain virtues, thrift, industriousness,
deferral of gratification. So capitalism, and I do this at length in my
chapter on political economy and the conservative sensibility, capitalism is soulcraft. Therefore, the American founding was better than I suggested
in "Statecraft as Soulcraft" because the American founding
presupposed a market society. - Thank you. So we've also had a number
of folks in the queue asking about your understanding of how conservatism has
changed over American history. Folks point out that
the conservatism of Taft is remarkably different from
the conservatism of Reagan and they wonder how a movement
that seeks to conserve a set of fundamental truths could itself change so much over time. And whether you could
talk about the dynamism of the conservative movements and what that means for
it as a conservatism and as a sort of add on to this question, could you say a little bit about the current Republican party and Trumpism as a sort of conservatism, whether it is a sort of conservatism and how it fits into this picture? - The current Republican party, to the extent that it's
a political party at all, it's hard to have a political party where the elected officials of which are terrified of their voters, which is the way it is now. The current political party is populist and whatever populism
is, conservatism isn't. Populism is again Wilsonian in that it wants the direct immediate translation into policy of strongly held passions on the part of the country. Conservatives believe passion is a problem and government exists
not to excite passions, but to damp them down and deflect them and slow down their course. So I've answered the last
part of your thought first. I in 1960 was an undergraduate in college and I supported Jack Kennedy and was just sort of
normal walking around guy. In 1962, I went to Oxford for two years, saw the Berlin wall, which was new then, and saw what I thought was socialism suffocating the energies
of a great nation, the United Kingdom, and came back and voted for Goldwater. Now, I cast my first presidential vote in 1964 for Barry Goldwater who had that Southwest wide open spaces leave me alone kind of
libertarian conservatism. So in that sense, I haven't
changed all that much. I'd vote for Barry again in a heartbeat. Conservatism has faced some temptations. The temptations posed by globalization and the fact that creative
destruction is often creative, but often destruction and there's frictions and pain involved. And there is a desire on the
part of some conservatives to stop it, to flinch from change saying, well it's just, it's too tiresome, it's wearying. It was all right once, but enough. We want stasis, it's more restful. Well conservatism is many things. It should not be a restful society. It should be a dynamic
society full of people going up and down the status ladder. So in that sense, I
think conservatism today still is largely what Barry
and I had in mind in 1964 that Reagan more or
less had in mind in 1980 and departures from it toward
collectivism and statism are departures from conservatism. - Thank you very much. So this is related to another question that I thought was really
interesting from the audience which is how does a conservative decide what not to conserve in a dynamic society? Some things have to be left behind through the process of
creative destruction and how do we most responsibly
decide what those things are? How do we distinguish between
the baby and the bath water? - Well, the baby, for
example, is family structure. We know because abundant
social science tells us that family structure is the great predictor of life changes. I speak now as someone whose best friend was Senator
Daniel Patrick Moynihan who as a 38 year old academic in Lyndon Johnson's labor department produced the Moynihan Report, which first raised the problem
of family disintegration, particularly among African-Americans. We know that we want to be a society that enforces equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome and condition, but, and this is the heart
of my book in many ways, conservatives have had to come to terms with the fact that equality of opportunity is a more complicated and
elusive goal than we realize. It's not a slogan. It's a difficult thing to achieve. Particularly when family structure, family is always the primary
transmitter of social capital, the habits, mores, customs,
dispositions necessary for flourishing in an open society. So conservatives rightly worry about policies to strengthen families. Hence, conservatives today are arguing about paid family leave, about child tax credits. And at this point, it's
an empirical argument. Conservatives don't say, no, we're against those because it's government doing something. Conservatives say, well, prove to me, show
me, give me some data. Let's be empiricists
about this, will it work? We know that the transition between policy to actuality is often a messy and
disappointing thing in government, but try it. If you want social mobility, you want the Joad's to get up and move, if you want the people
in the Monongahela Valley of Pennsylvania to move, help 'em move, give 'em new training if government knows the
future that it's training for, that's always a problem with government. The government will say, yeah, we're gonna train you
for this industry over here. Wait a minute, that's not, you gotta look over the horizon and government is notoriously bad at looking over the horizon. - Let me jump in here if I may Brad. The shift in the gay rights
movement to marriage equality was a case I think where there was a kind of conservatization of the movement in this regard. And some people would say that them's fighting
words for me to say that, but in the spirit that
you've just described, the things that we want to conserve would be things like family structure. And this is a community that
says we want what you have, which is that same, essentially that same family structure. And that shifted the balance I think in terms of public opinion, a very fast move in favor of gay rights at least on this front. And it was pivotal because then it became not just some other group that was way far away from your own direct experience. It was your neighbor, or it was your cousin or your sister whose family was trying to just have the same
rights as your family has. Is this an example of that kind of sorting that can upset usual
political points of division? - Yes, yes, indeed. I don't want to embarrass
my friend, Jonathan Rauch at the Brookings Institution
by calling him conservative or by saying that what he really advocated as probably the most forceful
and sophisticated advocate of same sex marriage, bourgeois values, but he is a conservative and he was promoting bourgeois values and welcome to the club. That's exactly right. The marriage equality movement triumphed when and because of it's transition to a vocabulary
if you will of conservatism. - Some folks in the audience who have read and enjoyed your book noticed that in the second chapter of it, you talk a lot about progressivism, Wilson, Boyle and these figures in order to talk about
some of the difficulties that have faced American constitutionalism in the 20th and 21st centuries, but they wonder if you
would distinguish or not between progressivism and what some have
called modern liberalism. And thinking of the sort of liberalism of Franklin Delanor Roosevelt or the way in which
liberalism has been used in the American context
throughout the 20th century. Do you make a distinction
between progressivism and so-called modern liberalism or do you think that modern liberalism is an abuse of the term? - Not much. Franklin Roosevelt came to Washington to be the assistant
secretary for Woodrow Wilson. He was a progressive. Now, he was also a great fidgeter. You had, as Amity Shlaes
says in one of the books, "the restlessness of the invalid". He wanted to fiddle with things, which is fine, you can understand the impulse in 1933. That said, the progressive agenda is an agenda to multiply
dependent factions, those factions dependent on government and Roosevelt set out to make
a organized labor organized and therefore a democratic faction. The elderly, the social
security, became a faction. The birth of modern agricultural policy made farmers a
government-dependent faction. This was done deliberately. It was a strategy for permanent majority. Permanent majorities have
a way in the United States of being impermanent, but it wasn't for want of trying on the part of Franklin Roosevelt. So to the extent that
progressivism understands equality as equal dependence on
government of various factions, I would say Franklin Roosevelt was well in the progressive tradition. - So when you were talking about the need for elites in society, some folks in the questions were wondering if you could
expound a little bit about that, particularly within the context of the question of the franchise. So some folks argue that
if you want better elites, you need better voters. And so we should restrict
the franchise somehow to create an epistocracy,
sometimes the term is used. And indeed, if you look at the history of the conservative movement in the US, it seems as though some factions were against women's suffrage and extending the franchise in other ways. So could you say something
about the relationship as you see it between democracy and the conservative sensibility? - Well, we always need better voters. There's no question. That doesn't mean we need fewer voters. We are committed to adult suffrage. That used to be 21, it's now 18. There's some Democrats who
want impulsive adolescents at age 16 to vote, but we'll leave that aside. To speak for elites, I would recommend a book
called "The Wise Men" by gosh I'm drawing a blank right now but it was Evan Thomas and it'll come to me in a minute, it's about the elites who took America through
the second world war. I'm talking about Chip
Bohlen, George Kennan, George Marshall, John
McCloy, people like this. They had something in common and this will grate on
some people, I'm afraid. They were an awful lot of
them from Groton and Yale. Sorry, they just were. And they came from elite institutions that saw it as part of their mission to produce people who would
hold elite positions in society, rather than just going to
Brown Brothers Harriman, Harriman was one of them, to coin money. So we need not just elites, but we need elite institutions that see as part of their rite the production of people who
think of themselves as elite. Again, Kennan, Bolan, Harriman,
McCloy, people like this, who turns out every once in a while, it's really handy to have
elites like that around. - I'm just gonna ask
one more quick question before turning it over
to Emily to close us out. And that was a audience member who was wondering if you could recommend two or three books that you think are particularly important for Americans to read? - Hmm, oh gosh. We'll leave aside "Tocqueville" and "The Federalist
Papers" and all the rest. "The Radicalism of the
American Revolution" by Gordon Wood, "The Ideological Origins"
by Bernard Bailyn, "Crisis of the House
Divided" by Harry Jaffa, and I'm gonna give you a
one right out of left field. You're gonna say, "What is
the matter with Will now?" It's called "Last Call" by Daniel Okrent. It's the history of prohibition. A, it's history that ought to be written, page turner, exciting, and it is on every page an illustration of the law of unintended consequences, of government just
getting out of its lane, not recognizing its limits, causing all kinds of changes. I mean better speed boats because the rum runners
were running the feds, Las Vegas was, I mean just all kinds of things happened that it's a great case study in how to, again a sensibility. Again, I don't want to call Daniel, I'm not calling him a conservative, but I'm saying that a lot of what the conservative
sensibility is about can be learned by reading that one book. - Well, George Will, thank
you for today's conversation. I also want to thank our audience. More than 500 people joined
us for today's conversation. And if you haven't already read "The Conservative Sensibility", I hope that today's conversation has convinced you to pick
up a copy and to read it. It is, after all, summer
reading season upon us. In closing, I note that the
Institute for Humane Studies host conversations like this through our discourse initiative, which aims to draw scholarly attention back to the grand intellectual
tradition of liberalism. You can learn more at theihs.org. Thank you again, George and thank you to everyone
who's joined us today. Be well.
