George Will: The Conservative Sensibility

[Applause] ladies and gentlemen welcome to the National Constitution Center it is wonderful to see a full house tonight hungry for constitutional enlightenment and to prepare ourselves for the rigors ahead let us inspire mr. will who were always honored to have back here by and reciting our mission I don't know if you've seen our audience do this before but it's very inspiring here we go the National Constitution Center is the only institution in America chartered by Congress to increase awareness and understanding of the Constitution among the American people on a nonpartisan basis there there we go I wanted you to hear that because it is so Madisonian and this important substantial illuminating book the conservative sensibility takes as its hero James Madison and George Will does need no introduction at the National Constitution Center he was here just a few years ago where he presented on Freedom Day the germ of an idea that is central to this book namely that all of American constitutional history can be seen as a battle between two Princetonian --zz James Madison and Woodrow Wilson so George first it's such an honor to have you back all the time and why don't you begin by telling us why the battle between Madison and Wilson defines American constitutional history I've said before I was now say again that the most important decision taken in the 20th century was not Germany's decision to side with Austria in 1914 and not Hitler's decision to invade Russia in 1941 and not done shoppings decision to modernize China the most important decision taken in the 20th century was where locate the Princeton graduate school president of the university winter Wilson wanted it down on the campus his nemesis Dean Andrew Fleming West wanted it where it is upon a hill near the college Wilson had one of his characteristic tantrums resigned went into politics and ruined the twentieth century I I simplify a bit and exaggerate some what Woodrow Wilson became and by the way until 2016 he was the president with the least public experience civil or military Woodrow Wilson became the first president to criticize the American Founding which he did not do peripherally he did it candidly forthrightly and root and branch he said first of all the doctrine of natural rights is a mistake anthropological mistake he said there never was a state of nature not that the founders thought there was but he said natural rights doctrine is bad because as the the most important word in the Declaration from my point of view as a verb to secure created equal endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights and governments are instituted to secure those rights first come rights then comes government and government does not give us our rights it protects them and this therefore the natural rights doctrine was inherently limiting second the natural rights doctrine defended progressives at the turn of the century because it implied a human nature a fixed unchanging human nature whereas if you can say there is no fixed on human nature then human beings can be understood simply as creatures situated in a society that acquire the culture surrounding them and that gives an enormous potential jurisdiction to government to change the culture and thereby change human beings to make new people as it were to make the human race itself progress and it's in its makeup third and related to the first Woodrow Wilson was an opponent of the separation of powers he thought it was an acronym and anachronism by 1912 he said it was all very well when in the founders era when they were four million Americans eighty percent of them living within 20 miles of Atlantic Tidewater but now he said we're a vast continental nation united by steel rails and copper wires and the more complex society gets the more we need a nimble government that was one of his telling words at the beck and call of a strong president therefore Congress needed to be somewhat marginalized the article one needed to become article to an article two needed to become article one of the Constitution that in spite of the fact that article one about half of article article two so excuse me about half of article two is how to select a president and how to remove in if necessary the other half is pretty much distilled in the one sentence that Congress is that the president's job is to take care that the laws are faithfully executed which definitionally makes him inferior to that to which he responds those who make the laws that he is to execute well this set the stage for what I think is the most equilibrium destroying fact of modern politics the great medicine and equilibrium dependent on rival Rishta tutions with their own pride in their own interests and their own prick leanness about defending their turf this gave rise to the modern presidency the next great step after Woodrow Wilson and this was Franklin Roosevelt an interesting fact that of course he came to Washington first to be Woodrow Wilson's assistant secretary of the Navy and when he became president when he gave his first fireside chat on this marvelous magical invention radio which was actually more exciting to people than the internet was and not without reason it annihilated distance in a way that the internet didn't do when he gave his first fireside chat he began with two words that do not appear on the transcript in the library at Hyde Park but he said him anyway he began the stewards were my friends now we're so used to presidents who feel our pain and presidents who treat us with a kind of faux intimacy they're in our living rooms all the time that doesn't startle us anymore but I try to imagine George Washington saying that do any group of Americans and my friends that austere man it was unthinkable and I want you to entertain the possibility that perhaps it's not healthy for presidents to pretend to be our friends that's an intimacy with with politics and with politicians and with the centrality and ubiquity of the president in our lives that is not healthy I I for one don't want to be want a president to be my friends I noticed that mr. Trump's chosen nickname for Joe Biden is sleepy Joe Biden I would like to have a sleepy president bring back William Howard Taft Taft had sleep apnea and he fell asleep during the way at the White House great man but there is so much in this really substantial book which you've been working on for three years ranging from discussions of the purpose of education to the need to resurrect the study of political economy to a discussion of the centrality of culture but of course here at the Constitution Center we should focus on the constitutional arguments what would you say to this the summary of your thesis there were there was an originalist republic in america founded on the principles of the Declaration it was perfected by Lincoln who resurrected the principles of the Declaration at Gettysburg and enshrined natural rights of equality into the Constitution but it was called into question in 1912 by wood Wilson and that was the birth of the progressive Republic which was then expanded by Franklin Roosevelt and ever since at least the 1980s conservatives have been trying to roll back the progressive Republic and resurrect the originalist Republic through the courts do you agree with that thesis I do I grew up in central Illinois champaign-urbana my father was a philosophy professor at the University of Illinois and according to local lore Abraham Lincoln was in the Champaign County Courthouse in 1854 when he heard that Stephen Douglas had passed through Congress the kansas-nebraska Act the kansas-nebraska act was an attempt to solve the vexing problem of what to do about the possibility of slavery's expansion into the territories Douglass said voted up or voted down as a matter of moral indifference the important thing is that we have popular sovereignty in the territories Lincoln's recoil against this implacable cannae unrelenting recoil against the idea that we would submit slavery the expansion of slavery to a vote launched him on what I consider the greatest political career in the history of world politics the question that Lincoln poses is is America about majority rule that is is America about a process or is it about a condition Liberty Lincoln I think came down firmly on the side of Liberty so I've been thinking about this more than three years I've been to up marinated in the spirit of Lincoln in central Illinois when I went to Princeton get my PhD I wrote my dissertation top title title was beyond the reach of majorities that's from justice Jackson's opinion in West Virginia versus Barnette the second of the flag salute cases where they reversed their earlier decision earlier the court had said it's all right for schools to require jehovah's witnesses to salute the flag although it was against their fundamental beliefs and he said in his opinion did get justice Jackson the very purpose of a Bill of Rights is to play certain things beyond the reach of majority to remove them from the vicissitudes of politics and this is a constant American refrain a number of people Alex Bikila Yale Law School his colleague Robert Bork and others Oliver Wendell Holmes who said if the people want to go to hell I will help them it's my job by deferring to majorities at all times that's one view my view is that that's a dereliction of judicial duty today many of the most interesting arguments are not between conservatives and progressives that were there against there were conservatives warring with one another i conserve ative for many years advocated judicial deference because they were in recoil against some of the more freewheeling decisions of the war on the court but when they adopted the language of judicial deference and judicial restraint they were adopting the language of the progressives who had had their pinup was their intellectual pinup was Oliver Wendell Holmes and this is where in my chapter in the book it's titled judicial supervision of democracy and it takes a it's aimed at Alex Bickle a very great man by the way and Robert Bork a close friend of mine they said judicial review poses the counter majoritarian dilemma that there's something anomalous about judicial review in a society devoted to popular government you can see where I'm going here because I say what we're not devoted to popular government popular government's an instrument to help us achieve the condition that we want which is Liberty but that's that's the nature of the argument let's delve in on this really important debate within the conservative movement about judicial deference and what's now called judicial engagement so just to emphasize the stakes here at ladies and gentlemen George will in this book argues for very vigorous review of laws that threaten the and just today the Supreme Court handed down an opinion called the Grundy case where justice Gorsuch in dissent resurrects one of the doctrines that George will argue should be resurrected namely prohibiting Congress from delegating vast swaths of authority to the executive to categorize crimes and just to put the point bluntly as Justice Kagan did in her majority opinion she said this resurrection would mean the end of government it would put the Supreme Court in the business of striking down environmental regulations price supports for farmers the ability of the executive to categorize crimes and it would basically strike down the whole post No Deal administrative state is that a good thing and how is that conservative I think it's hyperbolic on her part what it would strike down is the congressional practice of not legislating of turning over all the details to the administrative agencies or the Agriculture Department Congress is now so busy when we've had 535 members of the House of Representatives since a Wham knee early in the 20th century the country has tripled its population the government has increased I'd say 50 fold in what it does same number of Representatives and they're they're busy getting reelected and so what they do is they pass what christum youth very wise men in Washington says Congress now doesn't pass laws it press it passes abilities it simply says we shall have clean air you guys work out the details I wish everyone should have a quality education over to the education department you make the difficult trade-offs and assessments and and balancing the first substantive words of the Constitution the first words after the preamble are all legislative power shall be vested in a Congress of the United States the question is how can anything restrain Congress from divesting itself of powers that are given to it because the felon the founders gave the power to legislate to Congress they didn't say unless you find it tiresome and would and would like to hand it off to somebody and that's where some of us have said we really would like to see the non delegation doctrine breathes back to life and the court say I'm sorry you just that that is a degree that's obviously a matter of degree but there is a degree of delegation that is impermissible yes and it's a very mushy standard as long as there's an intelligible principle that majority said then you can have the delegation but I want to ask you very concretely you're a enough of a Burkean conservative not to just try to impose abstract principles from above with another vote on the Supreme Court it's not at all hypothetical in fact it's quite likely that justice gore such as vision could be embraced the non delegation doctrine could be resurrected what in practice would change about the government which administrative agencies would either be struck down or have to be restructured in which laws would fall I don't think you have to strike down any agency you just restrain the degree of discretion they'll have in achieving policy goals this would not injure the agencies it would injure Congress's time-off it would rip I mean Congress as you know works Tuesdays to Thursdays literally it's one of the reasons the fact that they don't live in Washington and socialize with one another it's one of the reasons that the atmosphere in Washington has become necessarily poisonous but I just don't there's the reviving the non delegation doctrine would have no policy consequence need to have no policy consequences you can sniff you want to subsidize soybeans I think it's a bad idea but go ahead if you want to have any kind of environmental regulations that fine but Congress has to do more of the decision-making that affects trade-offs and expenses not to hand that off to unaccounted in bureaucracies it's an inspiring vision embraced by senators from Ben Sasse to Chris Coons but in practice this Congress is so polarized but for the reasons you know it can't do anything so what how in practice would these regulations be passed and how in practice would government work well I don't think the current condition has always existed and I don't think it will always exist I think the country has to rise up and say we're tired of it I think we knew one of the lessons and it's both unfortunate but in its obverse it's heartening we've seen in the last few years the enormous effect one president can have in changing the tone of American life but if the tone is as plastic as it seems to be to the touch of presidents a better president can have a better touch so it seems to me you could have five years from now we can we might be saying to one another did that stuff really happen and we could get back to something more normal because I don't think the players in Washington remember there are only 527 people are in Washington because the people sent them their president a vice president hundred senators 435 members of Congress and I don't think they're happy they're not enjoying themselves when the court has struck down a lot of laws that are seriously out of step with public opinion in the past its provoked backlashes and judicial retreat and the FDR court packing is the most dramatic example if the court does what you hope and there's a future Democratic administration and say it strikes down the green New Deal might we not see court packing by Democrats and partisan warfare that makes the current stuff look tame we might but and before the Democrats go to the country with the idea that they want to pack the Supreme Court they should pay attention to what happened the last time in 1937 FDR tried to pack the Supreme Court he was stopped by the leaders in Congress who at that time were conservative Southern Democrats Roosevelt set out in 1938 to purge his members of his own party to support primary challenges and the rest the public rebuked him strongly and their rebuke in 1938 was so overwhelming that they swept in a bunch of anti Roosevelt Democrats and there was not a liberal legislating majority in until 1965 all that time the majority was conservative Democrats and Republicans so that the cost of packing the Supreme Court the last night were trying to is severe I just said the magic word 1964 and 65 this book is dedicated to the memory of the Barry Goldwater for whom I cast my first presidential vote in 1964 in 1964 77% of the American people said they trusted the government to do the right thing all the time or almost all the time 77 percent today the figure is 17 percent a 60 point collapse now my conservative my progressive friends and I do have some would be well-advised to read this because everything they want to do the entire Elizabeth Warren agenda depends upon strong government and strong government at the end of the day depends upon people having confidence in the government and unless they can figure out what went wrong we know the obvious things that went wrong Vietnam Watergate things like that but also the tremendous disappointment with what the government undertook to do in the aftermath of the Goldwater landslide which swept in a liberal legislative majority and for two years particularly the pent up agenda since 1938 if you will was rushed into law and the failure of the laws and programs to measure up to their fancy titles model cities for example head starts for example was I think even more loud did more lasting damage to the prestige of government government's pretense went up its prestige plummeted and more damage was done by the Great Society in my judgment than by Vietnam or Watergate just an another beater to on the courts you were not a fan of Chief Justice Roberts decision to uphold the Health Care Act and his concern about institutional legitimacy and yet he represents the conservative strain of judicial restraint which was not limited to progressives but goes back to John Marshall whom he invoked in his healthcare dissent about the importance of deferring to broad exercises of congressional power tell us why you think that Roberts his decision Roberts is concerned that for the court to strike down laws by five to four votes would damage the institution and measurably and that it's important to therefore to be restrained yeah I I'm very sympathetic to what Roberts did Roberts said do it are we going to overturn on a 5-4 vote the signature achievement of a president in a reelection year and when you put it that way and when you realize that the Supreme Court is well in Hamilton's language the least dangerous branch because it has neither sword nor purse but it's the weakest branch in the sense that having neither the sword nor the purse it depends on prestige and that can be dissipated we don't know how because we don't I mean suddenly the supreme court got an enormous infusion of prestige you may disagree with my thesis here but I think what what made the modern Supreme Court was Brown versus Board of Education the country said this is an enormous achievement we couldn't do it the institution's not just of the south remember brown v board of education came out of Topeka Kansas and and I think people were sort of proud of the court proud to have this institution that would do things majorities could not do but it's it can be frittered away it can be dissipated so I'm very simply I mean the logic of the decision was that I think they should have struck it down but what at home saying about the like for the laws not been logic good experience the exact and so I I think someone has to look after the eff just has to be a custodian of the institution and that's the chief justice's job have you changed your mind there because you gave me hell back in the health care days for calling on Roberts to be restrained yeah I changed my mind on a number of issues I used to be a bore Keon because bob was a good friend of mine I used to be against term limits now I'm for them I used to be against a balanced budget amendment but but that that is first of all a testament to your intellectual humility of mindedness but that's a huge change tell us about your evolution from a borken proponent of judicial deference to a willie and proponent of judicial engagement well again I think that the seed was planted when I was a child in Illinois learning about the kansas-nebraska Act and it was it was fertilized at graduate school at Princeton when I was writing about beyond the reach of majorities and the subtitle of my doctoral dissertation was closed questions in an open society what do we not submit to a vote so it was I'm just a slow learner but I wouldn't say more about intellectual humility in homes I've just read this excellent new biography of Holmes by Stephen Budiansky and I like you have been a home skeptic on the theory that he didn't believe in the Constitution he almost never voted to overturn any laws because he said he thought if the people want to go to hell I'll help them but what Budiansky resurrects is Holmes's deep intellectual humility he says that certitude has never been the test of certainty we've been cocksure of many things that are not so maybe 20 to 90 he just opened and read and changed his mind and and there's a lack of humility to have a five-to-four court just striking a lot of down based on it as Holmes said time has upset many fighting faith in the Abrams decision yeah I get that I also think I don't know I haven't read this book it's good I also think that part of Holmes view of the world got at balls Bluff and Antietam and all the the man had passed through the furnace of the Civil War the first war of modern munitions and the last war before proof of modern medicine so it was just everything was awful about the Civil War and I think he came away with a view of the universe that force is everything at the end of the day and if the dominant forces in the community want that want X they're going to get it that's going to hell and I will help them so I don't know if the biographer dwells on this or not he does and that's part of it but another reason that he lost his belief in Bolinas is louima and it's because he came to believe that ideals of any kind are elusive and it's impossible to assure of them and therefore life is a struggle and the only thing that can redeem it is ceaseless hard work without expectations as to the result that's what he gave that speech about a soldier's faith but grenoble this thing you can do is throw your life away on behalf of a cause you barely understand just out of pure courage and that's why he almost worked so hard at the law just for the sake of self discipline and self mastery not with any particular ideal in mind is that a little inspiring is too strong but does that resonate with you yes it does if I could swerve from the court just a bit down on the subject of humility one of the chapters in here's on political economy and the great non sequitur that I think the progressives made with Wilson Wilson said the more complex society becomes the more government must supervise society and must intervene in society and I think that's exactly wrong the more complex society gets the more epistemic humility to use Frederick Hayek a big figure in this books of his term the more epistemic humility the government ought to have because the markets are generating millions of people generating billions of decisions a day this very complicated flux and dynamism of a market society and government knows less and less and less because there's so much more to know that markets are producing enough in a society like this so in a way that the founders began with it with a an epistemic certainty there are some self-evident truths things we can actually know self-evident to them meant apparent to all minds not clouded by superstition but Hayek comes along and says no please understand that society is like a call to Moby oh you jiggle something here and things jiggle all over there and I've often said not that conservatives don't just understand the law of unintended consequences they are conservatives because of the law of unintended consequences which is that the unintended consequences of intervention and a complex society are apt to be larger than and contrary to the unintended consequences are apt to be larger than and contrary to the intended consequences you know what what could go wrong I mean I think ni thinking good old Elizabeth Warren out there her her mantra of her campaign is I've got a plan for that it's a Jewish saying if you want to make God laugh tell him your plans my mom said that so why should you look the same epistemological humility applied to the court which is why Holmes said the Constitution is made for people of fundamentally different yeah yeah well that's the problem this the imperial if you will role i cast for the courts and here in the we have judicial engagement and for the court appalled certain friends of mine for example the very distinguished judge on the Fourth Circuit J Harvey Wilkinson who wrote me a pain anguish letter will what you're going to do is you're going to have these courts there'll be a cafeteria of rights and you know and they'll take the ninth amendment saying the enumeration of certain rights in the Constitution shall not be said to disparage unenumerated rights and all hell will break loose and and it's dangerous and my answer that J is yeah it's dangerous there's no safety in politics the question is what do you fear more do you fear the the unitary president wielding an administrator state more or do you fear Congress with its indifference to its responsibilities and its role checking and balancing the executive or do you fear the courts I fear the courts least but in the 60s conservatives fear the courts more because of cases like Roe and if you believe that if you take a pro-life position then you'd think that's which I do which I do you take a pro-life yes I'm a pro-life and do you think that the court should just overturn Roe and leave it to the states or shouldn't recognize fetal personhood and require the protection of human I think they should if they overturn Roe they won't by the way it'll never happen but but if they peace you can clap on a nonpartisan basis that's we have half of my readers and my column appears in about 440 newspapers I'm sure half my readers think I'm a Catholic because I'm pro-life I'm actually as I say in my chapter called conservatism without theism I'm an amiable low voltage atheist but we don't need to get into that stuff yeah but a lot of people because they don't think a lot about these things think that if you overturn Roe V way that outlaws abortion if you overturn roe v wade all that means is it's subject regulable by the states and I think I'm not sure there's a state in the Union that would outlaw first trimester abortions and Alabama just hit Alabama Alabama did it only to provoke a Supreme Court case and they really work a knee about this but if the court agrees then it's banned in Alabama but but if the court agrees in the laws of Hell then it's banned in Alabama Louisiana yeah well you know yeah but it won't the court won't I think with another justice it might with another I think abort I don't think I mean abortion is I think the second or third most common surgical procedure in the United States it's not going away it just isn't the justices I Clarence Thomas would because he says let justice be done though the heavens fall but the other guys don't want the heavens to fall what what what about marriage equality as a libertarian devotee of the decoration I couldn't tell but I suspected perhaps she thought that that should be constitutionally protected yes what's the what's the argument the constitutional argument for protecting a constitutional argument here's where a lot of us judicial engagement people say we're not originalist and I'm not an originalist says the Constitution's text should be read so that the words have the original public meaning at the time they were written that affair yes distillation I think the eighth amendment overturns that originalism there should be no cruel and unusual punishments well if cruel and unusual means would have meant in Philadelphia when they were imposing draconian punishments as the Constitutional Convention was sitting then we'd be cropping ears and pillar rain people and flogging them in public and that sort of thing we didn't know I don't take the original public meaning I take the original intent the original intent was to to say we will not have cruelty inflicted by the government and then it turns out that Earl Warren was right that there are evolving standards of decency that marked the maturation of a society and the intent is constant but the application isn't your as you articulate this so well it sounds a lot like the book of our mutual friend and in front of the Constitution Center Randy Barnett our republican constitution it does give a huge amount of discretion to judges to decide what they think the Liberty and autonomy requires yes and it's dangerous I plead guilty haven't read everything in politics is dangerous but how is it principled because when you were a Bork and concern liberals have the courts and conservatives didn't want the rules to make up these rights and now conservatives how the courts and you wanted to make it up yeah but I don't I really think I've not changed for that reason I think if they were if the the other guys were appointing the justices was gonna say this Republicans weren't I'm not a Republican anymore Rosen no I know George Will's incredibly principled decision to leave the Republican Party because of his constitutional obligations to the President did you deserve great respect for that but what's the reason why did you why did you switch there is in here for example in the chapter on it's titled the judicial supervision of democracy there's a long exegesis of just how wise justice souter was in some of his in a wonderful speech he gave at Harvard a few years ago and justice Souter is supposed to be the the bogey man for disappointments to conservatives why did I change I just thought through look things I mean I kept hearing that if majorities majority should be referred to because and they're wise no they're not or they're inherently just no they're not so who's gonna stop bad majorities and yeah I thought you know that conservatives often combine deference to majorities with celebration of local rule a kind of residual anti federalism well the best example I can see a majority rule with local deference to local institutions and Jim Crow laws which is just about as bad as you can get but it's not originalist in the sense that the framers never anticipated such a vigorous role for the courts they did not yes and I say in my book that the third most important American after Lincoln in Washington was John Marshall because he established judicial review and understood that a written constitution without judicial review without this counter majoritarian anomaly as the Porton people thought it was that it written constitution without judicial review is impossible the Constitution will not constitute unless the courts will lay the statute next to the Constitution and when their discordant favor the Constitution and yet Marshall only struck down one federal law and there were only two struck down you know until 1857 but there were precious few laws to begin with when the first Congress met in Washington oh I guess they met was in New York I guess fella anyway when the first Congress met the Congress was larger than the federal bureaucracy State Department I get three employees something like that I mean so it was a tiny government second as you know 95 percent of the Marshall courts decisions were unanimous which is partly because they were under the leadership of this very canny and amazingly affable man personality matters in a small face to face society like a court and everyone loved John Marshall everyone that of the Madeira that he plied his fellow justices definitely helped right I'm pressing on this just because so much of this is appealing to someone to anyone who loves the Constitution and loves Madison but if this new if this originalist Republic that you call for is imposed by us well not originalist what would you call that well well yeah originally in the sense that I'm not an originalist of public meaning of the text I'm an originalist about the intent and the intent was to create a government that protects the duck duration of Independence so there's a big crowd on among conservatives again about to write a column on it for the 4th of July as to whether or not the Constitution that the declaration is relevant to construing the Constitution now again I'm a child with central Illinois I'm an acolyte of Lincoln and Lincoln said that the Constitution is the frame of silver for the apple of gold the apple of gold's the declaration frames are important and silver is valuable but butts in the frame is more important and goals more valuable than silver so III think this Constitution is to be construed in light of the bright light cast by the first two paragraphs of the Declaration which by the way to get back to the root of all evil Woodrow Wilson Woodrow Wilson said to the American people do not read the first two paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence they'll only mislead you he said it's it's 4th of July boilerplate I think it's it's law isn't the Declaration the first thing and then in the United States book of statutes nações yes and you say as a result of all states pledges to adhere to it laughter so from from the admission of Nevada on every state was required by Congress to well swear allegiance or to accept the u.s. code would be under the Supremacy Clause yesterday exactly so tell us more about the internecine debate among conservatives about the relation between the Declaration and the Constitution who's on what side well Justice Scalia said famously there's no philosophizing in the Constitution well he said it's a practical allocation of powers among institutions and that's all Mike and my kind of conservative says no that's what it does and there's no philosophizing in the Constitution but the Constitution comes after the Declaration it was to codify the purposes and intents and aspirations of the Declaration and in that sense it is derivative from and enabled by the declaration has a clear philosophic statement Justice Thomas got into trouble in his confirmation hearings for having written about the Declaration and he said it was just philosophic musing but in fact he's been quoting it in his opinion quite so what shall we call the Republic that you hope would be resurrected if the New Deal of the progressive Republican fell call it America call it it's we are guaranteed a Republican form of government that's the guarantee Clause of the Constitution and it would be a republic structured to make natural rights safe what are natural rights we don't know but just from the branding first before we get the philosophy so we have the founders Republic the reconstruction Republic you know the progressive Republic the Fourth Republic sounds too French so what's the what's the new one the declaration that natural rights Republic all right what are not what are natural rights and why are the rights of conscience the preeminent natural right well the natural rights are rights that you'll notice I'm about to define it without reference without theism without reference to a Creator natural rights are rights conducive to the flourishing of people with our nature's that which makes a secular natural right sad because it's basically a rural utilitarian because what we're saying is what we learn from history is that as a rule the rights that are conducive to flourishing understood in this way are these rights now people say well gosh sake I made a lot of arguments about that yes if you don't like arguing you picked the wrong country because Americans are condemned to arguing by having a written constitution where the litigation about which is where we really do political philosophy I just I asked about conscience because I looked it up in Morton White's book the philosophy of the American Republic the reason the conscience is unalienable in the state of nature is because the founders thought our opinions are the involuntary thoughts presented to our reasoning miles and therefore I can't alienate or surrender to you the power to control my thoughts cuz I can't control them myself they're the product and reason does that make well the Hume another one of my heroes Hume said that the the that the reason is is a spy for the passions that we are in a way who's trying to figure out how we reason I think my hero was not quite right on that that there is such a thing as a moral sense in people that's why Locke different from Hobbes Hobbes said in the state of nature life is solitary poor nasty brutish and short and therefore because people have known native sociability when you needed the smack of firm government you need a Leviathan Locke came along and said oh please people have a natural sociability and therefore you we Institute governments to cure certain inconveniences in the state of nature very telling word lock use too because if the worst we do to one another our inconveniences and because of our natural sociability government isn't quite need not be as overbearing as people thought his Hobbes thought it needed to be you just mentioned reason and the founders desire to tame passion with reason say more about the pursuit of happiness I've just heard a great new book delving into your point that Jefferson's phrase was from Aristotle and the Greek notion of eudaimonia or self mastery it wasn't let it all hang out do your own thing but master your passion so that you can achieve your true purpose yes people could only be happy according to Aristotle if they had self government meaning they governed themselves that hence his great emphasis on moderation and all things that if the passions were not under control people spun out of control and needless to say polities spun out of control but before you got to the macro problem you had the micro problem and Aristotle's ethics is about how the soul can achieve equipoise and therefore what do you think the purpose of education should be you give at least three purposes and you just gave the students hell at Princeton by telling them to praise more and blame less yeah well we live today in an age of rage where the default position is contempt and smart and cynicism and this is encouraged by what are called social media and should be anti social media the brevity and the instantaneousness and the wide dissemination brings out the very worst in people which turns out to be a lot but I think one of the purposes of Education is to teach people how to praise the default position should not be disparagement there's there's abroad in the land today the belief that if you're not disparaging something you're not exercising your critical capacities that critical capacity means to criticize and to criticize means to disparage that's not what critics do some critics celebrate and Harvey Mansfield and great he's known as the conservative at Harvard definite article there a few point now yeah Harvey masters also to teach people but praised because in order to praise you have to say there are certain standards and if you learn to praise and you learn to apply standards to the world you're going to be happier because praising turns out to be fun it's gratifying it's it's you're praising someone that doesn't the act of praising doesn't in any way diminish the prazer and why is it especially important to educate students in the science of government and in the Constitution well because government is complicated and government is inherently about compromise it's about the factions coming together and balancing one another and it's so it involves a lot of disappointment for people which means people have to think we're all in this together somehow and we've all accepted certain rules so you better know what the rules are and you better know what why they built this complicated government at the other end of the ball Madison's Revolution and democratic theory was this before Madison to the extent that people thought and very few people did think that democracy was possible they thought it was only possible in a small face-to-face society that you could walk across in a day the Russos Geneva or Pericles Athens because the big problem was supposed to be factions democracies had to be homogeneous Madison said that's exactly wrong and he had a catechism for the founders and he - what what is the worst outcome of politics the answer's tyranny - what form of tyranny our democracies pray tyranny of the majority solution don't have majorities actually it's me don't have stable and therefore potentially tyrannical majorities have unstable constantly shifting coalition's of minorities that form the majorities that can't over time be stable enough to be oppressive hence the need for an extensive republic vast lands with all kinds of people churning around in them hence his statement in Federalist 10 where he calls for an extensive Republic the first duty of government is to protect the different and on equal capacities of acquiring property because those would translate into farmers and mechanics and bankers and investors and industrial factions and we'd be there'd be a saving multiplicity of factions that's why it's very important for people to understand the rules we're written for a reason and the reason is to protect our freedom and enable complex passionate people to get along Madison thought that the extended Republic would make it hard for the factions to organize and discover each other and therefore their passions would peter out has social media or anti social media obviated to his vision and created a Madisonian nightmare yes that the technology of communication changes everything the technology of communications without it you can't have the modern presidency there's a wonderful book everyone ought to read by Geoffrey Telus called the rhetorical presidency in which he makes the point that until modern communication came along until hate to keep harping on the poor man Woodrow Wilson and the others almost all presidential rhetoric was in writing and it was directed to Congress there was very little speechifying aimed at the general American public radio television tweeting changes everything I want to talk baseball for just a second no no because I have to I got this is the one topic I can't talk so hey because I only write about politics to support my baseball habit okay my wedding ring has the Major League Baseball logo on it I mean this is this is sickness I admit it but but but baseball is like what I was just talking about the problem of democracy baseball is a great game for a democracy because there's so much losing in it no I'm serious every team goes to spring training they know they're gonna win 60 games are know going to lose 60 games play the whole damn season to sort out the middle 42 games you win 10 out of 20 games you're definitionally mediocre you went 11 out of 20 games you win 87 games you're on the outskirts of the postseason it's it's it's just a you know the greatest batting average career batting average was Ty Cobb's 367 that means he failed more than 60% of the time there's a lot of failure in it and a lot of give-and-take and and you got to get you if you know in football one of the many things that's wrong with football a team starts Owen 3 and if the Eagles ever start on 3 people be suicidal up here the Phillies lost twice yesterday unknown they'll be back tonight I mean it's a it democracy requires a kind of emotional equipoise and I think baseball encourages that end of my decoration I can't pose this question with the sports metaphor but has the social media so undermine the constitutional guardrails that the rules are out the window but they're not out the window but again looking on the bright side as I am disinclined to do that's I I think people the novelty will wear off some of this stuff Facebook social all that stuff that people are going to say what are we wasting our time doing here I don't want to get too personal here but I've I've never tweeted a young woman in my office tweets two hundred forty characters twice a week from my two columns that's all I've ever done now I bring out a book and they say Georgia I did get on Instagram I'm never gonna do I do it Instagram another so I said all right he takes your silk books so they said put up pictures so this happened yesterday and I said all right so they have a picture of me with Mike Trout of the California Angels and they said what caption should we have on it and when they and that guy said cancel my Instagram account I'm not doing it I'm just not gonna do this not going down that path but I do think I I do think this this idea that we have to be sharing our data generating it and cooling it there's a wonderful novel that I just read wonderful but dystopian novel a show of hands if anyone has read it it's called the circle by David Eggers good I mean yes an astonishingly gripping dystopian view of the logic of this constant pooling of everyone's data I really recommend it there's so many great questions as always and many of them are about a name that does not appear in this book and that is president Trump and they range from does president Trump have a conservative Sensibility do you think he'll try to seize power if he loses in 2020 or is this 1941 revisited and so forth why did you choose not to mention the president's name since you certainly have criticized him in your columns and does he have a conservative Sensibility I was on Bill Maher show recently and he said Trump's name doesn't appear in the book and I said neither does Doris Day's name because this is about ideas I didn't I didn't want to write a wash another Washington book I'm not under the impression that there's insufficient attention paid to him he has no Edith he's never said anything interesting about government or politics that's not what he does I want this to be a book that we read 5 or 10 years from now and it won't seem dated because I don't have that guy in there I will bet on 50 years from now this is like Russell Kirk's great conservative sensibility book like it is extremely impressive achievement and on the well alright we'll have one of one or two more questions one is how can we as ordinary citizens foster a conservative outlook and others well I I think we need to have something that's in here which is a robust defense of a market society what Burke called the organic nature of society and what Hayek taking the Burkean sensibilities that called the spontaneous order of our society an appreciation of the complexity and the creativity of the fecundity of freedom in a market society we have to patiently try and explain to people the great enrichment that has occurred since first the Dutch and then the British and then the Americans showed what can happen when you unleash the energies of common people through a market society does anyone here read Deirdre McCloskey 'he's three big three volumes on the bourgeois virtues wonderful book he said what the big J steam and coal and James Watt and all that stuff in Britain that's fine but before that who was the Dutch and the Dutch said you know enterprise and commerce is not the sinful working out of fallen man it's good for us and they began to their great painters began to paint distinguished burgers and bankers and suddenly it was dignified to be an entrepreneur and enterprising so we have to do something like that for Americans we have to tell them how complex things are how good things are we have to cure the social hypochondria to which Americans are prey I can I there's a thought experiment in this book in September 1916 according to some historians there was a surge in the value of standard oil stock and john d rockefeller became America's first billionaire it was a billion 1916 dollars so it was serious money thought experiment if I could give you a billion dollars in 1916 dollars of them but you had to live in 1916 would you take the deal I offer this to people and I say well don't even think of getting a toothache and by the way one in ten Americans had a toothache at any time in 1916 you'd be able to buy the greatest watch made but it wouldn't keep as good a time as the Timex you can get at the CBS you can go to any restaurant you want but there wouldn't be any end in a tie in Vietnamese restaurants cuz wouldn't a way back then you're gonna live life without antibiotics your entertainment will be a scratchy recording from Edison but there's no sound movies yet and Netflix is a way off into the future and I think when people think about it they know I'd much rather be a middle-class American than the America's first billionaire you're sounding suspiciously optimistic I'll try and watch it as as you note in this book one of the great pleasures and virtues is to praise and I must praise and thank you for having written a book that elucidates educates and captures the essence of the American creed helps explain the relationship between the Declaration and the Constitution and provides a way of resurrecting natural rights ideals in our polarized age it's always an honor to talk but a great George will [Applause] The Grates story told about Margaret Thatcher after she was elected head of the parliamentary Conservative Party but before she became Prime Minister she was at a meeting with her members and one of them was nattering on about the glories of centrism and the superfluous nurse of philosophy and politics and all that finally Margaret exasperated reached into her capacious handbag and pulled out Hayek's great thumping volume the constitution of Liberty she slammed it on the desk and said this is what we believe that's what I want a president to do with that some day [Applause]

Channel: National Constitution Center

Views: 16,770

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Id: Jwe3bzr22lM

Length: 62min 27sec (3747 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 20 2019