George Will's Libertarian Evolution: Q&A on Obama, Syria, & the Power of Choice

I've lived in Washington now for 44 years and that's a lot of folly to witness hi I'm Nick Gillespie with Matt Welch and we're talking today with George Will The Washington Post columnist this week panelist and author of many books including statecraft of Soulcraft what government does men at work the craft of baseball and most recently one man's America the pleasures and provocations of our singular nation born in 1941 and raised in the college environs of Champaign Urbana Illinois will holds a PhD in political science from Princeton a school once operated by one of the very worst of all American President Woodrow Wilson and his dissertation was titled beyond the reach of majorities closed questions in the open society we're gonna ask you tough questions about your dissertation later a former staffer for Colorado Republican senator Gordon allit he has taught politics at Michigan State worked at national review and received the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1977 Wall Street Journal has called him perhaps the most powerful journalist in America and he has the distinction of having been attacked as a pseudo intellectual in the pages of Doom's Barry back when people actually still read that comic strip and of having been praised by Cramer on Seinfeld not for his intelligence but for his clean scrubbed look welcome George well thank you it's the first time my children ever took me seriously I could imagine appeared on Seinfeld the nurse said I was cute yes he liked your appearance very much but not your brain so in 2011 you discussed in in your Washington Post column a rather obscure track called the Declaration of Independence how libertarian politics can fix what's wrong with America and you wrote these incurably upbeat journalist with Reason magazine believed that not even government try as it will can prevent onrushing social improvement America you continued is moving in the Libertarians direction not because they have won an argument but because government and the sector's it dominates has made them have made themselves ludicrous this has open binds to the libertarian argument is it correct to say that you yourself over the years are inclining more in returning direction as well yes for several reasons the first is that I've lived in Washington now for 44 years and that's a lot of folly to witness up close and whatever confidence and optimism one felt toward the central government when I got here in January 1st 1970 is pretty much dissipated at the hands of the government second I participate although I'm 72 and too old to learn very much I do participate in the changing technological assumptions give you an example when I was growing up and I wanted to hear the songs of the day Bill Haley and the Comets and the platters and all that stuff I would turn on the radio and hope that the disc jockey I was listening to would play three or four of the songs I wanted to hear in the next hour my daughter and other children want to hear their songs they just could be internet and they have 50,000 but I wanted a cup of coffee I went to a coffee shop and ordered a cup of coffee now you go to Starbucks or somewhere and you have a mind-boggling number of choices and choice just seems more natural more built into the socialism so what does that have to do with government or your assumptions about government well first of all government operates on one size fits all because that suits the bureaucratic method and impulse which is Empire building and manifest destiny on the part of every bureaucracy to maximize its mission you can see it at everything from the Secret Service no president can be safe enough to Obamacare you've said previously that John McCain was kind of helpful in your evolution in a more libertarian direction talk a little bit about that well the mccain feingold law did something that i had never occurred to me even Congress would have the audacity and effrontery to do or that the Supreme Court would ratify which it largely did at first and that is Congress which is to say incumbent laterz passed laws limiting the content timing and quantity of political speech about incumbent legislators and this a past which shouldn't have surprised me but it did and was as I say ratified by the Supreme Court so I mean that that was kind of the the final moment right your Kronstadt moment or something where you gave up completely on large government as an instrument of that was part of it that I also I'm a reader and I read Mansur Olson and I read Jonathan Roush demo sclerosis where he applied some of Olsen's insights about how interest groups fastened like barnacles on a ship of state and eventually immobilized the ship and make reform almost impossible let's let's talk about this in context of statecraft as Soulcraft which was published in 83 and it was kind of I mean you had been in the public eye for a decade or more but this was kind of a big statement and among other things you wrote caustically if the differences are actually the similarities between liberals and conservatives at the time and you were talking about people like FDR and Ronald Reagan you wrote I will do many things for my country but I will not pretend that the careers of say Ronald Reagan and Franklin Roosevelt involves serious philosophical differences specifically you fault at both groups for believing that the inner life of citizens are and you talked about our sentiments manners and moral opinions were none of the government's business so you were saying that FDR Ronald Reagan meant it when he said that he was an FDR Democrat and that the problem with them is that they left people alone too much no what Ronald Reagan said I'm an FDR Democrat not a Great Society Lyndon Johnson Democrat that Ronald Reagan never assaulted and never promised to assault in any fundamental way the social safety net it was when government got into the business of saying who should live where who should think what the Great Society agenda of comprehensive social engineering that Reagan got off the bandwagon state craft is Soulcraft to read by dozens was began as the Godkin lectures at Harvard and three lectures in 1981 the subtitle is what government does not what government should do but what government cannot help but do any regime by its structure of laws is affirming certain values and discouraging certain vices if you have a free-market laissez-faire society a market Society affirms certain values choice freedom self-reliance sanctity of contract promise keeping all the rest and therefore when you choose your regime you are choosing to affirm and nurture and encourage a certain character that's why what I said government cannot not be in any business other than the sole craft business do you still believe that I do and I think you do too well yeah let me ask us in in the column that you had written about our book the Declaration of Independence you you've noted the essence of libertarian political thought is the common sensical principle that before government interferes with the freedom of the individual and of individuals making consensual transactions in the market in markets it ought to have a defensible reason for doing so it usually does not now you're just talking about mccain-feingold you're the entitlement state you've been on an arch critic of things like Medicare and Social Security you're you are against war in Syria you became a critic of the Iraq invasion I mean you that the beads are piling up where your sack a government can't do these things right where are some places that the government still should be limiting human interaction or or you know where is it defensible to say no actually people can't do this fewer and fewer as you say obviously there are neighborhood effects of pollution and neighborhood effects of noise neighborhood effects of all sorts where the government goes astray is when the government decides that it is going to allocate wealth and opportunity and that's almost entirely what the government does nowadays the tax code for example is as chairman Dave camp of Michigan chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee says the tax code is longer than the Bible without the good news because it is entirely rent-seeking it is more than the appropriations process the tax code is how the government allocates favors and we reach a point and this is sort of a systemically important point and why I go to the tax code we may have reached a point where the tax code is so complicated it cannot be reformed that is because if you say let's start over as camp and Baucus have tried to do they said okay we're gonna have a blank slate we're gonna wipe out all the exemptions credits deductions all the rest and it's up to you people to defend them and we'll put them back in the problem is if you start with a blank slate you're not picking one fight with every American you're picking five fights with every American and the system can't handle it you get just to go back to that kind of man sir Olson or demo sclerosis model is is it impossible then to separate the barnacles from the hull and are we just going down and you know what I mean are we sinking or how do you what do you do now we're not sinking we're slowing down that is it's very hard to move the ship and it slows down in terms of economic growth because you're allocating wealth and opportunity in political rather than efficient ways and this has cumulatively a terrific drag on economic growth the sort of the philosophical basis of statecraft is Soulcraft for what we were talking about just earlier could be seen couldn't it as okay government is an instrument of morality and once people politicians and commentators have that feeling then that helps the removal of limitations in the LBJ way saw David Brooks I think was citing statecraft of soulcraft the other day as one of his periodic Jeremih ads against libertarianism yes so how do you square those kind of impulses well here's how strict pure libertarians say because the government can back its tastes with the police power it shouldn't have tastes the argument of statecraft is Soulcraft is that's all very well but you again what government does government is going to have laws it's going to legalize certain things prescribe certain things encourage certain things you have to pick you have to choose and unless you have the most severe sort of Nightwatchman state and we're not going to have that by the way by severe you mean totally freaking awesome it's not going to happen I mean I wrote the other day that if we could tax Americans cognitive dissonance we could balance the budget that the American people want all kinds of incompatible things they're human beings and they want a high services low tax omnipresent I'm the Provident cheap welfare state do do they get that in a place like Texas there's a new book out by Erica Grider which is pretty interesting she's a liberal who writes for Texas Monthly or the Texas observer and she talks about how you know Texas as opposed to California's essentially that it's it's low tax low service high opportunity it's not it's not a libertarian state but doesn't Texas show that actually maybe Americans would settle for something you know is is the vision of the country between California and Texas and Texas is winning right now this is why we have federalism there are two reason to have federalism first you're more apt to have three or four or five smart governors and you already have a smart president at any time so you dispersed decision making and experimenting beyond that Texas we can now practice under federalism what the late Daniel Boorstin great a historian and librarian of Congress called entrepreneurial federalism that is what the states compete for mobile businesses for SNAs wonderful essay on this in one of his three volumes of his history called the Americans he said it started with divorce that Indiana said we're gonna have easier divorces than anyone else and then the Dakotas that know now we're gonna have Dakota a divorcee isn't finally Nevada got in the act Nevada said like the Comstock Lode is petered out the money's gone to San Francisco we got more sheep than people here what can we do and they said we're gonna have really easy divorce and by the way while you're here waiting was six weeks or whatever it is you can gamble hence Las Vegas hence Reno has all the rest we see this all the time the president if I could mr. Obama the other day went to like Knox College in Galesburg on on art gave speech in which he said two particularly riveting things he said just terrible that Maytag pulled up from Illinois and went to Mexico no one said yeah mr. president that's because your friends and the labor unions chased him out about a few sentences later he says but wonderful things are happening Airbus is going to the European consortium going to build aircraft in Alabama well why they go to Alabama because it's a right-to-work state you do you think somebody like Obama doesn't understand that this juncture or you know I or is he is he you know just kind of dissembling this is a man who says ATMs and airport ticket kiosks cause unemployment we had this argument a long time ago about whether or not automation automating the Ford plant will mean no one will be able to buy Ford cars we surely we've had that argument but it hasn't percolated through to the Hyde Park section of Chicago do you feel like speaking of like that economic arguments that we have back slid a lot especially since the financial meltdown of 2008 refighting people are talking about reregulate announcer today's and magazines where they used to talk about deregulating airlines has there been a backsliding on economic discussion in this country I don't think so yeah I I don't think so no III think that any American who's on the board of a school museum Orchestra anything with an item now identified roughly with one tenth of one percent of American right but I speak for the 1% knows that when you have economic growth of three percent or more everything's happy in America when you have two percent protracted ly everything's sad in America 1% 1/2 percent makes all the difference in the world the American political system is not used to doing what it has been doing for a decade now that is allocating scarcity we're used to allocating surplus and it's much easier to do that talk about what are the roots of that because one of the things that's interesting about your reading your work over the past several decades is you were as tough on george w bush as you were as you have been on barack obama or on you know kind of broadly based liberals and democrats if economic growth started slowing down in the you know the middle of the 24 the first decade of the 21st century what were the policies that Bush was pushing that helped contribute to that or Republicans more broadly and and have they fully kind of internalized their role in this kind of scarcity America no I don't think they have those people have internalized it who asked the simple question of every proposed policy how does it contribute to or subtract from economic growth that's everything now we have an ongoing national tragedy we're losing a generation now you have what happened what percentage of young people are now living with their parents say 18 to 28 something like that you know and the real tragedy is for the parents I've got four children at home I've dodged that bullet but no I mean the the sheer waste you you began by quoting me is saying about how hard it is for government to stop innovation and growth the American people are prodigies at wealth creation it's hard to stop them we're industrious educated we have Continental market we're mobile people things aren't working in Michigan we moved to Texas yet still the cumulative weight of lots of little policies so what were some of those policies in particular that Bush or the Republicans kind of layered on top of the cake well first of all the regulations I was asked to come up and talk to the house members about two years ago and I said what's the what should we do I said first of all pledge you will not publish the Federal Register I can do it anymore I'm not gonna have any more regulations then and this is a something that Romney endorsed and others have any major regulation understood as one with a hundred million dollar impact on the economy has to be voted on but their fingerprints on this it'll really work wonders but that did happen with things like dodd-frank it more recently and in the back sarbanes-oxley the Medicare person I mean it's not a regulation but the Medicare prescription drug expansion well medically no you know what made the Medicare prescription drug particularly pernicious and particularly Republican was that it was the first major expansion of an entitlement without a dedicated funding they just said well we'll make it up as we go along but borrow it from the Chinese what what's going through the Republican mine that when they're when they're doing something well in the in the pithy statement of Dick Cheney Ronald Reagan proved the deficits don't matter he didn't do any such thing but the only prove that to Dick Cheney right and in fact deficits don't matter politically the American people talk about balanced budget they don't care about a balanced budget at all and in fact what what deficits have done and and Reagan gets some of the demerits for this deficits have made big government cheap we're giving the American people a dollars worth of government charging them sense filler and America say we can live with that there's a new generation of politicians who are arising that actually do talk about this stuff Justin Amash Rand Paul they talk about actually cutting government and tackling this problem they try to win elections and these are the people that would that you were speaking of when you said well a couple months ago that the most interesting thing in American politics since last fall's election was the Republican Party getting more interesting becoming more heterodox on foreign policy and domestic policy yes talk about that what do you find interesting about these guys well first of all they they begin with a principle that one you basically read me enunciate II which is before it's not a radical principle it says before the government interferes with freedom or privacy it ought to have a compelling reason that's all just tell me your reason when you start like that all kinds of things happen because 98% of what government does it does for factions what the founders called factions which are those who are not public spirited but private spirited who are trying to bend public power to private advantage and if you start with that simple principle there's no end the time you can ask that on a given day as to what's going on in Washington what what explains that if they appeal and and obviously you know the Rand Paul's the Mike Lee is the Justin Amash is Thomas Massey's of the world they're they're gaining energy and momentum but so far they're a fraction of the Republican Party much less the electorate why are why are they striking a chord with people and if in fact you know Americans like government on the cheap you know how how how far can they go with that well it we'll see how far they can go but this is the argument basically for a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution it's the public choice argument that the incentive to deliver benefits now and defer the costs on to the unborn and hence unconsenting future generations is irresistible the public choice argument is powerful and gaining more strength why the libertarian impulse now partly they've got as the government gets bigger it becomes more comprehensively annoying and the annoyances add up but beyond that there is a great sense that Americans lost its energy it's a kind of kind of sagging taking over the country that you look around you see even where we're supposed to spend money we're not spending money give you an example I traveled between Washington New York all the time by train I thank the people of Boise for subsidizing the Acela I don't know why they do it but he'd do it and I appreciate it but I don't want to live forever I want to live long enough to go through Union Station and Penn Station where all the escalators are working at the same time they are just awful this the shabby tadi shop worn down up the heels but by your nature of American public infrastructure but we shouldn't be spending money on yes we should who's we Kemosabe in that in that who's the show you ensure the public should spend on genuine public goods and in recent columns you've talked about things like I mean you talk about the sequester obviously you're in favor of cutting the over federal budget yes it is now but you talk about you you actually are critical of the sequester for the effect that's having on say the National Institutes of Health correct what are lay out some of the you know some of the things that you think the government actually should be spending money on well I'm a Henry Clay Abraham Lincoln central Illinois Whig I believe in canals on the Illinois and a lot of other states project if it broke when they plunge to too enthusiastically ended public works but yes I roads we used to be my dear and best friend Pat Moynihan said we used to be a nation that celebrated people who got things done now we celebrate people who stop things from getting done happen spent most of his long career in Washington try and get the West Side Highway changed in New York great potential urban scape that would be a great beauty to Manhattan can't get it done because there's some wretched fish in the river but here I guess is there a kind of algorithm and I guess there isn't but of you know you if the New Deal ends up giving us the Great Society you know okay then you have somebody like Ronald Reagan say okay I don't want the great Sutter I want the New Deal but then he pursues policies through deficit spending that actually then jack up the Great Society where do you get back to a point once you grant that well yeah the West Side Highway or Amtrak should be run by the federal if the New Deal of necessity had to in the end give us the Great Society it is because the New Deal gave rise to a new class not capital and labor but regulators and regulated that's what America's become we're now generating enormous numbers of lawyers happily there's a collapse in the law school admissions so there may be a corrective at work here but we have produced an enormous number of people who think they are entitled to rule who are trained to rule which is to say trained to administer the regulatory state and arguably absent the New Deal we wouldn't have had the regulatory state which gave rise to this class that decided it could fix Bedford Stuyvesant you're talking about foreign policy earlier this it seems since Reagan and perhaps before but definitely since Reagan there is a Republican culture of being sort of strong and barrel-chested on defense and then you have this kind of Justin Amash Rand Paul wing which is talking strikingly different about military spending and about civil liberties about due process and things like that can a modern Republican policy a party tolerate that kind of growth of a more skeptical humble type of foreign policy approaches well it it better because the long comes the president says or let's let's have a fourth intervention at least let's bomb Syria and eighty percent of the countries is let's not no 8020 issues don't come along that often and you want to be on the right side of those remember it was a Republican who warned against the military-industrial complex January 1961 farewell address Dwight Eisenhower who knew a thing or two about war having been in a few Eisenhower spurned those in his cabinet and they were loud and Legion who said we have to help the French and VN beyond food we said no we don't actually quemo mat-su the French British Israeli adventure and Suez he brought it to a halt he just stopped it using our financial power the Hungarian Revolution which we perhaps the improvidently encouraged but Eisenhower should be that as it may that did not obligate us to intervene we can't do it can't get there from here so there is a tradition of Republican restraint and and it's all the more impressive because what caused Eisenhower to take off his uniform leave shave and run for president was the fear that the Republican Party would be taken over by Bob Taft and Taft was too isolationist to use the problematic term although in tax case that may have been accurate it may have been but Eisenhower felt devoted to the Alliance NATO and all the rest and so here was Eisenhower who ran for president because he was more interventionist and internationalist than part of his party but who still had a had a fairly well-developed sense of restraint how much you know to take it down from a kind of atmosphere of rhetoric and war to political reality how much of it is that the Republican Party became the hawkish party because they started winning the south where a lot of military spending was done and the Democrats have been more hawkish when they ran the south I don't think that's it you know I think it has more to do with the intellectuals the party Pat Moynihan said in about 1980 he said something momentous happened in the 1970s the Republican Party became the party of ideas now the good part of that was they were the ideas of Milton Friedman about parlor ends Society the Austrian economists Hayek all the rest and in foreign policy however they became the party of first of all stopping the slide in the later stages of the Cold War which was real and dangerous I think when the Cold War ended I think some conservatives suffered an acute bout of 30s Envy it was a wonderful clarity to the thirty-day Franco Stalin Hitler Mussolini bad guys certifiable clear bed it looked bad they were bad and they went looking for something else to give them their lives meaning instead of kicking back and saying we got through the Cold War it ended without a cataclysm let's relax for a while just this morning I was reading Bill Kristol complaint with Hugh Hewitt that right now with the British Parliament voting against intervention in Syria that were just living through the 30s Oliver tell me they brought up the the the Oxford Union vote yeah no doubt okay well I thought was a stirring moment yesterday vote in the house Prime Minister gets outputted shift of seven votes would have he would have won and he looks across the chamber and says the government will act accordingly what does it say that our former monarchist overlords are showing more kind of democratic leanings on elections it shows that the iraq syndrome the successor to the Vietnam syndrome may be more durable than the Vietnam syndrome was that is people are still getting over that Vietnam was a mistake about nation-building and about the domino effect and all the rest but in the context of the Cold War you can sort of understand that what makes the made the Iraq war so interesting was the clarity of the failure of intelligence the man who must be dreading today's argument about serious Colin Powell because people are going to go back and run the guts go to the videotape and we're gonna see him presenting in complete sincerity bad information to the United Nations what is what was the mistake or was it a series that just kept getting worse the the intelligence was wrong that the u.s. acted on but then the war plan I get well actually I guess the war plan was pretty successful I mean we were able to invade and take you know get the bag that very quickly but then it's clear there was no operational plan after that and then we just compiled more and more errors both in Afghanistan well the head of our military establishment the time Don Rumsfeld didn't well stay there he said I want to get rid of Saddam Hussein hand the keys over to the Iraqi people and leave well the Iraqi people barely exist as a people turns out there are lots of different Iraqis they don't like each other very much regime should be understood the way Aristotle did regime is an entire culture of politics and assumptions and values and mores and customs and dispositions once you understand regime that way you begin to realize that regime change is preposterous just as nation-building as preposterous makes no more sense to talk about nation-building notice I've got orchid building orchids or organic things so our nation's actually that's how we got in trouble with with Iraq we thought we'd go in and change the folks behind the desk and you would effectively change Iraq when the Japanese government went to Admiral Yamamoto and said could you take stealthily a fleet across the North Pacific and deliver a devastating attack on the American fleet in Hawaii Yamamoto supposedly city I can do that and I will run wild in the Pacific for six months maybe a year but then what that's the question people forget desc Yamamoto had lived in the United States he loved the United States he'd been military attache in Washington been to Harvard amazingly he still loved the United States and he knew that what they would accomplish with pearl harbors to enrage a continental superpower it was not going to end well and it didn't when we talked about regime change in Iraq we could say oh yeah all Iraq needs are three people they needed George Washington a unifying figure above politics they need a James Madison a genius at the architecture of getting factions to live together they need an Alexander Hamilton who understands the political economy of a large society and oh by the way yes they need the political culture from which such people sprang it's that part that we neglected we undertook regime change in our country and we did it in the American South we started at Appomattox in April 1865 and reconstruction had a long elapse with Jim Crow and with litigation demonstrations all the rest we really affected regime change as Aristotle would understand it by the late 70s what you say a hundred and ten years I was gonna say you're just saying that it's too soon to issue a verdict on Iraq no it's not no because the pressure won't be kept on them I mean now at the same time I mean and and the case in foreign policy maybe it's easier to see the idea that you can just overnight rip up one you know take out one society or one culture and put a new one in that also makes sense in an American context and yet at the same time you have increasingly kind words for the what used to be derided by conservatives as judicial activism why does it make sense for the Supreme Court to or judges at various levels to really kind of step in and say no this is the way we're going to do it and to invalidate legislative decision first of all someone has to say what the Constitution means and and the final arbiter everyone is responsible for deciding presidents are behaving properly when they veto legislation on constitutional grounds so everyone's involved in this and it used to be until fairly recently in American history as about the 60s the the threshold question before Congress acted was do we have the power to act in this area with this kind of measure James Q Wilson the greatest social scientists of his generation said that the crucial moment may have been 1965 and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act is when they passed that you the legitimacy barrier had completely fallen there was no such thing in what way there was no said no subject that it was not legitimate for the federal government to legislate about just gone at that point I when I was at Princeton and graduate school 64 through 67 I was one of the earlier recipients of federal aid for graduate students you know it was called National Defense Education Act the interstate highway system was a National Defense highway system now they may have been stretching things the point is that was a healthy reflex there they said that we're attaching what we're doing to an enumerated power the Constitution now why should judges beyond that if anyone is going to vivify the theory that we have a government of limited delegated and enumerated powers it will be the judges because there's no incentive for the legislature to restrain itself but beyond that the threshold question is this does America exist to preserve freedom or to implement majority rules and is this the I mean I assume that that's the theme of your dissertation actually correct it we'll get to that just a second the most important word in the Declaration of Independence is secure all men are created equal endowed by their creator certain animal rights to protect those rights or that governments are instituted among men to secure those rights not to give us our rights the rights pre-exists government and governments exist to secure that which exists without their help governments are important to secure them but not as Fountains of rights and that means that democracy and majority rule is valid because and to the extent that it protects freedom but then we you know that's where the argument begins right because for instance you have written recently in this year critical of gay marriage or what we would call marriage equality if government exists to secure certain rights and it should be treating people as individuals why wouldn't that clearly indicate that two men or two women should be allowed to marry with all the privileges that the state secures well I it's this argument at this point is to be highly unsatisfactory because we're arguing about the name I mean even people who say we want to deny that word marriage to this or all for civil unions with the full panoply of social rights and entitlements so it's it's frankly it's not an argument that interests me very much other than to say that it's helped some of our liberal friends rediscover federalism we now have blue state federalism people saying huh that's a good idea marijuana but let Colorado decide and marriage good Californians see what happens and so it's been an educational moment for our friends marijuana federalism you wrote a couple of really interesting columns I think last year talking about your own kind of rethinking of where our drug laws are where incarceration the kind of problem of over incarceration in this country right now where are you right now when it comes to you know should people be arrested for smoking pot or selling it well my first point is I want a couple states - I want various states to try various regimes let's see what happens I mean one in eight Americans lives in California that's a big laboratory and let's see what happens out there and Colorado is going through all kinds of difficult yeah unanticipated questions arise workplace safety what about driving when you're using a controlled but legal substance all the rest let's figure it out by having little experiments to the extent that our drug laws are driving mass incarceration which is a national scandal and a huge national waste of money and a huge assault on the social fabric because everyone who goes to jail almost everyone who goes just coming out coming home back to the neighborhood and it's not coming home improved by the experience to that extent to the extent that the drug laws are tangled up in all the rest they need a radical rethinking yet for me the most interesting text that you've written in the past several years was the preface that you you gave to a new Princeton University edition of get Barry Goldwater's conscience of a conservative one of the things you talked about in that which i think is apropos of the current moment and conservative thought is that you said in the early 1950s when the conservative movement started getting cooking that it was remarkably bookish and there you know there were people like TS Eliot strains like that Russell Kirk and you said that you know that these were strains that were flavored by religion nostalgia and resistance to the permanent revolution of conditions in a capitalist market society and you said that it had Barry Goldwater been a reading man he would have he would have found these forms of conservative unintelligible even repellent is Barry Goldwater the model for where what you are now calling conservativism I want more Goldwater ISM in the mix what are the benefits or what you know what are the the strong suits of Goldwater that are that are missing in today well it's the basic skepticism about state action it is it's the Southwest open horizon multicultural society you know he's a great photographer Barry and he loved photographing Native Americans and he lived among people of Hispanic origin who've been there a lot longer than the Goldwater said men goldwater's came from Poland I think and when they got to the southwest they were newcomers so he had like this kind of live and let live open spaces a lot of sunlight just wonderful spirit in the southwest that I happen to love I want more of the Goldwater impulse and there's also an optimism friendliness and optimism because it was actually kind of stunning when you said earlier that you participate in technological innovation or you at least recognize it what you know at what point does the does that take over in terms of you know why are we still talking about government because as long as we can go to on the internet and get whatever song we want are we wasting our time by even focusing on government no because the government can be an impediment to this we want the government to get out of the way and we want the government to do certain kinds of research that because of the time horizons on the research the private sector is not going to do Bell Labs doesn't do it anymore used to may be good it may be true but they're not you're gonna you're in favor of for instance what you call basic scientific yes I would double the NIH is about you know I'd spend more on certain things but I've visited Goldwater at his home several times he built this home on a little bluff overlooking the valley where Phoenix is and he said he built a home where he used to sleep at night he'd ride his horse up and sleep at night in this little spot where house was built at that time he said there are a hundred thousand people in the valley now we're approaching four million now this is a man who had to be comfortable with change and dynamism as you know I'm sure the greatest him to capitalism ever written is in the Communist Manifesto Karl Marx says everything disappears into thin air and there is that that's European conservatives have never come to terms of that American conservatives have we kind of like that and yet the goldwater tendency has never really been the dominant one or the most successful one in the Republican Party what's what's the opposite of Goldwater ISM now who embodies that and I don't know I don't think you some people said well there's the establishment I don't think there is a Republican establishment the Republican establishment death can be dated for the front of it in 1966 from the New York Herald Tribune died there was a time when they had their newspaper that was the Republican establishment newspaper the Republican establishment Bank with Chase Manhattan you had Nelson and David Rockefeller they could get to the Goldwater convention in San Francisco in 64 and conger arrival nominee and Bill Scranton out of thin air they were they were four there no Republican establishment anymore which is good but there are countervailing forces and figures who don't have that kind of live and let live southwestern ethos who don't anymore have that kind of skepticism of government what happened or why why did that did those values become ascendant in conservatism well the the conservatives who are in elective office are looking over their shoulder had a deeply conflicted electorate and again it's the cognitive dissonance the American people rhetorically are Jeffersonians operationally they're hamiltonians and squaring that circle is a difficult challenge for political operatives that Romney tried to square the circle by saying you know I'm a good Republican and I'm never going to tell you anything that I'm going to cut ever because I don't want to scare you and people found him inauthentic what what did you see as him is sort of the as a face of conservatism well I he was he's not the face of conservatism he's a he's a northeastern big business creative capitalist who wanted to govern for a while honorable man intelligent man a man of great accomplishments tremendous personal decency but he wasn't a political man in the sense that he had an idea that America has serious problems that ought to be addressed in 2016 who-who D where do you see the choice in the in the country being between and not necessarily Republican and Democrat but you know what what is the choice that we have to make a decision about there that is going to actually allow us to start addressing the operational cognitive dissonance in the American population I think the American people feel today that the system isn't working for them and I think they're largely right I think what they have not internalized is that big government is invariably primarily a servant of the strong of the organized the educated the affluent the lawyered up that's why Washington is what it is today and that's why we get Medicaid prescription drugs for exactly this is the old law of concentrated benefits and dispersed costs and it's a kind of constant shell game two-thirds of the federal budget today is transfer payments so transfer payments are twice as big as everything else the Marine Corps the National Parks the FBI everything so everyone's on the take as it were and the challenge for conservatives and the challenge particularly for libertarian flavored conservatism is to maneuver within the public's complete conflicted desires you talk about 2016 my first rule is I want a governor I don't want any more senators they've never run anything they don't they really believe in the magic of words Scott Walker Kasich Mike Pence Bobby Jindal people have actually had to run things and had people clamorous people in their outer office the American people are now living with and more comfortable than they want to admit a big state and we're not going back we're just not I'd like to go back to it Robert Jay knock wanted but we're not going what our but I mean you by the same token you and you've talked about kind of economic determinism or the idea that people think that the way things are going now is the only way they can go and in fact in various periods in American history that just radically changes you know Medicare at this point if you know if you throw in Social Security as well I mean we're on Oh deaths we're in a death spiral are there ways to pull out of that that are not going to be so disruptive as to cause even more social upheaval President Obama says to Paul Ryan Paul Ryan would end Medicare as we know it arithmetic will end Medicare as we know it this is not a surprise and it's not optional it's gonna end questions then what do we do then what Yamamoto's quest again so Republicans have to be ready as the crisis nears I don't want to sound like this conservative Marxism the internal contributions become in support you have a I mean in the Goldwater preface you talk a lot about a bit kind of dialectic yeah and I mean do you see in a sense then I mean and this might bring it back to the concept of a libertarian moment that what we're seeing now is the dialectic shifting away from a kind of expanse of government across all ideologies to to its opposite right in part because when I come back to the technological part people are conditioned by their daily experience going to Starbucks going on the Internet to the sense of empowerment and the idea that some people here in Washington are gonna fix 18% of the economy that's the health care system by writing rules and regulations just strikes young people as weird just doesn't make any sense and that's a sea change can we perhaps wrap things up by telling us how Everett Dirksen's untimely death changed george will's life well I was teaching at the University of Toronto I was two years out of Princeton graduate school and in the fall of 1969 Everett Dirksen died in the great state of Illinois where I am from and Dirksen had been the leader of the Republicans in the Senate and so they had to vote and shuffled leadership and a Colorado Republican Gordon a lot of whom I'd never heard became third ranking Republican chairman of the policy committee he said to one of his staff I would like to hire a Republican academic to write for me it was 1969 there were no public and academics except me and I was in Canada through serendipity a guy at the University of Denver had been in graduate school at Princeton with me said to Gordon Allen I know a guy is really weird conservative and so they got me down here so if if Dirksen had lived a few years longer I would have got tenure and teaching somewhere do you regret moving back down into the United States and I wasn't alone no no no hopeless nationalist and would want to live here and I've had a wonderful time in Washington I think I'll let the shorts anomalous over theater life she said I've had a wonderful life I just wish I'd realized it at the time well I'm having a wonderful time in Washington I realize it every day because they in part I know that my current happiness to Barack Obama who is so aggressively progressive so thoroughly concentrates all the American progressive tradition and the academic culture that goes with it that he's really put the spring in my step just in opposition you had a great line earlier this year I think it was that the modern liberalism the whole point of it is to make people feel good about themselves which which struck me as being kind of true is do you feel like that's kind of the epitome of Obama ISM and the way that politics have been waged and in fact the way the 2012 election was sort of actually fought over as opposed to the actual issues yeah we now have a lot of data they say it's anecdotal one answered the plural of anecdote is data about affirmative action we know it's really not helping people through lis hurting a lot of people the way we're administering it doesn't matter to the advocates of affirmative action because the point of affirmative action is to make them feel good it's to make these we make the administrators of a make a university make elite universities feel virtuous and the fact that well there's abundant evidence that for example the way the major law schools the elite law schools in California are administering affirmative action reducing the number of african-american lawyers in California don't care because that's not what this is about it's about feeling good it even seeps over into foreign policy I mean the reason we went to worry in or at least over Libya but Mays feel good it was a it was a moral gesture with high explosives that and then we packed up and went home except for the people we left in Benghazi in in terms of kind of racial questions or racial dynamics in America you recently are you're fond of actually pointing out how when Daniel Moynihan wrote the Moynihan report what was the the level of illegitimate 23.7% right and now it's it's tougher to for black Americans here's a question for you in related to policy you know it it's also much higher among the white white births all births it doesn't seem like anything it's ever gonna go back down you know to what it was in the sixties I was considered well then what how do you affect that and I this might be a question it's a craft insult that's a good question because we don't know what caused this we've seen family disintegration in war famine pestilence this happened in peacetime high in prosperity we've seen this sea change of mores I don't know what caused it and until you know what caused it's hard to know how you address it but what we're seeing and what charles murray addresses in his book coming apart is a bifurcate dangerous bifurcation of american society we're in sort of traditional bourgeois morality norms of marriage and family obtained among the high achievers and because the family is the primary transmitter of social capital they will continue to reproduce themselves whereas down lower these norms among the people who most need the accumulated so capital of a family represents our doing the most damage to the family and i think charles murray says that he wishes that the upper classes those who said the cultural tone of the country would preach what they practice but i I don't I I think there are corrective mechanisms in society you know there was a great problem in 18th century London when the surplus of grain and the in the Western world combined with the new art of distilling in a producer gin and I produced the London of hogarth terrible ravages social costs of alcohol well they did the government research didn't licensing laws closed the pubs a bit I didn't what changed it what changed it was John Wesley John Wesley gave 30,000 speak sermons and he converted the women of Agnon and the women brought the men to heal and England healed and pretty soon you had the Victorian era things were different so things can change but it's not it's largely cultural ferment cultural dry I don't again getting into marks in language here but politics can be an epic phenomenon when hopes that it is because otherwise we're totally screwed well it's it's it's epic phenomenal often but not always we talked a lot about things that are kind of trending in a bad direction are you optimistic still despite everything yeah I think so because the American premises are quite correct and the American capacity for renewal is real we live in a city here in Washington that was segregated 40 years ago look at the change in this country breathtaking take just shocking behavior that was normal the routine daily insulting of America african-americans by white Americans now completely unacceptable that's astonishing improvement in laws here I have to say to my libertarian friends laws mattered here I said we're doing Goldwater is the one who said you know that you can't you can change the laws but you can't make me love my neighbor but in fact he's probably wrong about that that's right and and - it's the answer was a you'd be surprised and B even if you can't love him you can sit at the lunch counter with them and say pass the sugar and you do that enough things change and they did so that the plasticity of America is still wonderful you know you look at all the battle dick torian's in California high school named Rodriguez and no Yin it's it's the premises are right and a final word about the capacity for renewal we have a wonderfully retrospective cast to our politics we always look back to the basic documents the Declaration and the Constitution the best most renewing thing that's happened in America in the last four or five years called the tea party it's named after something that happened in 1773 for pete's sake I mean this it's a very healthy the way we go through life with a crick in our neck from looking back at our origins which are in a doctrine of limited delegated and enumerated powers for the government that's why I'm confident and I think we will leave it there thank you so much for talking at length with us George well talking with Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie for reason TV thanks very much

Channel: ReasonTV

Views: 99,870

Rating: 4.8251929 out of 5

Keywords: reason, reason.com, reason.org, reason.tv, reason tv, libertarian, Barack Obama (US President), Libertarianism (School Of Thought), syria, nick gillespie, george will, matt welch, reason magazine, goldwater, obama

Id: POphmn25gVs

Length: 60min 11sec (3611 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 13 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/scribble73]

Libertarians have run the governmet for twenty years. Their policies have failed overseas; failed domestically and failed economically. ... so now he wants to be a Libertarian?

Am I supposed to take this guy seriously? Has he ever put together a political argument that was not mendacious? Has he ever been correct about anything beyond predicting Republican election victories?