George Will's Uphill Battle Against Trump’s GOP and the Democratic Socialist Left

in 2016 after then House Speaker Paul Ryan endorsed Donald Trump for president George will the most decorated conservative newspaper columnist in America officially left the Republican Party he's been a thorn in Trump's side ever since he doesn't understand the vocabulary of American government he doesn't understand the conversations that are going on around him it's like a twelve-year-old in a room with people who specialized in quantum mechanics he just is lost at all times but even while bemoaning what he calls our authoritarian moment will has not abandoned conservatism to the contrary in his career punctuating new book the conservative sensibility will makes the forceful argument that classical liberalism based on natural rights and the political philosophy of James Madison is the correct path forward not just for the GOP but for a country that for too long has tilted toward Woodrow Wilson's progressive super presidential vision of government we caught up with will the week his book came out so George will thank you for joining us and congratulations on a terrific and I think consequential book thank you in our year 2019 so you've been I think you've been writing this thing for a long time now I seem to recall nearly 10 years ago you're referring to this you might've made a mordant joke about it being a eulogy anywhere situate this if you can within the context of your own career no app century in Washington writing about this stuff but also why in 2019 we need to be talking about the kind of you know of the pitched battle between James Madison and Woodrow Wilson well those two Princetonian czar the polar opposites in a way of our political argument Madison said first we believe in natural rights which is to say first come rights then comes government government is instituted and the most important word in the Declaration to secure our rights not to give us our rights but to protect them and inheriting inheritable link lumen of government in the very definition of it this was fine until Woodrow Wilson came along and became the first president to criticize the American Founding which he didn't do periphery he did root and branch he said the medicines constitutional architecture with its Newtonian equilibrium between the branches interested in us combating interest in this was fine he said when there were four million of us and 80 percent of us lived within 20 miles of Atlantic Tidewater but now he said we are a great nation united by steel rails and copper wires and most important we have reached a point of enlightenment that we don't need to worry about factions anymore because as a broad consensus furthermore Wilson came along when science was in the air Marconi Ford Edison of the Wright brothers and the idea of applying science to society as well as to the hard sciences cut their imagination furthermore to get an advanced degree in the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century you had to go to Germany to get it and there were lots of people did and they fell in love with the German state the big alien idea of a disinterested bureaucracy would be a long time before public choice Theory came along and said ah it's not as interested it's a faction itself government is its own faction and interest group but all this came together and when when Woodrow Wilson said we'd meet an or need a more nimble government he used that phrase when the can act with dispatch and force of a sort that is simply impossible under medicines architecture it flowed from that that we had if presidents or government that Congress should be Marburg marginalized we didn't realize how energetically it would marginalize itself reversing Madison's prediction that in a democratic society all power is sucked into the legislative vortex actually the legislature expels powers so it can get on with the to business of life which is to a avoid responsibility by allowing the essentially legislating to be done by administrative agencies and be to get reelected so that's where we are we have a rampant presidency we have a hollowed out supine boneless Congress and no one's happy it strikes me in reading some of the excesses of the Progressive Era right Teddy Roosevelt you also sort of single out early on and and we have no trouble in figuring out oh you know what prohibition of alcohol was a disasters a terrible idea or the eugenics that a lot of progressives embrace including both Roosevelt and Wilson in their own ways that was just a terrible aberration and some other things but the overall critique of the kind of scientism the bureaucracy didn't stick in a similar way it's as if you could just jettison the nasty parts without a thoroughgoing was there a failure of identifying this or have we just sort of forgotten that there were critiques of that at the time and they just lost the argument we forgot historical amnesia is de Tocqueville said a systemic problem of democracies for we're looking at all times and we have forgotten it and we've as you say we're going to keep the good parts of progressivism but the good parts of progressivism they're a family resemblance to the bad parts which is kind of overbearing us in Hayek's terms a misapplication of the confidence and the hubris if you will of the hard sciences when applied to the complexities of a society of spontaneous order in his wonderful Nobel lecture Hayek makes this point and he makes the call for epistemic humility epistemology being the branch of philosophy that tells us how we know things and he says most of us can know very little about what's around us every day we get more ignorant relative to what there is to know but markets which are nothing but mechanisms for generating and aggregating information make us smarter if we will listen to them the problem is there's been a constant desire not to listen to market for lots of reasons you mention Hayek here the book is filled with people who I would describe as libertarian heroes Milton Friedman's Virginia postural there's Deirdre McCloskey there's Ilya somin there's Randy Barnett there's the Institute for justice I'm it's dedicated to Barry Goldwater and the book is called the conservative Sensibility why is it called a conservative sensibility because conservatism rightly understood in America is the legacy of classic liberalism liberals long since turned on their own tradition of limited government resistance to Authority and conservatives took that over Barry Goldwater I guess my first presidential vote for Barry Goldwater he lost 44 states but I've always said he actually won it just took 16 years to count the votes Reagan came in but Barry Goldwater came from a new part of America in the southwest there's no there was nothing out there when he was born when he built his house on a little hill where as a young man he used to ride his horse and sleep under the sky there were a hundred thousand people in the valley of the Sun then to know them about four million it's a place without a past so he gave us a kind of libertarian mounted leave-me-alone kind of western conservatism which is in direct conflict in 2019 with the European import it's one of the grim paradoxes of our current moment the people who say their purpose is to make America great again want to do that by importing European conservatism blood soil thrown an altar ethnicity language all that stuff that gives a particular identity which they want to preserve European conservatism was about defending hierarchies and established institutions in order American conservatism is reconciling people to a constant churning to the radical openness of a society of spontaneous order is great you know dynamism in Virginia pastels termini think use it and a lot another buddy she said the most wonderful thing I think it's it's in the book I know it is she said the Bible reduced to one sentence is God created man and woman and lost control of things now the conservative sensibility says good we don't want control that's the whole point the anti conservative Sensibility says oh it's dangerous it's tiring it's worrisome and it's this anti conservative hostility to the current constant churning of a free society that I am afraid is about to produce what I'll call the big flinch people saying freedom was alright once it's just too stressful it's worrying and it and along comes Walmart and destroys our lovely little hardware store all of this that's what protectionism is today is an attempt to say enough we've had it we're gonna hunker down the problem is the American people whether they know it or not and they don't have already made a choice when they decided to have an entitlement state Medicare Medicaid and all the rest they decided that were they're gonna make these enormous promises to themselves enormous calls on the future productivity of the country they better attend to the future productivity so they are wedded to economic dynamism whether they know it or not as you sort of referenced the kind of upper hand right now since we have an overly presidential system whatever the president is is kind of the definition the modern definition of what conservatism ism or progressivism or however you might put it is and right now classical liberalism is dirty word means in the last 10 days in in the conservative commentariat of people just scratching each other's eyeballs out over the difference between a kind of catholic integral integral ism and classical liberalism i haven't seen the word that term used as much in the past ten days and i have since the last time libertarian tried to not describe themselves as libertarians and using classical liberalism itself so are you in in a sense trying to make the Reagan argument in 1976 he said to Reason magazine of all places that the heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism are you are you trying to say that yes you're about to lose this concept and if you don't watch out you're gonna drive out those people from what should have been in is a noble tradition classical liberalism was born and resistance to established churches entrenched hierarchies all of that and it is it defines itself in reaction against potentially and often actually oppressive institutions so there is that Liberty Jean if you will it's in the genome of American conservatism and yet it's it's on the run as as we speak and and being rapidly forgot I mean here's a critique from the people who are railing against classical liberalism in some sense rail against you in particular is that we're in a fight this is a flight 93 election yeah I feel like that metaphor I despise it well let's have an interjection of why do you despise that metaphor I did too but I'm curious Teri's because we bandy promiscuously the idea of a crisis we're not in a crisis now things are messy now I get that but we've had one constitutional crisis in this country and it was April 1861 when the institutions could not handle the forces loose and we had four years of saturation of blood and we got over it Watergate wasn't a crisis Watergate was misbehavior and we tidied it up what is the crisis on these people that we have a a conservative majority on the Supreme Court and it's a rather young about to be there what is the crisis I just don't get the hysteria built into the language well I mean part of what your book does talk about is kind of lead integration of the family yes there are indices that are unhappy right now and also that our resistance to easy kind of solutions or prescriptions of how we of how we get there is is there something in the because I I show the same thing you know it's not a crisis look at the last thirty years have been the most unprecedented ly prosperous time in American or in the world history in ways that language is not even we don't have enough language to talk about how wonderful that is but is there something in that triumphalism that has missed a hole at the center of the enterprise and that hole is something that you see nationalists not just in this country but around the world are eager to fill up well they're two very different things one is some people have been casualties of the very process that has enriched the majority and the casualties are resentful which is understandable and they should be helped as much as possible granted on the other hand there's another critique of classic liberalism that is profoundly dangerous and it is that it doesn't give me meaning and life it's a politics doesn't intoxicate me it doesn't fill me with a sense of worth and identity and mission good we've had quite enough of political movements that we're going to deliver all of those things new Soviet man new Aryan man does that any other thing politics shouldn't be that important part of what is interesting in the middle section of your book is that you talk a least a little bit about your statecraft a soulcraft book from 30 years ago or so and refute part of it you say I got something wrong and and I think part of and correct me my characterization air but that you underestimated the way in which the architecture of the Constitution was in itself of soulcraft that it created a sort of a template for the creation kind of a virtuous society or society that could become self-governing and that you underestimated that talk about that but also maybe in the context of this which is your argument you're making a very robust Madisonian arguments and against progressives a progressive claim is that this is old-fashioned stuff it's out of date isn't on some level the fact that you need to make this argument in fact you need to make this argument to Republicans may be a sign that the progressive critique might be onto something like it's the architecture didn't work like some of the planks have been pulled out of the ship and it's it's just not making as much sense anymore my book is among other things that call a summons to intelligent pessimism not fatalism nothing's inevitable but problems are probable there's so many ways things can go wrong a free society a democratic society is not the default option of the human race it takes construction it's a famous paradox that laissez-faire is a government program it needs courts and needs contracts it needs protection against fraud adjudication arbitration all the rest complex network to produce freedom I got that but on the off chance that some of your viewers have not recently reread state craft or so craft which is read by dozens that's when I came out let me refer some 1981 I give them Godkin lectures at Harvard and they became a book called state craft as Soulcraft and the subtitle is important what government does not what government should do but but it cannot help but do and my thesis was that by its structure of laws by the economic system it chooses to create by lots of things it changes sets out to change the soul of America the soul of the citizens the argument between the anti-federalists and the Federalists wasn't it was ostensibly about government it was about government it was about what kind of people were gonna be what kind of Americans and we're going to be Jefferson really wanted a sort of stable self-perpetuating rural yeoman Murray forever that would produce people rather like Thomas Jefferson Hammond said none on your life I want Restless entrepreneurial upwardly mobile constantly churning people rather like Alexander Hamilton well fair enough little special pleading to hurt but they were arguing about the kind of people we were and and what I got wrong in statecraft of Soulcraft as I did not realize the extent to which the system we had in terms of government which shaped the kind of people we are and most important what I missed was the extent to which capitalism itself is Soulcraft it's a wonderful passage and de Tocqueville is democracy in America he's travelling down in the 1830s the Ohio River on his left his slave holding Kentucky torpid no energy no progress no sound of enterprise on his right is Ohio fast lane cracked lane with energy people producing getting wealthy and all the rest thing there you had it a certain kind of capitalism doesn't just make us better off it makes us better it enforces certain virtues thrift industriousness deferral of gratification individual aspiration on flourishing that's Soulcraft you have a pretty withering chapter in there about foreign policy the series of monsters that we've gone insurgent destroying and also i think in a pretty interesting way kind of talking about the i sort of an attempted application of the same natural rights philosophy that you were defending in the book to the world we're going we're going to since since iraq people have the same aspirations and natural rights we do we're going to make that happen at that point of a gun what do people get wrong in applying this thing here there's a inherent tension and american foreign policy that will never be and should never be gone in my judgment we are a Creole nation we're a nation dedicated to a proposition as Lincoln said dedicating the cemetery we are a nation made as Margaret Thatcher said by philosophy unlike European nations as she said are made by history and our philosophy is that to all Minds unclouded by superstition that's what self-evident means the self-evident truths are that individuals are rights bearing and governments should facilitate the exercise of their rights and get out of the way now the question is is everybody ready at all times for this answer's no George Bush a borrowing a line from Ronald Reagan said it is cultural condescension to say that the Iraqis are not ready for democracy it was condescending and it was true that's more to the point I made this analogy in the book go to spring training a manager will say my team is just two players away from the World Series unfortunately there Ruth and Gehrig Iraq was just about three or four people away from perfection from being ready today and they needed a Washington a charismatic founder of a republic he needed a Madison a genius of constitutional architecture to enable factions with which Iraq was replete to live together needed a John Marshall someone who could construe a constitution Abele over the years and apply it to shifting circumstances you needed an Alexander Hamilton who understood the political economy of a nation and you needed the social soil of the Atlantic coast of the United States and us in the 18th century from which people like that emerged in something like profusion so the tension in our policy is we're on the side of the world's embrace of our Creed because we think it is self-evidently true but not tomorrow not everywhere now and that requires prudence that's what I mean prudence is the fundamental political virtue because it means applying principles to messy circumstances that's the one one person who in modern politics who I would say on some level agrees with the foreign policy like litany of mistakes that you spell out there Vietnam Iraq other kind of nation building exercises and you might bristle at this is Donald Trump comparatively speaking compared to a lot of politicians out there he ran against Iraq and said this is a bad idea yeah I just saw him I think this morning in England or last night talking about his own avoidance of Vietnam saying I am I never I was never a fan of that war which is a super crude thing for an American president to say also a correct judgment at least in my points of view um is there an argument that Trump is a use that use the metaphor of love like a breaking up the crust around a cake a few times in the book is Trump could he be that in in that forcing conversations about foreign policy for example that wouldn't otherwise exist you to add an another completely different topic of that you talk about judicial restraint and judicial engagement there and Chevron deference deference which is something that Neal Gorsuch a Donald Trump appointee is the leading proponent of breaking apart can Trump be this sort of cake on crusting figure a bull in a china shop getting us towards places that we've needed to go and frankly that the that the elite has in by staying within the 35-yard lines have failed to get us towards well I could say he's the stopped clock that's right twice a day but I would say several things of course it's in the courts Trump probably got elected because Scalia died that is he made the court central and won in court in two exit polls one in five voters said they voted because of the court and most of those were conservatives but he got elected because he says I promise not to exercise my judgement about judges I'm gonna outsource that to the federal society as a result he came up with judges that any Republican president would have come up with same source from the Federalist Society and of which I'm a member and other groups I think the reaction against Iraq and before that Vietnam was mature before donor club Trump came along and discovered that it was a good vehicle mm-hmm so I think we I think history hard cruel bloody history taught us long before mr. Trump appeared now I see critiques of you and your book in this moment of discussion from the Left congealing as a lot of discussion does from the left these days around the issue of race or immigration or some kind of tribalism which is to say okay mr. conservative have you not noticed that this has been in the Republican playbook forever preceding Donald Trump Mitt Romney played from an anti-immigration playbook for sure sound lost and then lost one of the uglier ideas and modern American politics was Romney's self-deportation will make people who were here illegally so miserable I want to leave unworthy aspiration is there something about the I mean this goes back to Goldwater he might have had perfectly principled ideas to oppose the Civil Rights Act and and I think did as expressed the coalition around him might not have shared his kind of highfalutin ideas about political philosophy and we're looking for an excuse to engage in racism is there something or how would you respond to the critique of that a lot of modern conservatism including to some degree of fealty towards classical liberalism and a throwback to the founders is looking the other way while a powerful class marginalizes those who are not as powerful I think the criticism was apt of a lot of people but not of conservatism okay they should go back and read Ronald Reagan's farewell address our nation needs walls but the walls should have gates and scepters that the door should be wide open to those who want to come in and be Americans we merit a stood much the same thing so there's that continuity on the Taft Goldwater Reagan strand of the Republican Party unlike the Teddy Roosevelt Thomas Dewey rockefeller wing of the party this is a simmering like a sine wave it keeps coming and going argument in the Republican Party most conservatives are equipped with the vocabulary to admire immigration because to immigrate is an inherently entrepreneurial act it is to uproot yourself take a risk take the only capital you've got which is your enterprise and come to a foreign society where you'll be linguistically challenged and culturally disoriented and prosper which they do furthermore it's another thing about which Americans have no choice sorry the puppy the workforce is aging baby boomers are retiring we very soon left 2.4 workers for every retiree on Social Security we must replenish the workforce and only immigrants can do it as our fertility rate continues to decline do you see this future and you write a lot about this the kind of entitlement math it just it can't possibly add up so my parents and relatives are all from from Portland Oregon so I remember watching Mount st. Helens blow up second or third time in July of 1980 it's pretty great but volcanoes go like this they go like this Irvin says hey look it's growing that's interesting I grows and grows and then it blows up and then Harry Truman dies on the Tualatin river but like it can be a big boom in a catastrophic event or he could be Japan the last 20-30 years you lose one decade it's a slow leakage of power and influence maybe you could say that the modern UK is in a similar way how do you look at this thing I don't see an explosion a collapse nations really don't go bankrupt I do see a sort of drift into account of entropy a kind of slowing of the American pulse as we make all kinds of adjustments to avoid all kinds of hard choices we are going to have to means test entitlement programs sooner or later we're going we have attached and the American people as a matter of entitlement to our most dynamic science which is medicine I give you all interesting figures in 1900 if we'd had national statistics which we didn't because Simon Kuznets had not lived medicine which is now 18% of our GDP would have been too small to be included in them in 1900 the American people spent twice as much money on funerals as they did on Medicine in 1937 percent of all deaths were from infectious diseases today it's 2% in 1900 only 17% of deaths were over 65 people over 65 today it's 75 percent that's an enormous social achievement it also is hugely expensive longevity is a budgeters nightmare because you live long enough you get to become eligible for the most interesting cocktail of diseases I forgot something that 40% of American Medicare patients are living with two or more chronic ailments any one of which would have killed them before the onset of modern pharmacology another great blessing but one expensive one so the American people have made another choice they have they've decided to live long and to be supported in this by a government they're gonna have to figure out ways to pay for it there you mentioned Richard Nixon earlier or the kind of crisis of Watergate that was was dealt with a lot of people don't know the intellectual history at least a little tiny wing of it in which you played a role which is you were a young National Review reporter at the time or Washington correspondent at the time 1971 there were 72 73 writing things that were not making the readers of National Review necessarily very happy in your critique of Richard Nixon at the time I want you to make the comparison not of Trump to Nixon of which that is an interesting comparison but let's show that because I think what's kind of interesting here is how Republican public opinion or conservative public opinion was with the president like strongly for a really long time until the moment that it wasn't and there's a lot of habits of mind that go with that sense of tribalism or team membership or just sort of support looking back on that time do you see things that strike you as what's happening now or actually there are a lot of conservatives who weren't really with Nixon heart and soul until it became clear he was a crook oh I'll tell you what in 1973 I leave the Senate staff in January and become a Washington bill Buckley's first Washington editor National Review and simultaneously began submitting columns to the post which was planning to start a syndication and they were gonna syndicate me and David Broder so they said here's how we can sell will we'll say two editorial page editors across the country at last someone dual support Richard Nixon yeah you think it's funny so by March Oh 73 yep I'm into this business three months and it's quite clear to me that where there's smoke there's a lot of smoke and was it a lot of smoke there's going to be a fire and it was clear to me that Nixon was guilty of at a minimum failure to superintend the excesses of his subordinates which is an impeachable offense in my judgment so 40 some years later I'm right back where I started having difficulties for the Republican president but then in those moments you get the strange new respect from the liberal media right I can do without that frankly the bill the National Review at that time as I recall this my memory may be faulty would do an analysis of their mail and they don't memo on it there was a category subscription cancellations in George will they were the same thing there's a lot and Bill Buckley to his great credit National Review then as now but then even more than now depended on the largesse of true believers many of whom supported Nixon and as I say many of them didn't really warm to him until he became embattled by people that these people and these Nixon supporters disliked more than they really liked Nixon which in fact happened in a sense under Bill Clinton as well I mean the impeachment process brought out progressives self-identified progressives really for the first time in 1998 they were they didn't like the way that he triangulated he was a third way guy he was a sister souljah moment person but it was only then because we saw all the troglodyte conservatives come after him that we will exactly have come in what do you do with that knowledge that this is how people respond to politics and and I may be a append to that of did you see that the the rise in the election of Trump but just that the trumpian moment as a bit of a wake-up call for how people in our business do our work and analyze things and synthesize things yes increasingly partly because of what are called social media and should we call anti social media we live increasingly an intellectual silos and we're increasingly subject to confirmation bias learning exactly what we want to learn from sources we pick because we only want to learn from them and it's it's dumbing down the public conversation there's no question and so what do you do with that information or it's knowing how people respond to things I'm including knowing how people responded to Richard Nixon rallying around the person because he's embattled more than adhering to an idea does does this just mean that people of principle are doomed to be a Justin Amash floating around as a despised character oh no Snyder it means there always are in society a large number of people who if they didn't have situational ethics they'd have no ethics at all and that's what they are and get over it not that many people interested in philosophic argument a large number of Americans are but a larger number of Americans art so you have to nourish those who nice the conversation about first principles and my book is in part a summons to intelligent pessimism but not fatalism and it it there's so many things that can go wrong but the grounds for optimism is that the political philosophy that I call the conservative sensibility has an enormous long and distinguished pedigree going back just in this country to after Locke to Madison and Jefferson and Hamilton and most of all Lincoln and that just doesn't go away because someone got more than 270 electoral votes just doesn't work that way in fact you see people in the throws of any hyper partisan moment which for now it's it's permanent with us whoever is basically losing an argument goes to the founders right they and throw or if they're losing an argument or waging an argument gainst the president the conservative incite and two words is nothing less nothing you try and make things last as long as possible but you also the the the that's consoling also in times like these hyper partisanship well last forever just won't people were getting exhausted they'll get burnt over and there will be better days before we let you walk to your next 37 interviews talking about this book you and I Nicholas we talked I believe in 2016 early 2016 I in which you observe that we're kind of living not through a libertarian moment but an authoritarian moments the way that you put it and we see some of this mapping out again not just in the United States the recent European Parliament elections Greens nationalists and the little Center was just withering and and getting small do you think we're going to get out of this fever when you when you look and see a Democratic Party that is much more interested in democratic socialism and expanding the Supreme Court's I think half the field wants to do now these days just a series of ideas that seem a lot more untethered towards norms here after the norm shattering president on these sort of a populist right is this just a bracketed era that we need to survive what do you see that in the near future as far as that well as the near future right now we're seeing in the Democratic field of candidates and attempt to define a left-wing trumpery that is to be just as silly as possible all these things that they know are not going to happen I'm not going to abolish the Electoral College I'm not going to take away private health since you're just not going to do it but because of the dynamics of their nominating process they feel they have to do this now they can in the process repeat their amazing achievement of 2016 which was electing Donald Trump he could not have done it without the Democratic Party and they have figured out how to do it again whether or not they're going to plunge off that cliff lemming like I don't know you quit if I'm not mistaken the Republican Party in 2016 or in 2015 2016 June 3rd the day after Paul Ryan endorsed Trump I said that's it the only Republican has actually read the constitution of Liberty because endorse Trump that's it I'm out of here and you've written favorably about bill weld who's competing against y'all Trump in this primary election so are you backing him do you envision coming back to the Republican Party is it all Libertarian Party for you from now on I find being a free agent exhilarating people say oh gee that must have been wrenching leaving the Republican mind dad daddy would tied up with a Republican Party it's a utilitarian device and when it quits being useful I quit it's it's not it's not a wrenching psychological spiritual moment politics isn't about spiritual things so no I don't find to go back to the Republican Party you know I like it out here in the cold very good well George well thank you so much conservative Sensibility it's the most impactful libertarian book of the year he would despite not having it in the India in the title thank you very much for joining with you

Channel: ReasonTV

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Keywords: libertarian, Reason magazine, reason.com, reason.tv, reasontv, Conservatism, Classical liberalism, Election 2016, Authoritarianism, Donald Trump

Id: qZ9JV-hmAzA

Length: 41min 4sec (2464 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 14 2019