Keynote Conversation featuring George F. Will (HD)

[Music] ladies and gentlemen welcome back for our keynote conversation with George Will about the future of Madisonian democracy my friends you know how enthusiastic I am about the conversations we have here at the National Constitution Center but there are a few that I have been anticipating as eagerly as the one we are about to be privileged to hear George Will is one of America's leading public intellectuals he's one of the great constitutionalists among public commentators who without fear or favor defends constitutional values regardless of their partisan implications and he the keynote speech last year on freedom day when we launched our Madisonian Commission for all asking what Madison would think of our current Congress presidency courts and media and how can we resurrect Madisonian values of public reason and thoughtful deliberation today so that's what we're gonna talk to George will about and I just can't wait for the conversation please join me in welcoming the great George F will welcome back to the National Constitution Center it is such an honor to have you here I'll just jump in you've listened to this excellent discussion after what you've heard should we repeal the 17th amendment or not well yes but but it wouldn't cure very much it was a it was a bad idea to repeal it it was as it was it's suggested that the point of republican government is small are that the people do not decide issues they decide who shall decide the issues and I think that attaches the Senators more closely to state interests with buttress federalism somewhat but a I am a fountain of lost causes and I and I know fine what I see one so this is not good this is not going to happen and besides if you really want to know where federalism died first ahead hasn't died it may be in hospice care and it's a pity it's a bit of meemic but it's not dead the 17th amendment was a kind of small tombstone over traditional federalism what really did federalism and was the 16th amendment because the income tax given the federal government this enormous mechanism for siphoning up national resources they had exceed the scenes of federal supremacy the federal government supremacy in a way that the 17th amendment hardly met it at all which of course if we're going to blame the 16th amendment we also we're back to demon rum and prohibition on all that because one of the reasons we had to have the 17th and the 16th amendment was to find an alternative taxation for alcohol taxes which were terribly important to the federal government and if we were going to ban demon rum we had to find an old the 16th amendment was also passed because the Supreme Court in the Pollak case struck down the income tax as something that had to be apportioned among the states our mutual hero William Howard Taft originally opposed Pollock and said it was wrong because Alexander Hamilton said the only taxes that had to be a portion were head taxes yes so was the court wrong and Pollock should have held the income tax and let that have sold us some problems I have strong feelings about so many things but not about the problem case ok all right well you do have strong feelings about the Progressive Era and the 16th and 17th amendment were both products of progressivism along with instruments like the popular initiative and popular recall of judicial decisions tell us about why you think the Progressive Era represented such a threat to the Madisonian ideal well it's I think you can really understand the American political thought as an argument between Madison and Woodrow Wilson to Princetonian I have said in before and still will say that oh I'm sorry I owe house I will speak with more vigor I'm a product of the Princeton graduate school and I've often said the most important decision made in America in the twentieth century or arguably anywhere in the 20th century was the location of the Princeton graduate school because Woodrow Wilson and the president the university wanted it down in the main campus his nemesis Dean Andrew Fleming West wanted to where it now is upon a hill adjacent to the campus Woodrow Wilson had one of his characteristics snips resigned went into politics and ruined the 20th century I I simplify somewhat exaggerated a bit but the argument between the Madisonians begins with the Madisonians are the defenders of the net your rights doctrine of the founders the most important word in the Declaration of Independence is the word secure all men are created equal endowed by the creator with certain inalienable rights and governments are instituted to secure those rights on to give us our rights first come rights then from government dregg's rights pre-exists government in that conception inherently limits government the progressives came along and said Woodrow Wilson said frankly don't read the first two paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence its fourth of July stuff it's it's retrograde and it leads to really bad things like the separation of powers which produces gridlock is one of the earlier panelists said the founders didn't come to Philadelphia to devise an efficient government the idea would have horrified them they wanted a safe government once strong enough to protect but not too strong to threaten our liberties so to bed em they fulfilled the government with locking mechanisms three branches the government's two branches of the legislative branch House and Senate with different electoral rhythms and constituencies vetoes veto override super majorities all kinds of ways to slow the beast down and in slowing and let's stop it but to slow it down to give time for opinion to moderate and the time do its work and I've read an awful lot of stuff about Madison the best single book on Madison by Greg Weiner of Assumption College has the Warren wonderful title medicines metronome because his point was to get a kind of rhythm that gave a kind of decorous pace to democracy so that democracy might be somewhat safe defenders of the 17th amendment say well we had to correct the founders jaundiced view of democracy and what they mean is the founders were constantly talking about the problems of democracy see what and therefore people say they were basically anti Democrats no the founders that talked about the problems of democracy explicitly committed they were exclusively interested in democracy they were considering no other form of government didn't talk about the defects of monarchy because that wasn't on the table they were determined to have democracy work I must endorse George's plug for Gregory weiners book Madison's metronome as George says wieners show so powerfully that for Madison the central question is slowing down deliberation because temporary and hasty majorities are ruled by passion that can dissipate and as long as there's time enough to deliberate then reason can prevail over time so George we now have to identify you've talked about the Progressive Era as having undermined the cooling mechanisms that the founders put into place to slow things down what are other important structural and technological changes in the 20th century that have undermined those cooling mechanisms and promoted passion over reason I was begin with the party system which was just now described did parties play a moderate slowing influence and has their decline led to more passion they do because parties which of course the founders did not anticipate and did not want when the Constitution was ratified in 1789 ten years later we had them and so that prescient though they were they missed an enormous thing that was coming at them and that you couldn't really organize a Continental Republic but the Continental Ben but what they call their Congress the Continental Congress they knew where they were going California sooner or later no I I'm fiercely opposed to almost all campaign regulations I think all campaign finance regulations are unconstitutional because almost all money in politics is used to disseminate speech to a large country and therefore campaign finance laws regulating the quantity of money regulates necessarily the quantity content and timing of political speech and all campaign finance laws past present and future have one thing in common they're all written by incumbent legislators and they will all be written to favor incumbency even if one accepts your argument that mccain-feingold harmed the parties by restricting the money that was available to them what about the counter-argument that citizens united made things worse by exacerbating the power of rich donors to whom the candidates have to be it didn't it was prior campaign finance reform that drove money into pacs and out of the party system by limiting the amount you could give all kids citizens united said was and remember this was arose from a question whether or not a movie about a candidate for national office mrs. clinton could be banned in the the mccain-feingold silent period which stipulated by the law exactly when you don't need silence that is right on the eve of an election all mckay know all citizens united said was that people do not forfeit their rights to speak when they band together in corporate form to magnify their speaking most people hear the word corporation they think ah well citizens united meant that PepsiCo and Microsoft are going to intervene in our elections neither has any interest in contributing large amounts of money to candidates the corporation's that were liberated or were mostly advocacy corporations the National Association of for abortion rights nice Sierra Club National Rifle Association and all the rest those are the all of them corporations that benefited from Citizens United but I don't think Citizens United changed that much all right well then what are other sources of the polarization that charles cook and our other panelists were describing they talked about the obvious one's self sorting Geographic self sorting the virtual filter bubbles and echo chambers what are your thoughts on those and is polarization of Madisonian problems it's almost the medicine Ian problem because medicine was about rubbing the edges of things obviously the new media cable television 1980 the year before CNN was invented 80 percent of all the television sets in use in the United States at the dinner-hour were tuned to ABC NBC and CBS I don't know what it is today but that oligopoly is essentially dead what we've got now is people living in their intellectual silos we have a whole industry it's called cable television that exists to produce confirmation bias reinforcing everyone's prejudices the good news is there's 327 million people in this country at any given moment about 322 million of them are not watching cable television not listening to talk radio they're cleaning the gutters and fixing the screen windows and getting on with life so it's a much healthier country than you would suspect by turning on this stuff I'm fighting one of the hands that feeds maybe you're a you're a light in a sea of unreason will turn to solutions and moan but we have to diagnose the problem are there other institutional or structural changes that have contributed to this polarization in Congress for example people have identified the decline of regular order the lack of power of Committee Chairman if you could get wonky what are some other factors well if you wanted to have negotiation which is a fancy word for conversation in Congress you could do certain things like obey the law the law says there shall be 12 appropriation bills passed every year by October first last time that happened was almost a quarter of a century ago tonight 94 if they had to do that instead of dropping enormous either a continuing resolution for dropping a mega bill written in private on people's desks and at 17 hours before they vote you would have conversation and negotiation I would also suggest that you might want to bring back earmarks earmarks are inefficient democracies inefficient earmarks a transaction cost of building coalitions in a continental society they grease the gears of government and they don't particularly increase the size of government or government spending almost all government spending is now uncontrolled entitlement programs anyway were arguing about a tiny portion of the budget so there are two things I do the third thing I would do and I think the most mediciney in the form of all is term limits because medicine was about incentives and try and control incentives and move behaviors this way this gorgeous necktie you're envious of the federal society necktie the silhouette is James Madison and and what term limits would do is in a Madisonian way change the incentives a for going into politics and B for making decisions while in politics if you couldn't have a lifelong career you would behave differently if Henry Clay came out of the Kentucky wilderness fought his way into Washington as a congressman the day he got there he was elected Speaker of the House a freshman now of course again the federal government barely existed then didn't do very much in 1789 the house and the Senate had more members than the federal bureaucracy there's no one there but term limits would I think again the common phrase is people would think of the next generation not the next election and there's I think truth in that term limits would require a constitutional amendment thanks to the Supreme Court decision mr. Kennedy five to four yep would you trust an article five convention not to go rogue and therefore no I would not trust on hard to go five convention to yeah I'm not big on trust I think the whole well the American system radiates distrust a lot of the people that's not right but the factions to use the medicine in turn no I mean the last time we tried this was the Annapolis convention and Madison said but let's go to Philadelphia and make a few tweaks of the Articles of Confederation and course they got here and went rogue immediately I'm awfully glad they did but if we're gonna have an article five convention I want to know who's gonna play Madison and he's gonna play Hamill and he's gonna play Franklin and Washington and James Wilson and all the rest it's simply a miracle that out of a population of I guess fewer than three million free Americans at that time we got those 55 people it's breathtaking I mean there aren't 55 people like that among our 327 and this is exactly what Madison says in the Federalist Papers opposing Jefferson's call for frequent appeals to the people he says let's not have another convention because we got lucky the first time and it's likely to be guided by passion okay term limits return to regular order and also earmarks what about the rise of direct primaries in the 70s the presidential election system was transformed by all these populist performs you probably don't like those much either not much and in 1968 Hubert Humphrey 1-0 primaries and became the Democratic nominee there was tumult in Chicago for lots of reasons some good some bad and the McGovern Fraser Commission came out and the McGovern Fraser Commission put in place reforms that gave us George McGovern a very good decent man who preceded having been produced by a popularized selection process that was going to give the will of the people proceeded lose 49 states so all these systems are fallible but it it does seem to me that the smoke-filled room we're not allowed to smoke anymore so the the smoke-filled room in the Blackstone Hotel that gave us that that a bit of American political vocabulary we should also remember it produced Warren Harding which is his is not an advertisement for that method but but it as someone said in one of the earlier panels the Democratic Party is now going the opposite direction to get rid of their super-delegates all super-delegates are are a way of institutionalizing the interest of the permanent part of our politics which are the parties and that seems to me to be a mistake I wish I wish that 95% of the delegate we're super-delegates not 5% but other reforms for strengthening the parties well most important is to give them more resources I always tell about too much money in politics if you think like an economist it is astonishing how little money we invest in electoral politics we invest far more money in lobbying for good reason but when you realize that the 535 members of Congress and the President and vice-president if they're only 537 people in Washington at any given time who were there because they were won an election they have so much to do with dispersing a budget of four and a half trillion dollars and we spend these people say these vast sums of money we spend about what we spend on Halloween candy every year on these elections if this is a rich country to siwash in money and what we've done with these laws is to turn this surplus into a scarcity and to drive the money out of the party system into PACs and independent spending groups and weakening the parties and further fragmenting the system that was supposed to give some order to the conversation so just so I understand it we have with the Supreme Court have to further revisit Buckley v Valeo and deep regulate campaign contributions in order to make that strengthen through the parties yes yes incumbent legislators right the limits on how much can be given to incumbent legislators who have enormous advantages and their opponents take all the caps off if someone wants to take a hundred thousand dollars from Philip Morris all that on make them put it on the Internet at the close of business let the journalists wallow around in this this data and let people think about it and could you imagine Charles Koch and George Soros giving to the parties rather than to individual candidates yes yeah sure Sheldon Adelson has all this money that he wants to inject into this year's campaign that's fine but why not give it to the parties because then you know who's responsible we'll get to reforms in a second but I imagine that some in our audience may be looking at us as a bunch of Madisonian antiquarians I mean this notion that you can have a politics that's resisting populist passions embodied in our mutual hero President Taft seems sort of you've recently called it a kind of Taff nostalgia is it really realistic to imagine that people could rally behind a constitutionalist president who's devoted to the Republican Party in the face of his populist rivals Wilson and Roosevelt and like to tell the audience because they were so it's so great that you said it why do you think that the greatest test of a conservative is who they voted for in the election of 1912 yeah that's the one sentence question if you want to determine this some sitting next to you on the airplane as a conservative Eskom who they would have voted for in 1912 Woodrow Wilson of course is unthinkable and the other two it was a year when a former president and a future president ran against the incumbent President Teddy Roosevelt had decided that Taft was for many reasons defective so he went out to ask a lot of meat Kansas which produces more history than it can consume locally and gave the speech that became the basis of the new nationalism where he said I'm for pure democracy pure many unmediated direct as possible hence nominating primaries even unto having in every state the right to have referenda to recall unpopular judicial decisions and it was that that galvanized William Howard Taft was not easy to galvanize he was a rather well if you weighed 326 pounds you'd be hard to move also but only when he was president he lost the way back he pilio to have been when he died he waited about what he weighed isn't Yale undergraduate yes this is all in his book whicker's not trying to plug it but I'll plug it it's it's a on sale in the bookstore downstairs and it's terrific but anyway yeah your question really is what if someone came along today and said well we can't afford that or we shouldn't have that anyway one of the arguments for federalism is from a conservative point of view is that most of what government does or tries to do or wants to do it has either no constitutional warrant for doing or no knowledge how to do it therefore when the federal government acts it more often than not makes mistakes that's the law of averages and it makes continental mistakes and whereas when state governments make their mistakes they make them within the borders and the odds of having four or five intelligent governors at any given time is are better than having an intelligent president at any given time therefore brandeis another another Rosen book on Brandeis gonna say we're not really paying if it's true thank you very much Brandeis said there's no laboratories of democracy and let a thousand flowers bloom and let's see what happens so that that's why federalism is is such a good idea reforms I mean I'm just I'm just waiting here with my pen and you have to save American democracy so we have about you know 20 minutes and let's just list the actual reforms that could resurrect Madison reason over passion you are number one the way to improve the caliber of argument yeah if you slow things down yeah slow things down well first you have to explain to the American people that what they used to learn this in school novel thought I don't think they do that anymore but you have to you have to explain to people that there's a reason for this but that again when people say oh gosh there's a gridlock nothing gets done in Washington nothing gets done in Washington under the Obama administration that the most sweeping financial reform since the Great Depression the largest new social welfare program since 1965 Medicare and Medicaid in the Affordable Care Act lots of things get done in Washington probably too much gets done in Washington but people have been sold the idea that the gridlock is a terrible thing and in fact gridlock means that people are supposed to negotiate I do believe that the Senate rules have to go back to what they were because now when you have we've really amended the Constitution in practice that we now have a supermajority requirement for everything in the Senate and that's a terrible thing because that does mean that one senator can stop an awful lot and this convinces the American people that elections don't matter and that's a very dangerous thing to tell the public so filibuster reform a little Bester reform absolutely you should not be able to filibuster the motion to proceed that as you now can have a filibuster just by threatening to have a filibuster on proceeding to the question so you don't not only don't get a debate you don't get a debate about whether it haven't have made but it's counterintuitive because you the filibuster is not a thing that slows things down it slows things down but it's those things in a way that that doesn't produce a thoughtful majority it produces a kind of minority dictate which is different but object I mean we are we are a democracy we're going to have majority rule the Madisonian project is to make majorities temperate and reasonable not to stop majorities from functioning yes and Madison says a faction is a majority or a minority animated by reason rather than passion Madison's revolution and democratic theory was this before Madison those few political philosophers who thought that democracy was possible thought that it was possible and advisable only in something like Pericles Athens a Rousseau's Geneva that is a small face-to-face society you could walk across in a day because they said in large policies you would have factions and factions for the enemy of good government medicine turn this upside down he had a simple catechism he said what is the worst outcome of politics tyranny to what form of tyranny our democracies pray tyranny of the majority solution don't have majorities don't have stable tyrannical majorities have majorities composed of shifting unstable coalition's of minorities and therefore you can have the majority rule can be safe because majorities are not going to be permanent and dangerous so to that end that was his way of reconciling popular government with the fear of tyranny beautifully explained so crystalline in its clarity and yet today and yet Madison counted on the extended size of the Republic to prevent minorities from factional from mobilizing and he thought it'd be hard for these mobs to discover each other and to become permanent and yet today we have a social media technology that has allowed the kind of instant communication and mob mobilization that Madison fear yes in Federalist 10 he said an extensive Republic will give us what Martin Dimond great student of defenders he called a saving multiplicity of factions to produce these unstable coalition's of majorities so that said he in Federalist 51 we will see throughout our system the process of supplying by opposite and rival interests the defect of better motives he wanted a system that would work even if people didn't have most of the time good motives and one of the problems today is that people do not Madison said in 51 you must have the interest of the man must be identified and aligned with the interests of the place that his senator should be jealous and rivalries and House members should be jealous and rival risk the problem today is that members of the Senate aren't caring about the Senate they're caring about their tribe their party what we need are people who think first as senators and late and the only then as Democrats and Republicans it seems to me because a lot of people have now discovered the conservative anxiety about the presidency for years conservatives preached congressional supremacy then they had the intoxicating experience of President Reagan and they decided that the presidency just fine and they put back on the Shelf what they should get down and reread James Burnham's book Congress in the American tradition about the importance of Congress is the primary branch of government so Congress has been giving away power just throwing it away giving it to the executive branch and therefore every time it does this I mean this president no worse than others in this regard he says well I'm going to impose tariffs on China where do you get that power the power to regulate the commerce with nations is a congressional power that they just gave away in vast chunks of discretion to the executive branch because they no longer are rival Russ and greedy about keeping their power how do you get them to be rival worse than greedy again it's a good question because a here we're in another election year men and women are going to spend gobs of money and calories of energy getting to the Senate and I want to ask them why because in Ben Sasse of Nebraska in his maiden speech in the Senate said if the Senate didn't exist would we notice would it really matter because the people are fighting to get into an increasingly hollow institution so if you had more congressional supremacy you'd have a less swollen presidency and people would have to argue about things about tariffs and going to war things like that should the Supreme Court strike down rule by executive orders unconstitutional I think that they should reinvigorate the delegate is a non delegation doctrine that there John Locke said in the second treatise on government legislators may make laws they may not make other legislatures and other legislatures we have essentially given the fourth branch of government now the administrative state the power to pass that do the real lawmaking Chris DeMuth very wise Washingtonians says Congress now nowadays passes abilities Congress says well we should have a good environment and a fine education and then it turns it over to the executive branch tell us what we meant by that and the executive branch writes all the rules we're beginning to see a pushback on something called Chevron deference she comes from a case with the word Chevron in it wherein the court said any reasonable executive construction of an ambiguous federal statute should be deferred to I'm among that was a small bitten growing tribe who thinks that we've had far too much judicial deference to the elected branches of government and Neel Gorsuch and a recent Supreme Court opinion in which he joined four liberals said no we these ambiguous laws are not laws properly and the court should should make the should not be afraid to say that what they mean justice score such is one of the leading critics of Chevron deference and you've long called for a resurrection of the non delegation doctrine but the fear of progressives and also conservative advocates of judicial restraint is this would have judges striking down the whole post New Deal administrative state and would resurrect the kind of rule by judiciary that both sides at least at some point a twentieth-century fear yes you said who do you trust I don't trust anyone and I don't okay I don't think we should have a system based on trust but at this point and for the foreseeable future I'm less afraid of judges wielding their power than I am of judges stepping out of the way for other branches of government wielding their power let me ask you this that lot if you likely we have had a friendly debate about this and I had defended the bipartisan tradition of judicial deference represented by Holmes and Brandeis and frankfurter and you've called for judicial engagement have you changed your mind on this yes well yes absolutely tell us about why Robert Bork who's the very embodiment of what I now oppose was a very good friend can I fought so strenuously in my column in the Washington Post and elsewhere for his confirmation that the day the Senate voted on it my friend made Greenfield who ran the editorial page of the Washington Post had a big editorials called dear George trying to talk me in off the ledge I'm not successful bob was a majoritarian yeah and he believed in the phrase from his friend and colleague at the Yale Law School Alex Bickle in the counter majoritarian dilemma I don't happen to believe there is a counter majoritarian dilemma the majority counter majoritarian dilemma allegedly is this we are a democracy therefore majority should rule therefore judicial review is inherently problematic because it says what majorities can't do well the whole Constitution is a tapestry of things you can't do it's you want an established church sorry can't have it that want restrictions on freedom of the press nothing but rule that out can't do it so Oliver Wendell Holmes my least favorite justice of all time said if the people want to go to hell I will help them it's my job I do not think it is his job to do that I think it's his job to try and stop them against slowed them down if the court says something does something wrong they can be corrected they are appointed by politically elected presidents they are confirmed by elected senators democracy is still involved in this but again it should be delayed and deflected and mediated and filtered all those medicine Ian herbs is judicial engagement all the more necessary as a cooling mechanism now that the other ones are gone absolutely particularly now that factions are so adept using the new media and other things to make their way felt judicial engagement is is the title of a book by Clarke Neely who's now Cato Institute was formerly at the Institute for justice the Institute for justice in Washington specializes in finding things that majoritarian institutions usually state legislatures do responding not to majorities but to determined factions in the state of Louisiana the Flores got together and said we have to stop competition from amateur flower arrangers so they got the motive they as some flower board appointed by the state legislature no majority ever wanted that no more the majority of Louisianans don't know it exists but it said if you're going to arrange flowers you have to go to flower arranging school and pay this and pay that and spend all these hours and in what sense is at a counter majoritarian dilemma for a court to step in and say no that is interfering with the rights of the natural rights of a mature flower arrangers who want to earn a living doing this without going to school and paying an admissions fee into this profession this happens all across the country there but 25% of the jobs in the United States are now subject to occupational licensing all of which are written again by legislators not in response to a majoritarian demand but in response to the to the rent seeking on the part of factions trying to restrict entry into their field for their own competitive advantage the case against judicial engagement would be this if Justice Kennedy retires and there's a solid conservative majority then the Supreme Court could strike down by five to four is six to three votes affirmative action environmental regulations clean water regulations financial regulations the Affordable Care Act the Voting Rights Act and it would look to half of the country this polarized country like a bunch of partisans in robes imposing their political preferences what do we do about that dude they have to they would have to be judicious and what makes the Supreme Court so interesting is they have to say why they did what they did they have to make an argument and the dissenters make an argument and the concurrences make arguments it's a uniquely educational institution used to be said by Daniel Boorstin and others back in the 1950s when there was a consensus theory of American history that our history is defined mostly by consensus and Daniel Boorstin great historian librarian of Congress said we don't do political philosophy in America actually we do it all the time it's done by the Supreme Court they argue about rights Supreme Court has said that citizenship is the right to have rights so the Supreme Court would have to defend itself now take the affordable care act justice Chief Justice Roberts bending over backwards to not trample on the majoritarian decision of the Congress said okay the individual mandate can survive that is the Congress passed a law saying you have to engage in commerce we have to buy health insurance because it's really a tax the president said it wasn't a tax Congress said it wasn't a tax just to impose this saving construction as he called it the Chief Justice said we'll call it a tax and therefore Congress it's not unconstitutional okay but a couple months ago Congress repealed the individual mandate so the democratic system still can make itself felt but the court set the terms of that debate I we can't we've well mooted the presidency Congress and the courts we need to take a beat before we close on the media does Facebook and Twitter pose a threat to Madisonian democracy yes because their instantaneous that's one of the reasons why so much of what is said in Twitter and Facebook is so shrill is that people don't think they don't have to think just hit Send and it goes off into the ether now i i've never tweeted well I think someone tweets for me now from my column twice a week I'm told I have a Facebook page I've never seen it quite literally I just not interested there's not enough time in the day you can either read or you can do this stuff and I'd rather read them but and I have a feeling that the novelty is gonna wear off how many how many hours can you spend on Facebook before you think I've already done this there are a lot of cat videos out there yeah I know the isn't it's a nonpartisan statement to say that the idea of tweeting presidents would have a called Madison yes you know who was the first tweeting President Barack Obama I forgot I forgot he's his first tweet was hello it's Barack really two exclamation marks really exclamation marks I mean right there I mean before before the 45th President did this he got an idea from the 44th president that's it can they all get these I mean if you look at the text of Roosevelt's first fireside chat taking advantage of this marvelous thing radio that brought a politician into your living room he began it with words that are not in the text it up at the library he began it my friends I don't want presidents to be my friends they're the head of one of our three branches of our federal government I want him to take care that the laws are faithfully executed why does he have to be my friend I don't want this kind of intimacy but he well I'm not serious it's not healthy for people to think that presidents are our moral auditors our spiritual advisors our consolers in time of grief there to see that the laws are faithfully executed get on with it he went on to say I can't resist I want to talk to you tonight about banking and then he went on for a long wonky address and people at least had to sit for a half hour to hear the details right but with tweets they're instantaneous so what do you do to slow down debate given tweets well again conservatives were taught by Bill Buckley distended Ward history shouting stop it doesn't work this stuff is here to stay but I do think it gets boring after a while and people will get used I think 10 years from now Facebook will be a shadow of itself we'll go on to some other mistake that's a story of a human race but it just might be possible for someone to run for office saying you know it is not dignified for presidents to behave this way now I know the dignities far down the list of what we're looking for it in presidents but there will come there will be a correction there will be that people will say you know we tend to by as I as I've said mr. Trump is occasioning Taft nostalgia and Don Rumsfeld has a new book coming out today the same Gerald Ford was by the way pretty good president and for some of the reasons that got him criticized then which was he didn't pretend to be a moral savant he just wanted to see that the laws were faithfully executed I think the 45th president is going to cure us of presidential fastidiousness you know we go into these elections out Kasich is wrong on this and of Jeb Bush no not unsound on that or return it and my view is not bring them all on you know anything's an improvement [Applause] I'm so loathe to close as Lincoln seven my second oh I'd love to close I was the first part as grunts yeah first in order personally affected but I must ask you this crucially important question we've had this great discussion tonight about how all of the cooling mechanisms that Madison put in place her under siege and his hope of promoting reason rather than passion is so imperiled will the Constitution save us or not well no the Constitution won't the Constitution will give us a chance to save ourselves that is the Constitution still makes things difficult and it still requires us to go through certain hoops and it's still people say when they read the Bill of Rights if ever they do they realized that it is a series of prescriptions things they can't do so the Constitution that people say they respect is about among other things restrictions on the popular will I grew up in central Illinois Champaign County the Champaign counties red sandstone courthouse is where local lore has it and as we say in journalism it's a story too good to check where it is said Lincoln a very prosperous railroad boy here at that time probably only 1% heard about the kansas-nebraska act kansas-nebraska act was one of the worst things ever done Steven a Douglas of the state of Illinois did it and it said all right let's just vote slavery up or down popular sovereignty in the territory and Lincoln who'd been out of politics said no the greatest career in the history of world government Lincoln's career began with a recoil against popular sovereignty on matters that should not be submitted to a vote Lincoln said we we don't vote on this slavery where it exists can't do anything about that got the problem but expansion of slavery will not vote on so the greatest career and I think in world government certainly in American history began with a recoil against popular sovereignty well I can't I got asked one last question will we in fact in this polarized 24/7 Twitter time find leaders who will recoil against popular sovereignty and resist popular I think yeah I mean I I looking on the bright side as I am disinclined to do again I rub earned this been a great sociologist and conservative said the great the greatest most explosive force in modern life is boredom and I think even boorishness can be boring I think Twitter can be born I thinks all going to people are going to say wake up someone's that I've done that tried that let's do something else and I just have harbored this suspicion that some candidate is going to come along on more than one and say if that's what you want that's not what I do but if you want something else here it is and I think they're gonna find there's a market out there markets work and there's going to be a demand and when there's a demand there's going to be a supply on that optimistic note please join me in thanking the great George Will [Applause] [Music]

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Length: 52min 31sec (3151 seconds)

Published: Tue May 29 2018