George W. Will is a conservative commentator, writer, and pundit. He is the author of the new book, Conservative Sensibility, and a regular contributor to conservative publications such as The Weekly Standard, National Review, and the Weekly Standard. He is also a frequent contributor to the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. In this interview, he talks about how he became George Will, how he got to where he is today, and why he writes so much about President Trump. He also talks about why he doesn t write much about Donald Trump, why he thinks he s better than most, and what he thinks about the current state of the country as a whole. Ben Shapiro is a writer and host of The Ben Shapiro Show, a podcast that focuses on politics, culture, and pop culture. His work has been featured on CNN, Fox News, NPR, and NPR. His new book is The Conservative Sensible, which is out now, and is available for purchase on Amazon Prime and VaynerSpeakers, wherever you get your bookshelf. If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe to the show and tell a friend about what you think about it! and don t forget to leave us a rating and review the show on iTunes! You'll get 20% off your first month with the discount code: BONUS. . Thank you, Ben Shapiro at anchor.fm/BenShapiro to help spread the word to other conservative thinkers everywhere! and much more! Thanks to Ben Shapiro for sponsoring the show! - Ben Shapiro and his team at ExpressVPN . . . Ben Shapiro's new book: The Conservative Senseibility by Ben Shapiro, The Best of the Week by by The Daily Beast is out in paperback edition by Mr. Ben Shapiro on on Nov. 27, 2019 in paperback now the best book of the best of the week? Thanks Ben Shapiro s latest book is out on Amazon by the bestseller of the year so far? and I hope you like it? by me too! by him thank you're a good friend of the book I read it out loud and I'm looking forward to hearing about it so much so that you're going to like it, Ben's book
00:01:44.000Bill essentially said, you're right, I do, and you're it.
00:01:47.000Bill had this habit of sort of collecting young people who he took a shine to.
00:01:52.000At about that time, Spiro Agnew, for your audience, he was a Vice President of the United States under Richard Nixon, was running around the country saying there are too few conservative columnists.
00:02:03.000So the Washington Post said, we'll syndicate Will as someone who will defend Richard Nixon.
00:02:11.000So I became a columnist in January 1973, just as Judge Sareka was imposing the sentences that caused the Watergate cover-up to unravel.
00:02:22.000And I instantly decided Nixon was guilty and was probably going to leave and probably should leave.
00:02:26.000So that marketing plan for my column didn't work out.
00:02:31.000But anyway, that's how I got to become a columnist.
00:02:34.000And in a second, I want to ask you how you decide on the topics of what you write, because you are famously not writing very much about Donald Trump, who's apparently the center and lodestar of all political talk these days.
00:02:44.000I'm going to ask you about that in just one second.
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00:03:02.000And then they're working hand-in-glove with Elizabeth Warren.
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00:03:58.000Okay, so let's talk about how you decide what to write about.
00:04:00.000So everybody is obsessed with President Trump.
00:05:17.000Well, we'll get to Trump talk a little bit later because, frankly, I agree with you and I think that, you know, all of the talk about President Trump tends to revolve around one of two notes.
00:05:25.000Either he is the greatest person who has ever lived in the universe or he is the worst person ever to have lived in the universe and none of it seems to be reflective of reality.
00:05:32.000But we'll get to that in a little bit.
00:05:33.000I want to ask you a lot about your book because your book really is a primer for people who don't understand conservatism or don't know much about conservatism and what conservatism should be.
00:05:42.000So it's called, first of all, The Conservative Sensibility.
00:05:45.000For folks who haven't read it, it is A terrific book.
00:05:48.000But why did you call it The Conservative Sensibility as opposed to, say, The Conservative Agenda, the sort of first conservative principles?
00:05:56.000There's this great divide in sort of conservative thinking over whether conservatism is in fact a sensibility and an outlook on the world, or whether it is a series of principles for which you are supposed to stand, or is it both?
00:06:08.000Well, the title The Conservative Mind was taken by Russell Kirk about 60 years ago.
00:06:13.000By sensibility, I mean more than an attitude, but less than an agenda.
00:06:17.000I didn't want to give ten legislative measures to make America great again, or anything else.
00:06:25.000I think a conservative sensibility is sort of a Michael Oakeshott, great political philosopher, approach, which is that there's a way of responding to the given of life, the flux, the uncertainty, the exhilarating openness of the future.
00:06:41.000It has been well said, I think, by Virginia Postel, that the story of the Bible, reduced to one sentence, is God created man and woman and lost control of events.
00:06:56.000We want the exhilaration of an open future and an open society to make the future open.
00:07:02.000You either welcome that, in which case you're a good American conservative, or You want to bring events to heel.
00:07:10.000You want to organize things, plan them, direct them from above, in which case you're a good progressive, which I've just framed, I think, the American political argument for the last at least 120 years.
00:07:24.000And in the book, you boil that down to a couple of different ways of thinking, the Madisonian way of thinking, the Wilsonian way of thinking.
00:07:30.000And I was wondering if you could elucidate, explicate on that a little bit.
00:07:33.000What exactly do you mean by that distinction?
00:07:34.000James Madison of the great Princeton class of 1771 gave us three thoughts, basically.
00:07:42.000He didn't give them to us, but he incorporated them.
00:07:48.000The first great word in the Declaration of Independence is secure.
00:07:52.000All men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, and governments are instituted to secure those rights.
00:08:00.000As Randy Barnett, the great constitutional lawyer, says, first comes rights, then comes government.
00:08:06.000That inherently limits the role of government to being strong enough to protect our rights and not so strong to threaten our rights.
00:08:14.000Second, that presupposes there is a fixed human nature, that we are not just creatures that acquire whatever culture we're surrounded by.
00:08:24.000Once you deny that, as the great progressive thinkers at the beginning of the 20th century did, Once you deny a settled human nature, that man is plastic to the touch of culture, you emancipate government for the most dangerous of its 20th century projects, to create new Soviet man, new German man, to modify human beings.
00:08:49.000That's when government really becomes at its most sinister.
00:08:53.000Third, the Madisonian Project says, because of the first two, fixed human nature, human rights, essential to the flourishing of creatures like us, we need a government that is checked and balanced, a separation of powers, so that it will be effective, but slow and modified, because it is the nature of human beings to be passionate creatures, and passions are problems.
00:09:22.000And therefore we want majority rule, But majority opinion should be filtered and refined and reflected through institutions and slowed down.
00:09:33.000Long comes Woodrow Wilson from the great Princeton class of 1879 and says, that was fine long ago, but it's an anachronism.
00:09:41.000When there were 4 million Americans, 80% of them living within 20 miles of Atlantic tidewater.
00:09:48.000When we were a simple rural country, that was fine.
00:09:51.000But now we are a great country, united by steel rails and copper wires.
00:09:56.000We need a strong, organizing government.
00:09:58.000We need to bring expertise to bear on the affairs of the common people.
00:10:04.000We need to concentrate more power in Washington, more Washington power in the executive branch, more executive branch power in the president, and in such administrative agencies as he creates.
00:10:15.000Therefore, we should marginalize Congress.
00:10:19.000And we should understand that rights are granted by the government for our own good, and the government will tell us what rights we ought to have, and it will be advised in this by experts.
00:10:32.000The great text of progressivism is Herbert Crowley's The Promise of American Life.
00:10:39.000Published in 1909, never out of print since then.
00:10:44.000Louis Brandeis gave a copy to Teddy Roosevelt, who took it on a safari, went off to assassinate large animals, which he thought was great fun, and he read it out there, and we've been suffering from it ever since.
00:10:58.000But Crowley says that Americans, by and large, are unregenerate citizens, and he had a plan to regenerate us.
00:11:08.000So when it comes to the Madisonian vision, it seems like there's a fair bit of conflict inside the conservative movement even about what the Madisonian vision encompasses.
00:11:16.000To start with a few of those premises.
00:11:18.000Let's start with the natural rights premise.
00:11:20.000So there's an argument that's now made inside the conservative movement that we are a movement that is too much focused on rights and not enough focused on duties.
00:11:28.000And this has led to a small government conservatism that is Unsustainable for the future.
00:11:32.000It's an argument made by some people, you know, for example, Tucker Carlson has made this sort of argument that basically we are so focused on individual rights that we've forgotten that we have to take care of each other and you need government to come in and help take care of us in that way.
00:11:44.000You've heard that argument from, frankly, George W. Bush in sort of his compassionate conservative days.
00:12:19.000The kind of conservatism you're talking about—some of them call themselves national conservatives and all the rest—there is a rebellion against individualism.
00:12:28.000Now, they begin with the obvious point, which I make much of in my book.
00:12:34.000Of course human beings are all situated, but that does not mean that they are mere creatures of their culture.
00:12:43.000The revolt against individualism is driven nowadays in no small measure by religious conservatives, and particularly Catholic conservatives, who I think are understandably distraught that their congregations are getting smaller and that Christianity's hold on the American public has weakened.
00:13:10.000And their solution is the weaker it gets, the stronger it ought to be through politics.
00:13:20.000I've always made the argument, you know, frequently and strongly that we do need more and stronger religious communities to back the sort of preservation of rights.
00:13:29.000But that doesn't mean that it can be done from top down by the government, because that would be precisely the opposite of the sort of freedom of religion that you need to flourish.
00:13:35.000In order to preserve rights, that if rights rely on our ability to take care of each other in a dutiful way and rely on a community, you don't want the government doing that job.
00:13:43.000It actually tends to quash religious freedom over time.
00:13:46.000I guess the kind of follow-up question to the definition of natural rights is you could easily see that perverted by the wide definition of natural rights.
00:13:54.000What I mean by that is that if we don't define natural rights either specifically or To a certain point, narrowly, you could see a government that is designed to secure those rights, securing rights that may not in fact be rights, and using the power of government to do so.
00:14:11.000Madison and others, although Madison really wrote the Bill of Rights more than anyone else, when the founders, framers of the Constitution left Philadelphia, they didn't think they needed a Bill of Rights.
00:14:23.000Turns out they needed it to get the Constitution ratified.
00:14:25.000So they promptly said, fine, ratify it, we'll amend it with a Bill of Rights.
00:14:30.000One of the reasons the framers were opposed to that, they said the structure of the Constitution is itself a Bill of Rights.
00:14:45.000Hence the Ninth Amendment, saying the fact that we've enumerated some rights does not disparage or denigrate the possibility of unenumerated rights.
00:14:54.000But the government should also protect.
00:14:56.000Now, people say, but how do you decide?
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00:16:24.000Okay, so let's talk about the structural constitution.
00:16:26.000So, one of the points in your book where I found myself a little bit taken aback, actually, was your argument for the strength of the judiciary.
00:16:33.000So, I've always been an advocate of the position that judiciary is, at the very least, the third most powerful branch of the government, that judicial review under Marbury v. Madison is, at best, a stretch assumed by the Supreme Court.
00:16:45.000I sort of agree with the Alexander Bickel argument that this is an assumption of power by the Supreme Court that was not actually justified by these structural checks and balances.
00:16:53.000You rely pretty heavily on the judiciary to defend rights, and I tend to think, having watched the progression of the judiciary over the last 50 years, that that's an exceedingly dangerous position, and actually avoids some of the sort of conflicts that you've been talking about, the embrace of the chaotic nature of back-and-forth democracy, having a judiciary that simply says, here's a right, cramming it down, we're done here.
00:17:15.000Why do you rely so heavily on the judiciary?
00:17:18.000Conservatives for many years, and I among them, Bob Bork was a close personal friend, believed that, partly prompted by the excesses of the Warren court, that in fact the judiciary should defer more.
00:17:34.000Judicial restraint meant judicial deference to the elected branches.
00:17:39.000And I believed that until I quit believing it.
00:17:43.000It's the biggest change of my life and it's now very interesting.
00:17:47.000The most interesting political arguments in the United States are not between conservatives and progressives, they're among conservatives right now.
00:17:54.000One of which is those of us among conservatives who now argue for what's called judicial engagement.
00:18:02.000Clark Neely, with the Cato Institute, wrote a book of that title.
00:18:08.000Let me go back to central Illinois, where I grew up.
00:18:10.000According to local lore, it was in the Champaign County Courthouse that Abraham Lincoln heard about the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 by another Illinoisan, Stephen A. Douglas.
00:18:25.000Douglas said, we're going to solve the problem of Whether to expand slavery into the territories by popular sovereignty in the territories.
00:18:36.000It's a matter of indifference, because the important thing about America is majority rule.
00:18:42.000Lincoln's ascent to greatness, to the greatest career in the history of world politics, in my judgment, began with his recoil against the Kansas-Nebraska Act.
00:18:53.000Where he said, America's not about majority rule, it's about liberty.
00:18:57.000We're for majority rule whenever, and to the extent that it is, as it usually is, a bulwark of liberty, but it is not always.
00:19:07.000Therefore, I mean, the Bill of Rights is a tissue of prohibitions.
00:19:11.000If the majority wants to abridge free speech, or to establish religion, or to abridge the right to petition, too bad, majorities can't have it.
00:19:28.000I wrote my doctoral dissertation's title was Beyond the Reach of Majorities.
00:19:33.000It was in the second flag salute case to West Virginia v. Barnett.
00:19:38.000Justice Robert Jackson said, the very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to place certain things beyond the reach of majorities above the vicissitudes of politics.
00:19:48.000I think judicial deference often is dereliction of the judicial duty to make sure that what majoritarian institutions do, be it a city council, be it a state legislature that says you have to salute a flag even if you're a Jehovah's Witness and that offends your deepest beliefs, that courts ought to be more actively engaged than they have been, particularly in defending economic rights
00:20:17.000In laying what the majoritarian institutions do next to the Constitution and next to the Constitution as construed in the bright light cast by the Declaration of Independence.
00:20:31.000Timothy Sandefur, tremendous young lawyer and scholar.
00:20:36.000He's written a book called The Conscience of the Constitution, which I recommend to all your viewers.
00:20:41.000And he says, first comes the Declaration of, and then comes the Constitution.
00:20:47.000In Lincoln's famous formulation, the Declaration of Independence is the apple of gold that is framed by the frame of silver that is the Constitution.
00:21:03.000I agree with the central premise, but I do wonder, again, kind of linking the two questions that I've asked already, if you broadly construe rights, and then you broadly construe the ability of courts to implement those rights, don't you end up with almost a Wilsonian perspective on government just from the judiciary, not the executive?
00:21:18.000But again, go back to what I said earlier, there is no safe spot in politics.
00:21:23.000Anything we do is going to—life lived on the slippery slope.
00:21:27.000Yes, you could have the irrigation of essentially democratic decisions by legislatures, minting new rights, I mean, by judicial people, minting new rights that reflect their policy preferences.
00:21:46.000And nationalizing perceptions of rights, meaning that the founders were also very much concerned with the Montesquieu point that localism mattered when it came to definition of particular rights.
00:21:54.000And so defining sort of levels of rights, there were obviously rights to be protected by the federal government, but the federal government is really, the Bill of Rights abridges the powers of the federal government.
00:22:04.000It's really not meant to enable the federal government to cram things down on states so much.
00:22:08.000I mean, the First Amendment is designed to stop Congress from legislating against the First Amendment, not to give the federal government power to encroach on the rights of states per se.
00:22:17.000But I think conservatives should welcome, should embrace, in fact, the incorporation of the Bill of Rights by the 14th Amendment.
00:22:27.000that now the Bill of Rights now applies to the states.
00:22:30.000I think we should go back and relitigate the slaughterhouse cases of 1873 when the The court gave a ridiculously truncated understanding of the privileges or immunities of an American citizen.
00:22:43.000I think the purpose of the 14th Amendment was to define rights of national citizenship that superseded those of the states.
00:22:50.000I think it is fair to say that the Civil War amendments were, in a way, completing the American founding.
00:23:00.000Madison called First, the Annapolis Convention, leading to the Philadelphia Convention, in order to strengthen the central government, because Madison was appalled by the results of localism during what historians rightly call the critical period of American history, the period under the Articles of Confederation.
00:23:44.000Before Madison, the very few people who thought democracy was possible at all said it had to be In a small face-to-face society, Pericles, Athens, Rousseau's Geneva, a place you could walk across in a day because, they said, the enemy of freedom and democracy is factions.
00:24:04.000So you want to have a small, homogenous polity without factions.
00:24:35.000Going to have majorities, but they're going to be unstable majorities, shifting coalitions of factions.
00:24:43.000Therefore, we need an extensive republic so that you will have government's first task being, Madison said in 10 and 51, the protection of the different and unequal capacities of acquiring property, because that will produce different factions, and a saving multiplicity of factions will produce freedom.
00:25:04.000So, remember the Constitution was written by people from Madison to Alexander Hamilton.
00:25:12.000Immediately after the Constitution became enemies and rivals, but there they understood the first thing was to pull government up from localism so that we could have an effective national government.
00:25:24.000But the federalization of politics, the removal of rights from the state level to the enforcement mechanism of the federal government, well, obviously everyone agrees that with regard to slavery and with regard to Jim Crow, that that's a very good thing and very positive for the country.
00:25:37.000It does result in a deep-seated Rage that I think a lot of people are feeling in the country right now Which is the loss of local control a belief that you're now your life is now being controlled either by judges on the one hand or by regulators in the executive branch on the other and By legislators who basically kick their task over to both the regulators and the judges I recall during the campaign finance reform debates George W Bush signing into law campaign finance reform and suggesting that he thought it was unconstitutional But that it was the job of the Supreme Court to weigh in on that.
00:26:04.000Yeah, it's interesting because Before the Iowa caucuses in 2000 Yeah, early 2000.
00:26:11.000He was on our program on ABC, and I asked him, I told him before the show, I was going to ask you about McCain-Feingold.
00:26:40.000Of course, he signed it in secret, doing just what you said, hoping the courts would rescue him from making an independent judgment about constitutionality.
00:26:48.000But remember, Jim Crow was majority rule.
00:26:56.000And I think local values and majority rule are not all they're cracked up to be.
00:27:01.000But this is a perfect example of where Individuals get oppressed by local majorities.
00:27:11.000Right, and the basic idea of a federal government stepping in and doing something about the enforcement of particular rights that are specifically defined, I think is important.
00:27:22.000I think that the Civil Rights Act, I tend to agree with the argument that the Civil Rights Act is effectively what ended segregation, not the ruling in Brown v. Board, which I feel actually didn't do very much.
00:27:30.000Desegregation didn't actually accomplish anything via Brown v. Board.
00:27:35.000All of a sudden, black people could vote and Strom Thurmond said, hire a black person for my staff.
00:27:43.000I mean, he immediately got the picture.
00:27:45.000So that's the power of the legislature, not the power of the judiciary.
00:27:49.000And I guess the point where that struck me was you make a very strong argument in favor of the ruling in Lawrence versus Texas and against Justice Scalia's dissent in Lawrence versus Texas.
00:27:57.000And you say, well, you know, the basic notion of rights is a sort of John Stuart Mill version of rights that I get to wave my hand in the air so long as I don't hit you in the face.
00:28:05.000So what exactly does the government have to do with regulating private bedroom activities?
00:28:09.000That's a principle with which I fully agree.
00:28:11.000I am not sure it's a principle with which the founders would have fully agreed, particularly since many of them were in favor of laws that regulated exactly that sort of behavior.
00:28:19.000And I guess the question becomes, since we are now talking about the morphing of rights beyond what the founders suggested, is there any limiting principle there whatsoever?
00:28:28.000I think there is, and let me try and explain it with reference to Scalia and another part of the Constitution, the Eighth Amendment.
00:28:34.000The Eighth Amendment prohibits cruel and unusual punishment.
00:28:39.000The Eighth Amendment is one reason why Scalia defined himself as a fainthearted originalist.
00:28:45.000While they were sitting in Philadelphia in 1787 writing that, and while a few years after that they were ratifying the Eighth Amendment, It was common practice in America to crop ears, brand cheeks, floggings, whippings, pillorings, etc.
00:29:19.000Here's how I think you get there by being true to it.
00:29:21.000I think there is such a thing as intention originalism.
00:29:25.000What was the intent of the authors and ratifiers of the Eighth Amendment?
00:29:30.000It was to prevent cruelty as government policy.
00:29:35.000Now, that does not mean that it meant to prevent cruelty as it was understood in the 1790s.
00:29:43.000It meant cruelty as society understood it as it evolves.
00:29:49.000Now, Earl Warren said, There are evolving standards of decency that mark the maturation of a society.
00:29:59.000And because Earl Warren said it, a lot of conservatives say we don't believe that.
00:30:03.000Let me say something about Earl Warren.
00:30:05.000Before he was Chief Justice, he was Governor of California.
00:30:09.000Before he was Governor, he was Attorney General.
00:30:11.000Before he was Attorney General, he was a District Attorney.
00:30:15.000And he knew what went on in the back rooms of police stations.
00:30:19.000And a lot of the criminal justice decisions of the Warren Court came from that, that the Chief Justice knew what was going on.
00:30:29.000And I think conservatives ought to be able to accommodate that.
00:30:33.000Intention originalism says, what were they intending?
00:30:38.000When we get to the Brown decision, school segregation, it would have been much cleaner if, instead of the Warren Court going into a lot of sociology, if they just said, hey, look, We're guaranteed equal protection of the laws.
00:31:03.000I just hesitate to allow intention originalism in any, we wouldn't do it in any other area of the law, right?
00:31:09.000If you read the Sherman Antitrust Act, you wouldn't simply reinterpret it based on the evolving standards of the meaning of words.
00:31:14.000You would read it as literally as possible.
00:31:16.000And if we want to change the law, we have legislatures, we have, which require effectively super majorities given the filibuster.
00:31:23.000We have methods of changing the law and having the Supreme Court step in and curtail a lot of the debate that is happening, whether it's in the Obergefell decision or even in cases where, again, I agree with the outcome like Lawrence v. Texas, it seems to me a dangerous, you know, you say we have to embrace the danger, but it seems to me that the danger from having unelected justices who are unanswerable to any form of public
00:31:47.000Blowback make the rules as opposed to we can get rid of certain people we can replace them with other people That's not I'm still very much in favor of the checks and balances.
00:31:55.000I just wonder if there's no actual check or balance on the judiciary Well, you cited a moment ago the great Alex Bickle who was a clerk for Felix Frankfurter and a colleague and mentor in a way of Bob Bork Alex Bickle's great books about the least dangerous branch quoting Alexander Hamilton courts have neither the The person or the sword, how much damage can they do?
00:32:18.000Well, we know they can do a lot of damage.
00:32:19.000But should they exercise force or will, then they lose their legitimacy.
00:32:40.000So, in your book, you talk a lot about sort of the secular roots of the Republic, and you kick back pretty strongly against the notion that this is a Judeo-Christian Republic or a Christian Republic.
00:32:50.000Obviously, I agree that there's nothing in the Constitution that mandates a particular religious viewpoint, but I feel like you may be giving some short shrift to the Judeo-Christian roots of some of the very ideas that you're talking about.
00:33:04.000So, you say sort of that secularism or agnosticism, atheism, that these kick in favor of conservatism, Maybe you can explicate that argument so I don't mischaracterize it.
00:33:14.000Yeah, the chapter in the book that I had most fun writing was called Conservatism Without Theism.
00:33:20.000Can I be autobiographical for a moment?
00:33:23.000My father's father was a Lutheran minister, and my father as a young boy would sit outside Pastor Will's study and listen to Pastor Will and some of his congregants wrestling with the problem of reconciling the doctrines of free will and grace.
00:33:40.000That made my father a philosopher, not a religious person, a philosopher.
00:33:45.000And I grew up in a secular household, not hostile to religion.
00:33:48.000I've described myself as an amiable, low-voltage atheist.
00:33:52.000I'm married to a fierce Presbyterian, so I'm live and let live.
00:34:01.000I don't deny the enormous contribution of Judeo-Christian thought to the culture that produced, eventually, in the 18th and 19th centuries, democracy.
00:34:13.000I say in my book that Martin Luther, although as autocratic as can be and a ferocious opponent of peasant revolts and all the rest, nevertheless, when he stood at the Diet of Arms and said, I cannot do otherwise.
00:34:31.000That was asserting the primacy of conscience, the great Protestant contribution to Western civilization, and the primacy of conscience is the basis of individualism, the heart of the kind of conservatism I'm talking about, and the kind of conservatism against which some conservatives, as you said a moment ago, are in rebellion against kind of what they consider excessive individualism.
00:34:59.000What I wanted to argue here was not that there's any incompatibility between religion and conservatism, but there's no necessity for a religious basis of conservatism.
00:35:11.000People say, well, what about the founders?
00:35:13.000The founders, basically, the most important one were deists.
00:36:13.000I'm back to the conservative sensibility, God losing control of events in the Bible.
00:36:18.000And if you embrace world, then cosmology itself, all that we know about the great crashing whirl of the universe suggests that there is perfectly possible to have design, if you will, things that look created but weren't created by a creator.
00:37:28.000I don't like being read out of the movement on religious grounds.
00:37:31.000Yes, I think it is perfectly possible, just as it's perfectly possible to be a fully moral, and sometimes more moral than a religious person, atheist.
00:37:38.000It is perfectly possible to be a conservative while being an atheist.
00:37:41.000I don't know that atheism tends toward conservatism.
00:37:43.000In fact, I think that it tends toward the opposite.
00:37:47.000Statistically speaking, obviously, as religion declines in America, so has conservatism.
00:37:51.000The relationship between religion and any doctrine is contingent, and there's no question that you're right empirically.
00:37:57.000As a matter of fact, religion tends to make people more susceptible to conservatism than atheism.
00:38:06.000And I'm going to make the slightly stronger argument, which is that even some of the premises that you're basing conservatism on do require a footing in religion.
00:38:13.000So to take the example of natural right, there's nothing in nature that dictates natural right at all, obviously.
00:38:19.000And nature is a place where things kill other things and eat them.
00:38:23.000And so the idea of rights that spring from that is actually quite unnatural.
00:38:27.000I mean, nature is a creation of hierarchy and power hierarchies and Nature red in tooth and claw.
00:38:33.000I mean, this is why the original interpretation of Darwinism for the first 70 years of its existence tended toward social Darwinism and fascism, was the idea that nature was counted against rights and that it was survival that actually mattered most.
00:38:46.000And so the notion of individual rights based in natural rights, that actually does not spring from anything atheistic.
00:38:54.000The other contention I'd make is that your conservatism is very much dependent on the notion that you are a free actor acting in a world that has certain predictable rules to it that either emerge from chaos or emerge from a creator.
00:39:07.000But even the notion of free will, the idea that we have the capacity to choose, is an assumption that you have to make about the universe that is simply not present in a scientific materialist sense.
00:39:22.000I believe there is, as the great conservative James Q. Wilson, the greatest social scientist of the last 50 years, wrote a book called The Moral Sense.
00:39:39.000We are disposed to compassion and kindness and promise-keeping and other ways.
00:39:45.000I say in the book that, in fact, I think we are, at the end of the day, rule utilitarians.
00:39:54.000The greatest happiness for the greatest number is produced over time by obeying certain rules, and that the rules include respecting certain rights that we empirically, from historical experience, have decided are crucial to human flourishing.
00:40:13.000And I think individualism is crucial to human flourishing, I think individual property rights are absolutely crucial to human flourishing, because Property creates a zone of sovereignty in which you can operate.
00:40:29.000None of that requires a grounding other than observation, anthropology, sociology, and history.
00:40:37.000Isn't that sort of linking isn't ought in a way that is logically inappropriate, meaning that because things have been that way, Thus it is a moral rule, as opposed to an actual principled moral rule, that there are natural rights, that these do exist, that they pre-exist government.
00:40:53.000In other words, the problem with rule utilitarianism is that a lot of things are utilitarian that would conflict with your individual rights-based morality.
00:41:00.000Rule, not I think, I don't think they would conflict over time.
00:41:04.000That's why it's not act utilitarianism, it's rule utilitarianism.
00:41:09.000That you judge not just individual acts, but a pattern of behavior A series of social arrangements.
00:41:16.000We know that democracy is pretty good.
00:41:20.000We know that without property, people do not flourish because there are no means for asserting themselves and exercising sovereignty and making choices which are the essence of freedom.
00:41:40.000I can't Anchor this in some cosmology.
00:41:43.000I mean, I guess that and that, I guess, is the problem is that when you read the Declaration of Independence, it is not a rule utilitarian document.
00:41:49.000It is it is a document of essential principle about the way things should be, not saying that in the past rights have worked and therefore rights are good.
00:41:57.000But the author of the declaration said that these truths are self-evident, by which he meant and those who agreed with him meant evident to minds not not clouded by ignorance or superstition.
00:42:11.000They did not mean that everyone on the planet accepted these propositions.
00:42:14.000Damn few did, or still do for that matter.
00:42:21.000Minds unclouded by ignorance and superstition, clear minds, clear thinking minds, Accept those truths as self-evident.
00:42:29.000So let's talk about the question of the role of government in light of sort of a real utilitarian viewpoint.
00:42:34.000So folks on the political left would suggest that in a real utilitarian way, the government should be involved in, for example, health care.
00:42:41.000Because when the government is involved in health care, then there is a universality that applies to health care, even if the price is higher or even if it means that certain people on the upper end The first question is the proper scope and actual competence of government.
00:42:52.000Can government do what people want it to do?
00:42:53.000the age spectrum, then that is the way that it ought to be.
00:42:56.000How do you apply a small government conservatism to questions of where the government should be involved in American life?
00:43:02.000The first question is the proper scope and actual competence of government.
00:43:10.000Can government do what people want it to do?
00:43:15.000Or is it, to use Hayek's great phrase, the fatal conceit of government, that it can acquire information and manipulate information and act disinterestedly on information better than markets can allocate information and generate it.
00:43:36.000That's all markets are, information-generating devices.
00:43:40.000Governments, first of all, don't act disinterestedly.
00:43:45.000I wish my progressive friends would sit down with James Buchanan's works, Nobel Prize winner from the University of Virginia, who gave us the public choice theory, which is that governments are run by human beings.
00:43:59.000In the private sector, human beings try to maximize profits, basically, broadly understood.
00:44:05.000In government, human beings try to maximize power.
00:44:48.000They can understand, the more affluent and educated can understand the gears and pulleys and levers of this opaque machine, this great Leviathan in Washington.
00:45:01.000Then, however, Elizabeth Warren and other progressives say, solutions to make the government much bigger and much more powerful, get it much more deeply involved in allocating wealth and opportunity, at which point you say, no, no, wait, please.
00:45:15.000You've just described the government as given to certain pathologies that are inherent in a large government that is deeply involved in the allocation of wealth and opportunity.
00:45:28.000Want to reduce the role of money in politics?
00:45:46.000So folks on the left would say, well, this doesn't allow for change nearly quickly enough because it sort of forecloses grand experiments.
00:45:52.000It suggests that stuff that is working half well, maybe there's a better way and we just haven't tried it yet.
00:45:57.000And on the conservative side, there are people who say, well, rule utilitarianism because it's not rooted in a fundamental unchanging principle per se, that that actually does allow for exactly that sort of experimentation that can get quite dangerous because you don't know it's failed until it's failed.
00:46:10.000Whatever progresses, Criticize about capitalism, surely they can't say it doesn't produce change.
00:46:16.000I mean, the greatest change in the history of the human race occurred from the late 18th century to today, called The Great Enrichment by Deirdre McCloskey in her three-volume book on the bourgeois virtues.
00:47:00.000Trotsky should have been a capitalist.
00:47:04.000Capitalism is the permanent revolution, and government, the more complicated society gets, said the progressives, said Woodrow Wilson, the more complicated it gets, the more it requires government to manage it.
00:47:34.000Where we are in the country right now, you mentioned Marx and his belief that the end goal, the end point of this particular journey is not the right end point.
00:47:43.000It is one thing in America to argue about the means to get to the end point.
00:47:46.000It's another thing to argue about the end point itself.
00:47:48.000Do you think that we've reached beyond the sort of conciliatory I don't think we should agree on endpoints.
00:48:00.000I don't think we should anticipate the end.
00:48:03.000We don't know what the end's going to be.
00:48:06.000Let me give you a tiny, just a simple example.
00:48:10.000Until 2007, millions and millions of Americans had cell phones and were happy.
00:48:19.000Then in 2008 along came the smartphone, and everyone hated the cell phones they had.
00:49:04.000was when, first it began sort of with Machiavelli, but then Hobbes and Locke and others, and said, you know, people are going to disagree about the ultimate good.
00:49:55.000Woodrow Wilson, I can exhaust you in the day with all his defects, but candor he had, and I admired that.
00:50:03.000So, in one second, I'm finally going to ask you about the topic we have now voided for a full hour, and that, of course, is President Trump and your thoughts on President Trump.
00:50:10.000But if you want to hear George Will's thoughts on President Trump, you actually have to subscribe over at Daily Wire.