3 Takeaways - Political Commentator George Will: Insights on American Government Today, and Where the Democratic and Republican Parties Have Both Gone Wrong (#87)

Episode Date: April 5, 2022

We sit down with George Will and discuss what conservatism means today and where the Republican and Democratic Parties have both gone wrong - the Republican Party with Donald Trump and the Democratic Party by being “dominated by a tail that wags the bigger dog.”  Progressives, he says, are at most a third of the Democratic Party, but they are 90% of Joe Biden's agenda now and they are “in the saddle riding poor Joe Biden.” He shares how Joe Biden squandered one of the great opportunities of modern politics and how the Democratic Party is disobeying Thomas Jefferson's admonition to not undertake large departures on slender majorities. As for the Republican Party, he talks about Donald Trump’s effect on the Party, how the Party has strayed from its roots and what it means to be a Republican today.He also worries that from Elizabeth Warren on the left to Ted Cruz on the right, the political class is united by a constant powerful imperative for deficit spending.George Will is a political commentator, columnist and author of 16 books. He has won a Pulitzer Prize and is a regular contributor to the Washington Post. This podcast is available on all major podcast streaming platforms. Did you enjoy this episode? Consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts.Receive updates on upcoming guests and more in our weekly e-mail newsletter. Subscribe today at www.3takeaways.com.

Welcome to the Three Takeaways podcast, which features short, memorable conversations with the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, scientists, and other newsmakers. Each episode ends with the three key takeaways that person has learned over their lives and their careers. And now your host and board member of schools at Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia, Lynn Thoman. Hi, everyone. It's Lynn Thoman. Welcome to another episode. Today, I'm excited to be with George Will. He's a columnist for The Washington Post and is known for his independent thought and insights and his contributions to the conservative movement. He's won numerous awards, including a Pulitzer Prize.

He recently released his 16th book, an anthology of his columns titled American Happiness and Discontents. I'm looking forward to his insights on America today, its governance, and what it means to be a conservative or a Republican. George, welcome, and thanks so much for our conversation today. I'm glad to be with you. It is indeed a pleasure. You are one of the most knowledgeable scholars of America and American history. How has the country changed in the last 10 or so years? Well, something that began 100 years ago has accelerated, and that is the progressive repudiation, which has been remarkably forthright and candid of basic American premises. Woodrow Wilson was the first president to criticize the American founding, which he did

not do peripherally, but root and branch. He said, first of all, he sort of shared the progressive inclination to say there's no such thing as human nature, that basically we acquire the impress of whatever culture we're situated in. Therefore, there's no point in organizing a polity around the idea of natural rights, that is, first come rights and then comes government. But that's all wrong, Woodrow Wilson said. Basically, rights are spaces of autonomy the government grants by majority rule. And of course, these can be revoked. So this has accelerated in recent years with a kind of racial essentialism now has entered the mix that we are whatever racial or ethnic or gender group that we are immersed in. That is our identity. And the society is a constant power struggle between these identity groups. And that the world is always divided between oppressors and oppressed. And this biological struggle defines life. I think that's what critical race theory and the new ingredient in this 100-year-old progressive view of the world is,

applying this to a kind of today's racial obsessions. What does being a conservative mean today? In the phrase American conservatives, the adjective American does a lot of work. Conservatism began in Europe and became self-conscious and articulate, particularly with Edmund Burke and his reaction against the French Revolution. So European conservatism has always been largely about the defensive order and hierarchy. And therefore, it has been tainted, I would say, by blood and soil, throne and altar kind of preoccupations that don't translate across the Atlantic well into

the American context. In America, to be a conservative is to want to conserve the American founding. The three principles of which I just listed in terms of the progressive, again, forthright and candid overthrow of human nature, natural rights, and a Madisonian architecture to limited government. So that has not changed for conservatives. themselves conservatives or locate themselves on the rightward wing of the political spectrum are not interested in any more than the progressives are in this classic conservative agenda. As I say in my 15th book, The Conservative Sensibility, conservatives in America are the legatees of classic liberalism, as it's understood in England, from Hobbes to Locke to Adam Smith, David Hume. So it's a little late in

the day to sort out the terminological confusions of American political discourse. But again, I think American conservatives are largely the inheritors of the classic liberal tradition. How important is capitalism to conservatism? Capitalism and conservatism are inseparable. Capitalism stresses the spontaneous order of society, of individuals collaborating with one another. Capitalism is a reliance on markets. What markets are, and this is really all they are, are information generating devices. And as society becomes more complex, there's a lot more to know and a lot less that government can know,

which is why socialism always everywhere fails because socialism ignores the imperative of epistemic humility. Epistemology is the field of philosophy that thinks about how we know things and what it means to know things. And what capitalism does is disperses decision making, disperses information. What socialism does or statism and government direction of the economy, but that always

founders on is government's inability to organize and master the information. That's one of the reasons socialism founders. The other is that government intervention is always on behalf of the strong, the established, the big battalions in society, which means you get a kind of sclerotic defense of the status quo. But capitalism, of course, was named by its enemies, Marx and others, which is why I prefer to talk about capitalism in terms of a market society in which markets and the collaboration of free individuals allocates wealth and opportunity rather than wealth and opportunity being allocated by government, which is politics straight through. And basically what you're clearly saying is that a market-based approach is in many ways a more humble approach than a government-directed approach, where one is more heavily reliant on the perspective or knowledge of government to select directions for the economy. Precisely. Progressivism began at a time when science was in the air, literally in the air. Marconi, the Wright brothers, Henry Ford, Edison, and Woodrow Wilson, who was an early

president of the American Political Science Association and an early acolyte of and advocate of the science of public administration thought as progressives are wont to do, that government staffed by disinterested experts would produce disinterested government. To me, that's an oxymoron. I think if people would just study public choice theory, we'd all be better off. The public choice theory punctures the romantic view of government as disinterested and says simply that in the private sector, people try to maximize their profits. In the public sector, people try to maximize their power. And basically, the activity of maximizing profits is a lot less dangerous than the activity of maximizing power in government. What does the Republican Party stand for today? Do you see it as being conservative and standing for limited government and markets? Well, to put it politely, I guess you'd say,

and perhaps optimistically, the Republican Party is schizophrenic today. There's a traditional conservative skepticism of the Build Back Better bill and spending in these trillion-dollar tranches, all of which are designed to increase dependent constituencies and to produce equality understood as equal dependence of more and more people on the government for their material well-being. And there's a conservative resistance to this and a conservative understanding of the role of the judiciary and supervising the excesses of democracy and all the rest. But this is less important today, less garish than the Republican Party's, I'm not going to say

loyalty to Trump, because loyalty implies some kind of affection. And no one likes Mr. Trump. Even those who profess to don't. They're terrified of him because they think, and they're not necessarily wrong, that one dyspeptic tweet from Mar-a-Lago can end their careers, which doesn't make for a happy party. A party that is terrified of a substantial portion of its voters is a funny political party and not a happy party. Why do you think 10 million more people voted for President Trump in 2020 than 2016? Do you think people were attracted to his style, his theatrics, if you will, or to his policies? I think the style is the point. I think that his persona is his message, his naughtiness, his disregard of standards of truth and politeness and congeniality and

everything else. People like that. Same reason people like professional wrestling, with which, by the way, Donald Trump has been connected in the past. Mary Kempner, a great columnist who's my idol when I first got interested in columnizing, once said that American politics is like professional wrestling in the absence of sincere emotion. And I think Donald Trump carried this to perhaps its logical conclusion or extreme in that it's hard to know what Donald Trump cares about other than Donald Trump. He doesn't care about reforming entitlements, for example. He doesn't care about the rule of law. He doesn't care about most of the things conservatives talk about.

He cares about Donald Trump. And when a political party becomes preoccupied with devotion to a person rather than a program, there's a sense in which it leaves politics and becomes a performative kind of arena for virtue signaling and striking poses and giving disaffected people the catharsis of themselves voting for naughtiness. It's not an edifying spectacle. How do you see the Democratic Party? The Democratic Party is also dominated by a tail that wags the bigger dog, and that is the progressive wing is in the saddle, riding poor Joe Biden. In the Democratic contest for the 2020 nomination, only one third of those who participated

in the nominating process voted for Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. So progressives are at most a third of the Democratic Party, but they are 90 percent of what turns out to be Joe Biden's agenda now. was clearly elected to bring normality and temperateness and realism and adult supervision back to government has disappointed a lot of people who voted for him. This is why his poll numbers are depressing to Democrats. It's one of the great squandered opportunities of modern politics, what he's done. As I say in a column that he's taken a silk purse and made a sow's ear out of it. With this promiscuous spending and this sense that the Democratic Party is going to disobey Jefferson's admonition, do not undertake large departures on slender majorities. They've taken their slender majorities in both houses of Congress as an incitement.

They have to hurry because these are apt to be perishable majorities. They have to get everything done in two years before the 2022 off-year elections. And that makes for hell-mell access. Can you give some examples of that from the Build Back Better bill, for example? There's so many. My favorite is the subsidy for electric bicycles, please. If people want electric bicycles, bless their hearts, go out and buy an electric bicycle,

but it's not a federal policy. Also in the bill, there are untold billions for electric charging stations for electric cars. Question, in 1920, there were 8 million automobiles in the United States. At the end of that decade, there were 20 million. Exploded across the landscape. Every one of them found gas stations, not one of which was built by the government. How'd that work? Well, the market worked, and entrepreneurship worked, and price signals worked. But we don't do that anymore. Nothing happens unless Washington gives a subsidy or a tax credit or a mandate for it. It's just a whole view

of the world that I find unhistorical and productive of colossal waste. Another example, journalists fancy themselves rugged individualists, skeptics, independent, all that stuff, all that sort of front page blather. Well, in the Build Back Better bill, there's tax credits for local newspapers and I suppose other journalistic entities for the journalists they hire. Build Back Better makes media dependent on government. Now, how journalists square this with their jawed, chest-pounding independence, I do not know. How do you see national government in the U.S. today?

Overstretched. The government is doing so much, is into so many aspects of life, that Congress, which has had 435 members for more than a century, whereas what Congress is involved in has increased probably 50-fold since 1921. Therefore, Congress doesn't so much pass laws anymore as it passes melodies, passes aspirations. It says we should have a quality education for everybody. You guys over in the education department, you define quality education and write the rules. And so most of the legislating is done by the federal bureaucracy, which is if the Supreme Court would enforce the non-delegation doctrine, which is, as John Locke said, legislatures can make laws, but not other legislators.

It would say Congress just can't do this. It has to legislate. It can't just hurl big dollops of discretion at the federal bureaucracy. It would require the government to be more parsimonious with its energies and its attentions. You have said that the political class today is more united by class interest than it is divided by ideology. Can you explain that? Sure. From Elizabeth Warren on the left to Ted Cruz on the right, the political class is united by a constant, powerful imperative for deficit spending. Give the American people a dollar's worth of government goods and services, charge them only 75 cents for it. The public's happy. This is terrific. Fob a quarter of the cost of our consumption of goods and services off on the unconsenting

because unborn future Americans. We used to borrow money for the future. We fought wars for the future. We built roads, highways, bridges, tunnels, harbors for the future. Now we're borrowing, again, to finance our own current consumption of goods and services. That isn't decadent and immoral. I don't know what is. But that's why for all the talk about the discord in America today, and Lord knows the discord's really enough, I'm more alarmed by the consensus in Washington, which is that this is perfectly all right. Remember, Donald Trump,

a Republican of sorts, ran a trillion dollar deficit before the pandemic with 2% economic growth, a trillion dollars. And Republicans went right along with it. When Donald Trump secured the nomination by winning the Indiana primary, he came back to Washington. And Paul Ryan, knowledgeable, cheerful, intelligent, policy-oriented, was given the task of briefing Mr. Trump on the unsustainability of various entitlement programs as they're currently configured, Social Security, Medicare, et cetera. He's given 20 minutes. Of course, that's four times longer than Donald Trump's attention span. So after five minutes, Trump says, OK, you guys, you deal with this later. He says, I understand that they're unsustainable, but when the crisis comes, I won't be here. That gives you a fair idea of the political class today.

The electoral cycle will rescue them from the consequences of their behavior. And you believe that that is not limited to Donald Trump? No, certainly not. No, no, no. We're storing up big problems with our public fisc. And arithmetic at the end of the day is going to impose its truths on us that we can't continue like this. And every day we delay coming to terms with this, it's going to make the eventual crisis all the more wrenching. But no one wants to take the lead. How do you see the presidency and executive power? The swollen presidency is, to my mind, the most alarming

aspect of modern politics. It's not just the dislocation of the Madisonian equilibrium. Madison assumed, as he said in Federalist 51, we see throughout our system of government the policy of supplying by opposite and rival interests the defect of better motives. He thought the House should be the rival of the Senate, the Senate the rival of the House, the Congress the rival of the executive branch, and that this wholesome rivalry would produce equilibrium. The problem is something happened in the 1790s that was neither desired nor anticipated by those who wrote the Constitution in the late 1780s. That is the emergence of parties. And today, party loyalty trumps, if you'll forgive the expression, loyalty to your institutions.

And people tend to think of themselves in Congress as team players, and the captain of the team is the president of their party. So the Madisonian assumption of a wholesome rivalry has been short-circuited by this. And as a result, we have this odd presidential fixation in the country, which is, I think, a sign of national immaturity. When Franklin Roosevelt, taking advantage of radio, which I think more than the internet, more than television, it was radio that began the transformation of our politics as a technology. When Franklin Roosevelt began his first fireside chat after becoming president, March 4th, 1933,

first words, and these do not appear on the transcript that they have in the library at Hyde Park, his first words to the nation were, my friends. We're so used to this kind of cloying intimacy that we have with presidents who are in our living room daily on television that we don't think anything of it. Try to imagine George Washington addressing the American people, my friends. Inconceivable. And I don't think we want presidents to be our friends. I think we want presidents to take care that the laws are faithfully executed. That's pretty much what Article 2 of the Constitution says they're for. They are not consolers in chief. When Michael Jackson dies, presidents really don't have to talk about it.

They can go about their business. The idea that presidents have to orchestrate the nation's emotional life is, again, it's childish. How do you see Congress and congressional power? Well, I'm a congressional supremacist. I think Congress is Article 1 for a reason. Article 2 says the president shall take care that the laws are faithfully executed. Well, he executes what Congress does, with the clear exception of foreign policy where presidents ought to be dominant. But Congress has to get back to doing certain basic things like appropriating. They never obey the law, which tells them when the 12 appropriations bills are supposed to be passed.

Get back to what is euphemistically called regular order, which isn't regular anymore, hasn't been for decades. But again, when government grows to its current dimensions, the idea of Congress controlling it, having meaningful oversight, it becomes more and more attenuated. So we've talked about the presidency and Congress, the third branch of government, the Justice Department. We haven't yet talked about how do you see the justice system now? And is it effectively curbing the expansion of presidential power? No, but it might. I'm sometimes asked, I've been writing columns for almost 50 years now. What have you changed your mind about?

And my answer is I've changed 180 degrees about the role of the judiciary and the supervision of democracy. I was for a while, when I came to Washington in 1970, I was, as many conservatives were back then, an advocate of judicial restraint, judicial deference to the elected branches of government, because I was in reaction against some of the more freewheeling jurisprudence of the Warren

Court. But if you are a majoritarian, then you believe, as Oliver Wendell Holmes, a pure majoritarian, said, if the American people Wendell Holmes, a pure majoritarian, said, if the American people want to go to hell, I will help them. It's my job. Well, I don't think that is the job of the judiciary. If I can give you a little autobiographical swoop here. I grew up in central Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, where my father was a professor at the University of Illinois.

According to local lore, it was in the Champaign County Courthouse that Abraham Lincoln, at the time in 1854, a prosperous traveling railroad lawyer, learned that Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas had passed through the Senate and Congress the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 set out to solve the problem. The problem was what to do about the question of slavery expanding into the territories. Slavery was in the states, was the state's business. The consensus was the federal government couldn't do anything about that, but the federal government was in charge of the territories. Therefore, it had to answer questions of could slaves be brought into the territories?

Could there be slavery? Could the territories exclude slavery? The Kansas-S Nebraska Act's solution, Stephen Douglas' solution, was popular sovereignty. Vote slavery up, vote slavery down. It's a matter of moral indifference to Stephen Douglas. What was morally important to him was majorities should rule. Lincoln's assent to greatness began with his implacable, canny recoil against this. He said, no, America is not about a process, majority rule. America is about a condition, liberty. My view is that the judiciary has an ever-expanding legitimate role in curbing

majority threats to liberty. I mean, the founders had a catechism. They said, what's the worst outcome of politics? Tyranny. To what form of tyranny is democracy prey? Tyranny of the majority. And it's up to the judiciary to superintend the excesses of majorities. When in 1943, in the case West Virginia v. Barnett, the Supreme Court reversed itself from just a few years earlier and said, actually, states cannot compel Jehovah's Witnesses children to salute the flag at the beginning of the school day because it goes against their conscience. Justice Jackson, former attorney general, future head of the judicial delegation from the United States at the Nuremberg war crimes trials,

Justice Jackson said in his opinion, the very purpose of a Bill of Rights is to place certain things beyond the reach of majorities, above the vicissitudes of politics. Just the Bill of Rights, that's the Constitution. Constitution is a counter-majoritarian device. The First Amendment says Congress shall make no law respecting establishment of religion, even if majorities want it. Sorry, can't have it. We've decided that. Can't abridge freedom of the press, even if a majority wants to. Can't do it. Sorry, took that off the table. I think that's judicial review and an engaged judiciary have an increasing role to play. We've talked about governance at a national level. What do you see as far as governance of America's major cities? Well, to the extent that they can be said to be governed right now, I'm thinking of the flash

mobs looting luxury stores in downtown San Francisco. I'm thinking of Walgreens closing drugstores in San Francisco because people go in with impunity and steal up to $950 worth of goods. Up to that point, it's a misdemeanor in San Francisco. Well, we saw the mayor of San Francisco, I think, yesterday said, enough of this. Let's not defund the police. Let's fund the police. If you look at the educational system in our major cities that is so conspicuously failing, people trying to get on the bottom rungs of the ladder of opportunity in the United States. If you look at, again, policing, law and order, the spike in homicides and crime right now, blue America runs most of our cities, and they are not, shall we say, conspicuously well-governed.

Let me quote you. Can a nation so thoroughly committed to equality cultivate and celebrate excellence, which distinguishes the few from the many? Well, it's a good question since it's mine. Exactly. Yeah. All the thoughtful people have been worrying about this for a very long time. The rancid, awful vocabulary of populism, criticism of elites and elitism. Good heavens. I mean, the question for grownups is not whether elites shall rule, but what kind of elites are going to rule.

And the problem and the challenge of democracy is to get people to consent to worthy elites. Robert Taft, senator from Ohio, was Mr. Republican for many years until he died early in the Eisenhower administration. And someone once asked Taft's wife if he was a common man. She said, good God, no, he's not a common man. He was first in his class at Yale, first in his class at law school. People of Ohio don't want a common man. They want an exemplary man. It'd be hard to imagine someone saying that nowadays, but it's true.

I don't think people actually, when they go into the polling booth, say, let me find a real mediocrity here. Someone without a taint of elitism. Some people say, no, elitism means people think they're better than others. Well, some people are better than others at governing. They're better than others at writing novels, directing plays, hitting a baseball. We want America to be a meritocracy in which elites are identified and rewarded. Robert Frost, a poet once said, I do not want to live in a homogenized society. I want the cream to rise. We spend gobs of money on universities to try and get the cream to rise. What do you think the biggest trends and challenges facing America are?

One is to follow on from what I just said, is the revolt against meritocracy. What they're going to replace meritocracy with, I do not know. But there is a move driven by envy and resentment. Envy, it is worth noting, is the only one of the seven deadly sins that doesn't give the sinner even momentary pleasure. It's a kind of curdling, nagging, disagreeable frame of mind. That's part of it. Another is we're spending all this money on educating people, and we don't know what education is for, but I will now tell you. The point of education is to learn how to praise. Most people think, no, no, no. Education means critical thinking and criticism means tearing down. Not true.

Learning to praise is learning to say this book or that movie or this person measures up to high standards. And therefore, learning to praise is learning to identify and affirm high standards. And therefore, learning to praise is learning to identify and affirm high standards. That's what I would like to see modern America be, more praising and more praiseworthy. And other challenges that you see? Aside from, as I say, restraining our appetite for spending money we don't have, it seems to me we need a continent-wide deep breath. We need someone to come along and say, as a president or a presidential candidate, and say, everyone relax, unclench your fists, unfurl your brow, unpurse your lips, lighten up. Because

as Lincoln said at the close of his great first inaugural, we are not enemies, we must not be enemies. I tend to think that the fever we're in nowadays, as fevers generally do, fevers don't generally kill their hosts, they burn out. I think people are exhausted, they're tired, they're angry. Most Americans aren't angry. There are 331 million people in this country, and at any given time, 325 million of them are not listening to talk radio, not watching cable television. They're going about their lives and getting along with one another perfectly well. But the tone of society is set by angry, compact, articulate minorities. And we'll get over this, partly because it's boring.

The great human capacity for boredom is going to save us because just to take today's racial obsessions, when everything is seen through a lens about race, it's deeply boring. The New York Times sports page almost always has something about race. I remember not long ago, they had something fretting about the absence of racial diversity

in snowboarding. And I said, well, what next? Well, what came next was a story about the absence of racial diversity in surfing. Richard Price said, well, we can skip the Times sports page because it's not about sports. Many people believe in a life cycle of nations, the countries rise and then decline. How do you see the U.S. position in the world compared, for example, to China? I think China is dangerous but overrated. China has enormous problems. China's demographic destiny is ominous for China. By about 2026, about five years from now, it will no longer be the most

populous nation. India is going to pass it because of the long lingering echo of the obscene one-child policy that the Chinese Communist Party imposed on the country. China is going to go gray before it becomes rich. It's going to have an enormous population of the elderly, supported by not enough young people, and it's going to be a real problem. It's going to confront what's called the middle income trap. That is, it's gone from a manufacturer providing the world with cheap goods made by cheap labor to a mid-lane country producing goods made by no longer cheap labor, therefore goods no longer competitive, goods now that are going to be made in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka and Vietnam and elsewhere. So I think China, although dangerous, is in part dangerous because it can see some problems coming down the road and a window of supremacy closing.

And how do you see the U.S.? I think that the United States is still the nation where people are risking and losing their lives in attempts to get in. People want to come here and work. People aren't trying to come in here so they can get on welfare. They want jobs, two or more jobs. One of our great strengths is that we know how to assimilate immigrants,

something China can't do. Of course, no one's fighting to get into China anyway, something that most other nations can't do. As long as we understand the great American strengths, which is immigration and relatively light governments that leaves ample room for the spontaneous order I was praising earlier, I think the United States is, this can be another American century. Wonderful to hear. Before I ask for the three takeaways you'd like to leave the audience with today, is there anything else you'd like to mention that you haven't already touched upon? No, I've aired most of my grievances in our 45 minutes. I'm content. What are the three takeaways you'd like to leave the audience with? First, although everyone's besotted by the new media, I still believe that books are the primary

carriers of ideas. So when you're not reading a book, you're wasting your time, probably. So keep reading. Second, the American Constitution is the most successful instrument of governance ever devised. And make sure you understand where it comes from and what its premises are. And third, remember that nothing lasts. Roman Empire didn't last. The Ottoman Empire, Carolingian Empire, Habsburg, nothing lasts. But the United States is doing pretty well. And when I say nothing lasts, the current distemper won't last either. Mark Twain once was staying in a hotel with his friend, the novelist, William Dean Howells, and they decided to go for a walk in the morning.

They stepped out on the hotel's porch and saw it was raining. It was a deluge. And William Dean Howells said to Twain, do you think it will stop? And Twain said, well, you know, it always has. And I think well to remember that little story. George, thank you so much for our conversation today. And thank you also for your 16 books so far and all of your columns. Well, thank you. It's amazing to be paid to have as much fun as I have writing them. If you enjoyed today's episode and would like to receive the show notes or get new fresh weekly episodes, be sure to sign up for our newsletter at 3takeaways.com or follow us on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Note that 3takeaways.com is with the number three. Three is not spelled out. See you soon at 3takeaways.com.