The Ricochet Podcast - Triumph of The Will

Episode Date: July 12, 2019

This week, we’re fortunate to be able to access the deep mind of one of the country’s great thinkers and writers, George Will on the occasion of his new book, The Conservative Sensibility. We conduct a long and wide-ranging conversation with him covering everything from the meaning of conservatism, President powers, progressive regulation, and much more. Take our advice: pour yourself a tall... Source

I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University. As government expands, liberty contracts. It's funny, sometimes American journalists talk about how bad a country is because people are lining up for food. That's a good thing. First of all, I think he missed his time. Please clap. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long. I'm James Lileks.

Today we only need one guest, and that's George Will. Let's have ourselves a podcast. Welcome, everybody. This is the Ricochet Podcast number 455. James Lalix here in Minnesota, Peter Robinson in California, and Rob Long. Well, he likes the island Manhattan. Smoke on your pipe and put that in, as the man said. Gentlemen, welcome.

Thank you, James. James, here we are. Indeed, we are. And we've got a great guest coming up, but there is stuff happening. And apparently, as far as I can tell, and this may not be fair, the media seems to be trying to forge a rather adamantine bond between the Epstein situation and Donald Trump. Is that what you're getting? Or am I misreading what they're doing and conveniently leaving out some of the things that I've read elsewhere about Trump's opinion of Epstein? And how's this going to play out? I think it's just another thing that's going to be in the news for a week and then evaporate like all of the other things that are tried.

But where's this going? I'm sorry. I'm California allergies in here. So here's what I as best I can tell, there's really no connection between Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein's circles in Manhattan did not overlap, except in the most tangential way with those of Donald Trump. There's one comment by Trump on Epstein in a profile. I think it was in Vanity for some magazine and it goes back some number of years and Trump made a now, it now seems disgusting comment. Epstein's a great guy was part of the comment. The second comment was, and he likes the ladies. They tend to be on the younger side. Well, that's horrible.

And it's the, what we've come to expect expect. But there's no real connection between Epstein's criminal activity and Trump. Alex Acosta, Florida figure who cut the deal under which Epstein received what now appears to have been very lenient treatment, has now resigned as secretary of – what was he? Secretary of Labor. As best I can tell, that was that was a unjust he was unjustly targeted in the press i believe that the longish account of what acosta did that appeared in the wall street journal earlier this week strikes me as accurate or at the very least plausible actually acosta didn't have all the cards that a prosecutor might wish to have in his hand, and the deal wasn't as lenient as it now seems to have been.

Acosta probably did a perfectly reasonable thing when he was in charge of the prosecution of Epstein all those years ago. Nevertheless, he's now out. It was a distraction. As far as I can tell, that's it. The Epstein drama will continue to unfold, but there's no more connection between Epstein and Trump or the administration. No, and it's sort of hilarious too. No, I think you're absolutely right.

And it's sort of hilarious too because here you have a guy who's credibly accused and is going to do some time for – the worst crimes possible, right? I mean short of murder uh you know sex slavery and sex traffic it's pretty bad and what people of the media are most obsessed with is where where's the trump connection trump said a thing about him that that is more outrage column inch outrage than the actual crime itself probably because there is a connection, a political connection with Jeffrey Epstein, and it is not two prominent Republicans, but two prominent Democrats. And in a way, I mean, I hate this, as you know, my brand, as you know, is anguish. It anguishes me to say it, but this reminds me a lot of the Russia dossier and the Russia investigation in which we no longer hear anything about it now that we know the true tick tock of it is that it was a piece of opposition campaign research paid for by the Democrats and planted and used to to go on a fishing expedition against an opposing campaign.

And we know that. That's true. But we're not allowed to talk about it anymore because it doesn't – the narrative isn't what we want it to be. And I can't believe I used the term narrative. But this is the madness of the Trump administration. It's driving me to use words like narrative and – Just wait. When it's known that the plane that Epstein used to get around to his private islands was called the Lolita Express. Somebody will point out that the book Lolita was written by Nabokov, who was a Russian American.

Yeah, right. That is true. I suspect even the Bill Clinton stuff will fade away because – not because Bill Clinton is clean, but because there was – or maybe he's just incredibly prodigious but there is another uh incredibly distasteful billionaire uh a supermarket king um who was a as a major wasn't many times for many years a major uh la-based financier who um who did uh fly around on his plane he was there's no there is no evidence that the women were underage but there were a lot of women. And the plane was dubbed and Bill Clinton was on it all the time. He was on it so much that the plane was dubbed Air F1 and the F didn't stand for force. Wow. So here's what we know.

Donald Trump on the one side, we have Donald Trump who made a ridiculous, borderline, disgusting comment years ago. And that's the only connection Trump has with Epstein. And we have Alex Acosta, who is the only man who so far has put Epstein behind bars. On the other hand, we have Bill Clinton, whose office issued a statement saying that he flew on Epstein's jet only four times. And now we have journalists who've checked the flight records and discovered it's 26 times. There you have a discrepancy that journalists should be going after. Who are they going after? Alex Acosta and Donald Trump.

It is just – it's beyond – it's just journalistic incompetence at this stage. It's just – I was about to say it's madness. It is at a minimum maddening. I guess we should all be used to it. But good lord, where's the editor saying, excuse me, ladies and gentlemen, you have a known discrepancy here. Start digging. Nobody. No one will dig.

And once again, it reminds me – I mean Molly Hemingway has a number one bestseller, a book out about the Kavanaugh hearing, former ricochet – our beloved former ricochet colleague Molly Hemingway. I think it's a number one or number one, number two. It's one of the most popular books in the country right now. It is simply not part of any narrative either in the mainstream media or near times. It just doesn't exist for those people. They just don't want to hear it. It's not that they're bad at their job. In a way, they're good at it.

They're so good at it, they do not want to cover why Bill Clinton was on the plane 26 times. And notice also in the front page what they're covering now. Enormous amount. We're going to learn a whole bunch about Joe Biden's lobbying or travel-related tax exemptions and the intricacies of his finances because the left-wing cabal, I guess you could say it, in the major media, especially in The Times, do not want Joe Biden to be their candidate.

They want somebody Marxist, which they may get. Well, they were remarkably curious about Biden during the eight years in which he was vice president. It's very odd that we're now finding out that President Obama, the most enlightened man ever to hold the office, had appointed as his vice president somebody who had such retrograde ideas on race, segregation, busing, and the rest of it. It's interesting to watch the ground erode from under Joe. And it may be with Bill Clinton and the Lolita Express. Hard as it is to say, it's possible people have already just factored this in. I mean, they say, we've factored in Trump's bad behavior and statements and the rest of

it. I mean, I think the idea that Bill Clinton had taken his desiccated self down to one of these places surprises absolutely nobody. I mean, it's like, yeah, I can see that happening. I mean, to me, it's important to note, as I keep reading elsewhere here, that Trump actually kicked Epstein off Mar-a-Lago property because he'd assaulted somebody underage. That would seem to be far more relevant to the thing than something that he said in an interview X number of years ago or what Acosta did. But, but, but, but. All right, we'll see how that one plays out.

The other thing, the other bit of drama that's going on in Washington right now, which will fade away into absolute nothingness, but is so, so much fun now is pelosi versus aoc the the new turks the the the the the woke intellectually certain brave souls storming the barricade uh versus the lady behind the curtain who um apparently threw shade as they like to say how do you think this plays out exactly you know it's hard to know how it will play out but the first first point is of course exactly as you said james it is just delightful to watch but you've got on the one hand it's even hard it's like the old iran iraq war you sort of want both sides to lose um i guess i'd put my money on Nancy Pelosi, who is,

after all, a very shrewd, extremely experienced politician who has most of the caucus behind her, who has the raw politics behind her. The raw politics are that something on the order of 20 members of the Democratic caucus have been elected from districts that Trump either won or very nearly won. So if that party moves too far to the left, it puts the Democratic majority in trouble. As I say, Pelosi has the raw politics on her side. But the entitlement and the hipness and wokeness and the cool press that AOC and the other women have and the amazing, the willingness to take on Nancy Pelosi in the most disrespectful, imaginable way. Where's the quotation? If you come with the king, you'd best kill him.

Is that what you mean? AOC accused Nancy Pelosi of going after women of color yes yes the implicit argument was that nancy pelosi is a racist which is unbelievable that she feels entitled to say that and that's and actually so the again raw politics nancy pelosi cannot permit that to go unpunished or she will lose her authority with the rest of the caucus well it's like it's like what you know a prince of england bringing home some commoner who walks into a their first meeting with the queen chewing gum and keeps her cap on and then looks around the room and says what come on are we how stuffy do we have to be around here i mean to to to bring

that level of of uh of brashness and and uh and lack of respect into that chamber and that person bespeaks a remarkable lack of ability to read the room, shall we say. Yeah. Well, by the way, James, that was a terrific pitch, movie pitch. I watched that. But I would say two things. We are truly in crazy town when it is – you can legitimately argue and you can argue with a preponderance of evidence is that Nancy Pelosi is the most sensible mainstream Democrat alive. And that is something we all should – this is a very long, hot summer, I got to say. The second thing is how remarkable this keeps happening to the speakers of the house they uh they sweep into power and there's a very loud boisterous cabal of rabble

rousers and radicals either on the right or the left who simply do not want to play by the rules and make their lives really really difficult uh this happened to this is this has really happened to i think i can't think of a recent speaker that it has not happened to but especially happened with a vengeance to paul ryan it happened to his predecessor it happened to nancy pelosi uh and it's going to keep happening uh until these until the parties reassert their strength you know parties be very very strong this is an inconceivable thing to have happened under tip o'neill inconceivable thing to have happened under Tip O'Neill. Inconceivable thing to have happened under Denny Hastert, let's be honest. But the parties have lost a lot of power and unless they regain it, this is the kind of noisy, boisterous,

disrespectful, not-wait-your-turn-ism that American politics is going to enter or re-enter after about a century of very, very, very strong party control. Well, it's a different culture being imported into what was traditionally a man's club. This is sort of like Anna Wintour catching the new intern doing a drop-dead impersonation of her in the break room. That's not the culture of Washington that it used to be. That's a good pitch, too, by the way. I think that one's actually been done.

So there we have it. Well, that'll be fun. That will be a joy to play out. Between her and Omar and Tahib and the rest of it, there is a lot of heat and a lot of noise and a lot of sparks coming off these particular representatives. You've got to give them credit. You do, and if you're on the right, you have to be happy because they're stating what the base wants to hear and as such making everybody else have to come in line and say yay or nay. And they kind of got to say yay, especially if they're running for president. Who's up this week, by the way?

I forget. Who's up this – oh, you mean in the polls? Well, I don't know the money. Kamala Harris raised a lot of money. Kamala Harris raised a lot of money because she openly attacked Joe Biden for having a position that she agrees with, which is a remarkable piece of sleight of hand. You got to give her credit. And here again, we saw the press. The press really wants her to do well. We now know that she's drifted back down. So after the debate performance, she pulled up close to Biden. There were a couple of polls that showed her even with Biden.

I think there was a poll that showed her a point ahead of Biden. This is polls of Democratic voters. And now she's drifted back down. It's Biden in first place, Sanders in second place, Kamala Harris in third place. So it looks as though what the press was saying was Kamala Harris has her moment and breaks out of the pack. Well, she certainly had a strong performance, and she's now in the top tier of candidates. But that was at least in part a bump, and now she's drifted back down. It's just – Rob will appreciate – no, we want to appreciate it. He'll be horrified by it, but he'll get it. What strikes me is the extent to which the whole country,

at least the whole democratic, you know, the whole country is starting to look more and more like California. And I don't mean that in a good way. I have thought to myself for years that if I live 30 miles North in San Francisco, I would actually vote for Nancy Pelosi because in San Francisco, she's the sane one. And now, as Rob just pointed out, she's the sane one in the Democratic Party across the whole country. Right. The culture spreads from California and New York and from the colleges so that you have a small town – well, a suburb of Minneapolis that decides not to do the Pledge of Allegiance anymore because – not because they think it's an old, outdated relic written by a socialist but because there are people from diverse communities who may not agree with what the statements are, which is a fascinating thing because it's like directly injecting Berkeley philosophy into a small first-ring suburb and saying that there is no national identity. There is no concept of the citizen. There is no e pluribus unum.

There is just a series of competing groups. Was it a school board decision? No, it was a simple renegade teachers. City council. Oh, you're kidding. No. It was a formal elected body. Yep.

Oh, my goodness. Well, it's too bad that we got to get to something else because we could have gotten to Eric Swalwell, who apparently quit because I think he'd maxed out the one credit card he was running this thing on. You know, you got a $5,000 limit. There's only so much you can do nationally as a presidential campaign. And you know those credit cards? If you got them, you know that for decades they've been telling you, hey, buy it now. Put your whole campaign on your card and see what happens. Pay for it later.

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writes a twice weekly syndicated column for the Washington Post column he began in 1974 and for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1977 new book the conservative sensibility usually here's where we tell you where you can find the person on Twitter but Mr. Will is a wise man and abjured of that particular platform. Welcome. Let's start at the very top of the book. You dedicated to Barry Goldwater, a name that perhaps has receded in the American imagination and shouldn't. What were your reasons for doing that? Well, one was to call attention to 1964 when I cast my first presidential vote for him, in 1964, 77% of the American people said they trusted the government to do the right thing all the time or almost all the time.

Today, the figure is 17%. And one of the things the book tries to explore is to explain this 60-point collapse in the prestige of government as the government has become more solicitous, not to say servile. Well, one of the strains that's tearing conservatism apart these days is exactly the government that we don't trust, what we should do with it. And American Greatness, that peculiar website before the election, the one that gave us the Flight 93 analogy, was saying, heck, you know, we're going to have a Caesar.

He might as well be our Caesar. He can use the instruments of power to do the things that we want the government to do. That's the problem today, isn't it? They look at conservatives of having accomplished nothing by preaching restraint and say, it's our turn to go for the gusto. Well, exactly right. That's the fallacy of the false alternative, seems to be the governing philosophy among some conservatives today. The fact is that conservatives have achieved a great deal, that if conservatism doesn't stand for restraint, particularly restraint

involving the incipient, watery Caesarism of the modern presidency, then conservatism has no role to play. Hey, George, as you know, one of my particular obsessions in this book is how the presidency has grown and become untethered from its constitutional moorings at great cost to the Madisonian equilibrium that was bequeathed to us. Hey, George, it's Rob Long in New York. Thanks for joining us. So I understand, I mean, in the book you talk about that.

You talk about certainly the collapse of faith in government. But then why are we asking to do more things? If I go to Home Depot and buy a bucket, a simple orange bucket, about two-thirds of that bucket is stenciled with bucket warnings that are federally required. The presidency now has sort of I mean, we used to joke about the imperial presidency. But I mean, my God, Pennsylvania Avenue has been shut down. The president can't travel without two full planes of people. You know, Lincoln would wake up in his bedroom and on his way to the bathroom, he would be interrupted and stopped by petitioners. So if we all agree the government's the wrong place and we don't trust to do the

right thing, why do we keep asking it to do more things? Well, I'm afraid as James Q. Wilson, the greatest social scientist of his era, never tired of explaining politics, particularly legislative politics, is additive. You support my increase of government, I'll support yours. And we do this in part because we've made big government cheap. We've done this by making enormous deficits, even in times of rapid economic growth and more than full employment, as in today when we're going to run a trillion-dollar deficit under those conditions, we've made big government cheap, giving the American people a dollar's worth of government and charging them 80 cents for it,

and fobbing the rest off on the left to Ted Cruz on the right is more united by this class interest than it is divided by ideology. And the class interest is in permanent deficit spending is that the fault of the toddler in the high chair, you and me in the body politics saying, we like it this way. We'll deal with it tomorrow. I mean in the 60s and 70s and I think for most of the Reagan administration, the bargain that you mentioned was true. It was like you let us spend to end the Cold War and we'll let you spend to make sure all the buckets have stencils on them, basically. But now I think we don't have a Cold War, so all we're doing is painting buckets. Where do you see that stopping? The grim truth is that our representative government is representative. That is, it really does represent the appetites of the American people.

You're not allowed to say a discouraging word about the American people because this is a populist era. But one of the themes of my book is that populism is the obverse of conservatism. The populist says the passions of the public are good. The founding fathers thought passions were inherently problematic. The populace says we must translate our passions directly into governance through an emancipated president, the sort who would go before a convention and say, only I can fix it.

Conservatives like Madison say majority rule should rule. Majority opinion should matter, but that opinion should be filtered and refined and a plurality of judges on the Supreme Court, then we could get some stuff done. We have had all of those. Because the emancipated president, advocated by Woodrow Wilson, theoretically justified by Woodrow Wilson, practiced by Franklin Roosevelt and by the man who came to Washington in the 1930s to work for Roosevelt, the man, the only American president to spend his entire adult life in Washington,

Lyndon Johnson. Because conservatives understood that such men, such emancipated presidents were the great engines of the growth of government, conservatives for a long time had a healthy respect for congressional supremacy, arguing that Congress is Article I of the Constitution for a reason, arguing that Article II is very spare in what it says about the president's duties, and they distill, really, to taking care that the laws are faithfully executed, which makes the president subordinate to Congress. Yet, along about 1981 at noon on January 20th, conservatives put away their copy of James Burnham's wonderful book, Congress and the American Tradition, and discovered the delights of presidential power. And they've never acquired, they've never reopened James Burnham's book since, so far as I can tell. So, George, if we take, let's simply take the budget as a kind of index for the health of the republic. Very, very crude, but for now, you'll see what I'm getting at. For 150 years, it all worked pretty well. Right through Grover Cleveland,

whom you have described as the last democratic president who had a proper constitutional appreciation of the office, right through really Woodrow Wilson, right up until the Great Depression and Franklin Roosevelt, the federal government, I think you could argue at least as displayed in the modesty of the budget and the assumption of everyone is it that it changed so permanently? Why can't even very determined conservatives claw it all back? Well, it's very difficult to claw back entitlements because people feel entitled to them. That's the first problem. The second is that after Roosevelt left, the fundamental change in the 1960s was the collapse of what James Q. Wilson called the legitimacy barrier. Up till then, Congress at least made perfunctory, nodding acknowledgement of the theory that ours is a government of limited, delegated, and enumerated powers. So that whenever Congress wanted to do something, it at least pretended to link it to an enumerated powers so that whenever Congress wanted to do something,

at least pretended to link it to an enumerated power in the Constitution. So when Dwight Eisenhower and Congress decided to build the interstate highway system, they called it the National Defense Highway Act. And I went through Princeton Graduate School on support from the National Defense Education Act. But James Q. Wilson thought that the legitimacy barrier finally fell in 1965, the first year after the anti-Goldwater landslide, when for the first time since 1938, there was a liberal legislating majority in Congress, and Congress passed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

They didn't even bother to connect that to an enumerated power, this federal intrusion into the quintessentially straight and local responsibility of education, grades K through 12. That's where it fell, and since then, Congress has been completely uninhibited. George, so is there a way back? Or does your book amount to a brilliantly reasoned, beautifully written lament? It's partly that. And as I say, it's a summons to intelligent pessimism, because in a democratic society, any free society, so much can go wrong. And in our society, so much has gone wrong. However, there are two hopes. We've seen flickers in the last few months, actually, that the Supreme Court, for the first time since 1935, a resonant year, might begin to enforce the non-delegation doctrine.

That is, the first substantive words of the Constitution, the first words after the preamble are, all legislative power shall be vested in a Congress of the United States. The court is tiptoeing up to the point of again saying Congress has no right, no power to divest itself of essentially legislative powers to the administrative state. In saying this in a recent case, it provoked Elena Kagan, Justice Kagan, to say, well, then most of the government is unconstitutional. Good point. So we're about to have a robust argument about this. But beyond this, we really cannot hope for even an engaged judiciary to enforce real limits on this.

This has to come from the public, and it has to come from an understanding that people now despise a government that is more solicitous of their approval than ever. conservative sensibility, not conservative convictions, not conservative principles. The book is a masterpiece, but I have to say the title worried me when I first heard that that was going to be the title because it sounds so subjective, so airy. Tell me why I'm wrong. Tell me why you did it. Here's why I did it. By sensibility, I mean more than an attitude but less than an agenda. I didn't want to tell people so much what to think as how to think.

And I believe that an individual's political philosophy is tied up with sensibility. That is, with how he or she experiences the flux of events and the human condition, if you will, that first comes this kind of sensibility and then comes, or shortly thereafter comes, real philosophy, that is reflection. Let me give you an example. I cite in the book Virginia Prostrell's wonderful saying that the Bible, reduced to one sentence, is, God created man and woman and promptly lost control of events. The conservative sensibility finds lack of control, unpredictability, an open future, the spontaneous order of a free society.

A conservative finds this exhilarating. The progressive looks at this and says, what a mess. Let's organize it. Let's put stencils on the pails and organize everything else from top to bottom. There is the difference, and it's essentially a difference of sensibility. It has philosophic ramifications and philosophic justifications, these two points of view, but the conservative sensibility embraces we're all, if you will. Right, right. George, I have one more, if I may. I know Rob and James want to come back in.

But you're getting, as of course you darn well should, you're getting rave reviews from fellow conservatives. Matt Continetti put up a beautiful review a national review um you're getting a little bit of um in some some quarters quite sharp criticism for your view of the judiciary and and it well i'll just leave it to you could you explain what what has got people upset how would would you differ from Antonin? If Antonin Scalia were here, this is a man you knew well. If he were still with us, what would he say about the view of the judiciary that you lay out in the book? And why would he be mistaken? Well, he would say I was wrong.

And here's why he would be mistaken. Conservatives for many years, responding to many of the more freewheeling court decisions by the Warren court, began to echo, and they don't realize they're echoing, they began to echo the progressive rhetoric about judicial deference, the criticism of Lochner and all the rest, the idea that it is a fundamental American ethic to yield to majoritarian sentiments in legislatures, Congress or state legislatures, because America is about majority rule. And therefore, judicial review itself and courts generally represent a counter-majoritarian dilemma. Here's what's wrong with that.

America is not about a process, majority rule. It's about a condition. I grew up in central Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. My father taught at the U of I there. Local lore has it that it was in the Champaign County Courthouse that Lincoln, traveling the circuit as a prosperous railroad lawyer, heard about Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas getting past the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. Kansas-Nebraska Act said, here's how we'll solve the vexing question of whether slavery should be extended into the territories.

We'll vote on it. Popular sovereignty in the territory was his riling cry. Lincoln's recoil against this, his implacable, canny, protracted recoil against popular sovereignty in the territory began his ascent to the greatest career in the history of world politics. Because, as again I say, we are not about are not about a process, we're about a condition. My doctoral dissertation at Princeton was titled, Beyond the Reach of Majorities, Closed Questions in an Open Society.

And that phrase, beyond the reach of majorities, comes from the second of the Supreme Court's flag salute cases, wherein after just three years it overturned its first ruling, in which it had said it is all right for states to compel Jehovah's Witness children to salute the flag even though it violates their deepest beliefs. Justice Jackson said the very purpose of a Bill of Rights, I would say the very purpose of a Constitution, is to place certain things beyond the reach of majorities and above the vic is discordant, to overturn it. important American after Lincoln and Washington was John Marshall. And that conservatives should stop echoing the liberal pinup, Oliver Wendell Holmes, who famously said in his majoritarian

sympathies, if the American people want to go to hell, I'll help them. It's my job. I do not think that's the job of Supreme Court justices. I want to ask George what it's like for us to mortgage the future of the country, because that's a bad thing. But mortgages individually aren't. Mortgages are necessary for your house. And if you have a mortgage and a family that depends on your income, then you need to protect the ones you love with insurance. Life insurance can pay off a mortgage, help send the kids to college. It's peace of mind.

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Not available in all areas. And our thanks to SelectQuote for sponsoring this, the Ricochet Podcast. Mr. Will, I want to take two points in your book and link them together. The first, in your chapter on progressivism, you began by talking about the triangle shirtwaist fire, which is this touchstone. And I believe that modern conservatives today would not regard it as a fatal imposition on property rights to require a fire door and an exit. But when the left then comes back and says, well, actually, what we also want to do is mandate sprinklers in outhouses in rural areas, and the conservative says that's an overreach and unnecessary, then it's back to, well, you just want people to die, like in the triangle shirtwaist

factory. In other words, we're evil. The other point that you make is that the young people believe the conservatives, the right, is the stupid party. And I'd say that they think that the right is stupid and evil, in which that their objectives are bad. Their objectives are meant to hurt people, and their stupidity is based on, I don't know, some you know religious backwater snake handling cliche that they ascribe to them or just the fact that they're not espousing liberal values and ideas means that they're automatically not as smart as the technocrats who would do our bidding for us so i mean smart and stupid how does the party get out or evil and stupid how does the party get out, evil and stupid, how does the party make its way amongst the youth with that stacked against them?

Well, I don't think it's, I don't believe in inevitabilities. I'm a pessimist, but not a fatalist. So looking on the bright side, as I am emphatically disinclined to do, I say the answer to your question is this. When the post-war conservative revival began is to reason with them, to tell them the enormously impressive pedigree of conservative ideas and the fault of progressive ideas, the most sinister of which is implied in Barack Obama's famous statement in Roanoke, Virginia, campaigning in 2012 for re-election, when he said, if you built a business, you really didn't build it. It was really built by society. Because society educated your workers and provided the roads your goods go to market on, etc., etc.,

he was actually echoing something that a new Senate candidate named Elizabeth Warren had said in the same election cycle. We have to tell the young people, who simultaneously, by the way, say we have sympathetic views of socialism and we distrust the government. Try and square that circle. Tell the young people that what the progressive theory does is socialize us all in the sense that it makes us half-owned by government. And what we own is half-owned by government. And I think there's a tension in young people these days. By socialism, they mean nothing more precise than everybody being nice to everybody. But they have a robust skepticism of government and a healthy, I think almost Internet-bred sense of openness, possibility, and individual spontaneity.

So I think if we appeal to that side of the young people, the conservatives can prosper. All right. I'm trying not to laugh, George. That seemed entirely too optimistic, and I want my money back. It probably is. Yeah. Well, I mean I was – here's what I always thought. I always said the most effective direct mail piece, political direct mail piece for the conservative agenda was the pay stub. The minute you get it, the first time you get it, you stare at it and you think, my God, I thought I was going to actually make what they told me I was going to make. I was going to make 70 percent of that. And that has been a clarifying moment for a lot of young people.

It's what I call the FICA scream. Your child calls up for their first job and says, good God, what is FICA and why is it taking my paycheck? And it's usually begun with the phrase, did you know about this? So assuming that the financial pinch is usually the only pinch that works, and we as a country, as a body politic, have been love spending money we don't have and putting it off. And those of us who believe in a certain kind of economics think, well, in the future it will be easier to pay than it is now.

And those of us who just want to put our heads in the sand. But assuming that we're all wrong, what do you think – when do you think the bill will start to pinch? There are two ways it can pinch. We can have a crisis, a collapse of confidence. We can have people stop – foreigners and others stop buying our treasury bills, stop buying our debt, or worse, we can have a slow slide into slow growth entropy and an ever more bitter distributional politics as we argue about how to carve up a static pie. Those are the two ways, and neither is very happy. I note that today the latest intellectual fad among progressives

is called modern monetary theory. And it is that if you have fiat currency, you can print as much of it as you want and there's really no such thing as scarcity of government resources. Conservatives are actively ridiculing this while practicing it. It seems to me that's exactly what conservatives have been doing and running up the debt as fast as we have. Again, there's a Republican Senate. There's a Republican president.

Until January, there was a Republican House. And we have coming now a trillion-dollar deficit at full employment. Am I being pessimistic enough? Yeah, you know what? That makes me feel a lot better. Me too. Me too. Yeah. Am I back to being pessimistic enough? moment of good cheer. I'm just trying to think, what is one lever? What is the one, you say we need to, ultimately the American people get the representation they seek. So you're saying it has to, we have to change, we have to improve our character really is what you're saying. We need to all brush our nails and sit up. And so how does that get accomplished?

Does this sound plausible to you that if one had to launch one single political crusade in pursuit of George Will's ideals, it would be in favor of charter schools? It would be some sort of crusade to bust up the teachers' unions and break open American education? Would that be the one political aim that might best achieve something? It would be one of three. My second would be a balanced budget amendment, which I opposed for many years, but I have in my book, I found one written by others that I think is prudent and workable. And the third, I've written a whole book about this in 1994. The third would be term limits. I know the cost of that. I know the dangers of it. I know that it costs institutional memory in the Congress, but term limits for members of the House and the Senate. There's no other way to, in the phrase of the term limits movement, get these people to stop thinking of the next election and more about the next generation.

Those three things would be a start. George, I have to say, as a former Reagan speechwriter who wrote speech after speech in favor of a balanced budget amendment only to open the Washington Post and read George Will saying, oh, Tosh, I have lived to see a conversion. Well, what's converted me is understanding the following, that dangerous as it is in a way to constitutionalize fiscal policy, it's more dangerous not to. And we just had somebody who was worried about the word sensibility being too airy, say, Tosh. Mr. Will, last question from me, James Lylex, here in Minnesota. You talk about this at the start of the book.

What I have written, you wrote, is the distilled wisdom, as I understand it, that I've acquired from half a century in Washington, my home, which I love. I did a four-year tour of duty in D.C. in the 90s when it was violent and broken, and my recent trips have made me fall in love with the place all over again. It's better, which helps when you've got billions of dollars flowing into the imperial capital. But you've been there a long time and seen it ebb and flow and rise and fall. What is it about Washington that you love? First of all, I love the monuments. I love the residue of American history that is everywhere around you. And of course, you don't have to travel far outside it to be in the heart of the Civil War battlefield belt that extends from Gettysburg down to Appomattox. But beyond that, I believe that politics is dignified.

I believe that American politics, for all its chaos and nonsense, is a noble profession. I believe you can't despise the government and love your country. I believe, as a woman said in her maiden speech to the House of Commons not long ago, she said, democracy is like sex. If it isn't messy, you're not doing it right. And I would amend that simply to say politics is like sex. If it isn't fun, you're not doing it right. And I find Washington fun.

Well, sir, about a month or two ago, my daughter and I, she's 18, were having a political conversation. It was on a Sunday morning. And after we were done, I looked at the Sunday editorial section of a newspaper for which I work. And there it was. There was your big piece on your book. And it distilled absolutely everything that I've been talking to her about. And I her that and said this is the stuff this is what i mean and it's propped it's propped up on her desk at this very moment and when she gets around to reading it which i will make her to do i hope it is as important to her as your work has been to so many of us throughout the years you're very kind

if i could just add something here. You remind me of the wonderful story of Margaret Thatcher after she became head of the Parliamentary Conservative Party, but before she became prime minister, she was at a meeting of her members, and one of them was nattering on about the beauties of centrism and squishiness and all the rest. She reached into her famous handbag,

pulled out a great thick copy of Hayek's book, The Constitution of Liberty, slammed it on the desk, and she said, this is what we believe. I propose for a president someday to pick up the conservative sensibility. We'll all wait for that date and hope that it comes to us soon. George, Will, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. Thank you. I've enjoyed it very much. Thank you, George.

Thanks. Yep. Bye-bye. Well, boy, money. You know what? I almost think you should just have 10 minutes of silence. Yeah. I mean that you mean like zero noise,

zero talking? Just to let ourselves and our listeners absorb what George Will just said. All right. Let's do it then. Zero input from us while people just absorb the rest of it. Maybe not, though.

I mean because we're supposed to talk. Dead air is bad, right? Dead air is zero and nobody likes zero of anything, right? I mean remember when you broke your phone and you had zero contact with the outside world, zero calls, zero texts. That stuff was horrible. Without being a phone, it means zero everything. Having zero money is a bad thing. Having zero future, all this stuff. Look, zero is bad unless we're talking Zebit. Zebit, that's Z-E-B-I-T. They will change your whole perspective on zero forever. What am I talking about exactly? Well, it's this. Zebit, it's a better credit option. Zebit provides a better credit option for those who need it, frankly. They allow you to buy what you need and pay over time interest-free. Those are magic words. There's zero cost to join. With Zebit, there's no cost, no membership fees, no late fees, zero credit score needed because Zebit does not check your credit score and your Zebit account does not has everyday items at regular prices you'd love.

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Ricochet for $2,500 of interest-free credit. Zebit.com slash Ricochet. And our thanks to Zebit for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. Well, gentlemen, when George began his column, we had already been to the moon several times, and now we're coming up on the 50th anniversary of the moon landing. I, at the time, remember thinking this is just the start. We're going to have a base in 15 years. We'll be in mars in 30 and the way it turned out was such a grave disappointment to those of us who had hopes for mankind in space unlike peter robinson of course he's against all those stony heart was unmoved by the site and thought the money could i don't know no no no i was very moved by the site and and it was 50 years ago that was a very good use of government funds

it was a tremendous it what we were at war we were in the cold war if you think back this is the way i think of it if you think back to the end of the second world war wouldn't we all feel better now i believe that the the atomic bombings in Japan were necessary. They're justifiable. But even I would argue it would have been better if we'd had a demonstration explosion above Japan to show them what we could do. We kind of did. It was I mean, the first the fact that we had to do two, I think, indicated that the first one was insufficiently. I would rather have had a demonstration above japan that didn't kill anybody than have to drop the first bomb on hiroshima the point i'm trying to make is that

sending men to the moon was a demonstration of american technological economic superiority it shook the soviets badly it played on traditional old Russian, the old Russian insecurity in the face of the West. They're better than we are. They're technologically more adept than we are. And of course, it gave it was a tremendous boost to our own morale. I have nothing against space travel, but we're not in the same kind of conflict now. And I am very happy to see Elon Musk raising private capital, spending a lot of his own capital. and Jeff Bezos and Richard – what's his name? Branson. Branson.

Yep. That's the – I'm all in favor of it. I just don't believe at this stage that it needs to take place as a government project. Well, I sort of agree, but I also feel like it's partly – that we are doing an enormous amount of outer space work or geosynchronous orbit work. I mean there's a gigantic new Milky Way of satellites up there making communication and telemetry and all sorts of things much better. So we are kind of still exploring the physics of space, but we don't really have a purpose yet for the rest of it. And I think without a national purpose, which is actually okay, what we have is that maybe we're entering the period of the 19th century

where what we had was not a navy but a merchant marine. And sort of in the second half of the 19th century, enterprise built with some help from the government a gigantic merchant marine which of course could be converted at any moment into into some military to the navy and maybe that's the that's the phase we're in i just think the moon landing itself was much more of a cultural event and much more of sort of a world sort of consciousness event where this object that we have been living with and thinking about and mythologizing and pinning hopes and dreams and fears on for since the beginning, since the first human looked up, we now had a human looking down. And I think that was a remarkable thing for the human sort of consciousness and world culture.

And I think we're still digesting that actually. Right. There's two things to do in space now. One of them is economic. And a lot of the reasons these guys have gotten into private boosters is because they're making money on it. There's a lot of payloads to deliver upstairs. And there's mining to be done out there. There's a ridiculous article that said this asteroid of mine will provide everybody in the world with a fortune of such and such. Well, no, it won't. Because if we find

abundance, gold in the abundance that they're describing, it sort of kind of drives the price down. But there's there's stuff to be gotten up there that's of value. There is no economic value necessarily for building a craft that can go way out there just to explore. And some of those may need people. Now, in 1977, we launched the Voyager probes, which were amazing pieces of technology. I mean, the moon landing itself just absolutely blows my cranium to think of how they got there with what they had, that there's more computational power in my car's dashboard than the entirety of the program that did it. When you watch Apollo 13 and you see Tom Hanks' character literally looking at marks on the window to figure out the way home, it astonishes me what they did. And now,

Voyager itself was more complex and a little bit more technically sophisticated, but it did amazing work in mapping areas of our own backyard that we never knew about. And for the first time, we saw where we were. And for the first time we saw where we were and for the first time we built a craft that escaped from our solar system into interstellar space out of the out of the i mean what they did then with what they had is stunning but we've got more to do and there's all kinds of thoughts out there i mean nasa is toying with a warp engine strange as it seems the definition of it is kind of wonky but yeah it's sort of what it is there's a guy who's trying to put together money to build these ships that will be powered by an immensely powerful laser array in orbit that will shoot them so fast that they will get to another planet much quicker than we thought. They're going to be very small.

I mean, the size of a Coke can, but they'll get there. And that is the aspirational nature of space travel, which has no purpose other than this is what humans do we look at the heaving sea and we carve a boat out of bark and we go because there's something to be found and that's the that that can't be left entirely to private enterprise and i don't mind the fact that we've got government scientists on the government dole who are working out ways to do the things that are simply aspirational for humans because if if Americans don't do it, somebody else will. And I'd rather the country that had the flag that stood for the things that humanity ought to stand for is the one that gets out there.

Everyone, come along. Come along with you. But I want NASA on the side of the ship, and I want the American flag under the window. Speaking of the American flag, my father's Harley, he had just got himself a new American flag because apparently the one that he had on the back of his Harley had a tatter. And that just wouldn't do. It wouldn't do at all. He valued the flag. He loved it.

He loved everything that it represented. And so he got himself a new one and put it on the back of his Harley. And it's thick. It's quality. And there's no way that the rippling breeze from his daily rides on his Harley was going to disassemble that thing. In the office the other day, somebody was joking with him and said, Ralph, your shoes, there's an N on your shoes. Those are Nikes. And that's all that somebody had to say because my dad was irritated on behalf of Betsyoss's flag because he loved the flag so

much and made a great antic hilarious show of taking off those shoes he wasn't going to wear disrespectful shoes until somebody pointed out they're not nike's dad they're new balances uh he loved the flag and the country and everything it stood for and there will be a large beautiful flag draped over his coffin next week when he was put to rest and uh he would go out sometimes proud to wear his world war ii veteran hat and people would stop and thank him because there weren't many of his type left somehow when the country needed him we came up with a lot and now they are so few and the gratitude that he got made him smile growing up i never thought of my dad's identity as being a vet.

He was dad. And he would just sort of shrug it off and joke and say, I was in the big one, WW2. And the extent of it was simply a picture in the laundry room of the fighting block island, the FBI, the battleship, or the aircraft carrier in which he served. And he said nothing of it until decades later when my wife and my daughter asked questions and I began to hear of the experiences in the war. My dad was of a generation of a man who would tell you, oh, I've had ringing in my ears for 70 years. I haven't been able to hear in this one because of damage from bombardment. You just never know. You just figured maybe dad didn't hear you, but he just didn't bother to tell you that he was deafened from the war. All of those

things of his generation, they kept inside, but rather than being stoic and uncommunicative, he was funny, he was talkative, he was a hoot, he was a delight, he was a joy, and he did so much in this world for so many. I learn of all the people that he helped. I go through his stuff on the kitchen table and find the charities for small children who are indigent, whose upbringings were like his own that he helped. I hear constantly from the people who would say that he cared when they were in the gas station business. My dad carried him on the cuff for months because he couldn't pay and eventually would do their best to make it right by Ralph because Ralph was the kind of guy you wanted to make it right by. You wanted to follow his example. And he just simply set a wonderful example of what it means to be an American, what it means to enjoy life, what it means to get out

there with a gun and bring something down, what it means to get out there with a rod and pull up some bounty from the sea, what it means to come home every day reeking of gasoline and sit down at the kitchen table with your family and never miss a meal because that was the most important part there was. I was expecting, and we all were, that somebody of his indiminished vigor would just simply expire and taper and go away and be in a room somewhere. And it didn't happen. There's a sort of life that when you say it ended unexpectedly at 93, that's how much vim and vigor he had.

It was an accident. He was gone. And now we're all looking around shell-shocked. And now we're just expecting him to walk into the door any day with a box of cookies and a smile on his face and tell everybody he's back, but he isn't. And so I miss him a great deal, tremendously. And everybody out there, of course, has their moments with their fathers and their parents passing if there's anything to remember it's that you will find somebody like my dad in your daily walk who may not be wearing the hat but will be of that age of that era of that service and we owe them our world and this podcast has been brought to you by zebit lending club and select quote please support them

for supporting us and leave a review on iTunes. And now I'm starting to lose it. So I'm going to go. Thank you very much for listening. And Peter, Rob, it's been a fantastic podcast and I value doing it with you guys. And we'll see everyone in the comments at ricochet 4.0 next week,

boys. Next week, James. Shadows are falling and I'm running out of breath Keep me in your heart for a while If I leave you it doesn't mean I love you any less Keep me in your heart for a while

When you get up in the morning And you see that crazy sun Keep me in your heart for a while There's a train leaving nightly Called when all is said and done Keep me in your heart for a while Sha-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la Keep me in your heart for a while

Sha-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la Keep me in your heart for a while Sometimes when you're doing simple things around the house Maybe you'll think of me and smile You know I'm tied to you Like the buttons on your blouse Keep me in your heart for a while Hold me in your thoughts Take me to your dreams Touch me as I fall into view

And when the winter comes Touch me as I fall into view. And when the winter comes, keep the fires lit. And I will be right next to you. Engine drivers headed north to Pleasant Street. Keep me in your heart for a while. These wheels keep turning, but they're running out of steam. Keep me in your heart for a while. Sha la la la la la la la la la la. Keep me in your heart for a while

Sha la la la la la la la la la Keep me in your heart for a while Ricochet! Join the conversation.