George Will is a columnist for the Washington Post, commentator for NBC News and MSNBC and the 1977 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Commentary.
Three years ago this month, Will officially quit the Republican Party over its acquiescance to Donald Trump. “This is not my party,” he said then. It’s even less so now.
Will joined Dan & Amy for a conversation about his new book The Conservative Sensibility:
Dan Proft: George Will has a new book out called “The Conservative Sensibility.” We’re pleased to welcome George Will back to the program. Thanks so much for joining us, George. Appreciate it.
George Will: Glad to be with you.
Dan Proft: So “The Conservative Sensibility,” it sort of calls to mind, at least to me, at first blush, “The Conservative Mind.” And I wonder how we’ve moved from mind to sensibility. I hope we’re not down the road of sentimentality in your book.
George Will: No, by “sensibility,” I mean, more than an attitude but less than an agenda, to write a book telling people what to think, but suggesting, rather, how to think about the complexities of society. This is not just another Washington book, in other words.
Amy Jacobson: You haven’t written a book in five years, so why now?
George Will: I have a feeling the country rightly thinks that things have gone off the rails with the government. That something’s wrong institutionally. I’m not just talking about who’s up and who’s down and the politics of the moment. But for one hundred years now, progressives have been criticizing the founding, particularly the separation of powers, all in an attempt to unleash the president. Progressives assume that it would always be one of them occupying the White House — Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson. Now, they have someone they’re not fond of occupying an office that has been, for eight years now, increasingly emancipated from any control by Congress. And I don’t think they’re happy with it.
Dan Proft: And so you would argue, going back to sort of the nation’s founding, that this is the opportune time for conservatives to reassert Constitutional principles, limiting the power of the president when, you know, one of theirs is in, as it were.
George Will: Not only the power of the president but also limitng the power of the government. The Founders had a very clear understanding about the proper scope and actual competence of government. Progressives somehow reason that the more complicated society gets, the more we need government to intervene and regulate society. It’s exactly the reverse. The more complicated society gets, the more government interventions Are apt to confirm the law of unintended consequences, which is that the unintended consequences of intervention on a complex society are apt to be larger than and opposite to the intended ones.
Dan Proft: Have we, conservatives, been drawn into the Left’s trap, as it were, by obsessing about government, its size and scope. I mean, Russell Kirk, in “The Conservative Mind” observed that if you want to have order in the Commonwealth, you first have to have order in the individual soul. Would conservatives be wiser to focus on what you’re sort of doing with your book, which is suggesting a way to think about a complex society, think about a way you should live in a free society, and do more of letting the politics take care of itself?
George Will: Quite right. One of the things Kirk said correctly was that to conservatives, politics is not the center of life. And I’m afraid too many conservatives nowadays, think of, as you say, sort of, by the progressive view of the world, which is that we must define ourselves by our political allegiances. Conservatives know that politics is important, but it also should be somewhat at the margin of life.
Amy Jacobson: Do you or have you ever thought of President Trump as a conservative?
George Will: I never have, and frankly, to give him credit for candor, neither has he. He made a point during the 2016 campaign of noting that this … He said it’s called the Republican Party, not the Conservative Party. He’s not a man of theory. And this book of mine is a book about the idea of the goddess here and about disorientation of our institutions, the supine Congress, shedding powers, that it has no right to shed that have been going on for 80 years, long before Mr. Trump arrived.
Dan Proft: Yeah, and so with respect to that, this challenge, we seem to have both within Republican Party elected ranks, as well as within the punditocracy and those that are ascendant, who know some of the talking points, but haven’t read many, if any, of the books. Do you look across the landscape and see, either particular pundits or particular elected officials that have done the background, have done the homework, and actually are trying to operate on a basis of theory that people that could be in the leadership position for the party and the movement to kind of carry it forward in the direction you’re suggesting?
George Will: I think first of all, I’d like to say two senators who seems to me are showing up well in this. One is Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska, a Yale PhD in history. He’s written two excellent books about the condition of the American culture now and what he decries as the vanishing American adult. And I would also say, Pat Toomey, Pennsylvania Republican senator who has been very good about trying to prod other members of the Senate to claw back some of the power that Congress has, under both parties, has recklessly given to presidents of both parties. So this is not a partisan complaint. This is a bipartisan failure.
Dan Proft: Thinking about culture, about a decade before the fall of the Roman Republic, the historian Livy observed that Rome was going to fall because it was in a position where it could no longer endure its vices or their cures. Do you think that that’s where we are at?
George Will: That is very astute. You know, for all the talk we hear about a discordant America, and Lord knows it’s real enough. What alarms me is a consensus in Washington is broad as a Republican and it’s as deep as the Grand Canyon, it is simply this — we should have a large, generous entitlement state and not pay for it. Everyone’s agreed. I mean, here we are at full employment at approaching 3% economic growth, and we’re still running a trillion dollar deficit. Now, think about this. What’s going to happen when the next recession begins, and we start at a trillion dollar deficits? And when we start that low interest rates, and so cannot stave off the recession by cutting interest rates. It’s going to be very interesting. Now, some people may think that this President has outlawed the business cycle. If he had, I don’t think that his native modesty would have prevented him from mentioning it.
Dan Proft: You wrote a piece recently at “The Washington Post,” I assume, consistent with the book, “The Conservative Sensibility,” sort of asking the question whether or not the individual is obsolete, after the infamous incantation that, “you didn’t build that,” from the previous president. So in the era of identity politics, or even many on the center-right seem susceptible, is the individual obsolete?
George Will: Well, I think that’s the biggest worry we have. The root philosophic worry is the attempt to say that because we are, as individuals, situated in a social setting, we are somehow merely the products of our culture. Woodrow Wilson, explicitly told the American people … He said do not read the first two paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence. He dismissed it as Fourth of July boilerplate. What he was really dismissing was the human … the natural rights doctrine. And the way to get rid of the natural rights doctrine, which inherently limits government, is to deny there is a fixed human nature. The Founders insisted there was. The progressive say no. Every individual is simply reflection of … an absorber of the culture in which he or she is situated. Therefore, government, by manipulating the culture, can create a new human nature or a new human being. This is the vaulting ambition that makes government most dangerous.
Dan Proft: Well, and the interesting thing about that, and we see this play out in Illinois all the time. On the one hand, there’s this immanentizing the eschaton thing at play. On the other hand, it’s very cynical, the big government politician, so for example, Illinois, which just recently legalized dope, the state senate president said, hey, look, people are going to do it, anyway, so we might as well make some money on it. And that that should be our new slogan, by the way. That should replace Land of Lincoln. People are going to do it anyway, so we should make some money.
George Will: Put in on the license plates.
Dan Proft: Really, we’re seeing that play out all over the place. People are just … They’re just revenue sources for the state. That’s all they are. And you have these predatory government policies, I would argue. New York is moving to legalized prostitution. Hey, they’re going to do it anyway, so we might as well make some money on it, get our cut, wet our beaks. That’s what’s going on.
George Will: I would’ve thought that criminal law was to tell people there’s certain things you shouldn’t do and there are penalties if you do them. Illinois, I hate to say it, is becoming a caricature. I expect that in the next five years there’s going to be a constitutional moment when Illinois realizes it cannot grow its way back to solvency, and it’s going to come to Washington looking for a bail-out. And it’s going to find that the Senate, happily which represents all the states, is going to find a lot of people saying I don’t think people in Wyoming ought to a bailout to people of Illinois. So it’s going to be a serious crisis.
Amy Jacobson: And you think that’ll happen in the next five years?
George Will: I think so. I’ve been when you look at the trajectory of the public sector pensions and other entitlements in the state of Illinois, I do not see how you slow their growth relative to the growth of the Illinois economy. After all, the Illinois government has been the best government Indiana, Missouri, Wisconsin has had because of all the people fleeing to more congenial surroundings
Dan Proft: But you’re forgetting one thing, George. The thing you’re forgetting is that in Illinois math is just an opinion. So you can just disagree with it. You just disagree, and it goes away.
George Will: Math is fake news.
Dan Proft: Exactly. George Will, columnist for “The Washington Post”, commentator for NBC, MSNBC, Pulitzer Prize winner, of course. His new book, “The Conservative Sensibility.” George, thanks for joining us. Good luck with the book
George Will: Thanks. Enjoyed being with you.