This is longtime Cater Daily podcast host, Caleb Brown. After thousands of episodes over nearly 18 years, I've moved on from the Cater Daily podcast, but in the interim, I, along with some of you, have selected some favorites. I hope they resonate with our current moment and continue to spark the desire to defend liberty. Thank you for listening.

This is the Cato Daily podcast for Friday, July 5th, 2019. I'm Caleb Brown. For columnist

and author George Will, it's no small thing that the vision of government laid out by the founders

was the correct one. For a century, he says self-described progressives have been doing a decent job of

dismantling that ideal, if not the substantive checks on government power the Constitution

provides. George Will's new book is The Conservative Sensibility. You argue that what conservatives

ought to be working to conserve is the American founding, how should

people who agree with that sentiment articulate it, that is, make it real?

They should understand the forthrightness and the success with which progressives have

attacked the founding and overthrown it for an early

a century. And they should understand that by preserving the founding, of course, do not mean

preserving America when it was four million people strung along the coast of the North American

continent, 80% living within 20 miles of Atlantic tidewater.

Preserving the American founding means three things.

First, the natural rights philosophy, which is that there is a constant human nature,

that's the second thing, and that this is best served preserving the rights that are natural to creatures of our nature,

requires a government structured the way Madison did it,

which is to say an equilibrium between contending forces in government,

the separation of powers, in order to make sure that the government does what the declaration,

second paragraph, says it is instituted for, which is to secure natural rights. That's the

most important verb in the declaration, and it simply establishes first come rights, then comes

government. We do not rights, then comes government.

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