George Will makes the conservative case against democracy

The Gray Area with Sean Illing

Vox Media Podcast Network

Society & Culture, News, Politics, News Commentary, Philosophy

4.6 • 10.8K Ratings

🗓️ 15 July 2019

⏱️ 71 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It’s a good time to be a Republican. But it’s a bad time, George Will argues, to be a conservative. Hence his new, 700-page manifesto, The Conservative Sensibility, which tries to rescue conservatism from the perversions of the Trumpist GOP. Will’s conservatism is rooted in a deep mistrust of majority rule, and an almost religious veneration of the Founding Fathers, or at least a certain understanding of them. Remember, he writes, “the Constitution of the first consciously modern nation, the United States, protects the sovereignty of private individuals, not the sovereignty of a public collective, ‘the majority.’” Will is articulating a tendency that’s always been present on the right, but is becoming more central today: the belief that majority rule will be the death of the American experiment and that the conservative project is at odds with democracy. Will is more forthright than most on this point: He chides conservatives for blasting activist judges, for instance, arguing that the right needs a judiciary willing to make sweeping rulings to curb the power of the state. There’s a lot to discuss here. And discuss we do. Book recommendations: The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay Freedom: Virtue and the First Amendment by Walter Fred Berns ******************************************************* The Ezra Klein Show has been nominated for best Society- culture podcast in this year’s People’s Choice Podcast Awards! Cast your vote for The Ezra Klein Show at https://www.podcastawards.com/app/signup before July 31st. One vote per category. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Political scientists have been saying for years that Americans are ideologically or rhetorically
0:05.0	conservative but operational liberals.
0:07.2	Absolutely true.
0:08.2	They talk like Jeffersonians and insist on being governed by Hamiltonians.
0:24.0	Hello, welcome to the Clanchon, the Box Media Podcast Network.
0:26.7	My guest today is my old Washington Post colleague, George Will.
0:29.8	He doesn't need a ton of introduction, legendary conservative columnist.
0:33.2	But he's written a new book, a fascinating book called The Conservative Sensibility.
0:36.3	It's an effort to articulate a conservatism that is Will's conservatism.
0:41.6	It's a much more narrow conservatism than what we think of as a conservative movement,
0:45.0	which I think contains a lot of alliances with philosophically different traditions
0:49.0	and the one he's talking about.
0:50.5	But it's interesting to me about what Will's doing here.
0:52.9	He's trying to define, as he says, a sensibility, a temperament.
0:57.0	And that temperament is narrower.
0:59.5	It is very rooted in a particular idea of the founders and natural rights and what human
1:04.3	nature is.
1:05.3	There's an argument he wants to have in the book.
1:07.4	I feel like I tried and couldn't quite get him to have it here on the podcast.
1:10.4	But there's an argument he wants to have in the book about the plasticity or lack of
1:13.7	of human nature and what kind of government follows from that.
1:17.2	And his view is that a very limited government follows very directly from a clear idea of
	...

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