-So, this is really how
your friendship with Moynihan
begins is with this letter.
-Yeah.
-From another famous
conservative, Irving Kristol.
It says that you are
conservative, true, very smart,
true, very nice, true,
and a true-blue intellectual.
-Two-and-a-half speed, yeah.
-Senator Daniel
Patrick Moynihan,
late Senator of New York,
who was also
United States ambassador
to the United Nations,
close advisor to both LBJ
and Richard Nixon --
not many people can say that --
and your lifelong close friend.
What would Moynihan
have to teach us
about our situation today?
-He was a world-class
social scientist,
certainly the finest
social scientist
ever to serve
in the legislative branch.
He's justly remembered
and rightly remembered
for his famous aphorism,
"Everyone is entitled
to their own opinions
but not their own facts."
He respected data.
What I loved about Pat
was he started from facts,
from reasoning from the data,
because he was
a social scientist.
-We need more of that today?
-We need a lot more of that.
Lord knows we're in
the opinion business.
I'm in the opinion business,
but opinions are only
interesting
when they take off
from a large sentiment of fact.
-Now, Moynihan was not a
conservative.
-That's correct.
He was a New Deal liberal.
-And you engaged with him
over decades, conversations.
Did that engagement,
did that relationship form
the kind of conservative
you became?
I think so.
Pat was so much fun.
A woman entering the House
of Commons in Britain
recently said
in her maiden speech --
she said, "Democracy's like sex.
If it isn't messy,
you're not doing it right."
I would modify that to extend to
say that politics is like sex.
If it isn't fun,
you're not doing it right.
Pat had an enormous capacity
for pleasure and happiness
in what he was doing.
This Time magazine cover
from the 1964 convention
was hanging in
Barry Goldwater's Senate office.
-This very one.
-This very one.
"A new thrust
on American politics."
Carried 44 states
for Lyndon Johnson.
-I thought it was more.
Now, your book is dedicated
to Barry Goldwater, who --
the late Barry Goldwater --
who was a Senator from Arizona.
Probably most famous in American
history for his candidacy
as the Republican nominee
in 1964 as an unapologetic,
conservative,
small-government.
But I think it's probably,
in our day,
a somewhat controversial
choice of dedication,
because he's also known
for opposing things
most people believe
are wise such
as the Civil Rights' Bill
and so on.
Make the case
for your dedication
and for Goldwater's legacy.
-I cast my first presidential
vote in 1964
for Barry Goldwater,
but, back then,
conservatism was considered
naughty but not serious.
This liberal consensus
was so strong,
and Barry came along and said,
"I don't like the way
the country's going."
1964 this was.
I was at Princeton
in graduate school.
Goldwater finished third
in the faculty poll
at Princeton
behind Lyndon Johnson
and some peace-and-freedom
candidate from somewhere.
What Goldwater said was this --
"Sooner or later,
you're gonna find out
that as the government
becomes more solicitous,
it becomes less respected,"
and look what's happened.
1964, 70% of
the American people
said they trusted the government
to do the right thing
or almost all the right thing
all the time.
70%.
Today it's under 20%.
Since 1964, the government
has become
so permeating
in American life,
and, as its pretensions
have increased,
its prestige has decreased.
The irony here --
the cunning of history,
if you will --
is that Goldwater
made this possible.
By losing in a huge landslide
in 1964,
the Democrats elected
for the first time since 1938,
when the country
recoiled against
Franklin Roosevelt's idea
to pack the courts --
another bad idea
whose time has come again --
until --
between '38 and '64,
there was no liberal legislating
majority in Congress.
Suddenly, there was one,
and Lyndon Johnson
took full advantage of it
to this eruption of legislation
to produce the Great Society,
and government
grew promiscuously,
and, as I say,
its prestige plummeted.
Why?
Because the government lost
track of its proper scope
and its actual competence.
-The unintended consequences
of the Goldwater candidacy.
-I used to say that Goldwater
didn't lose,
it just took them 16 years
to count the votes.
He won in 1980
with Ronald Reagan.
-There's a lengthy passage
in your book about religion.
Specifically --
-A whole chapter.
-Yes.
-Called "Conservatism
Without Theism."
-It's about religion and why
it is not necessary
to being a conservative.
We live in a time when probably
the hard core
of what's considered
the conservative movement
in this country consists
of evangelical Christians,
and along comes George Will
to explain
what I think some people
find as sort of surprisingly,
not just not -- a non-religious
take on conservatism.
Tell us a little bit about
your personal background
as an atheist
and how that informs
your political philosophy.
-First of all, I'm not hostile
to religion.
I am an, as I have said,
an amiable, low-voltage atheist.
I'm married to a voracious
Presbyterian.
I'm not sure there are
any other kinds, but anyway.
I grew up in an utterly
secular household.
My father was the son
of a Lutheran minister,
and he used to sit outside
Pastor Will's study
and listen to the pastor
and some of his more
thoughtful parishioners argue
about the problem of
reconciling grace and free will.
My father, having seen
quite enough of churches
by the time he grew up,
became a philosopher,
professor of philosophy
at the University of Illinois.
He, too, was a non-believer.
So the question never arose
in my household.
So I was sort of startled
when I mentioned in something
that I was a non-believer,
and people were either
scandalized
or surprised
or God-knows what --
"God knows."
I'm not --
I think Bill Buckley was right.
A conservative
need not be religious,
but he cannot despise religions.
I think the great religions
express common durable
human anxieties and aspirations
and worries and questions.
The Founding Fathers were,
to a remarkable stint, deists.
That is, they believed that God
cranked up the universe,
set it in motion like a clock,
and then absconded.
A deist god is like a distant
wealthy aunt in Australia --
benevolent
but not often heard from.
My argument in the chapter
"Conservatism Without Theism"
is not just that conservatism
does not depend on theism
but that there is
a conservative sensibility
that rejoices
in the whirl of things,
the unpredictable,
unplanned nature of things.
Virginia Postrel, a very wise
writer in Washington,
once said the story
of the Bible,
distilled to its essence,
is, "God created man and woman
and lost control of events."
Conservatives --
proper conservatives,
someone with
a conservative sensibility --
loves the fact that events
are out of control.
Good.
Who knows where it'll go,
but that's part of the fun.
You look at the universe,
and we are such
an infinitesimally
insignificant cooling cinder
at the back of beyond in this
enormously expanding universe,
expanding into what,
no one knows.
Some people either find
this frightening or depressing.
A conservative sensibility says,
no, this is what
we like about life.
-In a way, as I listen to you,
it comes together with
your critique of progressivism
because progressives
are playing God, as it were.
They're trying to constantly
impose order
on what is essentially
permanent chaos.
-Yes.
And the chaos, what Hayek called
spontaneous order of society,
is creative.
The fecundity of freedom that we
live with on a daily life
is what conservatives want to
protect from the fatal conceit,
another Hayek word,
the fatal conceit
that we can plan the future
and do it better
than the spontaneous creative
energies of American life --
327 million Americans
getting up in the day,
making billions of decisions
a day, that drive the society.
-Now, that brings us
to the present day
and the present President,
whose name, by the way,
it's Donald Trump,
does not appear in your book.
Now, that can't be an accident.
-The names of Charlemagne,
Audrey Hepburn,
and Duke Ellington don't appear
in the book, either.
-That's true.
-Because this is a book
about ideas,
and the current President
is not part of that discussion.
He has nothing to do
with conservatism.
He, really, to his credit,
has never pretended
to be a conservative.
He's an entrepreneur
in politics,
and he's maximizing
whatever he wants to maximize,
but this is a book
about important arguments,
and he's not part of that.
-You made a great impression by,
in the midst of the Trump
run for the presidency,
renouncing your membership
in the Republican Party,
on principle,
because of his nomination.
And, in listening to you
describe your critique
of progressivism,
in a way,
I think it goes together with
your critique of Donald Trump.
You've written, many times,
that his cardinal sin,
so to speak,
is to attempt to control things,
through tariffs,
through bullying.
That, in some ways,
his essential flaw
is the same flaw
that progressives,
or the same error
that progressivism commits.
-Sure.
"Trade wars are easy to win."
Oh, yeah?
You go out to Iowa and you'll
stand there in a soybean field
and the farmer will say,
"One in three of those rows
of soybeans
were going to go to China.
Oops!"
Looking on the bright side, as I
am strongly disinclined to do,
but, in this case, the physics
of our politics is gonna work.
Equal and opposite reactions.
Donald Trump represents,
in a way,
the culmination of the grotesque
inflation of the presidency.
There was a time,
sixty years ago, at least,
when conservatives
believed strongly
in Congressional supremacy.
Their text was
James Burnham's book
"Congress and
the American Tradition."
Because they had seen,
correctly,
that, under Theodore Roosevelt
and Woodrow Wilson
and Franklin Roosevelt
and Lyndon Johnson,
the presidency was the engine
of expanding government.
Well, then, they had the heady,
intoxicating,
deranging experience
of Ronald Reagan.
They said, "Lord, this is fun,
having executive power."
So they became part of this
absurd inflation
of the presidency.
Alchemists used to think
they could turn lead into gold.
We now think 270 electoral votes
turns a run-of-the-mill
politician into a savant,
into someone
who will create jobs
and run the economy
and all the rest.
Great moment in, well, a great,
big moment
in American history --
in his first fireside chat,
Roosevelt began with two words
that do not appear
on the transcript
of his fireside
chat in the library
at Hyde Park.
Those two words
were "My friends."
Well, you say,
"What's the matter with that?"
I don't want presidents
to be my friend.
I want them to occupy
the executive branch
and do what the Article II says,
which is simply take care
that the laws
are faithfully executed.
That's enough!
Don't be our moral tutor.
Don't embody the nation.
Don't run the country.
327 million Americans
are busy doing that.
Leave them alone!
It works!
Donald Trump, at the convention
that nominated him in Cleveland,
in a way, was the culmination
of the progressive view --
"Only I can fix it."
Well, right back to the --
and it's in my book.
It goes right back to Theodore
Roosevelt
and the stewardship idea
of the presidency.
Roosevelt said, "Whatever I am
not forbidden to do explicitly,
I am permitted to do."
And you go from there
to what we've got.
-Where do conservatives go now?
Is there a refuge for them?
Is the Republican Party
still their home?
Do they need to look
somewhere else?
-The Republican Party today
is more homogenized
than ever before in its history.
The Republican Party
has been warring with itself
since Teddy Roosevelt decided
he wanted the presidency back
and went to war against
William Howard Taft.
That war is over, in the sense
that the Republican Party
is Mr Trump's party.
At the 500-day mark
in Ronald Reagan's presidency,
he had the support
of 77% of Republicans.
At the 500-day mark
in the Trump presidency,
he had the support
of 87% of Republicans.
We've seen, with Senator Corker,
Senator Flake,
Congressman Sanford,
what happens to people
who break ranks.
What this means is that
the Madisonian premise
of rival institutions
has fallen apart.
The Republican herd
believes its job
is to be teammates
of the president.
Madison would be spinning
in his grave about this,
among many other things, because
he wanted the executive branch
and the legislative branch
to have a creative rivalry.
-It's quite fashionable
to criticize
the Founders
of the United States.
We hear a lot of talk now about
how the Senate is so unfair,
the electoral college
is misconceived,
Thomas Jefferson and George
Washington were slaveholders.
Contrary to that trend,
this book, I think,
can be understood
as a defense of the Founders
and of their vision
and I'd like to ask you
to explain
why you defend the Founders
and why you consider it
not just valid,
but very important to recover
their vision today.
-I think you can understand
American political thought
and our current condition
by understanding
the argument between
two Princetonians --
James Madison
of the Class of 1771;
and Thomas Woodrow Wilson,
Tommy,
as he was known at Princeton,
of the Class of 1879.
Woodrow Wilson was
the first president
to criticize
the American founding,
which he didn't
do peripherally.
He did root and branch.
He said, "The fundamental
Madisonian architecture
of the Constitution is wrong
because the separation
of powers is wrong.
And it's wrong because it
inhibits the government
from acting with dispatch,
quickness, nimbleness."
What worried the Founders
didn't worry Woodrow Wilson.
What worried the Founders
was factions and majority rule
and majority abuses
of minorities.
Wilson thought we'd evolved
so far,
we'd become modern and had
achieved consensus about life,
and we didn't need to worry
about factions
and minorities' rights
and that sort of thing.
So, in that sense,
the progressives have been
remarkably forthright
and amazingly successful
in overturning
the Founders' vision,
which was natural rights,
which means first come rights,
then come government.
And government's function
is inherently limited
by the natural
rights' doctrine.
I think the most important word
in the Declaration
of Independence is "secure."
"All men are created equal,
endowed by their Creator
with with certain
unalienable Rights,"
and "Governments are instituted"
to secure those rights.
That inherently limits
the function
of government, in theory.
It hasn't worked out
that way in practice.
But to understand the tension
between the progressives'
understanding
that we must
emancipate government
for enormous enterprises
and the Founders'
much more constricted view
of what politics is about.
-So, let's go back
to that word "secure"
because in contrast,
I guess the idea would be
a more kind of European idea,
which is governments exist
to create and grant rights.
And I think if we're honest,
we would say that
in American culture today,
that has taken hold, that idea
that it's the government's job
to sort of confer rights
and indeed benefits on people.
Well, what's really wrong
with that,
and why do you feel that it's
more consistent with freedom
to think of the government
as having just the function
of securing rights?
-In the speech that made Ronald
Reagan's political career,
the speech in
the Goldwater campaign,
called "A Time for Choosing,"
Ronald Reagan said,
"Today, we now seem to believe
that rights
are dispensations
from government."
And indeed that's what
the progressive vision is,
that government doles
out rights with in mind
the public interest.
And when it thinks the rights
serve the public interest,
it hands them out,
and when it doesn't, it doesn't.
That is a government that has
a relationship with the citizens
where the citizens truly become
subjects of the government.
Franklin
Roosevelt in the campaign
in 1932 said as much
in a great speech
in the San Francisco
Commonwealth Club.
He said, "We're offering
partly a new deal
in that we'll have a bargain.
The government will do this,
and the citizens
will be compliant."
-So, I also thought of your book
as a contrast
between certain people,
who are kind of the heroes
of the book,
and then there are
certain villains of the book.
One of your heroes
is definitely James Madison.
I think you alluded
to him earlier.
Briefly explain
to a contemporary American,
who doesn't know a lot
about Madison necessarily,
why they, too, should think
of Madison as their hero.
-I would tell them to read
Federalist 10 and Federalist 51.
Before Madison came along
and affected
a revolution
in democratic theory,
everyone who had thought
democracy was possible --
and there weren't
that many who did --
thought it was possible
only in a small,
face-to-face, homogenous society
because a homogenous society
would not have factions --
Rousseau's Geneva,
Pericles' Athens,
someplace you could
walk across in a day.
Madison came along,
and they had a different
catechism for the Founders.
The Founders said, "What is
the worst outcome of politics?"
The answer is tyranny.
To what form of tyranny
are democracies prey?
Tyranny of the majority.
Solution --
don't have majorities.
Don't have, that is, stable,
tyrannical majorities.
Have majorities that
are constellations
of constantly shifting factions.
To do this, have an extensive
republic, to use Madison's term.
So, in Federalist 10, he said,
"The first duty of government
is to protect the different
and unequal capacities
of acquiring property."
That would guarantee
a plethora of factions
and an unstable society
in the sense
that you didn't have
a stable, tyrannical majority.
In Federalist 51, Madison said,
"You see throughout our system
the process of supplying
by opposite and rival interests,
the defect of better motives."
The Framers, flinty realists
that they were,
were not going to
rely upon good motives.
They said, "We're going to
disperse power
through the separation
of powers,
and properly
rivalrous institutions
will resist one another
and prevent
any stable abuse of power."
That was the theory.
Hitherto, the ancient
philosophers said,
"Define the best and aim
for it in politics."
The Framers said, "No, that's
a little bit risky.
We're gonna orient ourselves.
We're going to take our bearings
from the low and solid
and predictable in life,
including interestedness."
And, therefore, they aimed
not to achieve the best
but to prevent the worst,
which, again, was tyranny.
-Well, I want to pick up
on that point
because, again, I think
you're getting at something
that is really essential
to this book,
which is bringing to our time
a sense
of the downside of government
and the whole concept
of unintended consequences.
We live in a time where really
it's not just on the left,
but, really, if you consider
Donald Trump the right,
there's a sense
that government exists
to intend good things and go out
and get them
and that what matters
most about political action
is your good intentions.
So, I'd like to ask you
to discuss a little bit
about why it is so important
in Madison's thought
and therefore for us today
to keep an eye
on the possibility
that things could go wrong.
-Well, the sentimental
and romantic view of government
is that it is the one thing
in life that's disinterested,
that is inherently altruistic.
Public-choice theory came along
from James Buchanan
and others
at the University of Virginia
and said, "Wait a minute."
Public-choice theory simply says
just as in the private sector,
we understand that people try
to maximize their affluence,
in the public sector, they try
to maximize their power.
They are not disinterested.
They are not angelic.
And, therefore, you must
understand the government
is an advocate,
a party, an interest
group itself, a faction.
And when it's as enormous
as it is,
you expect people
to cluster around.
Someone has wisely said
that when you lay out a picnic,
you expect ants.
And the biggest picnic in the
world is the US federal budget.
There is a reason why, what,
5 of the 10 wealthiest
counties in the United States
by per-capita income
are in the Washington area.
We don't make anything here
except trouble
and laws and regulations.
We have no natural resources.
What we do is distribute
trillions of dollars
in one way or another,
and people come to affect the
influence, this flow of money.
-Now, if there is a villain
in your book,
it might be Woodrow Wilson.
I've got to say,
he enjoys otherwise
a very good reputation
in the United States.
He has schools named after him.
He has a bridge here
in Washington named after him.
He is known as the man
who led us through World War I.
-He's the only president
buried in Washington.
-And you present
a devastating critique
that I think will strike
a lot of people
as new
in that you identify Wilson
as a kind of founder
of modern progressivism.
Tell us a little about what was
so mistaken
about Wilson's vision
and how it still kind of,
those mistakes
are reverberating today?
-Recently, at Princeton,
some African-American students,
becoming cognizant
of Woodrow Wilson's
very retrograde views on race --
he actually resegregated
the federal workforce --
were up in arms
and wanted to rename things
because they named it
Woodrow Wilson School
and Wilson College,
and all the rest.
And I called the president
of Princeton, Chris Eisgruber,
and I offered to come
to Princeton
and teach them how to
really dislike Woodrow Wilson.
Woodrow Wilson simply believed
that in fact government
now had to transcend,
had outgrown
the Madison architecture.
He said, "It was all very well
once
to worry
about the separation of powers
and all that when we were
3 million or 4 million people
scattered along the fringe
of a continent,
80% of people living within
20 miles of Atlantic tidewater.
But now," he said, "we're
a giant continental empire,
united by copper wires
and steel rails,
and, therefore, we need
a government with the ability
to act decisively
and emphatically and quickly
to regulate
the forces of industrialism
and all that's let loose."
Again, that's fine, as long as
you think the government is
and will always remain
an independent umpire
calling balls and strikes.
Government, however,
is an interest group,
and it is inevitably
the biggest interest group,
and because it has a monopoly
on violence and coercion,
it is the most
dangerous interest group.
That's what the Founders
thought.
-Well, there's someone else
you talk about in your book,
and that's the famous
economist Friedrich von Hayek,
who was well-known
for theorizing
about the role of information
in government decision-making.
And his point he elaborated
is that it's impossible
for any central authority
to know
all the things
you would need to know
to manage the country
the way a progressive
wanted it to be managed.
Isn't that really at the heart
of what you find so troubling
about Wilson's thought,
that he aspired to
that kind of omniscience?
-Hayek preached
epistemic humility.
Epistemology is the field
of philosophy
about how we know things.
He said, "The market is nothing
but an information-generating
device,
and when you interfere with
the market or ignore the market,
you're either interfering with
the generation of information
or ignoring information."
Now, the Soviet Union
died of ignorance.
It didn't know
what things should cost.
The Soviet Union would
manufacture shoes
with the marvelous
value subtraction.
That is, the shoes were worth
less than
the materials
that went into them.
They had no idea
how to function.
Hayek alerts everyone to the law
of unintended consequences.
It is rightly said that
conservatives understand
the law of
unintended consequences.
I think conservatives
are conservatives
because the law
of unintended consequences,
which is when you intervene
in a complex system,
like a society,
the unintended consequences
of what you do are apt
to be larger than and contrary
to the intended
consequences.
Society is like a Calder mobile.
You jiggle something here,
and things jiggle
all the way over there.
So, be very careful.
-Another theme of your book
is that we sort of
are living
with the accumulated --
some would say encrusted --
legacy of past government
interventions,
which you call
the administrative state,
that whole bureaucracy that goes
by the alphabet soup of names
from EPA to SEC and so on.
You're quite passionate about
the dangers that this poses.
I think a lot of people
have grown up
with the assumptions
that no, those agencies
are what protect us
against pollution and so forth.
Talk a little bit about
why people out
to be more concerned
than they seem to be
about the growth
of the administrative state.
-Because the administrative
state is unaccountable
and because the administrative
state exists to take power
that cannot properly
be delegated to them
but is delegated to them by
the Congress, which is so busy
"a," getting re-elected
but also micromanaging society
that it can't do
its own business.
Therefore,
it increasingly passes "laws"
that are actually
sentiments.
"We should have a clean
environment.
You people out there
work out the details.
We should have quality education
for everybody.
You, down at the Education
Department,
you write the regulations that
will put meaning into that."
Christopher DeMuth,
a great thinker in our town,
says, "Congress engages
in velleities now."
Just expresses nice sentiments
and leaves it
to the bureaucracy.
Well, the bureaucracy
goes way off
writing the rules
and regulations.
Walk into the office
of Senator Mike Lee of Utah,
you'll see two piles of paper.
One's about that thick,
and it's what Congress did
in terms of passing laws,
actual laws
in a given term.
The 8-foot pile is what
the bureaucracy
generated in response to laws --
regulations, rule making,
all the rest.
That graphically demonstrates
the fact
that we are today
governed by executive agencies
exercising vast discretion
granted illegitimately,
in my judgment,
by a Congress too busy
to actually govern.
Now, there's a doctrine
that some people --
myself included -- would like
to see revived by the court,
which is the
nondelegation doctrine
that says you simply
have no right
to give this kind of essentially
lawmaking power
to unelected, unaccountable
executive-branch agencies.
-Well, you mentioned the court,
and I think one thing that will
surprise some of your readers
is that though a conservative,
you're not wedded to the
doctrine of judicial restraint,
which conservatives
are associated with.
You argue that it's up
to the courts, really,
to reign in this
administrative state.
Why do you think
that would be effective,
as opposed to just substituting
another set of unaccountable
officials into the situation?
-Because the judges are
accountable to the laws
written in the Constitution
that they supervise.
What I call the judicial
supervision of democracy
is inevitable,
as soon as John Marshall,
the third-most-important
American,
in my judgment, after Lincoln,
Washington, then John Marshall,
because he with judicial
review said,
"The judicial supervision
of democracy's excesses
is inescapable
under a written Constitution."
Conservatives are allowing
their intelligence
to be bewitched
by their language.
They adopted the language of
judicial restraint in reaction
against some of
the more freewheeling
rights-inventing judgments
of the Warren court.
But what they were really doing
was embracing a classic
progressive aspiration,
which was to use
the courts --
actually to not use the courts,
to have the courts back off
and let legislative
and executive power
run free to have
a more energetic,
interventionist, comprehensive,
regulating government.
Often in America these days,
the most interesting arguments
aren't between left and right.
They're within the right.
And the most interesting
argument of all
is between
those like myself,
who argue for
judicial engagement,
and those who still continue
to argue for judicial restraint.
The city government of
New London, Connecticut, says,
"Ha, we're gonna use
eminent domain
to condemn
an entire neighborhood
so that we can give the property
to another private interest
that will pay more taxes to --
guess what --
us, the government
of New London, Connecticut."
Well, the court deferred,
was deferential
to the democratically
elected government,
and conservatives
were horrified,
as well they should be.
But they had provided
the rhetoric,
the language,
the moral justification
for judicial deference
to democracy.
Properly understood,
conservatives want judges
to enforce the Constitution
and that there comes a point
where deference is dereliction
of judicial duty,
and that's what
we're arguing about.
-So, as you look at
the political landscape today
and the movement of many people
in the Democratic Party
to the left and toward
a progressive vision of society,
who do you think is sort of most
in the Wilsonian tradition?
Who do you think most completely
embodies that mind-set?
-Probably Elizabeth Warren.
Elizabeth Warren has a very
firm grip on half of a point.
Her half a point is,
"The government we have today
is a plaything of rent-seekers."
"Rent-seeking" is an economist's
term
for people who bend public power
to private advantage,
either to confer an advantage
on themselves
or a disadvantage
on competitors.
Of course they do.
And, again, she is firmly
in the grip
of the sentimental view
of government,
that if only we could just
enlarge the government enough,
it would stop this.
But look what she's saying.
She's saying, "The government
is a plaything of rent-seekers,
and we need more government."
Maybe, just consider
the possibility
that we need
less government.
Progressives are always
saying
there's too much money
in politics.
You want to get the money
out of politics?
Get politics out
of the allocation of money.
If government weren't so very
deeply involved,
waist deep in the allocation
of wealth and opportunity,
less money would
flow into politics
to influence the government.
-If you think about
all the characters
for whom you express
admiration in this book,
if you could name one,
who would be most helpful to us
in our present predicament?
-Oh, Lincoln.
Lincoln had prudence,
which is not indifference
to principle.
Prudence is how you apply lucid
principles to untidy realities.
Lincoln dealt with a country
falling apart.
He dealt with a country divided
on very fundamental questions.
You know, we talk about
all the discord today.
The differences between
our parties today are trivial
compared to what they were
in the 1850s,
when the party system
fell apart.
There is no place
for conservatism right now.
It is an orphan persuasion
in a cold and windy world,
but get over it.
The party system
changes over time.
The Republican Party
didn't always exist.
The Whig Party once did.
I'd be a Whig today.
Lincoln was a Whig before he was
the first Republican president.
And when this passes,
this current detour
in the Republican history,
see if they can reinterest
the Republican Party
in reconnecting with its
relationship to the Founders.
Lincoln's career in one sentence
was an attempt to reconnect
the country to the Founders.
