Contemporary American political debate comprises an argument between Madisonian conservativism and Wilsonian progressivism. To be conservative is to adhere to the Founders’ classical liberalism, to individualism borne of pre-government natural rights and the spontaneous social order which emerges. The core of its endeavor is promoting political and socioeconomic practices which promote virtuous living. More specifically, the political objective is to restore government based on natural rights, which imply limited government because these rights predate government, which exists to secure those rights. Conservatism faces three core problems: family disintegration, unfunded social benefits, and corrupt political culture, especially in Washington DC.
Since the Enlightenment, the West’s primary political problem has been the tension between self-assertion and self-control. In a plural society, government focuses on minimum moral essentials which can be described as empathy and self-control. Reasoning about the proper use of freedom is liberty in practice. By 1770, the colonials came to see individual rights not a originating in English common law but natural law: Madison wrote the Revolution was only a consequent of changed attitudes over 1760-75. The American project is exceptional in being free of feudal remnants, religion, or aristocracy, in stemming not from social theory but personal liberty – not what government should do, but what it must not do; this American sense of conservativism is incidentally opposed to the UK / continental traditions of duty and hierarchy. The Founding is one of history’s most extraordinary feats of political culture, made possible by general deference to excellence in public life, brought together in Philadelphia. Moreover, founding America on Madison interests was prudent; everyone has them, whereas virtues are difficult to acquire, agree, and sustain.
A society which values individualism expects unequal distribution of rewards. The more complex the society, the more government should defer to spontaneous order. Political economy was shortened to economy at the behest of social scientists touting rigor, yet the core remains allocation of scarce resources. Hayek asserted society advances by the functions it can perform without thinking (i.e., reflexively), contra JS Mill; government is an unequal and corruptible judge. Thus society’s economic regulator is pricing. Whereas JK Galbraith in the Affluent Society saw consumer desires as manufactured by corporate marketing, undermining respect for market equilibria. The effect is to reverse Burke’s view of government’s existing to deal with social wants; government can stimulate wants which it will be duly rewarded for providing. Inequality is not inherently injurious provided there is sufficiency (adequate resources).
Progressives attack individualism, reversing the view of rights preceding government. The democratic (majority) will is the manifestation of liberty; government’s antecedent job is shaping appetites, a European view which conflicts with the Lockean view of natural sociability. Progressivism holds human nature is plastic, is a product of shaping social forces, always becoming and therefore susceptible to steerage (which Will sometimes idiosyncratically calls historicism). Borne of Rousseau, this view is the more man is stripped of his own resources (i.e., of his nature), the greater the government’s possibilities – the very basis of 20th-century totalitarianism. It is Roman, government-made law with no limiting principle. Progressivism’s core text is Charles Beard’s Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, which aside from asserting the economically determined views of the contemporary politicians, disparages judicial review, and its worldview follows Thomas Dewey’s results-oriented pragmatism. The contrast is cooperative order versus top-down social engineering. Paradoxically, though Progressivism sees no individual human nature, groups (races) possess them. Also, Progressivism feel plural society should not be allowed to carry core cultural views from generation to generation, that is, it is intentionally historicist. The modern presidency is the agent of Progressivism, beginning with Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson (who held that checks and balances are absurd) and then to Lyndon Johnson.
Modern Americans talk like Jefferson (‘wise and frugal government’) and vote like Hamiltonians. In contemporary America, 35% of receive means-tested benefits including 50% of blacks and Hispanics; in 1960 the ratio of disabled to employed was 1 in 134, today it’s 1 in 16. Dependency should not be a political right. Conservativism seeks an equilibrium. Human nature makes political claims; government inevitably has a nurturing role, borne of the virtuous qualities, which Will sees as a popular government’s continuing task of education. (Statecraft as Soulcraft was not a prescription but an observation of what government inevitably does: whether to secure individual rights or shape collective outcomes? Will declares he was wrong upon 1983’s publication that the Founders paid too little attention to civic virtues: everyday capitalism promotes good habits such as honesty, politeness which are implicitly virtues.) Virtually the whole of contemporary government has become a corrupting force in a Tocquevillian vein, degrading without tormenting.
Congress must reassert itself via less delegation to administrative bodies, and the judiciary led by the Supreme Court should insist on separation of powers. In the latter 20th century, government services were increasingly less connected with elected officials and more to semi-permanent bureaucrats. In 2016, Congress passed 3,000 pages of legislation, against 97,000 pages of administrative law enrolled in the Federal register, an example of legislative delegation to executive agencies such as the Consumer Protection Bureau – which dangerously funds itself. Congressional atrophy is executive branch hypertrophy. (An aside: stripping the states’ rights to appoint senators (in 1913’s 17th amendment) served to make states administrative extensions of Congress and senators more responsive to Washington.)
Only the courts can preserve constitutional order against the general will. Originalism is meant to defend a fundamental understanding; judicial restraint does not equal securing rights but only deference to majoritarianism. The US constitution specifies not democracy but federated republic. Its fixed purpose is to protect natural rights in changing circumstances. Contra Oliver Holmes, there is no right of majority to embody opinions in laws. Lochner wrongly sought to establish government’s right to prescribe contracts (Bork is majoritarian?); the due process clause should prohibit arbitrary government actions which restrict individual rights.
America’s problem is not wealth determining political power but the opposite. The Depression accelerated America’s dependence on government; the postwar era (including educational subsidies) renewed social confidence; the civil rights movement reinvigorated federal centrality. The New Deal’s break with Liberalism was abandoning the idea that society produces most elements of happiness: instead, government has a duty to provide. Providing for nebulous insecurity added emotional needs and established a permanent tension in the dynamics of free, capitalist society.
Americans are less likely to believe in the destiny of bleak social forces because they embrace individualism. Most Americans are not only patriots who love their country but also nationalists who feel their system is better. Progressives, notably Barack Obama!, disagree.
Pessimism is a check on scientific fatalism, a realistic opposition to prescribed outcomes, a revolt against passive role in predetermined events, a clarifying of what we can and cannot do. Freedom is not universally defined all countries, let alone universally understood relative to other political goods (equality, social cohesion). Totalitarianism rises from claims to certain understandings of history and the necessity of untrammeled action. Hannah Arendt forecast ideology plus bureaucratic social control would produce new, irresistible tyranny, but she admitted the 1956 Hungarian rebellion showed human nature was unchanging in its thirst for liberty.
Religion is helpful to but not necessary for American Conservatism. Christians should be wary of government which goes beyond defending individual rights, because Christianity is concerned with dignity of the individual. Locke said most need religion as a shortcut to wisdom; Christianity was certainly central to the Founders who observed the imperfectability of human nature, that original sin does not vitiate individual dignity, and there are universal moral truths. But the author’s overstates agnosticism as if to demonstrate realism.
Who will want to attend the postmodern university if everything is open to reinterpretation? Why devote scarce resources to obsessing race, sex, class?
Will is at his best identifying the contrasts of Conservativism and Progressivism, and the addition of Hayekian views of spontaneous socioeconomic order are helpful; yet his somewhat idiosyncratic in his views of religion, historicism. While immensely learned, the book should have condensed (or several books): too often it’s a clip job.