Welcome to the Future of Liberty, a project of Liberty Fund, hosted by Mitch Daniels. Greetings, everyone. Today marks two firsts, at least, in the series of interviews that I've been privileged to do for the Liberty Fund. First of all, we have, by my estimation, the most distinguished of all the guests that we've been fortunate enough to entice into these conversations. And secondly, the first time we've done this in front of a live audience. I'm told the laugh track has been engaged, but I hope it won't be necessary on too many occasions. George, thank you for joining us today. Pleasure. This series of conversations has headlined the future of liberty and so I'm going to try, although there are so many topical questions that I'm sure will be of interest to the audience, I'm going to try to inquire more about longer-term issues facing our republic. And I thought I would do that in three broad categories, ask you about the health of some institutions, which have up to now been important to the preservation of our system, and then about the American people, and then a little about history. So to start with the institutions, we're in an unusual time in terms of what some perceive as a very unrestrained executive. on occasions seemingly not limited by the processes, customs that have typically hemmed in or at least limited the reach of presidential and executive power. Is that an overreaction when people talk about autocracy and the death of democracy through dictatorial actions? It's a perennial worry. Several recent books, the last 15 years, they've just taken their titles. Harvey Mansfield, Taming the Prince on Executive Power. Michael McConnell at Stanford University, now former appellate judge, he would not be king. Cy Prakash at University of Virginia Law School, taming the living presidency, the theory of which is how to cage the executive lion. Turns out legislatures can only do so much in detail. Therefore, discretion is granted to presidents. Therefore, the kind of person who gets to be president is ambitious and has a kind of muscular sense of himself or herself soon, no doubt. And the tendency of power to expand until it reaches the end of its ability to expand is inexorable, as Madison and others said. So it's a perennial problem. It is unusual at the moment because the current president has intuited, A, that the Madisonian checks and balances don't work right now. We can talk about why that is so. And also because populism is in the air and populism means, populism depends upon a rampant executive. Populism is that the people, A, know what they want, and B, it should be translated directly into policy as fast as possible, meaning no nonsense about refining it through legislative branches and all of that. Madison wanted mitigated democracy, a wonderful phrase. A populist president wants direct democracy. and everything in the American system militates against direct democracy. So we've seen it manifested recently, and I'd just like to hear you comment on certain of the actions, which some see as beyond the range of what ought to be the proper range of presidential authority. tariffs or taxes by another name, by another means. Does he have the authority? And if not, what's the remedy? He has the authority until someone says you don't. Teddy Roosevelt really pioneered the modern presidency. Woodrow Wilson, who I think is the root of most evil. in fact it was Teddy Roosevelt who had the stewardship theory of the presidency and the stewardship theory is that the president has the power to do whatever he is not explicitly forbidden to do in a way it was in the great anthracite coal strike of the right after the turn of the 20th century when he said don't tell me about the constitution the people want coal That was a good populist sentiment. The first of Congress's enumerated powers in Article I, Section 8 is tariffs, trade relations with foreign powers. That's how we got started as a country, Boston Tea Party and all of that, Jefferson's embargo. It's been a hardy perennial of American argument. And if we don't get this right, the president will be endlessly emancipated. Presidential power will be twice what it was eight years ago. Now, what will the Supreme Court say? I don't know. But Congress could always fill in the blanks. Congress has left huge blanks. The emergency power, you can declare an emergency, but Congress could with a line say, here's what an emergency is. The president right now, in a related manner, is asserting the power to impound federal funds. The president is saying congressional appropriations are only ceilings. well he's got to actually has a better historical case than i thought yeah and congress can solve that problem say no this is not a ceiling this is a mandate one sentence the question is if can we interest congress in governing again would it like to stop being a spectator up in the bleachers what happened it seems to me Mitch, is that the Madisonian architecture, the checks and balances, assumed we were not going to have political parties. The founders, when the Constitution was written in 87, ratified and came into effect in 89, neither desired nor anticipated parties. Eleven years later, we had a ferocious party presidential election in 89. What happened? Well, parties, it turns out, are natural, like dandelions and suburban lawns. They're just going to happen. So the problem with that is I'm not against parties. They do give weight to partisanship and helps the system work. But members of the president's party, when they are in the majority in Congress, think of themselves nowadays as downfield blockers for the presidential quarterback, that their job is to advance his agenda and not have an agenda of their own. Problem. Madison's architecture depended upon the institutions having a independent institutional pride and their own ambition. Ambition, he said, said the great Madison in Federalist 51, must be made to counteract ambition and the powers associated with the rights of the place. He wanted senators and congressmen to be loyal, perhaps to their president. He was, after all, a president. But not just loyal. And what is today disheartening and ultimately dangerous to the architecture of our Constitution is the sense that there's no rivalry, that they're team players. I believe I'm correct that I was temporarily heartened when the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee introduced the bill that would have clarified the president does not have unilateral power to impose tariffs. But as far as I know, he's never even been able to hear that bill on his own committee. That's right. Yeah. Well, if not Congress, then potentially the Supreme Court in whose lap some of these issues are about to land. And before I ask you about the separation of powers issues, let me ask you about a couple others that have come along more recently. The idea that a president is immune from prosecution within the scope of his job, rightly or wrongly decided? I think rightly decided Our system cannot function I mean I been banging away with my usual lack of consequence on the subject of presidential power but the system doesn work unless energy is in the executive to take the phrase from Alexander Hamilton. And if we're going to have an energetic president, Congress can disperse presidents on duty 24-7. It used to be just to get Congress back to Washington was a chore. people coming up by steamboats and through canals and over corduroy roads it was just difficult the good old days presidents exactly the president's there all the time now and he cannot be hauled into court he cannot be indicted he has to be immune from certain frivolous lawsuits and the lord knows there are enough of those yeah the last session or the last last year's session the supreme court brought a lot of good news some of us thought in the major questions decision specifically, giving clear signs of reining in at least executive branch agencies. Were you, I know you were as pleased by those as some of us. I was because what Congress is doing there, they're kind of a defibrillator trying to get the heartbeat of Congress back strong. saying, if you want the executive to do this, say so clearly with certain discernible principles implied. So Congress, the Supreme Court has been said, well, the court's taking power under itself. No, no. The court is saying, do your job, Congress. You mentioned the two-party system, and it has been frequently, let's say, a ballast or it led to corrections when our political process seemed to be running off the rails one way or another. You're of the view that there is an exhausted middle in somebody's phrase. Can the two-party system, which in the past has reacted to assemble new majorities, can it do so once again? It doesn't give signs right now of operating as it once has. It doesn't, but our two parties Herman Kahn or someone said that after nuclear war the cockroach would be the only thing to survive because it's really simple. I think our political parties are the cockroaches of our political system. They're very elemental and they're very adaptable. They have been... The analogy is appealing on other grounds too. The parties have been in the past acutely sensitive market mechanisms. Seismographs trembling to every felt tremor from the public. Nothing wrong with that. Not to surrender to every tremor, but to be aware of it. If you go back and read the 1924 Socialist Party platform, it's almost all law now. They sold their ideas. and that's one of the functions of a third party, is to expand the conversation. Something has happened, though, that we're not doing that. We're not drawing from these other sources. How we get that back, I don't know. It begins by not looking at the other side as evil. Bill Lee, the governor, two-term governor now of Tennessee, says, I'm conservative, I'm just not angry about it. What a nice thought. And I just think that America is about to become what they used to call, when religious revivals would sweep the country, a burned over region of the country. The whole continent is now burned over politically. And unless I'm mistaken, and there is precedent, the country is ready for a change of tone. Well, we might hope so. The parties have typically been not without principle, but they have been, Flexway exists, they have existed to win elections and therefore have been. You and I are old enough to remember when the political scientists in the 1950s said, wouldn't it be wonderful if we sorted our parties out on ideological grounds and we'd have coherent politics, a liberal party and a conservative party? Well, we've done it. And is everyone happy? Not exactly. When I went to work on the Senate staff in 1970, Democrats controlled everything. There was McClellan of Arkansas on the Labor Committee, John Stennis from Mississippi on Armed Services, James Easton from Mississippi on the Judiciary Committee, Richard Russell from Winder, Georgia on Armed Services, Sam Irvin on Judiciary. It was all Southern conservatives, frankly, segregationists, almost all of them. but because there was diversity you had a functioning system now that you have ideological clarity you also have perennial animosity as far as i can tell your former columnist colleague friend of mine the late mark shields had a formulation about the parties that about losing parties and how they eventually adapt and it i think it the cycle as He saw it was blame the candidate, blame the message, blame the people, and find anybody. And the out party these days, it seems to me, we have a president with, last I looked, low and declining approval ratings, has an opening. But are they too trapped by their ideology to seize it? I don't know. The president's approval rating right now, his net approval rating, is approximately where Biden's was after the debate that knocked him out of the race. So, again, markets work, political markets work, and eventually this political market will work. There is such a thing in politics as a creative loser. You're sitting today, Mitch, with one of the surviving of the 27 million voters for Barry Goldwater. cast my first presidential vote for Goldwater. In 1962, I graduated from college where I'd been a sort of normal Kennedy Democrat. Went to Britain, saw a great nation being suffocated by socialism and collectivism. Went to Berlin, saw the Berlin Wall, came back and voted for Barry. Now, at that point conservatism was considered naughty but not serious that it was kind of bad manners but something you'd tolerate well Goldwater lost but if Goldwater hadn't lost and changed the Republican Party in the more conservative direction I wouldn't have been able to say as I have many times that Goldwater didn't lose it just took 16 years to count the votes and so there's such a thing as a creative loser you could make the case that mcgovern was a creative loser that he in turn he really changed the axis of the democratic party there's a let me ask you about a uh what i i take to be a new series of theories that suggest that the environment which we operate is is fundamentally different now um there's a book by a guy named guri you've read everything so you you'll be familiar, who believes that not just here, but in other societies as well, elites of all kinds have lost their grip over information and therefore their credibility. And he makes the case that it will be hard, if not impossible, for anyone to assemble a majority in a society as deeply cynical, skeptical as the ones we've, this phenomenon has created. I have read Gurry. Is that over- And it is the case, half the story is that the elites have lost control of information. Yeah. The other half of the story is that people have lost their belief in information. Yes. That there's no such thing as information. There's simply partisan ammunition to be seized upon and wielded. And that's the dangerous thing there. It's kind of postmodernism has leaked out of the literature departments of our universities into a kind of pandemic of epistemological nihilism. Yes. And it's profoundly dangerous. By the way, that's my immigration policy. You want to hear it? Yeah. For every 10 immigrants we accept, we deport one tenured professor of English. It's a great idea. Can I suggest we tweak the ratio? Yes. May not be aggressive enough. A little while back, I was able to talk with Gary Kasparov, world chess champion, but much more important, an important dissident from the last days of the Soviet Union. And he, in response to a question, made, I thought, an interesting and somewhat surprising observation. He said that the reason Russia collapsed back into Putinism was that they had a fundamental misunderstanding He said we thought democracy was a result but it a process And that the moment you begin to conclude that you can rig the game it's okay to tweak the rules so that our side wins, he said that school's out. Does that comport with your view of maybe where we are now? Yes. It's now a common place to say that politics is downstream from culture. and culture that nourishes democracy must be, on the one hand, the wonderful ferment of culture we had in the revolutionary era when, as historian Gordon Wood has said, what we pioneered was a non-deferential culture in our society. We were no longer going to tug our forelocks to any other institution or country or class. The problem with that is the question in any society, Mitch, isn't whether elites shall rule, it's which elites. And the challenge of democracy is to get consent to worthy elites. It's hard to do when you've decided that to be an elite is to be suspect and a public enemy. It's partly the reason we have this confusion. Our elites are not very elite. That is elite, that's an elite automobile, that's an elite baseball player. That implies extra talent. Elite now has come to mean only unearned prominence and unjustified power and influence. And again, it's a kind of nihilism. As you say, culture is the wellspring. and this was no mystery at the founding. The founders all said by, I think all said, by one in one expression or another that the republic they were fashioning was fit for a virtuous people. And you have written in your... Can I interrupt you just on one thing? Yes. A virtuous people would be immune to what the founders called popular arts. By popular arts, they meant demagoguery. They meant things to trick the public, to bring out their worst aspects, to suppress the better angels of their nature. So they were worried about the arts of their own class. These were all political people, and they liked politics, and they knew it was indispensable. But within this indispensable, honorable craft, there's a serpent. And the serpent in the garden is the ability to degrade the public while courting it. The most indispensable book of recent times is authored by our guest. I trust if you haven't all read it, you will accept my advice and rush out and buy it immediately. It's called The Conservative Sensibility. And I think you once told me your staff refers to it as the New Testament. The New New Testament. Yeah. Yes. Which it's an appellation it deserves. They're required to speak it that way. But you do say there that, among other things, that government today is inimitable to the virtues of self-government in at least two ways. One, by fostering dependency. Second, by encouraging and practicing incivility and aggressiveness and so forth. That's kind of a dispiriting, can't argue with it, but it's sort of a dispiriting analysis. In 1964, the year Goldwater ran and lost 44 states, I can pick them, can't I? The public was asked in a poll, do you expect the government to do the right thing all the time or almost all the right time? And the answer was 70%. today that poll would be something like eight percent what's changed well what's changed is the government is bigger the government is more solicitous the government is more caring the government is more intrusive and as its pretensions have risen its prestige has plummeted there's a lesson in that and it's so obvious which is that if government would do the little things right. First things first. You know, don't run USD. Fix the roads. Someone ran, the governor of Michigan got elected on the slogan, fix the damn roads. Good slogan. If government would start like that. Second, if we could have a politics, There are two ways of approaching politics. One is to envision the best and pursue it. The other, which I subscribe to, is notice the worst and avoid it. We've had an enormous opportunity in the 20th century to see just how bad politics could get. Start there. Figure out what the lessons were and let's avoid that. A lot of people say, well, that's boring. It's banal. It doesn't make my pulse race. Good. I don't want pulse race politics. I want calm. I've said many, many times over the years that after I pass away, if there's a tombstone, it will read, he raised four great daughters and fixed the Bureau of Motor Vehicles. and they're applauding because it happens to be true i i and and it was it was based on exactly your conviction that the government ought to earn can earn confidence by doing those things that we can all agree it is necessary to do this is why it seems to me the sleeper issue in our politics today is K-12 education. That is where for most Americans, government intersects with their lives at some point or other. And that's why we see the most creative ferment in our policy in K-12 education. The new civics education in schools, school vouchers, education pods, It's homeschooling. There's a real wonderful ferment out there, which really testifies to the fecundity of American freedom. It's still there. I want to read you just one quote before we leave the American people behind us here. Andrew Sullivan, I don't know if you regard him highly or poorly, but I share that. and he wrote, I was very discouraged to hear him, to read him writing this just recently, the American people who no longer want to govern themselves, who are sick of this republic, no longer keep it, choose to keep it if it means sharing it with people they despise. Now, earlier today I read you a more encouraging quote from someone who thinks that the pendulum will swing back, that those who have been exhausted by recent politics will search for and find someone to restore calm, perhaps some competence. Are you betting on that side of the equation? I am. What I'm going to say, I'm going to say delicately because I don't like to talk about current stuff too much. I'll say this. One of the lessons of the last decade of American politics is how profoundly one person can change the tone of American life. the good response to that is, the cheerful response is, it ought to be possible for one person to change it back. That is, I regret the fact that we live in a presidential-centric country. I think the president is too much with us. Of all parties, let me digress for just one moment. when Roosevelt gave his first fireside chat as president after his March 4th, 1933 inauguration, he began with two words that didn't appear on the transcript. It's up at Hyde Park. It's not there. But he began with two words. He began, my friends. Now, he's on the radio. Radio was, to me, a more revolutionary technology than the Internet or television or anything else because it annihilated the distance between the governor and the governors. It created a new intimacy. Roosevelt knew he was talking to people in desperate fear at that point, sitting around their Philco's in parts of the country that barely got rural electrification. And they wanted a friend in the White House I don want a friend in the White House I want someone who will take care that the laws are faithfully executed and will at least start there And just, again, a more modest sense. Why, I don't want to be callous, but when Michael Jackson died, I'm sorry he died, but we didn't need the president to speak about this. Presidents are now expected to be national mourners. national keepers of our consciences. No, take care that the laws are faithfully executed, then get back to us. We've seen it emphatically demonstrated, as you say, that a president can change a single person, and the president can change the tone of public conversation for the worse. Remains to be seen, whether that having happened, whether it can be changed in the other direction. That is the test. As you have said, is this swing a pendulum or a ratchet? If it's a ratchet that clicks in only one direction, then we're in serious trouble because we have now legitimized behaviors that we would punish in our eight-year-old. I just don't think there is such a thing as permanent victory or permanent loss in a society. There are no final victories. If I had to sum up the great conservative insight about life in two words, it is nothing lasts. Now that can be consoling. Great story. Lincoln, in 1858, war clouds and disunion lowering over the country, gives a talk at what was the precursor of the Wisconsin State Fair. And he concluded by telling the story of the Oriental despot who summoned his wise men and gave them a shower. He said, I want you to go away and don't come back until you have devised a proposition to be carved in stone, to be forever in view and forever true. They came back and their proposition was, this too shall pass away. But Lincoln said, perhaps it's not true. If we cultivate the internal world within us, as assiduously and prodigiously as we cultivate the physical world around us, we might endure. Well, we have. Partly because Lincoln came along. And it's really hard to count on Lincoln's coming around. but who thought Lincoln was going to come around now I know people in Indiana maintain that his greatness is that he spent his formative years in Indiana if you didn't point that out I was planning to I was afraid of that but Lincoln's a miracle but there is precedent one last question then And you're a historian, and others who purport to be think they see cycles in history, sometimes over the long sweep of centuries, sometimes just within the context of American history. Every so often, it's certainly been true that cataclysmic events have occurred that have changed the nature of the republic in the time after. You can pick your own, but the election of 1800 is sometimes seen as one in the Civil War and the Depression and, of course, wars, like the Second World War. And there are many people who think that we're due for one, that we're headed for one, that maybe we've built our deaths, for instance, the preconditions for one. So my question is, do you think that's fated to be? And if in fact it should occur, is it possible that it's necessary? A purgative, just as sometimes recessions lay the groundwork for stronger economies? The study of history, and when I'm dictator of this country, the only permissible major in college is going to be history. I'm serious. I'm so tired of reinventing the wheel that let's learn from the past. The study of history teaches us contingency. It teaches us that nothing is necessary. It teaches us the role of luck. If there hadn't been a fog in the East River in that late summer of 76 that rescued George Washington's army, One night, one fog, revolution would have been over. If that Confederate courier hadn't dropped the cigars for an Indiana corporal to pick up before Antietam. With the Confederate plans for Antietam, yes. Luck plays a role. Contingency is good. That's why history, sometimes, you know, people say it's one damn thing after another. And other people say, no, it's the same damn thing over and over again. needn't be that way. Things change. Some Yale graduate goes south to be a tutor on a plantation, gets tired of listening to the planters complain about the problem of separating cotton seed from cotton fiber. So this kid named Eli Whitney invents the cotton gin. Suddenly the plantation system spreads, slavery spreads, brings on the modern Civil War and the modern world, Rather a lot of change from one entrepreneurial genius from Yale, unlikely places. Especially these days. Exactly. So if you understand the contingencies, nothing has to happen. Decline is a choice. And we can make different choices. George, thank you so much for spending this time with us. I have made it a practice to end each of these little inquisitions with the same question. to which your most recent comments that lead us vary directly. In the year 2050, do you expect that the United States will be more or less free than today? I think it will be more free because we're flirting with all kinds of departures from freedom, as I understand it. free trade, government permeating culture in unhealthy ways. And one of the reasons they're unhealthy is they don't work. We've seen this before. This is the same damn thing over and over again. And I think we often learn by running into walls and stubbing our toes and hitting our fingers with the hammers, and it's painful. But we learn. We're more careful with the hammers. So my feeling is we're about to go into a kind of seminar on mistakes, avoidable mistakes, but we're going to get tired of the crony capitalism that's going to be the result of these tariffs where the Commerce Department becomes an auction, always in session, doing special favors for people. the reason we're conservatives is it works freedom works the fecundity of freedom again has been proven over and over again and periodically we have to depart hit our thumbs with the hammer and then correct course but the recuperative powers of our country are astonishing I have lived in I'm 84 years old born in 1941 in the early 1950s one of the most heroic stories in the history of the human race began well it didn't begin then but took special life then the civil rights movement people got set to dismantle tyranny let's call it that Jim Crow was a tyranny a majority popular tyranny in the south and they did it astonishing the changes in this country I mean, to think that in 1954, people had to sit in the back of the bus. Try and explain that to someone now. The change of the American mind, the plasticity in the best sense, the fact that we take new shapes from new evidence, unbelievable and inspiring. George Will, for 50 years, you've been not one of, in my judgment, the most important voice in our country for these principles we've been discussing. I know on at least one occasion I tried to pay, I can't pay a high enough compliment to our guest, but I did say he has so frequently changed my mind. And thank goodness you're still working and changing minds, I know, on a regular basis. Thank you for your service to our republic and to the principles that the Liberty Fund and I know this audience cherish as you do. Thank you for being with us. Thank you all for joining us. The Future of Liberty has been brought to you by Liberty Fund, a private educational foundation dedicated to encouraging discussions of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals. Thank you.
