CLARIFYING CONSERVATISM.

I opened this year's collection of book reviews, rather late in the year, with a look at George Will's The Conservative Sensibility.  I flagged, for possible use in that review, a few observations about the book from sources you might have heard of.  Those didn't make the cut then.  Let's return, though, starting with a pair of short take candidates by Kyle Smith in  National Review.  Mr Smith was reasoned out of campus leftism by regularly reading and understanding George Will, Chicago Cub and American Flyer loyalties notwithstanding.  His verdict: "Were every college student required to read it and be tested on it, American progressivism would have to pull down the shutters and close up shop, like phrenology or alchemy."  To Mr Smith, Mr Will is a source of intellectual ammunition for assorted sorts of conservatives. "Progressives who can win the argument with Will have won the argument against conservatism. May they read this book and take their best shot."  That can't involve calling him mean-spirited or questioning his motives, but that's how arguments go these days.

As I put it in the review post, "If you have a conservative or libertarian disposition, dear reader, Conservative Sensibility offers plenty to make you check your premises; if your disposition is technocratic or vanguardist, ask whether Mr Will offers evidence that might make you revise your priors."  The technocrats and vanguardists might be driven to a loss of composure, though, by the well-posed bon mot.  That's what most of my marginal notes referred to.  Mr Smith found room for a few.  Here's my favorite, follow the link for more. “In the 1960s, progressivism became a stance of disdain, describing Americans not only as [John Kenneth] Galbraith had, as vulgar, but also as sick, racist, sexist, imperialist, etc.”  Not only do they tell you It Is For Your Own Good.  They deplorable-shame you to boot.  If they're so smart, why aren't they rich?

Mr Will also gave an interview to Matt Welch in Reason.

American conservatism, rightly understood, is the legatee of classical liberalism. American liberals turned on their own legacy of limited government and resistance to authority, and conservatives like Barry Goldwater took that over by giving us a kind of American West conservatism. Conservatives who say they want to "make America great again" have imported European conservatism: blood and soil, throne and altar, ethnicity and language. European conservatism is about preserving hierarchies. American conservatism is about reconciling people to constant churning and the radical openness of spontaneous order.

That interview concludes, "Politics shouldn't be that important." What have I been saying about democracy being a drag on civilization?

We're returning to those interviews because in the course of his conversation, Mr Will invoked Virginia Postrel on the essence of libertarianism being essential to betting on emergence, which is what sustains a prosperous society, even one nominally social-democratic.

She said the most wonderful thing: The Bible reduced to once sentence is "God created man and woman, and then lost control of things." The conservative sensibility says, "Good! We don't want control. That's the whole point." The anti-conservative sensibility says, "Oh, that's dangerous. It's tiring. It's worrisome." This anti-conservative hostility toward the constant churning of a free society is about to produce what I call "the big flinch." It's leading people to say, "Enough. We've had it. We're going to hunker down."

The problem is that the American people, whether they know it or not, have already made a choice. When they decided to have an entitlement state, they made enormous demands on their future productivity. And when you do that, you better attend to your future productivity. So they are wedded to economic dynamism whether they know it or not.

Mr Will has since put together a compendium of his columns, American Happiness and Discontents, and when he sat down with Reason editor Nick Gillespie, that same observation came up.

[M]ost of reality is not governed. Most of the time that's a very good thing. It's been well said that the essence of the Bible reduced to one sentence is, "God created man and woman and promptly lost control of events."

Those of us with a libertarian streak—some streaks broader than others, but mine is broad enough—believe that things being out of control is exactly what we want. We want a spontaneous order: up-from-the-bottom creativity rather than down-from-the-top command structures. However, events can be unruly and turbulent and dangerous as well as constructive. And I think we're seeing the dangerous side in the last period that my book covers.

I wonder if the atheist Mr Will is admitting some appreciation for Ayn Rand calling Original Sin a monstrous lie?  I'd feel better about the Will Libertarian Tory tour if he would say an Act of Contrition for telling people to punish Trumpian Republicans by voting for Democrats.  Note the jury-rigging of top-down command structures in Washington and Sacramento and St. Paul, and despair.  The beginning of wisdom is in recognizing the consequences of his advocacy.

Look what Joe Biden did in his first weeks in office: a flurry, a blizzard of executive orders. That is not healthy. I believe that the most alarming thing in American government is the modern presidency, which is essentially untethered from constitutional restraints. People say the presidents have usurped the powers of Congress. If only they'd had to usurp them! Congress hands away powers on a silver salver. It's so eager to get rid of them. They don't really pass laws anymore. They…say, "We really ought to have good education. You folks, over there in the Education Department, fill in the details."

So what you get is, to make this very timely, the Centers for Disease Control [and Prevention] says, "Well, OK, to control disease we're going to seize landlords' property and make them house tenants free, while they go on paying their mortgage, interest, taxes, etc."

Or to be even more timely: The president says, "Therefore, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration is hereby directed to order 80 million private sector employees to be vaccinated." Two things wrong with that. Either Congress intended that, in which case the Supreme Court should step in and say that violates the nondelegation doctrine—that is, you have delegated to the executive branch, essentially, legislative powers. Or Congress did not intend that, in which case the statute's being misapplied.

I keep coming back to the fact, and a large chunk of my book is about this, that all that stands between us and even worse government than we normally have is the judicial branch. The president will not limit himself. Congress will not limit itself. Only the judiciary can police the outskirts of limited-government.

He also notes, "Do not undertake great departures on slender majorities."

That might be so, but that's not how the self-styled progressives operate.  They prefer a judiciary that reads all manner of elasticity into the Federal Constitution, the better to ratify the latest raft of "fill in the details" coming out of thousand-page resolutions and executive orders.  That is, as long as it's their Congress and their figurehead in the White House, and if they can figure out a way to jam those changes through, they will, never mind the consequences.

His observation about the destructive nature of politics also bears repeating.

If the personal is political, everything is politics. And that's the definition of totalitarianism.

A mistake people commonly make about totalitarian societies is they say, "In a totalitarian society, you're not allowed to participate in politics." No, no. In a totalitarian society, you can't not participate in politics.

I remember when I first entered East Berlin, my first sight of a totalitarian society, what struck me was (a) the absence of advertising, which I missed instantly; and (b) the presence of the big red banner saying "Victory for Sozialismus." That is, we were conscripted into political vocabularies everywhere, and that's the problem. And that's of course why we're fighting so much about the teaching of American history.

At least we still can fight, unlike the East Germans, whose Stasi knew how to shoot straight.

Politico deputy editor Zack Stanton also engaged Mr Will in book talk.  That conversation covered a variety of topics, including the self-lowering of higher education.

It took 800 years of the evolution of the great research universities — through thickets of ecclesiastical and political interference — to get to where they became the great ornaments of Western civilization. And it can take about one generation to kick all that away.

Now, part of the problem is that a lot of the radicals in the 1960s went to work on campus, got tenure and through the tenure system, reproduced themselves. There are a lot of people on campus nowadays who just don’t belong there — they shouldn’t be teachers; they should be political activists. Fine! Go out and do your thing, but don’t pretend that you’re going to be teachers.

This isn’t just on campuses. There’s a common academic culture from Harvard Graduate School to kindergarten in Flagstaff, Arizona. It’s spread across the country as evenly as honey on toast.

He's being polite, I would have referred to something on a shingle.  Our Intellectual Betters, though, want us to eat that toast.

You’re not just mistaken [in your beliefs]; you’re somehow vulgar. And it’s this sense of condescension to the vulgarians that infuses a certain high-octane bitterness into our politics these days.

One of the striking things to me about our politics is that the grievances — which multiply like rabbits and cause people to be constantly furious — are very difficult to address with “politics” understood as “legislation and policy.” I mean, if people feel condescended to, how do you write a bill and take care of condescension? It’s very hard to address, which is why politics becomes sort of cut off from the normal stuff of politics. Donald Trump says, “these people despise you and we should despise them.” What do you do politically? I don’t get it.

Perhaps — that previous passage reminding me of Charlie "Prof Scam" Sykes — both of them should participate in that Act of Contrition after carrying Democrats' water for the past six years or so.

You can’t unring the bell and you can’t unsay the things he said — and they have consequences. However, you can get someone different to ring a different bell.

It’s not easy for people who are not demagogues to have the kind of dramatic effect a demagogue can have. But I do think someone with Eisenhower’s smile or Reagan’s chuckle would make a big difference. If someone came along and said, “Really, now. Calm down. Deep breaths.” I think the country would be so ready for that.

That starts, though, with a libertarian principle.

We’ll go from the small to the more particular: The small is the swollen presidency. Presidents [were] magnified first by radio, which I think probably had a bigger effect on politics — particularly in Germany in the 1920s and ’30s — than television has had because it gave an immediacy to strong figures. But because of modern technologies — radio, television, now the Internet and all that — the presidents are ubiquitous. They’re in our living rooms at all times. Michael Jackson dies, and the president is supposed to say something. How did that happen? The president is to take care that the laws are faithfully executed. He is definitely secondary to those who make the laws that he has to see are faithfully executed.

The swollen presidency is part of this. It permeates us. That’s partly because, famously, the United States doesn’t distinguish head of government from head of state the way the British did. The British could push all that ceremonial stuff off on the House of Windsor, let them do it, and let [Prime Minister Boris] Johnson embody the national spirit. That’s at the pinnacle of it: the conspicuousness of the head of the executive branch.

Flowing from that is an excessive belief that politics determines happiness. Whereas in fact, what makes America so interesting and so creative — what explains the fecundity of American freedom — is the spontaneous order, to use a good Hayekian concept that is so creative and rich. It’s a version of what Tocqueville marveled at: an amazing American genius for creating intermediary institutions. You know, the wagon trains would head out from St. Joseph, Missouri, and about the first night, they’d circle the wagons and start electing officers. That’s just the way we are. And it’s the bottom-up richness of American life that gets eclipsed when we focus instead on senators.

Arguably, the Speaker of the House ought to be the head of government, with the president executing the ceremonial duties such as greeting foreign heads of state and signing properly passed legislation.  To restore that job description, though, requires a rollback of the administrative state, and the president's abilities to unilaterally declare emergencies.

Both of those interviews are wide-ranging, and I've selected passages to make my points.  There are other dimensions of the conservative sensibility under discussion and left to the reader to explore.