The Conservative Sensibility

by George F. Will

  In a 1911 letter to the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce (1866–1952), Georges Sorel (1847–1922), the French philosopher who advocated revolutionary syndicalism, said that “movements toward greatness” are “always an effort, and movements toward decadence always natural.”16 The Founders bequeathed to posterity a republic that throve under a limited government that provided social space for the creativity of society’s spontaneous order. The abandonment of the Founders’ ideas is having several large consequences. Current discontents are fueling a boiling distrust of government and corrosive distrust of Americans regarding one another. For the last fifty years, especially, the government’s ambitiousness and solicitousness have varied inversely with the government’s prestige. It is time for second thoughts—or, in many cases, first thoughts—about the price we are paying for what has been lost. Interest in the problem of—perhaps the inevitability of—the decay of political regimes is as old as Western political philosophy: So, the preoccupation with decay had a distinguished pedigree long before Edward Gibbon, on October 15, 1764, in Rome, “sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter.” It was then “that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.” He wrote “the last lines of the last page” of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire on June 27, 1787.17 On that day, in Philadelphia, the Constitutional Convention debated the institutional architecture for limited government that would resist the degenerations to which other republics had succumbed.

  “Because the civilization of ancient Rome perished in consequence of the invasion of the Barbarians,” Tocqueville wrote, “we are perhaps too apt to think that civilization cannot perish in any other manner. If the light by which we are guided is ever extinguished, it will dwindle by degrees and expire of itself.”18 Human beings are unique among living creatures in that they are capable of being dissatisfied with themselves. For American conservatives, dissatisfaction is a retrospective frame of mind. Conservatism’s task is to urgently warn about what is perishable: Everything. Lincoln’s anxiety was about the perishable nature of national memory, particularly America’s memory of its Founding. It would, he said, inevitably “grow more and more dim by the lapse of time.” At the close of the Revolutionary War, its “living history was to be found in every family.” But that history, the memories of participants “are gone,” destroyed by “time.” Lincoln spoke when some Americans from the Revolutionary era were still alive. Mrs. Alexander Hamilton, final survivor of the Founders’ circle, died in Washington in 1854 in her ninety-seventh year, having lived the entire life of the Republic. So had the slave interviewed in Virginia during the Civil War’s 1862 Peninsula Campaign, who recalled hearing cannonading at the Battle of Yorktown eighty-one years earlier. But even in 1838, memories of the Founding era were few and flickering, so Lincoln toiled to supply new supports for the American project, supports “hewn from the solid quarry of sober reason.”19 His public life was devoted to reconnecting the country with the principles of the Founding. This is conservatism’s core purpose today.

  CONSERVATISM’S RADICAL WORRY

  Politics is usually driven by competing worries. Today, conservatives are more radically worried than are progressives concerning conditions in America’s government and culture. Conservatives worry about the relationships they think they discern between government and culture. Progressives still express their worries in an essentially 1930s vocabulary of distributive justice, understood in economic, meaning material, terms. This assumes a reassuringly mundane politics of splittable differences—how much concrete to pour, how many crops to subsidize by how much, which factions shall get what. Conservatives worry in a more contemporary vocabulary, questioning the power and ambitions of the post–New Deal state, and finding a causal connection between those ambitions and the fraying of the culture. Many of today’s conservatives believe, or say they do (their actions in office often say otherwise), that the nation needs to rethink the proper scope and actual competence of government.

  In 1893, three years after the Census Bureau declared the closing of the frontier, Woodrow Wilson pondered the changes that were challenging the old American faith that freedom is, in large measure, a function of space—that freedom consists partly of not being able to see the smoke from your neighbor’s cabin or to hear the sound of his ax. In 1893, Wilson wrote, “Slowly we shall grow old, compact our people, study the delicate adjustments of an intricate society.”20 In classical political theory, compactness was a precondition for a successful republic—a small population compacted in a small polity that might be free of factions. The audacity of the American experiment was and still is its attempt to have a republic that is big, but in which life nevertheless is conducive to the virtues requisite for self-government, the virtues of self-reliance and self-restraint. However, in the more than twelve decades since Wilson brooded about the emergence of “an intricate society,” our big country has acquired a big government that seems to foster dependence, and which inflames incontinent appetites, including appetites for government provision of illimitable wants.

  Liberalism as originally understood—limited government supervising market societies; government respectful of individual autonomy and individuals’ voluntary transactions—is thin gruel for those with an appetite for red meat politics. As Isaiah Berlin wrote, “A liberal sermon which recommends machinery designed to prevent people from doing each other too much harm, giving each human group sufficient room to realize its own idiosyncratic, unique, particular ends without too much interference with the ends of others, is not a passionate battle-cry to inspire men to sacrifice and martyrdom and heroic feats.”21 Passions sometimes have their places in political life, but should not be the routine features of normal political processes. Sacrifice, martyrdom, and heroism can be necessary, but usually are so only when things have gone badly awry. A political order that requires such things constantly or even frequently is failing to provide good order. Americans who think their government is now failing at that task are not wrong. What they require is leadership that tells them that they and their political appetites are large parts of the problem.

  Locke and Montesquieu were important to the American Founding, but our national wagon really got rolling because Americans came to believe what Huckleberry Finn said: “All kings is mostly rapscallions.”22 Thoughts like that came easily to, say, a farmer who had just broken his plow on a Connecticut rock, and who would rather buy a new one than pay taxes to a distant monarch. We have come a long way from sod huts and muddy boots to an economy that produces billions of dollars’ worth of soap. And we may be learning what Mark Twain meant: “Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run.”23 The easing of the physical strain of Americans’ existence has proceeded apace with a general loosening of social restraints. As recently as 1944, the library of the US Naval Academy would not issue the novel Forever Amber—it was considered quite racy—to anyone of the rank midshipman or lower. American hedonism has come a long way, fast. And there are many persons who think America’s modern history is summed up by a Thurber cartoon that shows a woman perched on the arm of a sofa, talking animatedly to a circle of enthralled men. Behind her, a disgruntled woman says to another: “She built up her personality, but she’s undermined her character.”24 Many thoughtful people today think the Republic has more personality and less character than is healthy, and that it is afflicted with a weakness, decadence, that may be the fatal flaw of developed free nations. The theory is as follows.

  The material success of capitalism—to which we owe the marble in our lives—has been made by hardships of life in the mud of Connecticut and Nebraska and the Oregon Trail. But abundance both produces and requires a constant increase in consumption, and in appetites. This dynamic generates a culture of self-indulgence. Such a culture is incompatible with self-government, which is, after all, about governing the self. That is
why the concluding stanza of “America the Beautiful” is a kind of prayer: “Confirm thy soul in self-control…”25 There is tension between the economic dynamic that inflames appetites and the need for discipline—political as well as economic—in a free society. Some people say this is the “cultural contradiction” of capitalism. Others call it the “cultural consequence” of capitalism. Be that as it may, in its third century, the Republic’s most pressing task is to demonstrate that political habits of restraint and moderation are compatible with an economic and cultural ambience that celebrates, and often provides, instant gratification of immoderate appetites. It is a national triumph, of sorts, that this problem of abundance confronts the descendants of the generations that walked through the mud to Oregon.

  We characterize various eras and epochs, from the Founding era to the Roaring Twenties to the complacent Fifties to the convulsive Sixties, in order to slice history into discrete episodes. They are, however, parts of a seamless flow of events, each one birthed by previous ones and pregnant with others. Today Americans wonder how it came to pass that a tiny collection of thirteen loosely related communities could produce the generation of American founders who, at Philadelphia in 1776 and 1789, accomplished history’s most stunning feat of political creation, which was to become a continental democracy. The answer is not, or at least not primarily, that an accident of history blessed the colonies with an extraordinary number of wise and decent men. A better explanation is that there was then a habit of deference to excellence in public life. After all, the remarkable thing is not just that the Founding Fathers existed, separately, but that the political process brought them together in Philadelphia.

  Since then, however, there have been changes in the theory and, hence, the practice of American democracy. The changes began with the “Jacksonian revolution” in democratic thinking. In his first message to Congress in 1829, President Andrew Jackson said: “The duties of all public offices are, or at least admit of being, made so plain and simple that men of intelligence may readily qualify themselves for their performance.”26 The duties of public office are, however, “plain and simple” only if government problems are only problems of administrative technique. But such a mild conception of politics is blind to the political virtues of judgment, prudence, and courage. The devaluing of the political vocation has been followed in our time by a related degradation of government. Today, government exists to be “responsive.” Politicians exist to respond like simple mechanisms to impulses recorded from demanding constituencies. This plain and simple task requires no uncommon virtues. To be vigorously servile to all demands, a politician should be “a person of the people,” prepared to serve democracy by representing its common denominators, including (perhaps especially) the lowest. Today’s servile government possesses, at most, utility, never dignity. Not surprisingly, the public evidently thinks it would be unreasonable to expect dignified politicians, and, besides, that dignity is irrelevant to the politician’s low function. Half a century ago, Governor George Wallace, the Alabama Democrat who was an early voice of the populism that has flourished in our time, said: “Hell, we got too much dignity in government now.”27 That is not a contemporary complaint.

  How did America come to its present condition? By a protracted apostasy from principles that, by limiting the scope of government, protected the stature of politics. Our nation had a founding moment, which means it is founded on more than inertia. Our nation emerged not from forces obscured by the mists of the past but from a clear, public act of choosing—an affirmation. Of the correctness of their choice, the Founders were breathtakingly confident. Think about this: The First Amendment forbids the establishment of religion because the Founders thought that religious truth was unknowable and so must remain an open question. But the Constitution guarantees the establishment of a republican form of government in all the states because the Founders considered the best form of government a closed question in our open society.

  One measure of a political philosophy’s seriousness is what it requires of its adherents. Conservatives today are required to tell people that they should be formed by respect for the Constitution. They should be formed for a life of choosing not to choose all that government can offer because those offerings come at a cost to the virtues of independence and moderation. Which brings us back to what may be the cultural contradiction of conservatism: Conservatism depends on eliciting from citizens public-spirited self-denial. But that is not easily elicited in a commercial republic of the sort that conservatism celebrates, where individualism enjoys maximum scope for private pursuits. Public-spirited self-denial can only be elicited by a conservatism standing for more than the sum of the demands of the groups in its coalition. It can only be elicited by respect for the Constitution and, hence, for the virtues of self-reliance and self-restraint that our polity presupposes. As today’s conservatives struggle to develop a constitutional vocabulary for infusing self-government with self-restraint, they should remember this: The Republican Party, the former and perhaps future vessel of conservatism, first became a national factor because of one man’s refusal to accept popular sovereignty as a complete expression of the formative project of American politics. The party’s intellectual pedigree traces directly to Lincoln’s denial that Kansans could choose to have slaves.

  Lincoln’s noble insistence was that a great continental nation could be, indeed had to be, a single moral community. Conservatism’s task today is to demonstrate that the dignity of constitutional government depends on restraints of a sort that do not come easily to conservatives or any other Americans. And these restraints will not come automatically or spontaneously from institutional arrangements—from federalism or the separation of powers or judicial review. The restraints requisite for limited government, and hence requisite for the virtues that republican government presupposes, will come only from thoughtful reverence for the nation’s founding, a reverence that not only honors the memory of the Founders but is conscientious in understanding their principles.

  The search for restraint is an American constant. It is a search in which progressivism is not helpful. Liberalism entered Western political thought with a breezy faith that the good life would flourish when the last king had been strangled in the entrails of the last priest. Today, we know it is not that simple. The good life is menaced by forces of disorder, and big government has become one of those forces. As Alexander Bickel said, “The future will not be ruled; it can only possibly be persuaded.”28 The foundation of a democratic society is opinion, so conservatism’s task is rhetorical. It is to be persuasive about enlarging whatever remains of Americans’ reverence for the Founders and their premises. It is ominous that today the word “rhetoric” carries almost entirely negative connotations. It once denoted a means of persuading others by offering reasons for beliefs. Now it means deceptive, duplicitous, or plainly false spoken words. “I don’t like eloquence,” said one of Dashiell Hammett’s hardboiled anti-heroes in 1924. “If it isn’t effective enough to pierce your hide, it’s tiresome; and if it is effective enough, then it muddles your thoughts.”29 There you have it—rhetoric is obfuscation.

  Leadership in a democracy is, however, the ability to persuade a majority to consent to things they are not disposed to desire. It is to get a majority to accept short-term pains in the expectation of long-term gains. So, the mission of contemporary conservatism is at once melancholy, daunting, and, because it is so challenging, exhilarating. It is to convince people that governmental promises have been made to them that the government—that American society, actually—cannot afford to keep and to persuade them that the kind of supposedly ameliorative government that has been created on their behalf, and at their behest, is both unattractive and unsustainable. It is unattractive because it is the plaything of avaricious factions. It is unsustainable because it has a powerful and permanent incentive to disguise, by deferring the costs of, the goods and services to which it has told people they are entitled.

  Con
servatism has the paradoxical burden of telling people that attempts to conserve some of today’s settled arrangements and familiar expectations are going to be futile, costly, and potentially ruinous. Conservatism, which often in history has been devoted to the defense of the existing order, must now accept the task of reconciling people to the disruption and churning that accompanies economic and cultural dynamism. The political class has prospered by hiding from the public the cost of the public’s appetites. By making vast deficit spending not an occasional counter-cyclical recourse but a constant governing strategy, it has made big government deceptively cheap, giving today’s public a dollar’s worth of goods and services and charging them only about 80 cents. By doing so, government deepens America’s infantilization. It is characteristic of children to will an end without willing the means to this end. This is now a national characteristic.

  But what, then, about compassionate politics? Compassion is a passion, and passions are, the Founders agreed, problems to be coped with. Compassion is not, strictly speaking, a virtue. As a passion, it is disconnected from reason and often at odds with it. Hence compassion is an unreliable guide to justice, which must be defined by reason. Compassion may be put to the service of virtue; it may prompt virtuous action. But this is a contingent, not a necessary, relation. And when compassion is elevated to a principle of political philosophy, it is incompatible with a conservatism of limited government. President George W. Bush, who called himself a “compassionate conservative,” said: “When somebody hurts, government has got to move.”30 That is less a compassionate thought than a flaunting of sentiment to avoid thinking about government’s limited capacities and unlimited confidence. Compassion does indeed involve the desire to prevent or ameliorate pain or distress. Because there never is a shortage of those things, compassion is steady work. So, as a political imperative, compassion as an animating force of government can mean expanding government without end. Hence the contradiction between compassionate conservatism and constitutionalism.