Here is an alternative conservative view, one man about whom I would hope most would say, "I do not agree with his view, but it is not crazy or despotic." George Will recently published a book called,
The Conservative Sensibility.
Interview with George Will.
The "Play" button to the left takes you to the subscription page.Click on the headphones to the right to listen.
There are some issues on which I disagree with Will (he welcomes incorporation, while I find it a constitutional abomination without supporting evidence from the XIV proposal/ratification period), but in other areas his argument is well-reasoned and supported by some evidence.
He postulates three thoughts on which the conservative sensibility is predicated:
* Rights precede government. Governments exist to secure rights.
* There is a fixed human nature. We are not creatures that acquire whatever nature we are surrounded by. Once you deny this, as the great Progressives did, you emancipate governments for the most dangerous of its twentieth century projects to modify human beings, the "New German Man," or
homo sovieticus.
* Because of the first two, we need a government that is checked and balanced, so that it is effective but slow and modified, because men are passionate and
passions are problems. We want majority rule, but slowed down.
The discussion covers Randy Barnett, Alexander Bickel (
The Least Dangerous Branch), Michael Oakeshott, Timothy Sandefur, Herbert Croly's seminal Progressive manifesto,
The Promise of American Life (1909)
Side notes.
Will is an atheist (did not know that)
Will is an anti-Trump conservative (I did know that).
I thought some might find this interesting.
Anyway, this is a conversation with a conservative who dissents from Trump.
Conservatism existed before Trump and it will exist once Trump is gone from the scene.
When asked to define the position of one's opponents, human nature (in order to justify one's own position by comparison) is to cast them in the most extreme light, in ways to which those opponents would probably object. Here is a conversative's definition of conservatism.