What Makes a True Conservative - The Atlantic - 1 views
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The Conservative Sensibility, a thoughtful, elegant reflection on American conservatism and the Founders’ political thought.
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By “sensibility,” Will has in mind less than an agenda but more than an attitude. A sensibility is, he argues, a way of seeing.
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Will’s 1983 book, Statecraft as Soulcraft, had a significant intellectual impact on me. He questioned the Founders’ faith that moral balance and national cohesiveness will be supplied by the government’s doing little more than encouraging the free operation of “opposite and rival interests.”
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when a political regime establishes, through laws and courts and customs and other matters, a particular political economy, it is establishing, it is choosing the kind of people that would live under that regime,”
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The Conservative Sensibility suggests something else: that we should be attending more to the machinery of government and that government should be far less concerned about inculcating virtue in the citizenr
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“It turns out that Madison was smarter than I am.” When he argued that America was ill-founded because insufficient attention was given to soulcraft, he explained, he hadn’t fully appreciated that the Founders were indeed arguing about statecraft as soulcraft—that a government really can inculcate virtue.
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America was “ill-founded,” he wrote, because there was not enough attention to what he termed “the sociology of virtue.” Government needed to take a greater role in shaping the moral character of its citizens
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He argues in The Conservative Sensibility that capitalism doesn't just make us better off; it makes us better by enforcing such virtues as thrift, industriousness, and the deferral of gratification.
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long story short: I did not appreciate the extent to which Madisonian liberty with Hamiltonian energy is soulcraft.”
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Will has claimed that Trump has done more lasting damage than Richard Nixon did during the Watergate scandal because, in Will’s words, “you can't un-ring the bell. You can't unsay what he has now said is acceptable discourse in the United States.
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he hoped Trump supporters are right—but he’s pretty sure they are wrong when they say that what Trump is doing to our culture, our politics and our civic discourse is ephemeral.
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Will argues that Trump’s agenda, to the degree it pleases conservatives, is what any Republican president would have done. “So the question is what does Trump bring that's distinctive?” Will said. “And it's all vulgarity, coarsening, semi-criminality.
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asking about the concrete, tangible harm of Trump’s conduct.“The answer is in the terms themselves,” Will replied. “The norms, that is, what are normal and what are normative, cease to be normal. And cease to be normative.
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“It’s amazing to me how fast, and we saw this in the 20th century in a number of ways, how fast something could go from unthinkable to thinkable to action,”
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“And it doesn’t seem to me it’s going to be easy to just snap back as if this didn’t happen. It happened. And he got away with it. And he became president. And there will be emulators.”
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Those who may have forgotten are now being reminded that government has a vital role in the cultivation and sustenance—or in the degradation and destruction—of political cultures. Which brings us back to Statecraft as Soulcraft.
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“mankind is not just matter, not just a machine with an appetitive ghost in it. We are not what we eat. We are, to some extent, what we and our leaders—the emblematic figures of our polity—say we are.”
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in 1964, when I cast my first presidential vote for Barry Goldwater, to whose memory the book is dedicated, 77 percent of the American people said they trusted the government to do the right thing all the time or almost all the time. Today it's 17 percent—and that 60-point evaporation of government prestige has accompanied a 60-fold increase in government pretensions.
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their entire agenda depends on strong government and strong government depends on public confidence in the government.”
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“What I'd like conservatives to take away from this book,” Will added, “is the sense of the enormous intellectual pedigree behind conservatism from Madison to Lincoln to Hayek and the rest.” Will said conservatives need to answer the question: What does conservatism want to conservative?
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The most important of all revolutions, Edmund Burke said, is a “revolution in sentiment, manners and moral opinion.”
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what we think Trump supporters either don’t understand or deny, is the destructive revolution in manners and mores that Donald Trump is ushering in, the enormous cultural and social blast radius of his presidency. Through his promiscuous lying and assault on demonstrable truths, his cruelty and crudity, his coarseness, bullying and dehumanization of his opponents, and his lawlessness and conspiracy-mongering—the whole corrupt, packaged deal—he has brought us into dark new realms.
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hen I probed Will on what has gone wrong with the American right, he mentioned the anti-intellectualism that inevitably comes with populism, which he called “the obverse of conservatism.”
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“Populism is a direct translation of popular passions into governments through a strong executive. Someone who might say something like, ‘Only I can fix it.
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Will argued that James Madison understood the need to “filter and refine and deflect and slow public opinion through institutions. To make it more refined, to produce what Madison called, in one of his phrases that I’m particularly fond of, ‘mitigated democracy.’
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what would most concern the Founders about contemporary politics. “Political leaders today seem to feel that their vocation is to arouse passions,” he told me, “not to temper and deflect and moderate them.
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Will has claimed that Trump has done more lasting damage than Richard Nixon did during the Watergate scandal because, in Will’s words, “you can’t un-ring the bell. You can’t unsay what he has now said is acceptable discourse in the United States.”
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Will replied that he hoped Trump supporters are right—but he’s pretty sure they are wrong when they say that what Trump is doing to our culture, our politics, and our civic discourse is ephemeral.
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Will argues that Trump’s agenda, to the degree it pleases conservatives, is what any Republican president would have done. “So the question is, What does Trump bring that’s distinctive?” Will said. “And it’s all vulgarity, coarsening, semi-criminality.”
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Trump’s supporters on the right “misunderstand the importance of culture, the viscosity of culture, and I think they are not conservatives, because they don’t understand this,”
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Donald Trump promised when he ran for president that he would overturn our norms, Will has said, and that’s one promise he’s kept.
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All of us, including Will, have to deal with the fact that we are now confronted with a head of government who is systematically assaulting our ideals and virtues
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“To revitalize politics and strengthen government, we need to talk about talk. We need a new, respectful rhetoric—respectful, that is, of the better angels of mankind’s nature.
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And their dilemma is this: In 1964, when I cast my first presidential vote for Barry Goldwater, to whose memory the book is dedicated, 77 percent of the American people said they trusted the government to do the right thing all the time or almost all the time. Today, it’s 17 percent—and that 60-point evaporation of government prestige has accompanied a 60-fold increase in government pretensions.
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I would think my progressive friends would be alarmed by this, because their entire agenda depends on strong government, and strong government depends on public confidence in the government.”
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For Will, the answer is the American founding, by which he has in mind three things: the doctrine of natural rights, understood as rights essential to the flourishing of creatures with our natures; a belief in human nature, meaning we are more than creatures who absorb whatever culture we’re situated in; and a government architecture, principally the separation of powers, that is essential to making good on what he refers to as the most crucial verb in the Declaration of Independence.
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What conservatives like Will and me believe, and what we think Trump supporters either don’t understand or deny, is the destructive revolution in manners and mores that Donald Trump is ushering in
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Through his promiscuous lying and assault on demonstrable truths, his cruelty and crudity, his coarseness, bullying ,and dehumanization of his opponents, and his lawlessness and conspiracy-mongering—the whole corrupt, packaged deal—he has brought us into dark new realms.
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There was a time when Republicans and conservatives more generally insisted that culture was upstream of politics and in many respects more important than politics; that leaders needed to take great care in cultivating and validating standards of decency, honor, and integrity; and that a president who destroyed rather than defended cultural norms and high standards would do grave injury to America.
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now Republicans are willing to sacrifice soul and culture for the sake of promised policy victories.
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“If the great columnists got a single sentence in the history books,” I asked Will, “what would you want to say about your contribution?”
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“It would be to convince people that politics is both fun and dignifies—that it has a great and stately jurisdiction, because and to the extent that it is a politics of ideas. Period.
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“The American nation’s finest political career derived from Lincoln’s refusal to allow his country to be seduced into thinking of itself in an unworthy way,”
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the civic virtues that Madison and the other Founders believed were essential for a free republic to survive “must be willed. It is folly to will an end but neglect to will the means to the end. The presuppositions of our polity must be supplied, politically.”