“REVIEW OF GEORGE WILL, THE CONSERVATIVE SENSIBILITY”

When I was doing my research for The History of Progress, one the books I read that excited my thinking most was The Conservative Sensibility by George Will. It is not that I agreed with everything Will had to say in this book. I took issue with many of his specific arguments, and I was even more troubled by the degree of emphasis he chose to place—or not place—on certain topics. I nearly got a wistful tear in my eye reading Will’s book, however, thinking this is the kind of political opponent progressives could use these days. This is someone with whom a progressive could at least debate.

In The Conservative Sensibility, Will essentially does for the conservative viewpoint what I try to do for progressivism in The History of Progress, taking a detailed look back at historical and philosophical developments that shaped a particular way of viewing, not just politics, but human life as a whole. Granted, The Conservative Sensibility does not go quite as far back as The History of Progress to start its story. Will begins his narrative, not with Big Bang, but with the period around the American Revolution, reflecting at length on the project the American founders gave themselves of designing an entirely new form of government. He then works his way forward to show how the type of conservatism that he espouses endured and evolved over the course of two centuries. Emphatically, this is the version of conservatism that was ascendent when Will, himself, came of political age in the 1960s and 1970s, ultimately leading up to the Reagan presidency. It is not the right wing populism that has more recently managed to claim the label of conservatism.

The strain of conservatism Will represents—which combines a laissez faire economic philosophy with a sense that the liberal social reforms of 1930s and 1960s had gone too far—was something progressives could and did disagree with. That’s what political opponents do: disagree. Still, as Left and Right vied for the country’s hearts and minds over the second half of the twentieth century, these viewpoints at least seemed to exist on a common spectrum. Bigger government or smaller? Higher taxes or lower? More regulation or less? With questions of this sort generally coming down to matters of degree, they admit to reasoned debate, amicable disagreement, and principled compromise. None of these things, of course, are anywhere to be found in our current political environment, in which it seems Democrats and Republicans do not so much stand at opposite ends of a spectrum as occupy two different realities. In any case, given that Will’s brand of conservatism probably has more in common with my own very broad conception of progressivism than it does with Trumpian populism, I thought it would help elucidate my understanding of the progressive worldview if I were to offer a brief review of The Conservative Sensibility, indicating where I find common ground with Will and where I part ways.

First off, Will and I share an appreciation for just how revolutionary the American founders were in resolving to free themselves, not just from the rule of one particular king, but from the rule of any kings, experimenting instead with a form of government that most classical authors had predicted would inevitably descend into anarchy: democracy. To highlight how dramatic this change was, I’ll frame it in my own terms rather than Will’s.

Virtually every society prior to the eighteenth century had governed itself in accord with some version of the system of privilege. This system of social organization works by dividing a society into distinct groups, generally as determined by birth, and arranging them into a hierarchical order. The relatively small number of individuals who land near the top of the hierarchy accord themselves a wide array of privileges, together with a small number of duties. The laboring masses stuck at the bottom of the social pyramid, conversely, are granted few if any privileges, instead being tasked almost entirely with duties, most of which are designed to fund the privileges their superiors enjoy. An array of intermediate ranks then fills out the hierarchy. The members of these groups are charged with a moderate number of duties, most of them directed toward keeping the state running, but also toward helping their superiors maintain the power, wealth, and privilege they have claimed. For such service, these mid-level functionaries are typically “paid”, not with a cash wage coming from their superiors, but rather with permission to claim certain privileges of their own, coming at the expense of those beneath them in the social hierarchy.

Dating back to ancient times, some of these intermediate-level groups consisted of guards and soldiers—basically anyone empowered to carry a sword. Others, however, others were distinguished by their literacy. This included the scribes and accountants who helped manage the state bureaucracy, but also such more spiritually-inclined types as poets, priests, and philosophers. Playing a key role the system of privilege, these caretakers of the Truth were quietly charged with maintaining what I call an ideology of privilege. This was a body of stories, dogmas, and rituals that may have served a variety of spiritual or social purposes, but inevitably established that the world, itself, is hierarchical in nature, down to its very metaphysical fabric. This made clear to the entire society that, with some people being noble by nature and others being naturally servile, all is right with the world—as God or nature intended—when kings are ruling and peasants are serving, each of them gracefully accepting their metaphysically sanctioned mix of privileges and duties. (For an exhaustive account of how ideology has long been used to justify existing social inequalities, see Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Ideology.)

Skipping over the details of the revolution in thought that occurred with the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment, the American revolutionaries picked up on the work of such modern philosophers as Hobbes, Locke, and Montesquieu to challenge, not just a the rule of George III, but the entire ideology of privilege. Rejecting the claim that different individuals are blessed with different degrees of moral worth, the American colonists instead put forward the proposition, eloquently expressed by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, that all people are created equal and endowed with certain universal, inalienable rights. These revolutionaries thus gave voice to a new ideology, one based on the concept, not of exclusive privileges, but of universal rights. And when they won their independence from England, they had the audacity to try to craft a new system of government that would lend concrete reality to this budding ideology of rights.

Another point upon which Will and I agree is in appreciating the hard work the founders put into designing a political system that would not only help realize the revolutionary new ideal of moral universalism, but also provide a durable, effective means of governing. This distinguished the American revolution from its counterpart in France, where revolutionaries were drunk on universalistic idealism, but they never put much thought into institutionalizing their ideals in enduring fashion, with the result being that the revolution did plunge into anarchy, ultimately producing Emperor Napoleon. Delegates to the Constitutional Convention, in contrast, took many long months to soberly devise a system of democratic governance that would last over time. Their key move in this regard, Will stresses, was that they did not assume the young country would always have virtuous leaders. If anything, they assumed the opposite. They tried to take human nature as it is, in other words—basically self-interested—and work with it rather than fighting it, first and foremost by splitting the governing authority into parts and pitting distinct interests against one another, thus creating a stable equilibrium. Most famously, this involved establishing three branches of government, together with their associated checks and balances. But the founders also consciously sought to establish balances between states and the federal government, between big states and small states, between different regions of the country, and ultimately between voters and their elected representatives—with this entire democratic system of governance being balanced by a free market economic system.

As a traditional conservative, Will predictably argues that this final balance skew should more to the side of the free market than to that of government power. Indeed, a constant refrain of The Conservative Sensibility is that the American founders meant for the federal government to establish the basic conditions of law and order, to include securing everyone’s natural rights—and especially their property rights—but then to get out of the way, allowing free people chart their own course on the open market. Most progressives, including myself, would argue for a different balance, maintaining that the government should be responsible not only for establishing an abstract legal equality,  but also for ensuring that concrete social conditions actually allow people to compete on even terms, while providing a social safety net for those who might fall through the market’s cracks. Indeed, for most of the twentieth century, this was the argument between conservatives and liberals, providing contrasting policy prescriptions but also a common spectrum upon which to debate, respectfully disagree, and compromise.

In staking out his conservative stance, the main critique Will launches against progressives is that they have long been prone to scientism: taking the latest findings of science, and particularly of the social sciences, then attempting to use this knowledge to reengineer not just society but human nature to achieve certain socially desirable outcomes. During Will’s own his own formative years, the Kennedy and Johnson administrations proudly staffed themselves with “the best and the brightest”—which is to say, individuals with strong academic backgrounds in the social sciences. As these progressive policy wonks then launched Johnson’s War on Poverty, critics such as Will’s mentor, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, argued that their redistributive policies were distorting market incentives and thereby creating cycles of welfare dependency that would end up lasting for generations. That said, the figure to whom Will most often returns as the patron saint of progressivism is President Woodrow Wilson. Although Wilson did not belong to the Progressive Party that had sprung up in the 1910s, he shared many of it pro-working class policy priorities. He also had a particularly strong belief in the power of modern science to make the world a better place—to include the pseudo-science of eugenics, a sort of race-based social Darwinism then in vogue among certain non-scientists, to include a young German art school dropout named Adolf Hitler.

Will’s focus on Wilson as the exemplar of the progressive sensibility highlights where Will’s understanding of progressivism not only departs from my own, but also—I would say—completely fails to engage with twenty-first century progressivism. If you ask the average progressive today which figures from American history occupy their pantheon of progressive heroes, I’m guessing most would point to the abolitionists of the early nineteenth century, the suffragists and union organizers of the early twentieth century, such civil rights icons of the 1950s and 1960s as Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, or still later activists like Gloria Steinem, Cesar Chavez, or Harvey Milk—all powerful advocates for some demographic group or another that had traditionally been marginalized by the larger American society. Wilson might get an honorable mention for his work on the League of Nations, but I suspect most progressives today know Wilson mainly a virulent racist. At the same time, I would guess few contemporary progressives have even heard of the concept of scientism.

This points to where I part ways with Will. The fundamental argument Will advances throughout The Conservative Sensibility is that the American founders more or less got things right, both with respect to human nature and with respect to the system of government they designed. Will does concede that the founders got things wrong on the question of slavery, and that the country did little better in the wake of the Civil War with the institution of Jim Crow. Will is generous enough to note, moreover, that progressives deserve credit for leading the charge against the resulting racial injustices. That said, Will’s 600-page book devotes no more than handful of pages to the historical treatment of Black Americans, and even less to the ways in which Native Americans, women, the LGBTQ community, and various other demographic groups have been systematically denied their supposedly universal rights over the course of American history. And thus the entire dynamic of social exclusion, to be followed by many long, hard fights for inclusion, amounts to little more than a footnote in Will’s telling of the American story, scarcely touching his argument that the founders more or less got things right when they built our country, nor affecting his conclusion that—now that the system has been working passably well for nearly 250 years—we are best off not messing with things.

Here is how I see things--a view that I believe to be shared by many progressives today, though not all. I do not believe the American founders were horrible people, having no other purpose in drafting the Constitution than to ensure that White men could continue enslaving Black people, killing off Native Americans, dominating women, and subjugating any number of other demographic groups. If this was the founders’ ultimate end, the particular approach they chose to take would make no sense. The system of privilege had already been around for 10,000 years, supported by various articulations of the ideology of privilege, so if the founders’ sole intent was to perpetuate the system of privilege, why would they have taken the risk of articulating an explosive new ideology of rights?

That said, I do not side with Will in believing the American founders got things more or less right when they founded a new nation and assembled its governing institutions. Rather, I would say they got things half right. What they got right was embracing the nascent ideology of rights and resolving to ground their new nation on its guiding ideal of moral universalism. This was a unique event in world history and a revolutionary achievement in itself, laying down a path that later Americans could walk farther down and other countries around the world could emulate. I would also say the founders got things right in devising a democratic system of government that could endure over time it virtue of its stable, self-balancing structure. Where the founders went wrong, however, is in failing to live up to their own professed ideals. Specifically, they took their novel ideology of rights and applied its protections more or less universally—within the demographic group that had always dominated European society. This group, however, to which all the founders belonged, continued to treat all the country’s other demographic groups in accord with both the system of privilege and ideology of privilege. White men, that is, applied the concepts of universal equality and inalienable rights to themselves, yet they continued to both view and treat everyone else as moral inferiors, metaphysically deserving all the duties, indignities, and violence White men thrust upon them.

This is not a footnote to the American story! It was not minor “miss” on the part of the founders, since corrected. This was a massive failure on the part of our nations founders, on their own terms. And because we have since embraced their guiding values, the subsequent failure on the part of the country to view and treat all people as fundamentally equal has been a massive, ongoing moral failure on our own terms--a failure to live up to our own guiding ideals. This means that if our country’s founders got things half right by articulating these ideals and attempting to put them into practice, the complete American story simply cannot be told without careful, sustained attention to the half they got wrong, and to the long, slow, grueling, dangerous, yet inspiring journey upon which millions of Americans have since embarked to make thing right. This journey represents at least half the American story. It does not negate the part the founders got right. Had the founders not established the ideal of universalism as the moral North Star toward which future generations of Americans might steer, our country never would have improved on the social conditions of 1789. But if we fail to appreciate just how desperately these improvements were needed, we both delude ourselves and fail to recognize what further changes might still be needed if we are to fully realize our own highest moral ideals.

To be sure, Will does not call for the sort of whitewashing of American history that Ron DeSantis is now advocating with his anti-woke campaign—essentially a refusal to discuss our country’s history of discrimination and injustice because this might make White men and boys feel bad. That is why I say my disagreement with Will is more a matter of degree or emphasis. In arguing that the founders more or less got things right, Will declines to emphasize the colossal, tragic fashion in which our country got things wrong, failing to live up to its own standards. This reading of the American story translates into a conservative political stance that argues we should keep things more or less the way they are, or the way they have always been.

As a progressive, I do not believe things have always worked so well. I believe we should celebrate the wisdom, courage, and sacrifice of the founders for pointing us in a new, better direction. But I do not believe we honor their revolutionary spirit by concluding that the first pass they took at building a society based on the ideal of moral universalism was good enough—more or less what human nature can accommodate. I believe, rather, that we are called to keep building this new nation, rebuilding as necessary, taking just as many risks and enduring just as many sacrifices as our founders did when they first rose up in revolution. If we answer to this call, we may hope to one day bring the American story to the conclusion it original authors envisioned.