The Conservative Sensibility
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First Edition: June 2019
Excerpt from “For C.” from MAYFLIES: New Poems and Translations by Richard Wilbur. Copyright © 2000 by Richard Wilbur. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
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ISBNs: 978-0-316-48093-2 (hardcover), 978-0-316-48091-8 (ebook), 978-0-316-53488-8 (BN signed hardcover)
E3-20190502-DA-NF
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1: The Founders’ Epistemological Assertion
Chapter 2: The Progressives’ Revision
Chapter 3: Progressivism’s Institutional Consequences
Chapter 4: The Judicial Supervision of Democracy
Chapter 5: Political Economy
Chapter 6: Culture and Opportunity
Chapter 7: The Aims of Education
Chapter 8: Going Abroad
Chapter 9: Welcoming Whirl
Chapter 10: Borne Back
Acknowledgments
Discover More
Also by George F. Will
Select Bibliography
Notes
To the memory of Barry Goldwater.
He was the “cheerful malcontent” who
showed that it is possible to wed
that adjective and that noun.
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I do not mean to say, that the scenes of the revolution are now or ever will be entirely forgotten; but that like every thing else, they must fade upon the memory of the world, and grow more and more dim by the lapse of time…At the close of that struggle, nearly every adult male had been a participator in some of its scenes. The consequence was, that of those scenes, in the form of a husband, a father, a son or a brother, a living history was to be found in every family…But those histories are gone. They can be read no more forever. They were a fortress of strength; but, what invading foemen could never do, the silent artillery of time has done; the leveling of its walls.
Abraham Lincoln
Address Before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois
January 27, 18381
PREFACE
John A. Wheeler (1911–2008) a theoretical physicist at Princeton University, was fond of this aphorism: “Time is Nature’s way of stopping things happening all at once.” When he shared this with Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal of Great Britain, Rees responded with an aphorism of his own: “God invented space so that not everything had to happen in Princeton.”1 Some interesting things do have Princeton pedigrees, and they continue to reverberate in America’s political arguments.
INTRODUCTION
Princeton, 1777
It did not have to turn out as it did. The antecedent of the pronoun could be almost anything, but in this case it was a battle that is an exhilarating illustration of contingency in history.
In the American Revolutionary War, the fate of a continent, and of an idea, was at stake in a protracted conflict involving military forces that were, compared to those of the Napoleonic wars in Europe less than a generation later, astonishingly small. The war was won, in large measure, through the skillful maneuvering, which often meant retreating, by George Washington, who lost most of the not very numerous battles in which he directly engaged British forces. One of the battles he won might, if he had lost it, have ended the war and the Revolution.
The Battle of Princeton is often, but mistakenly, considered a mere lagging episode—a minor echo—of the Battle of Trenton. It was more than this, and for the purpose of this book it is a suitable subject with which to begin because the subsequent chapters are, among other things, an argument against the temptation of historicism—the belief that the unfolding of events is an autonomous process with its own laws and logic. The Battle of Princeton is an invigorating illustration of the history-making role of individual agency. It occurred less than two miles from Princeton University’s Nassau Hall. You can stroll across the battlefield in fewer than half the number of minutes—forty-five—that the fight is estimated to have lasted. As a historic site, it is shamefully neglected. As a historic event, the January 3, 1777, Battle of Princeton is astonishingly underestimated. It was one of the most consequential battles in world history because of what did not happen but easily could have. In it, the American Revolution, and the hope for a republic based on natural rights that limit government, survived a near-death experience.
The Battle of Princeton was a small skirmish in an eight-year war in which only 25,000 Americans died. This was, however, 1 percent of the new nation’s population, making the Revolutionary War second only to the Civil War in its lethality. In December 1776 the revolution was failing. Britain had dispatched to America 36,000 troops—at that point, the largest European expeditionary force ever—hoping to crush the rebellion quickly and forestall a French intervention on behalf of the Americans. General George Washington had been driven from Brooklyn Heights, then from Manhattan, then out of New York. The nation, whose independent existence had been proclaimed just five months earlier, barely existed as he retreated across New Jersey and into Pennsylvania. From there, however, on Christmas night, he crossed the Delaware River ice floes for a successful forty-five-minute battle with Britain’s Hessian mercenaries at Trenton. This was Washington’s first victory; he had not been at Lexington, Concord, or Bunker Hill. Trenton would, however, have been an evanescent triumph, were it not for what happened ten days later.
On January 2, 1777, British General Charles Cornwallis began marching 5,500 troops from Princeton to attack Washington’s slightly outnumbered forces, which Cornwallis hoped to pin down with their backs to the Delaware. Washington, leaving a few hundred soldiers to tend fires that tricked Cornwallis into thinking that the entire patriot army was encamped, made a stealthy fourteen-mile night march to attack three British regiments remaining at Princeton. The opposing forces collided shortly after dawn.
The most lethal weapons in this war were bayonets. The British had them; few Americans did. The Americans beat a panicked retreat from the advancing steel. By the example of his personal bravery, Washington reversed the retreat and led a charge that saved a nation. Serving Washington there was a fellow Virginian, a future Washington biographer and chief justice of the Supreme Court, John Marshall. So, in that small contested field that day were the two men most important in making the infant republic into a nation. When the redcoats ran, the British aura of invinc
ibility and the strategy of “securing territory and handing out pardons” were shattered.1 And the drift of American opinion toward defeatism was halted. The patriots’ blood that puddled on frozen ground that twenty-degree morning bought the birth of American freedom. The British historian George M. Trevelyan wrote of Trenton: “It may be doubted whether so small a number of men ever employed so short a space of time with greater and more lasting effects upon the history of the world.”2 But this would not have been the judgment of any historian if Washington had not prevailed at Princeton.
The British retreated into Princeton, where some took refuge in Nassau Hall. Of the three cannonballs that American soldiers fired at Nassau Hall, one missed, one bounced off the south wall, leaving a pockmark that is still visible, and the third supposedly sailed through a window and neatly removed the head from a portrait of King George II. It is said that the artillery was commanded by a Washington aide named Alexander Hamilton. It is altogether appropriate that Nassau Hall, which at the time was the largest building in New Jersey and the largest academic building in the nation, was, so to speak, present at this moment in the nation’s creation. In that building James Madison, who was to become the nation’s fourth president, had lived and studied, and Woodrow Wilson, who was to become the twenty-eighth president, would begin his ascent to national prominence from his Nassau Hall office as president of Princeton University.
This book is about American political thought, which today is, to a remarkable extent, an argument between Madisonians and Wilsonians. My subject is American conservatism. My conviction is that, properly understood, conservatism is the Madisonian persuasion. And my melancholy belief is that Woodrow Wilson was the most important single figure in the largely successful campaign to convince the nation that the Madisonian persuasion is an anachronism. This book is not an exercise in exegesis. It is not a systematic study of the origins and development of either man’s thought. There are many such studies, many of them excellent. Rather, my purpose is to show how the nature and stakes of today’s political arguments can best be understood by placing the arguments in the context of a debate now more than a century old. It is reassuring as well as clarifying to trace the pedigree of today’s arguments to long-standing American disagreements between large figures of impressive learning. We can dignify our present disputes among small persons of little learning by connecting them with great debates about fundamental things.
Princeton, 1964
There is a braided relationship between a person’s political philosophy and his or her sensibility, meaning a proclivity for seeing and experiencing the passage of time and the tumult of events in a particular way. Which comes first? Perhaps, in most cases, neither; they evolve entwined and are mutually reinforcing. A sensibility is more than an attitude but less than an agenda, less than a pragmatic response to the challenge of comprehensively reforming society in general. The conservative sensibility, especially, is best defined by its reasoning about concrete matters in particular societies. The American conservative sensibility, as explained in this volume, is a perpetually unfolding response to real situations that require statesmanship—the application of general principles to untidy realities. Conservatism does not float above all times and places. The conservative sensibility is relevant to all times and places, but it is lived and revealed locally, in the conversation of a specific polity. The American conservative sensibility is situated here; it is a national expression of reasoning, revealed in practices.
Charles de Gaulle began his war memoirs with a justly famous sentence whose power derives from its simplicity: “All my life I have thought of France in a certain way.”3 The way people think about their country can be difficult to distill into sentences. But Americans’ feelings are, to some degree, and often at a subliminal level, connected to ideas that were present at the country’s creation. This book is an explanation of how I think about America. And the book is about why I think doing so is conducive to national flourishing and personal happiness, the pursuit of which is, after all, the point of American politics.
This book’s primary purpose is not to tell readers what to think about this or that particular problem or policy. Rather, the purpose is to suggest how to think about the enduring questions concerning the proper scope and actual competence of government. This book is an exercise in intellectual archeology, an excavation to reveal the Republic’s foundations, intellectual and institutional, which have been buried beneath different assumptions and policies. My belief is that by this retrieval something quite beautiful can be revealed and put to practical use. Apologetics are writings that offer reasons, particularly to nonbelievers, for believing what the writer does. This book is my unapologetic presentation to unbelievers, who are a majority of contemporary Americans, of reasons why they should recur to the wisdom of the nation’s founding.
Conservatism is about the conservation of that wisdom, or it is nothing of much lasting significance. The proper question for conservatives is: What do you seek to conserve? The proper answer is concise but deceptively simple: We seek to conserve the American Founding. What, however, does it mean to conserve an event—or, more precisely, a congeries of events—that occurred almost 250 years ago? This book is my attempt to answer that question by showing the continuing pertinence of the Founding principles, and by tracing many of our myriad discontents to departures from those principles.
I have been thinking about this since arriving at Princeton University’s Graduate School in 1964 to begin earning a doctoral degree in political philosophy. The Graduate School is located on a small hill a fifteen-minute walk from Nassau Hall. The fact that the school is there is a matter of historic importance.
The university counts James Madison as its first graduate student because, although he graduated with the class of 1771, he remained there for a year to study Hebrew with the university’s president, John Witherspoon. The school was formally established in 1900, but its permanent location had not yet been decided upon when Woodrow Wilson became the university’s president in 1902. His restless, reforming spirit did much to propel the university to greatness—and to irritate portions of the university’s faculty, trustees, and alumni. Many of the changes he drove forward, changes concerning academics and student life, were more important than the question of where to locate the Graduate School. But this matter, coming after a long train of acrimonious skirmishes, became decisive. Wilson wanted the Graduate School integrated into the main campus. He was given to investing his preoccupations with immense significance, so he said: “Will America tolerate the seclusion of graduate students? Will America tolerate the idea of having graduate students set apart?”4 Actually, America was not all that fascinated by this campus dust-up. Perhaps it should have been.
Wilson’s nemesis was Andrew Fleming West, the dean of the Graduate School from 1901 to 1928. West’s statue graces the school where it now is, where West wanted it to be. Defeat provoked Wilson to resign in 1910. He immediately entered politics and was elected governor of New Jersey that November. We Madisonians rarely regret the defeats that Wilson suffered. We do, however, wonder whether subsequent American history might have been different, and better, if he had got his way concerning the location of the Graduate School and hence had remained in the president’s rooms in Nassau Hall, instead of rapidly rising to the nation’s capital.
From June until November 1783, the town of Princeton was the capital of the United States. The national government, such as it feebly was, had decamped from Philadelphia to seek refuge from restive American soldiers who were unhappy about the government, which, unable to levy taxes, was unable to pay them. The Continental Congress met in Nassau Hall, where it received General George Washington after the British surrender at Yorktown. It is therefore satisfying that Nassau Hall can be considered the symbolic epicenter of American political philosophy. In the era of revolutionary ferment, the building was, among other things, a dormitory housing James Madison, who would be the most creative participant in the pr
ocess that produced the Constitution that produced a national government without the infirmities that drove the previous government to shelter in Princeton. By 1902, Nassau Hall contained the university’s administrative offices, including those of the new president, Woodrow Wilson, who would become the first president of the United States to criticize Madison’s constitutional architecture. The sixteenth president would vindicate this architecture while saving it from destruction.
I was born and raised in central Illinois, and although I have not lived in the state since leaving for college in 1958, four months after my seventeenth birthday, I remain a Midwesterner, marinated in the spirit and lore of Abraham Lincoln. It was at Princeton’s Graduate School that I began the thinking that has culminated in the writing of this book, which in a sense began with my doctoral dissertation, half a century ago.
“BEYOND THE REACH OF MAJORITIES”
My home was in Champaign, which is cheek-by-jowl with Urbana, where sits Champaign County’s red sandstone courthouse, built in 1849. When Abraham Lincoln was a circuit-riding lawyer from Springfield, he had cases that brought him to Urbana, and he was, according to local lore, in the courthouse when he learned of the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Lincoln’s rise to greatness began with his recoil against this act that, by repealing the Missouri Compromise of 1820, lit the fuse that led to the Civil War. The Compromise had forbidden slavery in the Louisiana Territory north of a line that included the Kansas and Nebraska territories. The Kansas-Nebraska Act, introduced by Illinois senator Stephen A. Douglas, empowered the residents of those two territories to decide whether or not to have the institution of slavery. The act’s premise was that the principle of “popular sovereignty” is the distilled essence of democracy, and that therefore giving maximum scope to the principle of majority rule is the essential point of the American project. Lincoln disagreed.