George Will

Conservative Political Action Conference

Washington, DC
February 9, 2006

I’m going to talk with you now for about half an hour, and in the half an hour that I’m up here the center of the American population is going to move another foot south and west. It didn’t cross the Mississippi River until the 1980 census. Today it is southwest of St. Louis heading for Maricopa County, Arizona, (which is Phoenix) and Clark County, Nevada (which is Las Vegas), where everyone in America will live sooner or later.

Because of this, when George W. Bush leaves office, on noon January 20, 2009, all of the elected presidents for 45 years will have come from Georgia, Arkansas, Texas, or southern California. This being so, it is tempting on the part of conservatives to think that demography is destiny and that the mere shift of political weight in the country guarantees the conservative ascendancy. I dispute that.

Let me point out that in the last two generations—which are largely considered a Republican era—the last two generations during which Republicans have won seven of ten presidential elections, in these last two generations federal spending, the federal budget has increased seven times faster than the average family budget.

In the last 25 years of conservative ascendancy, domestic spending, domestic spending, in real-inflation adjusted terms has doubled. In the last decade since the Republicans took control of the House of Representatives after a 40-year sojourn in the wilderness, total federal spending in inflation-adjusted terms has increased 33%. In 1996 the Republican platform called for the abolition of the Education Department on Constitutional grounds. Since 2001 there has been an enormous federal intrusion into education grades K-12 and an increase in the education budget of 83%. The year 2002 gave us the largest agriculture subsidy programs in history, and in 2003, of course, the largest expansion of the welfare state since Medicare itself was enacted in 1965.

And as we speak we are, of course, engaged in a war wherein the government is attempting to run the Middle East with more skill and dexterity than it can run Amtrak. This is a mixed record.

Now, this is not to say that much good hasn’t been accomplished in the last two generations. It has. Taxes are much lower and flatter than they would have been without the conservative movement. The 1996 Welfare Reform Act is the greatest piece of legislation of the last 30 years. There isn’t a state in the Union that does not have a substantial reduction, in some cases up to 90% reduction, of the welfare rolls. The Medicare Prescription Drug Entitlement, for all its faults, did indeed contain the thin end of what we can all hope will be an enormous wedge of the health savings accounts. And, of course, there has been a long march to the institutions of the federal courts—an enormous change brought about largely by the Federalist Society, of which I am a card-carrying member, and which demonstrates, as does the ACU, enormous patience of politics and how it pays off over time.

But, we must all, I think, be aware of an old axiom, which is that any institution that is not philosophically and ideologically conservative will over time become liberal. It will happen to a university; it will happen to the Ford Foundation; it will happen to the Republican Party, unless it adheres to a set of principles about limited government.

Now some of the disaffection we all feel today we should have seen coming. Modern conservatism was born in reaction against the New Deal and renewed in reaction against the Great Society. It spoke the language of Jeffersonianism that government is best that governs least. But in the year 2000, we tend to forget, Mr. Bush and Mr. Gore agreed that the first great domestic task of the next president would be to strengthen the emblematic achievement of the New Deal—which is Social Security—and to enrich the entitlement menu with a prescription drug entitlement of the emblematic achievement of the Great Society—which is Medicare. No one remembers the 2000 election, other than the 36 days of intensely neurotic behavior in the state of Florida brought about because a bunch of little old ladies in Palm Beach, who have no trouble handling twenty Bingo cards at once, could not handle a butterfly ballot.

The fact is the American people do not often mean what they say. The American people, human beings generally, suffer from cognitive dissonance. It’s a genteel mental illness; it means they hold in their minds, with equal fervor and sincerity, flatly incompatible ideas.
The average American will tell you—go out on the streets of any of your communities—they do not like Washington. They like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, which is 43% of the federal government—that troika. It is, I think, time for us to face the facts about the difference between the rhetorical Americans and the actual Americans. They talk like conservatives but often insist on being governed by liberal measures. They talk like Jeffersonians and seek Hamiltonian government.

So the beginning of wisdom for conservatives in charting the course ahead is to face facts about our country. I believe the American people feel that the federal government has an enormous role to play in assuaging two ancient fears and one modern anxiety. The two ancient fears are illness and old age; and the modern anxiety is that there will be educational deficits that will prevent their children from competing successfully in an increasingly competitive world.

Now, we can address these anxieties with a conservative agenda, but it’s going to take some thought. And it’s going to require constantly calling the American people back to understand what George Washington meant when he said that Government is like fire—a dangerous servant and a terrible master. But within respect for limited government, there is much the country can do as a conservative agenda going ahead.

Six Ideas for Conservatives

The first is to take care to win elections so you can continue to stock the federal judiciary. Nothing is more important than that. The basis of our freedom is the freedom to argue about the government. And we are right now well into the most concerted and most dangerous attack on freedom of expression in this country since the Alien and Sedition Acts, which themselves were sunsetted and therefore not designed to be permanent as the McCain-Feingold regimen of speech-rationing by the federal government is.

There is all across the country today—thanks to a Supreme Court decision last year in New London, Connecticut—a concerted attack on property rights in this country, the likes of which we’ve never seen before. It’s going to require us to adjust our vocabulary. Too many conservatives say they want to prevent judicial activism. I want active judges who will stand against the seizure of property under eminent domain, which is to say we simply want judges who are active on behalf of the text of the Constitution.

The second of my six ideas for conservatives going ahead, is to pay attention to the dependency index. We have seen lines cross on a graph in a way that is ominous. One is the declining number of Americans who are paying a significant share of income taxes. The other is the simultaneously rising graph of more and more Americans dependent for more and more things on the federal government.

This is a classic case of what economists call “moral hazard”—a situation in which the incentives are for perverse behavior. More and more people getting more and more things from a government that fewer and fewer of them are paying for. It is time, in other words, to begin to understand that the welfare state can have, can have, a deleterious effect on the attitudes and aptitudes essential for a free society.

The New Deal revolution in American thought was that the government existed not just to provide the preconditions for the pursuit of happiness, but to provide happiness itself, understood as material well-being. That is the way to what de Tocqueville called a “soft, benevolent, enervating despotism.”

It is time to regain on the part of the American people a quickened sense of suspicion of this government that is so omnipresent and so omni provident. Now Ronald Reagan once said that in Washington the government’s axiom is, “If it moves tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. If it stops moving, subsidize it.” Which is to say the government will always find a way and a reason to intervene in society. And the American people must be taught the Tocquevillian lesson about the enervating, character-destroying effects of this.

Third, conservatives must become much more alert to the lawless attack on American success—the lawless attack on private sector sources of revenue that the government seizes to augment its energies.

We saw the precursor of this in the tobacco settlement. I have no brief for the tobacco industry, but it was simple theft what the government did when it decided (46 state attorney generals, clearly an unconstitutional master agreement, a compact between the states without the approval of Congress, which will, I think, in time be thrown out of court) . . . that the tobacco industry is a budgetary Alaska—the last untapped frontier for money. Well, it’s not the last.

We’ve seen in Maryland, in recent weeks, the state government in Maryland has said that unless Wal-Mart spends 8% of its revenues on health care, it must give the difference to the government of Maryland. We see this all over the country in the astonishing and symptomatic stigmatization of Wal-Mart. It’s a kind of “rent-seeking” writ large—an attack on Wal-Mart to protect local retailers, an attack on Wal-Mart as another budgetary Alaska. Think about this. How does a country decide that Wal-Mart is a problem?

John Kerry said Wal-Mart is a problem. I don’t know how often Mr. Kerry or Mrs. Kerry shopped at Wal-Mart, but it is indicative. Wal-Mart, that opens a new store every three days, that is the nation’s largest employer, that has 100 million customers per week . . . Wal-Mart, which according to a McKinsey Company study was by itself responsible for one-quarter of the nation’s productivity growth in the 1990s, Wal-Mart, which if it were a nation and its revenues were its gross domestic product would be the 38th largest nation in the world, slightly larger than Saudi Arabia (and a lot nicer) . . . .

How did we decide Wal-Mart—which is supposed to have these hellish jobs, which was just chased out of Chicago (the south side of Chicago would not allow a Wal-Mart, so Wal-Mart moved a block across the line into the suburbs, advertised for 335 employees and 25,000 people showed up seeking these jobs)—how do we make this an American problem?

I have a soft-spot in my heart for Wal-Mart because in February 2003, right before the war with Iraq—Valentine’s Day week—the government raised the terror threshold to mauve or chartreuse or whatever. And in that week—Valentine’s Day week, elevated terror threshold—Wal-Mart announced that two of its largest selling items were lingerie and duct tape. Let’s not go there. . . .

A fourth theme for the conservative movement, it seems to me, is to battle, not just the politics of envy, which we see in attacks on success in this country, but to battle the politics of condescension. This is the assumption on the part of the state, of the government, that the American people are incompetent—incompetent to choose their schools, incompetent to administer part of their Social Security taxes in private accounts, incompetent to exercise health savings accounts, incompetent in a way that makes them prey for the tort bar. That’s what this is about, the argument about tort bar in our country is whether or not American people are responsible, or whether when anything bad happens to anyone, someone else must be to blame and can be sued.

The politics of condescension produces the trial bar, which produces those fascinating labels we see on things. You buy a clothes iron and it says, “Do not iron clothes on body.” You buy a fold-up child’s stroller and it says, “Remove child before folding;” A good idea, but there’s something wrong with a country in which those kinds of labels, as lawyer defenses, are put up on the assumption that the American people are incompetent. Incompetent to choose. I think the conservative movement has the future before it because choice is part of the young people’s ethos in our country today.

When I was growing up and wanted a cup of coffee, I would go into a coffee shop and ask for a cup of hot coffee. Today, my daughter, who is 25, goes in and she orders a vente decaf, skim latte, extra vanilla, etc. When I wanted to listen to the popular music of the day in the 1950s—Fatz Domino and Little Richard and all the rest—I’d turn on the radio and hope that one of the two or three radio stations that played that kind of music would over the next hour play one or two of the songs I wanted to hear. When my daughter wants to hear the popular music she likes, she turns on her iPod and listens to one of the thousands of songs she has stolen off the Internet.

I believe that just as my children cannot understand, cannot find intelligible the fact that there was a time when black Americans had to ride in the back of the bus, I believe that thirty years from now people will find it unintelligible that we did not at some point in America take for granted school choice and choice in Social Security and all the rest.

Fifth thing for conservatives to do, it seems to me, is to remember this: They will not always control the executive branch of government. This country was founded on suspicion of executive power. If you read, and I recommend rereading the Declaration of Independence, that litany of complaints that begins, “He has done this” and “He has done that,” . . . The “he” was George III; it was executive power that this country was founded in rebellion against. Therefore it is incumbent upon conservatives to understand that precedence gets set by conservative presidents in, I believe, the overreaching by the executive that is going to have to be fought sooner or later.

Now we have a large boiling argument today with intelligent men and women of good will on both sides concerning surveillance. But I just say this: an administration that says it cares strongly about the strict construction of the Constitution, and of statutes, is ill-served by turning around and saying that a resolution authorizing the use of force, essentially in Afghanistan, overturned an entire regime of law pertaining to domestic surveillance. And to find the authorization for that in the Constitution’s few and ambiguous phrases about war-making and war powers and raising armies, is a stretch that conservatives should not docilely accept.

Sixth, conservatives have to speak on foreign policy, and they have to understand that the principles that guide us, the skepticism about the capacity of government to subdue unruly reality, must produce a kind of conservative prudence in foreign policy. I do not want to open an argument about how we got to where we are in Iraq, but it is important to say the following: The phrase “nation-building” makes no more sense than does the phrase “orchid-building.” Orchids are not built and neither are nations. Nations are the products of long organic growth, emerging from mists of history, and we get in trouble when we underestimate, when we are not sufficiently pessimistic. There is a pessimistic strain to conservatism. There’s nothing wrong with pessimism; it has its pleasures. Pessimists are right 90% of the time and are delighted when they are wrong.

But it is important to be skeptical about the ability of willful people exerting their will through government institutions to subdue a turbulent reality. We have problems in Iraq today because we went in with the wrong idea. Davids was right; ideas do not only have consequences, only ideas have large and lasting consequences. We are suffering the consequences today in Iraq of inadequate preparation, and the inadequate preparation for the post-war period flowed from ideas—good decent warm-hearted, cheerful, optimistic, wonderful American ideas—just wrong.

Tony Blair—a good American—in July 2003 addressing a joint session of Congress said it is a myth that our democratic values are the western values, the product of our culture. “No,” he said, “those are values shared by ordinary people everywhere.” . . . A kind, generous thought—just wrong.

President Bush, taking a phrase from Ronald Reagan, said it is cultural condescension to say that some peoples are not ready for democracy. It may be condescending, but in this case condescension is the simple truth—as anyone watching their television in the last few days has seen around the world. There are a great many people who do not share our values, and it will be a long time before they do.

It took us 572 years to get from Magna Carta and Runnymeade to the Philadelphia convention in 1787, and less than 80 years after that we had an enormous civil war to tidy up some unanswered constitutional questions. It is well for us as conservatives in urging prudence in foreign policy—particularly prudence in a foreign policy that has now said that the spread of democracy is integral to national security—to bear in mind what baseball managers sometimes say in spring training. They say, “My team is just two players away from the World Series. Unfortunately those players are Ruth and Gehrig.”

Iraq is just four people away from paradise. They need a George Washington, a charismatic, talismanic figure above politics, a symbol of national unity. They need an Alexander Hamilton, who can create an economy out of dust. They need a James Madison, a genius of constitutional architecture for getting factions to live together, and they need a John Marshall who can breathe life into the parchment of the Constitution. They need all of that. And they need the astonishing social soil of the United States in the second half of the eighteenth century from which people like that sprang in profusion.

Which is to say, Iraq’s not close . . . which is to say America is a miracle that conservatives can understand better than anyone else and can remind the country of the miraculous nature of what we are and how difficult it is going to be to try to replicate it elsewhere.

The trick, I think, in facing the conservative future is to remember what Ronald Reagan said. He said, “I and conservatives do not want to go back to the past. We want to go back to the past way of facing the future.” The past way of facing the future is of understanding that government has its limits, that where government expands liberty contracts, that America is about liberty. This is the conservative message. And if we face the future the way the past faced the future, the future will be ours.

Thank you very much.

Q&A

I have a few minutes I’m told, for three questions . . . in the unlikely event I said anything anyone disagreed with.

Q: George can you comment on the neo-conservative element and how it relates to conservatives in . . . [fades out]

A: Well, all of my friends (and some of my ex-friends) are neo-conservatives. They are alarmingly well educated. Many of them have made the long march from left to right, beginning as Democrats, or even more extreme, many of them come from the Scoop Jackson” wing of the Democrat party—which has ceased to exist. They have, in my judgment, an expansive and imprudent understanding of what the United States can do in projecting force and what follows force. The neo-conservatives, it seems to me, make one basic mistake—and these are wonderful people, public-spirited, American nationalists, the kind of people we want to work together with—but they don’t ask the question “But then what?”

That’s the question that Admiral Yamamoto asked when in 1940 the Japanese government summoned him and said, “Can you take a large fleet stealthily across the North Pacific and deliver a devastating blow against the American fleet in Hawaii?” He said, “Sure, I can do that, design some shallow running torpedoes, no problem. After that I will run wild in the Pacific for six months, maybe a year—but then what?”

Admiral Yamamoto knew our country, he loved our country, had studied at Harvard— amazingly, he still loved our country. He’d been naval attaché in Washington; he knew Japan would have on its hands an enraged, incandescent, united, continental superpower, and that its initial victory would contain the seeds of its defeat—but then what? That’s the conservative prudence question.

And we can all get along with neo-conservatives and conservatives without the prefix, of which I am one, but in fact, it is a question of fundamental conservative values prudence in foreign policy.

Q: Would you agree that there might be some similarity in Turkey? And the reason I bring up Turkey is because Emil Ataturk was able to take that Ottoman Empire and drag it from the dark ages into more of a modernistic thing before WWII? Can you explain some things that might be able to help the Middle East?

A: Ataturk is an interesting case. He had a long reign. He had a dictatorial reign. He used state power fundamentally to attack the culture of Islam in some of its manifestations . . . in education, in separating faith and state and all the rest. It’s a success story—probably. We shall see how the waves of radical Islam do or do not wash over Turkey in the next decade. But that is a case the neo-conservatives can make for the transformative effect of power, but it was the transformative effect of domestic indigenous power produced by the culture of Turkey itself. And so it’s of limited encouragement for those of us in the United States who want to use external power to drive social transformation.

Q: You’ve spoken with refreshing candor about the dilemma in Iraq. Do you believe that somewhere down the line the Administration will follow your queue and speak with equal candor?

A: Well . . . no. Partly because that’s not their job. I can understand that the commander in chief of forces under fire does not talk the way that some of us have to talk for him. Furthermore, I think everyone agrees—well not everyone—the Lieberman faction in the Democratic Party, which is real and important, all the way through the Republican Party understands that in fact we’re there, and we cannot leave a failed state. There would be a vacuum into which would flood all the forces of radical Islam. There’s an old saying that says when you have no choice you have no problem, and we have no problem in that sense. We have to win in Iraq. And I think we shall. It’s not going to be pretty getting there . . . and what we leave will not be pretty either, but it will be a distinct improvement.

Thank you very much.