Mitch Daniels and George Will examine the ambitions and limits of American power—from the restless energy of the executive branch to the resilience of the republic’s institutions. Drawing on his decades of political observation, Will examines the overreach of executive power, the fatigue of America’s two-party system, and the civic virtues that uphold the republic. Together, they reflect on the creative ferment of a free society, the cyclical nature of history, and the moral limits that protect liberty from ambition and fatigue.
Mitch Daniels and George Will examine the ambitions and limits of American power—from the restless energy of the executive branch to the resilience of the republic’s institutions. Drawing on his decades of political observation, Will examines the overreach of executive power, the fatigue of America’s two-party system, and the civic virtues that uphold the republic. Together, they reflect on the creative ferment of a free society, the cyclical nature of history, and the moral limits that protect liberty from ambition and fatigue.
Intro (00:02):
Welcome to the Future of Liberty, a project of Liberty Fund hosted by Mitch Daniels.
Mitch Daniels (00:16):
Greetings, everyone. This today marks two first, at least in the series of interviews that I've been privileged to do for the Liberty Fund. First of all, we have by my estimation, the most distinguished of all the guests that we've been fortunate enough to entice into these conversations. And secondly, the first time we've done this in front of a live audience, I'm told the laugh track has been engaged, but I hope it won't be necessary on too many occasions. George, thank you for joining us today.
George F. Will (00:54):
Pleasure.
Mitch Daniels (00:58):
This series of conversations is a headline, the Future of Liberty, and so I'm going to try, although there are so many topical questions that I'm sure be of interest to the audience, I'm going to try to inquire more about longer term issues facing our republic, and I thought I would do that in three broad categories. Ask you about the health of some institutions which have up to now been important to the preservation of our system and then about the American people and then a little about history. So to start with the institutions, we were in an unusual time in terms of what some perceive as a very unrestrained executive on occasions seemingly not limited by the processes, customs that have typically hemmed in or at least limited the reach of presidential and executive power. Is that an overreaction when people talk about autocracy and the death of democracy through dictatorial actions.
George F. Will (02:17):
It's a perennial worry.
(02:20):
Several recent books in the last 15 years or so, just to take their titles, Harvey Mansfield Taming the Prince on executive power, Michael McConnell at Stanford University, now former appellate judge, He Would Not be King. Saikrishna Prakash at University of Virginia Law School The Living Presidency, the theory of which is how to cage the executive lion. Turns out legislatures can only do so much in detail, therefore discretion is granted to presidents, therefore the kind of person gets to be president is ambitious and has a kind of muscular sense of himself or herself soon, no doubt, and the tendency of power to expand until it reaches the end of its ability to expand is inexorable as Madison and others said. So, it's a perennial problem. It is unusual at the moment because the current president has intuited A, that the Madisonian checks and balances don't work right now we can talk about why that is so, and also because populism is in the air and populism means populism depends upon a rampant executive. Populism is that the people A know what they want and B, it should be translated directly into policy as fast as possible, meaning no nonsense about refining it through legislative branches and all of that. Madison wanted mitigated democracy, a wonderful phrase, A populist president wants direct democracy and everything in the American system militates against direct democracy.
Mitch Daniels (04:24):
So we've seen it manifested recently and I'd just like to hear you comment on certain of the actions which some seen is beyond the range of what ought to be the proper range of presidential authority tariffs for taxes by another name, by another means does he have the authority and if not, what's the remedy?
George F. Will (04:56):
He has the authority until someone says you don't. Teddy Roosevelt really pioneered the modern presidency was Woodrow Wilson who I think is the root of most evil. In fact, it was Teddy Roosevelt who had the stewardship theory of the presidency and the stewardship theory is that the president has the power to do whatever he is not explicitly forbidden to do. In a way, it was in the great anthro site coal strike of right after the turn of the 20th century when he said, don't tell me about the constitution. The people want coal. Now, that was a good populist sentiment. The first of Congress's enumerated powers in Article one, section eight is tariffs trade relations with foreign powers. That's how we got started as a country Boston Tea Party and all of that Jefferson's embargo. It's been a hearty perennial American argument and if we don't get this right, the president will be endlessly emancipated. Presidential power will be twice what it was eight years ago. Now what will the Supreme Court say? I don't know, but Congress could always fill in the blanks. Congress has left huge blanks. The emergency power, you may declare an emergency, but Congress could with a lines say, here's what an emergency is. The president right now in a related matter is asserting the power to impound federal funds. The president is saying Congressional appropriations are only ceilings. Well, he's got actually has a better historical case than I thought and Congress can solve that problem. Say, no, this is not a ceiling. This is a mandate. One sentence. The question is if can we interest Congress in governing again, would it like to stop being a spectator up in the bleachers? What happened, it seems to me, Mitch, is that the Madisonian architecture, the checks and balances assumed we were not going to have political parties.
(07:24):
The founders when the Constitution was written in 87 ratified and came into effect in 89, neither desired nor anticipated parties. 11 years later we had a ferocious party presidential election in 18 or what happened? Well, parties, it turns out are natural like dandelions and suburban lawns. They're just going to happen. So, the problem with that is I'm not against parties. They do give weight to partisanship and helps the system work, but members of the president's party when they're in the majority in Congress think of themselves nowadays as downfield blockers for the presidential quarterback that their job is to advance his agenda and not have an agenda of their own problem. Madison's architecture depended upon the institutions having A independent institutional pride and their own ambition. Ambition he said, said, the great Madison in Federalist 51 must be made to counteract ambition and the powers and associated with the rights of the place. He wanted senators and congressmen to be loyal perhaps to their president. He was after all a president but not just loyal and what is today disheartening and ultimately dangerous to the architecture of our constitution is the sense that there's no rivalry that they're team players.
Mitch Daniels (09:04):
Yeah, I believe I'm correct that I was temporarily hardened when the chairman of the Senate judiciary Committee introduced the bill that would have clarified the president does not have unilateral power to impose tariffs, but as far as I know, he's never even been able to hear that bill on his own committee.
George F. Will (09:21):
That's right.
Mitch Daniels (09:21):
Yeah. Well, if not Congress, then potentially the Supreme Court in whose lap some of these issues are about to land. Before I ask you about the separation of powers issues, let me ask you about a couple others that have come along more recently. The idea that a president is immune from prosecution within the scope of his job rightly or wrongly decided.
George F. Will (09:51):
I think rightly decided our system cannot function. I mean I've been banging away with my usual lack of consequence on the subject of presidential power, but the system doesn't work unless energy is in the executive. To take the phrase from Alexander Hamilton and if we're going to have an energetic president, Congress can disperse presidents on duty 24/7. It used to be just to get Congress back to Washington was a chore. People coming up by steamboats and through canals and over corduroy roads. It was just difficult.
Mitch Daniels (10:33):
The good old days.
George F. Will (10:34):
Presidency. Exactly. The president's there all the time now and he cannot be hauled into court. He cannot be indited. He has to be immune from certain frivolous lawsuits, and the Lord knows there are enough of those.
Mitch Daniels (10:48):
Yeah. The last session or the last year's session of the Supreme Court brought a lot of good news. Some of us thought in the major questions decision specifically giving clear signs of reigning in at least executive branch agencies. I know you were as pleased by those as some of us.
George F. Will (11:13):
I was because what Congress is doing there, they're kind of a defibrillator trying to get the heartbeat of Congress backing strong saying, if you want the executive to do this, say so clearly with certain discernible principles implied so Congress, the Supreme Court has been said, well, the court's taking power under itself. No, no. The court is saying do your job Congress.
Mitch Daniels (11:40):
You mentioned the two party system and it has been frequently, let's say a ballast or led to corrections when our political process seemed to be running off the rails one way or another, you're of the view that there is an exhausted middle in somebody's phrase, can the two party system which in the past has reacted to assemble new majorities, can it do so? Once again, it doesn't give signs right now of operating as it once has.
George F. Will (12:20):
It doesn't, but our two parties, Herman Kahn or someone said that after nuclear war, the cockroach would be the only thing to survive because it's really simple. I think our political parties of the cockroaches of our political system, they're very elemental and they're very adaptable.
Mitch Daniels (12:41):
Analogy is appealing on other grounds too, right?
George F. Will (12:46):
The parties have been in the past acutely sensitive.
(12:50):
Market mechanisms, seismographs trembling to every felt tremor from the public. Nothing wrong with that. Not to surrender to every tremor, but to be aware of it. If you go back and read the 1924 socialist party platform, it's almost all law now. They sold their ideas and that's one of the functions of a third party is to expand the conversation. Something has happened though that we're not doing that we're not drawing from these other sources. How we get that back, I don't know. It begins by not looking at the other side as evil. Bill Lee, the governor, two certain governor. Now Tennessee says, I'm conservative, I'm just not angry about it. What a nice thought and I just think that America is about to become what they used to call when religious revivals would sweep the country are burned over a region of the country. The whole continent is now burned over politically and unless I'm mistaken and there is precedent, the country is ready for a change of tone.
Mitch Daniels (14:11):
Well, we might hope so. The parties have typically been, not without principle, but they have been flexible exists. They have existed to win elections and therefore have been.
George F. Will (14:20):
You and I are old enough to remember when the political scientists in the 1950s said, wouldn't it be wonderful if we sorted our parties out on ideological grounds and we'd have coherent politics, a liberal party and a conservative party? Well, we've done it and is everyone happy? Not exactly. When I went to work on the Senate staff in 1970, Democrats controlled everything. There was McClellan of Arkansas on the Labor Committee, John Stennis from Mississippi on Armed Services, James Easton from Mississippi on the Judiciary Committee, Richard Russell from Winder, Georgia on Armed Services. Sam Irvin on judiciary was all southern conservatives. Frankly segregationists, almost all of them, but because there was diversity, you had a functioning system. Now that you have ideological clarity, you also have perennial animosities as far as I can tell.
Mitch Daniels (15:30):
Your former columnist colleague friend of mine, the late Mark Shields had a formulation about the parties, about losing parties and how they eventually adapt and I think the cycle as he saw it was blame the candidate, blame the message, blame the people and find anybody and the out party these days seems to me we have a president with last I looked low and declining approval ratings has an opening, but they are they too trapped by their ideology as to seize it?
George F. Will (16:06):
I don't know. The president's approval rating right now, his net approval rating is approximately where Biden's was after the debate that knocked him out of the race, so again, markets work, political markets work and eventually this political market will work. There is such a thing in politics as a creative loser. You're sitting today Mitch with one of the surviving of the 27 million voters for Barry Goldwater cast, my first presidential vote for Goldwater, I'd been in 1962. I graduated from college where I'd been a sort of normal Kennedy Democrat, went to Britain, saw a great nation being suffocated by socialism and collectivism, went to Berlin, saw the Berlin Wall, came back and voted for Barry. Now at that point conservatism was considered naughty but not serious that it was kind of bad manners but something you'd tolerate. Well, Goldwater lost, but if Goldwater hadn't lost and changed the Republican party into more conservative direction, I wouldn't have been able to say as I have many times that Goldwater didn't lose. It just took 16 years to count the votes and so there's such a thing as a creative loser, you could make the case that McGovern was a creative loser that he, in turn, he really changed the axis of the Democratic party.
Mitch Daniels (17:37):
Let me ask you about what I take to be a new series of theories that suggests that the environment in which we operate is fundamentally different. Now there's a book by a guy named Gurri. You've read everything so you will be familiar who believes that not just here but in other societies as well, elites of all kinds of lost their grip over information and therefore their credibility and he makes the case that it will be hard if not impossible for anyone to assemble a majority and society as deeply cynical, skeptical as the ones we've this phenomenon has created.
George F. Will (18:25):
I have read Gurri, and it is the case. Half the story is that the elites have lost control of information. The other half of the story is that people have lost their belief in information that there's no such thing as information. They're simply partisan ammunition to be seized upon and wielded and that's the dangerous thing. It's kind of postmodernism has leaked out of the literature departments of our universities into a kind of pandemic of epistemological nihilism.
Mitch Daniels (18:57):
Yes.
George F. Will (18:57):
And it's profoundly dangerous. That's by the way, that's my immigration policy. You want to hear it?
Mitch Daniels (19:04):
Yeah.
George F. Will (19:05):
For every 10 immigrants we accept we deport one tenured professor of English.
Mitch Daniels (19:15):
It's a great idea. Can I suggest we tweak the ratio?
George F. Will (19:20):
Yes.
Mitch Daniels (19:21):
May not be aggressive enough. A little while back I was able to talk with Garry Kasparov and world chess champion, but much more important, an important dissident from the last days of the Soviet Union and he in response to a question made I thought an interesting and somewhat surprising observation. He said that the reason Russia collapsed back into Putinism was that they had a fundamental misunderstanding. He said, we thought democracy was a result but it's a process and that the moment you begin to conclude that you can rig the game, it's okay to tweak the rules so that our side wins. He said that school's out. Does that comport with your view of maybe where we are now?
George F. Will (20:24):
Yes. It's now a commonplace to say that politics is downstream from culture
(20:31):
and culture that nourishes democracy must be on the one hand, the wonderful ferment of culture we had in the revolutionary era when as historian Gordon Wood has said, what we pioneered was a non-deferential culture in our society. We were no longer going to tug our for locks to any other institution or country or class. The problem with that is the question in any society, Mitch, isn't whether elites shall rule. It's which elites and the challenge of democracy is to get consent to worthy elites. It's hard to do when you've decided that to be an elite is to be suspect and a public enemy. It's partly the reason we have this confusion that our elites are not very elite. That is elite. That's an elite automobile. That's an elite baseball player that implies extra talent. Elite now has come to mean only unearned prominence and unjustified power and influence and again, it's a kind of nihilism.
Mitch Daniels (21:51):
As you say, culture is as the wellspring and this was no mystery at the founding or the founders all said, I think all said by in one expression or another that the republic they were fashioning was fit for a virtuous people and you have written in your,
George F. Will (22:16):
Can I interrupt you just at one thing?
Mitch Daniels (22:18):
Yes.
George F. Will (22:19):
A virtuous people would be immune to what the founders called popular arts. By popular arts they meant demagoguery. They meant things to trick the public, to bring out their worst aspects, to suppress the better angels of their nature, so they were worried about the arts of their own class. These were all political people, and they liked politics and they knew it was indispensable, but within this indispensable, honorable craft, there's a serpent and the serpent in the garden is the ability to degrade the public while courting it.
Mitch Daniels (23:06):
The most indispensable book of recent times, it's authored by our guests. I trust if you haven't all read it, you will accept my advice and rush out and buy it immediately. It's called the Conservative Sensibility, and I think you once told me your staff refers to it as the new testament.
George F. Will (23:26):
The New New Testament
Mitch Daniels (23:27):
Yes. Which it is an Appalachian.
George F. Will (23:30):
They're required to speak that way,
Mitch Daniels (23:35):
But you do say there that among other things that government today is inimitable to the virtues of self-government in at least two ways. One, by fostering dependency, second by encouraging and practicing incivility and aggressiveness and so forth. That's a kind of a dispiriting, can't argue with it, but it's sort of a dispiriting analysis.
George F. Will (24:08):
In 1964, the year Goldwater ran and lost 44 states. I can pick 'em, can I? The public was asked in a poll, do you expect the government to do the right thing all the time or almost all the right time, and the answer was 70%.
(24:29):
Today that poll would be something like 8%. What's changed? Well, what's changed is the government is bigger, the government is more solicitous, the government is more caring, the government is more intrusive and as its pretensions have risen, its prestige has plummeted. There's a lesson in that and it's so obvious, which is that if government would do the little things right, first things first, don't run us steel, fix the roads. Someone ran, the governor of Michigan got elected on the slogan, fix the damn roads good slogan if government would start like that. Second, if we could have a politics, there are two ways of approaching politics. One is to envision the best and pursue it. The other which I subscribe to is notice the worst and avoid it. We've, we had an enormous opportunity in the 20th century to see just how bad politics could get. Start there, figure out what the lessons were and let's avoid that. A lot of people say, well that's boring, it's banal. It doesn't make my pulse race good. I don't want pulse race politics, I want calm.
Mitch Daniels (26:04):
I've said many, many times over the years that after I pass away, if there's a tombstone it will read. He raised four great daughters and fixed the Bureau of Motor Vehicles.
George F. Will (26:18):
Exactly.
Mitch Daniels (26:22):
And they're applauding because it happens to be true, and it was based on exactly your conviction that government ought to earn can earn confidence by doing those things that we can all agree it is necessary to do.
George F. Will (26:39):
This is why it seems to me the sleeper issue in our politics today is K-12 education. That is where for most Americans, government intersects with their lives at some point or other and that's why we see the most creative ferment in our policy in K-12 education, the new civics education in school, school vouchers, education pods, homeschooling. There's a real wonderful ferment out there which really testifies to the fecundity of American freedom. It's still there.
Mitch Daniels (27:17):
I want to read you just one quote before we leave the American people behind us here, Andrew Sullivan, I don't know whether you regard him highly or,
George F. Will (27:29):
I do.
Mitch Daniels (27:29):
poorly, but I share that, and he wrote, I was very discouraged to hear him, to read him writing this just recently, the American people who no longer want to govern themselves who are sick of this republic no longer keep it, choose to keep it if it means sharing it with people they despise. Now, earlier today I read you a more encouraging quote from someone who thinks that the pendulum will swing back and those who've been exhausted by recent politics will search for and find someone to restore a calm perhaps some competence. Is that, are you betting on that side of the equation?
George F. Will (28:21):
I am what I'm going to say, I'm going to say delicately because I don't like to talk about
(28:28):
current stuff too much. I'll say this, one of the lessons of the last decade of American politics is how profoundly one person can change the tone of American life. The good response to that is that cheerful response is it ought to be possible for one person to change it back. That is, I regret the fact that we live in a presidential centric country. I think the president is too much with us of all parties. Let me digress for just one moment. When Roosevelt gave his first fireside chat as president after his March 4th, '33 inauguration, he began with two words that didn't appear on the transcript. It's up at Hyde Park is not there, but he began with two words. He began "My friends", now he's on the radio, radio which to me a more revolutionary technology than the internet or television or anything else because it annihilated the distance between the governor and the governors. It created a new intimacy. Roosevelt knew he was talking to people in desperate fear at that point sitting around their Philco's in parts of the country that barely got rural electrification, and they wanted a friend in the White House. I don't want a friend in the White House. I want someone who will take care that the laws are faithfully executed
(30:10):
and at least start there and just again a more modest sense why I don't want to be callous, but when Michael Jackson died, I'm sorry he died, but we didn't need the president to speak about this. Presidents are now expected to be national mourners, national keepers of our consciences, no take care that the laws are faithfully executed, then get back to us.
Mitch Daniels (30:40):
We've seen it emphatically demonstrated as you say that a president can change a single person and the president can change the tone of public conversation for the worst remains to be seen. Whether that having happened, whether it can be changed in the other direction.
George F. Will (31:03):
That is the test. As you have said, here's this swing, a pendulum or a ratchet. If it's a ratchet that clicks in only one direction, then we're in serious trouble.
(31:15):
Because we have now legitimized behaviors that we would punish in our 8-year-old. I just don't think there is such a thing as permanent victory or permanent loss in a society. There are no final victories. If I had to sum up the great conservative insight about life in two words, it is nothing lasts now that can be consoling. Great story Lincoln in 1858, war clouds disunion lowering over the country gives a talk at what was the precursor of the Wisconsin state fair, and he concluded by telling the story of the Oriental Despot who summoned his wise men and gave them a shower. He said, I want you to go away and don't come back until you have devised a proposition to be carved in stone to be forever in view and forever true. They came back and their proposition was this too shall pass away, but Lincoln said, perhaps it's not true. If we cultivate the internal world within us as assiduously and prodigiously, as we cultivate the physical world around us, we might endure. Well, we have partly because Lincoln came along and it's really hard to count on Lincoln's coming around, but who thought Lincoln was going to come around? Now I know people in Indiana maintained that his greatness is that he spent his formative years in Indiana.
Mitch Daniels (32:59):
If you didn't point that out, I was planning to.
George F. Will (33:02):
I was afraid of that, but Lincoln's a miracle, but there is precedent.
Mitch Daniels (33:13):
One last question then. You're an historian and others who purport to be think they see cycles in history sometimes over the long sweep of centuries, sometimes just within the context of American history. Every so often. It's certainly been true that cataclysmic events have occurred that have changed the nature of the republic in the time after. You can pick your own, but the election of 1800 is sometimes seen as one in the Civil War and the Depression and of course wars like the Second World War and there are many people who think that we're due for one, that we're headed for one that we've built. Maybe we've built our debts, for instance, the preconditions for one. So, my question is do you think that's faded to be and if in fact it should occur, is it possible that it's necessary? Purgative just as sometimes recessions lay the groundwork for stronger economies.
George F. Will (34:27):
The study of history and when I'm dictator of this country, the only permissible major in college is going to be history. I'm serious. I'm so tired of reinventing the wheel that let's learn from the past. The study of history teaches us contingency. It teaches us that nothing is necessary. It teaches us the role of luck. If there hadn't been a fog in the East River in that late summer of '76 that rescued George Washington's army one night, one fog, the revolution would've been over.
Mitch Daniels (35:06):
If that confederate courier hadn't dropped the cigars with for an Indiana corporal to pick up before.
George F. Will (35:13):
With the Confederate plans for Antietam. Yes, luck plays a role contingency is good. That's why history, sometimes people say it's one damn thing after another and other people say no, it's the same damn thing over and over again. Need it be that way. Things change. Some Yale graduate goes south to be a Tudor on a plantation, gets tired of listening to the planters, complain about the problem of separating cotton seed from cotton fiber. So, this kid named Eli Whitney invents the cotton gin. Suddenly the plantation system spreads, slavery spreads, brings on the modern civil war and the modern world rather a lot of change from one entrepreneurial genius from Yale of unlikely places.
Mitch Daniels (36:08):
Especially these days.
George F. Will (36:09):
Exactly. So, if you understand the contingencies, nothing has to happen. Decline is a choice, and we can make different choices.
Mitch Daniels (36:22):
George, thank you so much for spending this time with us. I have made it a practice to end each of these a little inquisitions with the same question to which your most recent comments that lead us very directly in the year 2050. Do you expect that the United States will be more or less free than today?
George F. Will (36:47):
I think it will be more free because we're flirting with all kinds of departures from freedom. As I understand it, free trade government permeating culture in unhealthy ways and one of the reasons they're unhealthy is they don't work.
(37:09):
We've seen this before. This is the same damn thing over and over again and I think we often learn by running into walls and stubbing our toes and hitting our fingers with the hammers and it's painful, but we learn. We're more careful with the hammers, so my feeling is we're about to go into a kind of seminar on mistakes, avoidable mistakes, but we're going to get tired of the crony capitalism. What's going to be the result of these tariffs where the Commerce department becomes an auction always in session doing special favors for people. The reason we're conservatives is it works, freedom works. The fecundity of freedom again has been proven over and over again and periodically we have to depart, hit our thumbs with the hammer and then correct course, but the recuperative powers of our country are astonishing. I have lived, and I'm 84 years old, born in 1941 in the early 1950s, one of the most heroic stories in the history of the human race began, but didn't begin then, but took special life in the civil rights movement. People got set, had to dismantle tyranny, let's call it that. Jim Crow was a tyranny, a majority popular tyranny in the South and they did it astonishing the changes in this country. I mean to think that in 1954 people had to sit in the back of the bus trying to explain that to someone, now. The change of the American mind, the plasticity in the best sense, the fact that we take new shapes from new evidence, unbelievable and inspiring.
Mitch Daniels (39:08):
George Will for 50 years you've been not one of, in my judgment, the most important voice in our country for these principles we've been discussing. I know on at least one occasion I tried to pay, I can't pay a high enough compliment to our guests, but I did say he has so frequently changed my mind and thank goodness you're still working and changing minds I know on a regular basis. Thank you for your service to our republic and to the principles that the Liberty Fund and I know this audience cherish as you do. Thank you for being with us. Thank you all for joining us.
Outro (39:54):
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