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Sept. 21, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show

23:36

Ben Shapiro And George Will Discuss The Woke Future Of America

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	The way we parent leads to the production of risk-averse, frightened, brittle young people who arrive on campuses and say, we don't want freedom of speech.
	We want freedom from speech.
	We want bias response teams to fan out across the campus.
	The graduates go into corporations and suddenly Delta Airlines and Coca-Cola and all the rest are woke.
	How'd that happen?
	I take it all the way back to the bubble wrap children that are being produced by today's parenting.
	It's an honor and a pleasure to have on George Will here.
	He writes a twice-weekly syndicated column on politics, domestic and foreign affairs for the Washington Post.
	He's been writing since 74, received the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1977.
	He has a brand new book out that is a compendium of many of the columns he's written over the years.
	George, thanks so much for joining the show.
	I really appreciate it.
	Glad to be with you.
	So let's talk about the state of all things, since that's really what your book is about over the course of the last several decades.
	I know that the Constitution seems to have gone largely by the wayside in all of our political conversations these days.
	But what strikes me always when people on both sides talk about the Constitution is the specific focus on the Bill of Rights and the complete lack of focus to the actual structural underlying Constitution.
	And it's that structural underlying Constitution that seems to be most in danger to me.
	And it also seems to be the thing that people care the least about these days.
	Well, you're quite right.
	First of all, to my strict constructionist friends, Constitution Day is unconstitutional because they can't find any enumerated power justifying this.
	But beyond that, as you know, the framers in Philadelphia did not include a Bill of Rights, largely because they argued that the structure of the Constitution itself, including the idea of enumerated powers, was such that it would be unnecessary To have a Bill of Rights.
	And furthermore, once they said, once you begin to enumerate the rights we have, where do you stop?
	Do we have a right to wear a hat?
	Yes, but you have to put that in the Bill of Rights.
	And they thought it might disparage other rights, hence the Ninth Amendment.
	But you're quite right.
	The big problem today isn't the enforcement of the Bill of Rights, although there are problems with that.
	It is the utter disequilibrium that's been injected into the Constitution by the administrative state.
	Congress giving away its powers.
	People carelessly say, oh, the president is usurping powers.
	Well, if only presidents had to usurp them.
	The legislature is all too glad to hand them over on a silver salver, thereby ducking responsibility for the actual governance of the United States.
	And the executive branch itself then is encouraged by a too lackadaisical court Two lackadaisical to enforce the non-delegation doctrine, saying that you cannot delegate essentially legislative powers to non-legislative bodies, and also by being far too deferential under the Chevron doctrine and all the rest to administrative interpretations of the law, which are often vague.
	I mean, the legislature basically passes aspirations.
	It says, yep, we have Good education.
	You guys over in the education department fill in the details.
	And of course, the details are everything in legislation.
	We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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	While you're pointing out here, this is what scares me the most about sort of the future of the country, because we can focus in on the culture conflicts, which we'll talk about in a second, and which seem to suck up all the oxygen in the room.
	But the reality is that the sort of founding vision, which was essentially localism, and then you'd have a federal government that was capable of mobilizing on a very small number of issues, and there had to be pretty wide approval across a broad variety of institutions in order for that mobilization to occur.
	You had to have States that appointed senators you had to have the federal branches agree with one another you had several constituencies from the house to the senate to the judiciary to the presidency you had enormous levels of agreement in gridlock was the purpose and this is what people seem to have forgotten is that the structural constitution was designed to prevent the government from doing things not particularly to enable the government to do all that many things the the destruction of that is leading to a sort of winner takes all attitude toward government in the united states which is
	Basically, we now fight over the gun.
	There is a gun.
	It exists at the federal level.
	The President of the United States is almost an elected dictator who takes office once every four years, does whatever he wants, signs a bunch of orders, and all the Congress does is decide how large or small the check is that the President gets to sign over.
	And it seems like we are moving from an actual Republican system to an almost pre-Cromwell That's a very apt and interesting analogy to the Cromwellian government.
	was there to basically raise taxes for the king, and then occasionally not raise taxes for the king, and when they don't raise taxes for the king, then the king just declares personal rule and starts doing things on his own.
	That's a very apt and interesting analogy to the Cromwellian government.
	Now we have a Lord Protector in the presidency.
	There's another consequence of what you described.
	When you concentrate more and more power away from the states and localities into Washington, and more Washington power in the executive branch, and essentially independent agencies unsupervised by anyone, this is why, since the last bastion of restraint on the other two branches of government is the Supreme Court, this is why The confirmation of Supreme Court justices has become a blood sport because the stakes are enormous.
	Borden Gray has been very active in combating all this, makes a very good point.
	We see more protests with placards and all the rest out in front of the Supreme Court building than we do outside the Capitol building across the street because people rightly intuit that what goes on across the street in Congress is of Secondary or tertiary importance that the action is in the great marble monument to the court built by William Howard Taft.
	And you know, George, by the way, the name of the book, obviously, is American Happiness and Discontents, The Unruly Torrent, 2008 to 2020.
	I think this is leading to an exacerbation of the culture wars because when people feel as though their concerns are taken into account in the system, when they feel that their localities are capable of representing them and not being infringed upon by the federal government, or their states are more representative of them, or the federal government is capable of balancing a variety of viewpoints and then maybe doing nothing.
	When people feel that their voices are being heard, there's less of a necessity to attack your neighbor.
	I have to say, I've been disquieted, particularly over the past couple of months.
	I mean, look, things have been ugly in this country for a while, but over the past couple of months, the president of the United States, when Joe Biden gets on national television and he starts essentially saying that people should hate their unvaccinated neighbors because that's really what is stopping us from returning to normal, it's like this abdicates all policy duty.
	I mean, you either are in favor of people having a certain level of liberty or you're not. But whatever you're in, whatever you're in favor of or not in favor of, what you can't do is direct one segment of the population against the other segments of the population in order to avoid the political blame for whatever is going on in terms of policy. My book contains a whole section on judicial cases and judicial power. And that section is really a monument to my great change of mind over the last 50 years. When I came to Washington, I was a
	Borkian.
	In fact, Bob Bork was a very close friend.
	And Bork was an Oliver Wendell Holmes type who celebrated majoritarianism.
	He said America is about majority rule.
	Who said judicial deference.
	This was at a time when conservatives believed that the court should defer to majoritarian institutions from city councils to Congress.
	I no longer believe that.
	I believe that judicial deference is often dereliction of duty to police the excesses of majoritarianism.
	I do not believe there is a counter-majoritarian dilemma in judicial review.
	I think the point of having a written constitution is to override majorities.
	A constitution is to do that.
	The First Amendment begins, Congress shall make no law abridging In a way, sometimes I wish they'd stopped right there, but Congress shall make no law abridging that even if the country wants it, even if majorities want it, can't have it.
	Sorry.
	As Justice Jackson said in West Virginia v. Barnett, reversing the flag salute case of 1939, he said in 1943, the very purpose of a Bill of Rights is to place certain issues beyond the reach of majorities, above the vicissitudes of majoritarian politics.
	We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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	I agree with you that judicial activism is not the same thing as judicial misinterpretation.
	I think these two things have been conflated in pretty radically stupid ways.
	It is not judicial activism to say that something that clearly violates the Constitution is unconstitutional.
	And as you say, it should not be a matter of whether a majority passed it.
	If it hadn't passed, it presumably wouldn't be in front of the Supreme Court in the first place as a general rule.
	The real question is whether the judiciary is correct in striking a thing down or not striking down.
	But you're right that the Supreme Court is the sole kind of break on the authoritarian state.
	I think this is leading to the real possibility that the country starts to fall into more and more chaos.
	I said this a couple of days ago on my show.
	My great fear is that what's happening right now is that California and Texas are polarizing, obviously.
	California and Florida are polarizing.
	We moved our family from California to Florida for many reasons, including that polarization.
	And the sort of self-sorting mechanism that's happening has happened before in American life, but it's happening pretty radically right now.
	And as the federal government moves forward, there's going to be a choice to be made.
	And that is, does the federal government continue to centralize power in the administrative state, which is likely to break the system?
	It's likely to ossify the halls of power to make them unresponsive to these various states and the diversity of the American people and likely to break the thing.
	And more importantly than that, I mean, I'm wondering at a certain point if the administrative state becomes so ossified that even the president can't control the administrative state, at which point, essentially, it doesn't matter who you elect president, the administrative state is going to do what it wants.
	Well, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which is the brainchild of Elizabeth Warren, is a monument to that.
	It's financed not by an appropriation from Congress, but by the profits from the Federal Reserve System.
	The head of it can be removed only for God knows what.
	It's not clear, but he's certainly not at the pleasure of the president, which undermines the unitary executive.
	And all of this, you know, is taking place against the backdrop of something I think you and I both agree, which is that the truism That politics is downstream from culture and the culture is moving in so many different ways.
	When I put my book together, I was startled by how often I've been writing about parenting and about how the way we parent leads to the production of risk-averse, frightened, brittle young people who arrive on campuses and say, we don't want freedom of speech.
	We want freedom from speech.
	And we want bias response teams to fan out across the campus.
	And police safe spaces against microaggressions and all the other nonsense that's come up.
	This, of course, what happens on campus doesn't stay on campus.
	It leaks.
	The graduates go into corporations and suddenly Delta Airlines and Coca-Cola and all the rest are woke.
	How'd that happen?
	I take it all the way back to the bubble wrap children that are being produced by today's parenting.
	The book is American Happiness and Discontents, the Unruly Torrent 2008 to 2020.
	You know, George, when you talk about the sort of bubble wrap parenting, you can see this actually throughout American society. The sense of safetyism that has crept into American society is pretty astonishing. Now, when it came to COVID, I was, you know, worried about COVID because my parents are 65. They were essentially with us during the entire pandemic. And so I was not against the original lockdowns before we knew the data.
	I was not even against the idea that you should mask when you are in the presence of vulnerable people if you are unvaccinated and they're unvaccinated.
	But that was all pre-vaccine.
	When I say that we've reached to the point of safetyism, what I mean is that every day, essentially, I see a piece in the media about how unsafe the vaccinated are.
	I mean, we have the President of the United States get on national television and say that the vaccinated need to be protected from the unvaccinated.
	That's safetyism at its finest.
	Once I took the vaccines and my parents took the vaccines, I actually followed the data.
	They are about as safe as safe can be.
	They are safer than they are from the flu, at which point you need to go out and you need to live regular life.
	But it seems as though there's a certain level of comfort in feeling unsafe and in the idea that the President of the United States and the federal government can save you from every travail of life, whether it is The possibility of eviction or whether it is the possibility that you might get a breakthrough case of COVID that results in having to stay home for a couple of days.
	Some people just love the regimentation inherent in public health protocols and they will want them to be forever.
	You've noticed this for ever since the latter half of Franklin Roosevelt's initial inaugural address in which he said we have to be as though we were armed, we were being invaded by an army to fight the depression.
	We've made war on the depression, war on poverty, war on drugs, war on cancer, war on pornography, war, war, war.
	Why?
	Because it suggests the American people should be marshaled in Syrian ranks, obedient to commands from above.
	We've even heard in the current pandemic and vaccine fight, say, well, of course the president can exercise the general police power that we thought inherent in the states to order vaccines.
	Why?
	Because George Washington ordered the inoculation of his soldiers.
	Well, yes.
	If Americans are related to the central government the way a soldier is to his commanding officer.
	But we're not!
	And we don't want to live in a martial state, a garrison state, and be treated like this.
	We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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	Rockauto.com.
	So George, let's talk for a second about where conservatism stands, because really this should be a pretty target-rich environment for conservatives.
	I mean, we've been talking about problems that I think most Americans are deeply unhappy with, ranging from the sort of movement away from an aggressive American foreign policy under Joe Biden to an extraordinarily intrusive state, to culture wars that frankly, the left has moved too far, too fast on, and the polls tend to show that.
	It should be sort of a good situation that conservatives are in, and yet conservatives seem not to be in a particularly good situation.
	They may be okay electorally in 2022, maybe in 2024, depending on who gets nominated.
	But there is this sort of gap between the policy possibilities for conservatives pushing back against the left, and then the sort of failure to break out of an attitude that is more concerned at this point with how do we offend the left rather than how do we defeat the left.
	Good point.
	The pursuit of happiness has been distorted because happiness is now defended as understood as producing the unhappiness of the other team.
	Instead of a kind of affirmation of the joy of being an American, the joy of being an American consists in the fact That we define happiness on our own and we pursue it with voluntary association with others in the spontaneous order of a market society.
	Because when the market stops allocating wealth and opportunity, politics will.
	And to the extent that politics allocates wealth and opportunity, the stakes of politics go up and the bitterness goes up because the cost of losing goes up.
	And this becomes an awful intensifying spiral.
	That's producing today's America, which is why I believe that as more and more so-called conservatives become what I call hyphenated capitalists, common good capitalism, therefore, or some other adjective to modify capitalism, all they're doing is drifting into cronyism and the rent-seeking that is already pandemic in this country.
	That will produce a bitterness, as I've said, but also slower economic growth and therefore distributional conflicts that will further intensify our politics.
	I totally agree with this.
	I mean, I think that one of the things that I was talking with some friends about recently was the idea that for a lot of common good conservatives, the idea is not that there should be, you know, some sort of common good governance at the local level, right?
	Subsidiarity seems to matter very little to most people these days.
	This is why federalism mattered so much to the founders.
	It is one thing for you and your friends at a very local level to decide between yourselves that you want to run things, you know, like a nuclear family.
	It's another thing to extend that out to people you don't even want to share bread with.
	And as the government grows, and as the government is left unchecked, you basically now have a fight between the left that wants to use government to help their friends and the right that wants to use government to help their friends.
	And the reality is that half the country is not friends with the other half of the country.
	I think that we are looking at something that is going to approach an almost Brexit situation, but I don't know how that plays out in American constitutional system.
	I don't think it does.
	I mean, we're stuck with one another, and the sooner people realize that, the better.
	Deep breath, everybody.
	You know, in the 19th century, we fought bitterly to the point of dismembering the country, but they were big issues.
	Could one group of human beings own another group of human beings?
	Could they take their human property into the territories?
	Big stuff.
	How to fund the government, by tariffs or income tax or the sale of public lands.
	These were issues people were hot about, but you could say, here's how you address them legislatively, up or down, fugitive slave law, yes or no.
	How do you write a law that addresses anxieties that are essential class resentments?
	I don't know how you do it, which is why when politics has a difficult time getting a purchase on the real grievances people have, which are emotional and status related, Then politics becomes a performative art, and you get the United States Senate today.
	Totally agree with that, George.
	I think that one of the things that obviously is so troubling is that people are looking for love in all the wrong places.
	We're the drunk, the proverbial drunk, searching for the car keys under the lamppost.
	We're trying to use economics to Solve problems of soul.
	We're trying to use the government to solve problems of soul, and politics to try to solve all those problems.
	Those problems of soul aren't going to go away on their own, and it seems like they are being greatly exacerbated by things like social media.
	They're being greatly exacerbated by lack of community fabric, and that does have to do with the decline of institutions like churches.
	I'm not sure how we recover that.
	Yeah, well, first of all, abandoned social media would be a great start.
	People won't.
	I don't tweet.
	I don't know how to tweet.
	The tweets are done in my name twice a week.
	They're just excerpts from my columns.
	I'm told I have a Facebook page.
	I've never seen it.
	I don't get the point.
	I happen to believe that books remain the primary carriers of ideas.
	And I believe that Moynihan was right when he said in the 1970s, something momentous has happened.
	Conservatism, the Republicans have become the party of ideas.
	And in its post-war growth, conservatism was a very bookish outfit, beginning with Richard Weaver's book, Ideas Have Consequences.
	I've lived 80 years, and I am more and more convinced that only ideas have large and lasting consequences, and that books are still the primary carriers of these ideas.
	So, certainly, tweets, they're wonderful for vituperation, they're wonderful for venting, But carrying ideas?
	I don't think so.
	Well, George Will, obviously an institution all on his own in American life.
	His brand new book is American Happiness and Discontents, The Unruly Torrent, 2008 to 2020.
	Go pick up a copy because it is always filled with gems and excellent thinking and great ideas and stuff that is well worth mulling over for years to come.
	George, really appreciate the time, as always.
	It's great fun to talk with you and hope we do it again soon.
	The battle for the culture is heating up.
	We here at The Daily Wire are making some big moves.

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