The Conservative Sensibility suggests something else: that we should be attending more to the machinery of government and that government should be far less concerned about inculcating virtue in the citizenry. George Will circa 2019 seems a good deal less enamored with soulcraft as a goal of statecraft. I’ve admired and closely followed Will’s work over the years, and so I wanted to ask him why his thinking had evolved.

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For one thing, Will told me, he has a more jaundiced view of government now than he did in the early 1980s. But he added, laughing, “It turns out that Madison was smarter than I am.” When he argued that America was ill-founded because insufficient attention was given to soulcraft, he explained, he hadn’t fully appreciated that the Founders were indeed arguing about statecraft as soulcraft—that a government really can inculcate virtue.

“They understood that when a political regime establishes, through laws and courts and customs and other matters, a particular political economy, it is establishing, it is choosing the kind of people that would live under that regime,” Will said. He argues in The Conservative Sensibility that capitalism doesn’t just make us better off; it makes us better by enforcing such virtues as thrift, industriousness, and the deferral of gratification.

“There’s a wonderful passage that I quote from Tocqueville, in the 1830s, floating down the Ohio River. On his left is slaveholding Kentucky. On his right is free soil of Ohio. And the difference, Tocqueville says, is one is crackling with energy and high-spiritedness and optimism, and the other is torpid and frozen, like a fly in amber. And there’s the difference,” Will told me. “So, long story short: I did not appreciate the extent to which Madisonian liberty with Hamiltonian energy is soulcraft.”

When I probed Will on what has gone wrong with the American right, he mentioned the anti-intellectualism that inevitably comes with populism, which he called “the obverse of conservatism.”

“Populism is the belief in the direct translation of public impulses, public passions. Passion was the great problem for the American Founders,” Will points out. “Populism is a direct translation of popular passions into governments through a strong executive. Someone who might say something like, ‘Only I can fix it.’ Which, of course, is what the current president said to the convention that nominated him in 2016.” Will argued that James Madison understood the need to “filter and refine and deflect and slow public opinion through institutions. To make it more refined, to produce what Madison called, in one of his phrases that I’m particularly fond of, ‘mitigated democracy.’"

“The principle of representative government, which is at the heart of conservatism, is that the people do not decide; the people choose who will decide. And that’s why populism inevitably becomes anti-intellectual.” I asked Will what would most concern the Founders about contemporary politics. “Political leaders today seem to feel that their vocation is to arouse passions,” he told me, “not to temper and deflect and moderate them.”