The Gray Area with Sean Illing15 Heinä 2019

George Will makes the conservative case against democracy

It’s a good time to be a Republican. But it’s a bad time, George Will argues, to be a conservative. Hence his new, 700-page manifesto, The Conservative Sensibility, which tries to rescue conservatism from the perversions of the Trumpist GOP. Will’s conservatism is rooted in a deep mistrust of majority rule, and an almost religious veneration of the Founding Fathers, or at least a certain understanding of them. Remember, he writes, “the Constitution of the first consciously modern nation, the United States, protects the sovereignty of private individuals, not the sovereignty of a public collective, ‘the majority.’” Will is articulating a tendency that’s always been present on the right, but is becoming more central today: the belief that majority rule will be the death of the American experiment and that the conservative project is at odds with democracy. Will is more forthright than most on this point: He chides conservatives for blasting activist judges, for instance, arguing that the right needs a judiciary willing to make sweeping rulings to curb the power of the state. There’s a lot to discuss here. And discuss we do. Book recommendations: The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay Freedom: Virtue and the First Amendment by Walter Fred Berns ******************************************************* The Ezra Klein Show has been nominated for best Society- culture podcast in this year’s People’s Choice Podcast Awards! Cast your vote for The Ezra Klein Show at https://www.podcastawards.com/app/signup before July 31st. One vote per category. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Tämä jakso on lisätty Podme-palveluun avoimen RSS-syötteen kautta eikä se ole Podmen omaa tuotantoa. Siksi jakso saattaa sisältää mainontaa.

Jaksot(766)

How to survive awkward encounters

We all know what awkwardness feels like. It's that jolt of discomfort when the social script breaks down, and no one knows what to do next. But what if awkwardness isn’t a flaw to fix but a window int...

17 Marras 202556min

Truth in an age of doublethink

We use “Orwellian” to describe everything from campus dust-ups to authoritarian crackdowns. But what did George Orwell actually stand for, what did he get wrong, and what can we learn from him about o...

10 Marras 202552min

The case against free will

We all think of ourselves as authors of our lives. The difference between our happy ending and someone else’s tragic one are the choices we each make. But what if none of that’s true? Sean’s guest ...

3 Marras 202558min

What the climate story gets wrong

The story we tell about climate change is mostly a story about loss. But look to the data, and that story starts to fall apart. Emissions are peaking in key sectors. Clean energy is scaling faster tha...

27 Loka 202549min

The Great Enshittening

Open a browser and you can feel it instantly: everything online just feels… worse. Search results that look like ads. Social feeds that you don’t control. Streaming platforms that are packed with ads....

20 Loka 202547min

America chose violence. Now what?

Is America at a tipping point? Sean Illing talks with Barbara Walter, one of the world’s leading experts on violent extremism and domestic terror. She’s the author of How Civil Wars Start, about ho...

13 Loka 202558min

What's worth remembering?

We like to think of memory as a record of the past. But that’s not really what it is. Memory doesn’t keep the past — it can also remake it. It stitches fragments into stories, and those stories — true...

6 Loka 202558min

Why TikTok matters

This week, Sean talks with Emily Baker-White, author of Every Screen on the Planet, about why TikTok feels uniquely addictive, how it turned social media into a push-not-pull entertainment feed, and w...

29 Syys 20251h 3min