A poetic episode in our national history occurred July 4, 1826. On that 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the author of that founding document, Thomas Jefferson, died. So did John Adams, who did as much as anyone to produce the occasion for Jefferson’s document. The second president’s last words referred to the third president: "Thomas Jefferson survives." The third president’s last words were, "Is it the Fourth?"

Three days later, in Quincy, Massachusetts, after attending Adams’ funeral, some dignitaries were taken to see a prosaic force that would shape what the two Founders had helped to found. They saw something novel. They saw a railroad, one of the nation’s first. It was not much of one; it was built to carry granite a few miles from Quincy to Boston for the Bunker Hill monument. But it was huge as a harbinger.

Railroads soon would have constitutional consequences, and not just because, in the coming war against Southern insurrection, they were to help the army of the central government settle a constitutional argument about the primacy of that government. Railroads also had constitutional consequences because they influenced Americans’ thinking about the nature of their regime. Railroads, and the industrialism of which they were emblematic, filled our "extensive Republic" with energy. Our big country acquired a big economy, and a big government.

Today conservatism is asking whether a big government is merely a contingent, or a necessary, outcome in a big country with a big economy. That the country was to be big was never in doubt. In the Revolutionary era there were just four million free Americans, and 80 percent of them lived within 20 miles of Atlantic tidewater. Yet these Americans audaciously called their legislature the Continental Congress. They knew where they were headed—for California. They would get there by many means, including railroads. To promote construction of these steel sinews of national strength, the central government lent its considerable weight. For example, it gave 4.8 million acres of Nebraska—one-tenth of that state—to the Union Pacific.

By 1908, eight decades after the deaths of Adams and Jefferson, a professor of political science marveled at what industrialism had wrought:

The copper threads of the telegraph run unbroken to every nook and corner of the great continent, like the nerves of a single body. . . . Railways lie in every valley and stretch across every plain. . . . Industrial organization knows nothing of state lines, and commerce sweeps from state to state.

So wrote Prof. Woodrow Wilson, five years before becoming president.

He became the first president to criticize the Constitution, which he considered more ingenious than was suitable for changed conditions. The Constitution, he said, is elegantly Newtonian with its checks and balances, but it is not conducive to the energy and dispatch requisite for regulating an urban industrial society. He postulated the need for heroic presidents to marshal public opinion in order to override the government’s constitutional creakiness. What the Founders would have considered an anti-constitutional infusion of direct popular will, Wilson considered necessary to enable the national government to implement the national idea. He seems not to have worried about the possibility that his ideas might encourage passivity in the public, producing a nation of mere followers. When Wilson wrote and governed, Newton was out of fashion, Darwin was in, and the Constitution was coming to be thought of in organic terms, as a "living" document. However, it was unclear, then as now, what a "living," evolving, ever-in-flux Constitution is. What can a constitution constitute if, instead of shaping its times, it takes its shape from its time?

In 1893, three years after the Census Bureau declared the closing of the frontier, Wilson had pondered the changes that were challenging the old American faith that freedom is in large measure a function of space—that freedom consists partly of being unable to see the smoke from your neighbor’s cabin or to hear the sound of his ax. In 1893 Wilson wrote, "Slowly we shall grow old, compact our people, study the delicate adjustments of an intricate society." In classical political theory, compactness was a precondition for a successful republic—a small population compacted in a small polity. The audacity of the American experiment was—is—its attempt to have a republic that is big, but in which life nevertheless is conducive to the virtues requisite for self-government, the virtues of self-reliance and self-restraint. However, in the century since Wilson brooded about the emergence of "an intricate society," our big country has acquired a big government that seems to foster dependence, and that inflames incontinent appetites, including appetites for government provision of illimitable wants.

Tonight we are in the twelfth month of a year of intense debate about our domestic arrangements, the most intense debate in 62 years, since 1933. Then the New Deal accelerated the already-changing relationship between the individual citizen and the central government. Since then, government has become omnipresent in American society. It has increasingly aspired to be omniprovident. In the process, it has suffered a debilitating leakage of legitimacy.

This has provoked a conservative critique of the nation’s political tendencies in this century, and has produced this year of conservative opportunity. Unfortunately, conservatism is not yet measuring up to this moment. Perhaps conservatism has become intoxicated by triumphalism; perhaps it has become intellectually flaccid because of the sterility of its opposition—contemporary liberalism. In any case, conservatism’s critique of current conditions is not as searching as it should be, and its prescriptions raise three troubling questions. First, does conservatism have a distinctive and defensible understanding of the Constitution, or merely a different policy agenda? Second, is conservatism unaware of its own problematic tensions? Third, is conservatism capable of identifying and proclaiming the austere principle of our constitutional republican government?

Woodrow Wilson, to give him his due, once put the principle succinctly. He said that our constitutional government has not only "exalted" the individual, it has " thrown him upon his own resources, as if it honored him enough to release him from leading strings and trust him to see and seek his own rights." Our republic’s premise, said Wilson, is that "no man must look to have the government take care of him, but that every man must take care of himself." Such government does not merely presuppose "intelligence and independence of spirit," it "elicits intelligence and creates independence of spirit."

Can contemporary conservatism stiffen its sinews and summon up its blood and talk in that tone of voice to the American people? If not, the incapacity may reflect what can be called the cultural contradictions of conservatism.

A few years ago there was lively debate about the "cultural contradictions of capitalism." The postulate was that capitalism is jeopardized by its success: its prodigies of wealth-creation produce habits and character traits that subvert the very virtues—thrift, industriousness, deferral of gratification—that are capitalism’s prerequisites. This was not a new worry. It had occurred to that accomplished worrier, John Adams. In 1819, he wrote to Jefferson, "Will you tell me how to prevent riches from being the effects of industry? Will you tell me how to prevent luxury from producing effeminacy, intoxication, extravagance, vice and folly?" Today’s conservatism is much in need of a John Adams as it addresses the nation ’s principal worry, the condition of its culture, meaning all the institutions that compose civil society.

The contradiction in today’s conservatism is, happily, a contingent, not a necessary aspect of conservatism. But it can be a crippling contingency if it is not corrected. It is this: Conservatism is advocating not just disrespect for many activities of government, but even blanket disdain for government, and hence for the political vocation. However, conservatism’s vision of civic virtue depends on more than adherence to a particular policy agenda. It depends on respect, even reverence for our political regime—for our constitutional order understood as a formative enterprise.

Conservatism has come to power in the 1990s largely because this is the decade in which the nation has looked into the mirror and blanched. What Tocqueville called "the slow and quiet action of society on itself" now seems neither slow nor quiet nor wholesome. The crux of the conservative diagnosis is that "big government" is to blame. There is much truth in this diagnosis, but it is by no means the whole story, and it is a diagnosis altogether too easy for conservatism’s own good.

Contemporary conservatism’s greatest service to society has been to re-focus attention on an elemental fact that the Founders understood: Society is a crucible of character formation. Human beings are political, meaning social beings, fulfilled in associations. Government can damage associational life, and big government can do big damage.

Our party system was born of an argument about the action of American society on itself, and on the character of Americans. Hamiltonians wanted a society of high-velocity commercial energy and restless, striving individualism in order to produce national greatness. Jeffersonians aimed to promote other virtues, particularly simplicity and the serene independence of the self-sufficient yeoman. Such Americans would, Jefferson thought, avoid the degrading dependency of the urban manufacturing workers who, Jefferson said, "must live on oatmeal and potatoes" and "have no time to think."

We have been worrying and arguing about national character ever since. Sometimes the argument has taken comic turns, as when, in 1908, the Democratic candidate for president, William Jennings Bryan, said that the Republican candidate, Vice President William Howard Taft, was unfit to be president because, being a Unitarian, Taft did not believe in the virgin birth. But more often than not, in arguments about the national bank and abolitionism and immigration and prohibition and desegregation and, today, popular entertainment, American political argument has been driven by serious concerns about character.

The Founders bequeathed us a political order founded on realism about human attributes, beginning with this truth: In human beings, interestedness is a given, virtue must be acquired. Contemporary conservatism is resoundingly right when it argues that government itself has become inimical to those virtues essential to responsible self-government. It has become inimical because it fosters both dependency on government and uncivic aggressiveness in attempting to bend public institutions to private factional advantage. But does conservatism have the steely resolve required to tell the country the hard truth about how radically it has gone wrong in its thinking about, and expectations of, government?

Conservatism is driving today’s political debate because it senses, and is struggling to act on, the fact that human beings are biological facts, but citizens suited to self-government are social artifacts. However, conservatism is not yet sufficiently clear-sighted about how our constitutional order is supposed to contribute to the creation of such artifacts. And conservatism is not alert to the way its own tenets can complicate the creation of virtuous citizens.

Let us be clear about what conservatism is not saying about citizens as social artifacts. Conservatives do not subscribe to, indeed are implacably hostile to, the idea that human nature has a history. The hostility is implacable because that idea is utterly subversive of government based on respect for natural rights. This is so because if human nature has a history, then there really is no such thing as human nature, understood as something the essence of which is unchanging.

The idea that human nature has a history—that human beings only have a nature contingent on their time and place—is the idea that has animated modern tyrannies. It has done so because people susceptible to that idea are susceptible to the idea that self-government is a chimera—an impossibility—because the self is a fiction, or at best a flimsy reflection of the individual’s social setting. To say that human nature is utterly plastic is to open the way to governments that regard the creation of a new, improved form of humanity the highest government project. Such governments are apt to unleash "consciousness-raisers," who would use political power to extirpate "false consciousness." Such people insist that until proper consciousness is made universal, any consent necessarily arises from false consciousness, and hence is not worth seeking.

However, to say, as conservatives are prepared to, that individuals are not entirely autonomous and unconditioned is not to say that human nature is utterly unfixed and unformed, or utterly plastic to the manipulations of government or society. On the contrary, conservatism warns that people who believe there is no human nature must believe that no rights are natural rights. Indeed, if there is no human nature, then rights are just appetites tarted up in the aggressive language of rights-talk in order to acquire momentum for respect.

Conservatism seeks equilibrium, arguing that nature has political claims, and nurturing has a political role. Nature’s political claims rise from this fact: the idea of human nature involves the idea of essential human qualities or virtues that are conducive to excellence. And the task of political nurturing takes its bearings from that idea of excellence.

Wise conservatives take that task seriously. For example, John Adams, perhaps the most conservative Founder, declared that education makes a greater difference between man and man than nature has made between man and brute. The Founders understood that popular government would be—could not help but be—a formative experience, for better or worse. They thought that popular government properly constituted would be good for our souls. Today conservatives correctly argue that our government has become a deforming force, corrupting the country’s character. They say government has become a bland leviathan, confirming Tocqueville’s warning that government can "degrade men without tormenting them."

However, if conservatives are to be faithful to the full philosophy of the Founders, conservatives must understand that hostility to government, especially hostility to the central government, is not sufficient. Indeed, it is not permissible. The Founders believed that the nation should be and would be constantly conditioned by its founding. Our constitutional government was to be both agent of, and shaper of, the citizenry. It is not true that they subscribed to the notion that government should be neutral regarding the cultivation of virtues—regarding, that is, what we today, in the thinness of our moral vocabulary, call "values." The Founders intended the Constitution to promote a way of life, and they understood that to promote a way of life is to promote a kind of person. Listen to the words of one of the Constitution’s first great construers, John Marshall. In his biography of Washington he wrote:

[The] great and visible economic improvement occurring around 1790 [was in part due to] the influence of the Constitution on habits of thinking and acting, [which] though silent, was considerable. In depriving the states of the power to impair the obligations of contracts, or to make anything but gold and silver a tender in payment of debts, the conviction was impressed on that portion of society which had looked to the government for relief from embarrassment, that personal exertion alone could free them from difficulties; and an increased degree of industry and economy was the natural consequence of this opinion.

Note this: Marshall said the Constitution was designed to encourage particular habits of thinking and acting. From visible habits we make inferences as to invisible attributes of the soul. Therefore statecraft, as the Founders understood it, is soulcraft. Hence politics has a great and stately jurisdiction, and is an inherently dignified vocation, no matter how imperfectly practiced at any given time.

Note this, too: Marshall understood that acceptance of the Constitution was an act of self-denial in the name of self-government. The Constitution deprived the states of certain powers that they had used, under the Articles of Confederation, licentiously. The states had produced what Madison tartly called "a luxuriancy of legislation. " Because the Founders understood the contagion of faction, they did not believe that the best government is always that which is closest to the people. Being unsentimental about the people, the Founders were not sentimental about state and local governments. As Marshall saw, by depriving states of some of their powers, the Constitution helped to equip citizens for the dignity of life without degrading dependence on government.

The Anti-Federalists opposed the Constitution in the name of intimate government; the Founders framed the Constitution to provide effective government, and to spare citizens the discomfort and dependence that comes from being intimate with government. The Founders hoped that one effect of exalting the central government over other governments would be a diminution of the total amount of government—local, state and national. This, the Founders thought, would encourage self-reliance in the pursuit of happiness.

This, then, was an important dimension of the rationale for a strengthened central government. But that government was supposed to be strong within the strict limits of enumerated powers—powers that Madison insisted were "few and defined." However, we have not had such a government for a long time. Indeed, it is arguable that we never really did.

From its first year, the national government has asserted powers proportional to national needs, and from the first it has defined national needs in ways that did not produce government precisely or even notably limited in sphere or methods. Of the 39 members of the House of Representatives who were present when the First Congress took up its first order of business, 16 were Framers—they had been at the Constitutional Convention. Yet their first order of business was the enactment of tariffs. And they did not regard tariffs as merely revenue-raising devices. Rather, they also treated tariffs as instruments of what today is called "industrial policy," for the promotion of local or regional interests, and for the purchase of political advantage. Was that the exercise of an enumerated power?

The enumeration of powers in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution includes the power to "lay and collect taxes . . . to . . . provide for . . . the general welfare" and "to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing powers." Jefferson insisted that the word "necessary " meant more than just "useful," but in practice it never has meant more than that.

In 1944, with the nation more at war than ever before, and with the federal government permeating the nation’s life more than ever before or since, Justice Felix Frankfurter, writing for the Supreme Court, recurred to Woodrow Wilson’s theme of the effect of modern technology on federalism. Frankfurter insisted, "The interpenetrations of modern society have not wiped out state lines. It is not for us to make inroads on our federal system either by indifference to its maintenance or excessive regard for the unifying forces of modern technology. Scholastic reasoning may prove that no activity is isolated within the boundaries of a single State, but that cannot justify absorption of legislative power by the United States over every activity."

Well. Such reasoning may be, in Frankfurter’s pejorative term, scholastic, and such "absorption" may be, as Frankfurter insisted, unjustified, but Frankfurter went immediately on to say that the Court should do next to nothing about it. He said: "When the conduct of an enterprise affects commerce among the states is a matter of practical judgment. . . . The exercise of this practical judgment the Constitution entrusts primarily and very largely to the Congress, subject to the latter’s control by the electorate."

Just so. The lesson of 206 years of constitutional history is clear: If the federal government is to be limited, it will not be limited primarily, or even significantly, by courts construing the Constitution, which has proven to be merely a parchment barrier to enlargements of the federal government’s sphere. Never mind the Supreme Court’s recent small nibbling at the far fringes of powers exercised under the Commerce Clause. Limits on government must be grounded in the character of the people. H owever, the good news is that the character of the people can be shaped by constitutional arrangements and arguments, if they are given proper exegesis.

Big government did not fall out of the sky, unbidden, like hail in Kansas. And it was not foisted on a reluctant public. It grew for many reasons. Daniel Webster, a champion of the national idea, championed the Delaware breakwater as an "internal improvement" by the federal government because neither Pennsylvania nor New Jersey nor Delaware would build it: they would not pay all the costs because they would not get all the benefits. One use to which the Interstate Commerce Commission was put after its creation in 1887 was to keep certain east-west freight rates low in order to encourage commerce that would strengthen the national union. Do you think large federal entitlement programs are a recent development? In 1893, 42 percent of federal expenditures were for Civil War veterans. The federal Meat Inspection Act of 1906, which initiated federal meat inspection, did not come about simply because the nation’s stomach was turned by Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle. The federal government began regulating the meat-packing industry because the industry wanted it to. The industry wanted it because state regulations were so unreliable that some European markets were being closed to American meat.

The nationalization of our lives has taken many forms, and the nationalization of politics has proceeded apace. However, the change that made government not merely big but also bad for the nation’s soul was a change of mind. Ideas have consequences and today’s government is one of them.

The Constitution’s framers believed that individuals are endowed with natural rights essential to the pursuit of happiness and that governments are instituted to secure those rights, not to secure happiness. But life in this commercial republic has not been conducive to an ethos of limits, of any sort. It had been hoped that potentially disruptive passions might be tamed by being diverted from factional politics into commerce. It had been hoped that dangerous energies would be sublimated in wealth-creation and acquisition. But what was to prevent acquisitive people from coming to regard government as just another arena in which they could strive for material well-being? Nothing was to prevent that, because the nation was to abandon the Constitution’s underlying ideas, and because some new ideas were to encourage actively the conception of government as deliverer of material well-being.

In October 1932, the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee said, "I have . . . described the spirit of my program as a ‘new deal,’ which is plain English for a changed concept of the duty and responsibility of government toward economic life." Said Franklin Roosevelt, "Government has a final responsibility for the well-being of its citizens." Thus was the final responsibility for much of life removed from private life to the public sector—and to the banks of the Potomac. And thus was the "well-being" of the citizen defined with reference to material conditions, and without reference to the citizen’s character, or virtues.

In his second inaugural address, FDR spoke of government’s responsibilities toward "the one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad and ill-nourished." Toward the end of his presidency he claimed for government a responsibility that would still further enlarge its sphere. In his January 1944 State of the Union message he avowed a government "duty" to establish "an American standard of living higher than ever before known," and he said: "We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people—whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth—is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed or insecure."

This was a summons to permanent discontent on the part of citizens and government. This was the bestowing on government of a roving commission to define civic health solely in terms of the material standard of living, yet also to add to the growing list of citizens’ entitlements an entitlement to a mental state—a sense of security. Roosevelt said political rights would no longer suffice to insure "equality in the pursuit of happiness," so there must be a "second Bill of Rights." It would include rights to "a useful and remunerative job, " "adequate" food, clothing, and recreation, "good" education, "decent" homes, a "decent" living for farmers, "adequate" medical care, and a right to freedom from "unfair competition" and from "the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment."

All these rights, and myriad others that would be enumerated as the years rolled by, were necessary, Roosevelt said, because "necessitous men are not free men." Therefore government’s new task would be nothing less than the conquest of necessity. And so, twenty years later, in 1964, at the Democratic convention, the presidential nomination was accepted by a man who had been in Washington since Roosevelt was president and who planned to complete Roosevelt’s project—the elimination of necessity from Americans’ lives. Lyndon Johnson said to the 1964 Convention: "This Nation—this generation—in this hour, has man’s first chance to build the Great Society—a place where the meaning of man’s life matches the marvels of man’s labor." It was going to be hard to top that entitlement—the entitlement to meaningfulness.

But twenty years after that, the Democratic Party gave its presidential nomination to Walter Mondale, perhaps the last nominee to adhere to New Deal liberalism, or at least the last not to disguise his adherence. In his concession statement after losing 49 states, Mondale said his thoughts were with all those in need of caring government, including " the poor, the unemployed, the elderly, the handicapped, the helpless, and the sad." Yes, the sad. Sadness, too, like necessity, qualified as a public concern.

Now, how did it happen that liberalism annihilated all sense of limits on government’s responsibilities and competence? James Q. Wilson has said that New Deal liberalism was concerned only—only!—with who gets what, when, where, and how, but liberalism in its new phase was concerned with who thinks what, who acts when, who lives where, and who feels how. Especially if you feel insecure. Or sad.

In President Johnson’s 1965 speech at Howard University, which adumbrated the rationale for what has come to be called affirmative action, he said "men are shaped by their world." That is certainly true. Johnson also said people are shaped by "a hundred unseen forces." That also is true. But what was new was the idea that government could and should master all forces, the unseen and the seen, and, for that matter, should master "the world." The planted axiom was that because government frames society, government is complicit in, and hence morally responsible for, all social outcomes, and should make them come out right.

But this notion erases the very distinction on which classical liberalism—the liberalism of Locke and the American Revolution—was founded, the distinction between the public and the private spheres of life. On this distinction, freedom depends. Never mind. Government set out to "level the playing field." That recurring phrase is revealing: playing fields are leveled by bulldozers—which are not nice emblems of government.

The result of government’s equalizing aspirations is a paradox—power wielded by elites claiming expertise in the manufacture of equality. In its attempt to equalize "well-being," liberalism exalted one virtue—compassion. And compassion is a capacious concept. It can mean the prevention or amelioration of pain, of discomfort, of insecurity, or even of sadness. However, the frustration of desires is uncomfortable, and can make people sad. So compassionate government must toil for the satisfaction of all desires. If a desire unfulfilled is painful, or even a discomfort, fulfilling that desire is a duty of compassionate government. Such government believes that the pain of unfulfilled desires makes fulfilling the desires necessary. So the desires are upgraded to necessities. People suffering disappointed desires are therefore necessitous people, and, according to Franklin Roosevelt, necessitous people are not free.

Now, what moderation, what temperance, what restraint can there be in government animated by the idea that freedom, understood as emancipation from necessity, is the gift of comprehensively compassionate government? Such government has metastasized recklessly, and conservatism has risen on the tide of reaction against such government’s hubris and overreaching. But life in this target-rich environment has been a bit too easy for conservatism. With so many lurid faults to liberalism, conservatism has not had to ask itself some hard questions about what it is prepared to tell people that people would rather not be told.

Again, limited government cannot be attained by getting the judiciary to put the political branches on a short leash. The judiciary will not do that, and conservatives should not incite the judiciary to an even more imperial role than it already has seized. Limited government can only be attained by shifting the shiftable sands of public opinion. So the central political problem for conservatives is to get the public to consent to government that censors their desires, refusing to fulfill many of them.

However, in order for popular government to be strong enough to say "no" to popular desires, it must be respected. And if our constitutional government is to be respected, the Constitution must be regarded as something more, something grander than a mere framework for competing forms of willfulness. The conservative agenda of governmental restraint depends on government having the strength that comes from respect. And respect is never accorded to the servile.

So conservatives must drop their populist rhetoric about making government more "responsive." And they must abandon their populist posture, which has them living with their ears to the ground. As Churchill said, it is hard to look up to someone in that position.

Now that conservatives are convinced that they are riding a wave of anti-government opinion, it is comfortable for conservatives to think their mission is merely to remove impediments to popular opinion. However, their real mission is (in the language of The Federalist) to "enlarge and refine" opinion. Is that an elitist thought? Of course. But the question, now as always, is not whether elites shall rule, but which elites. Republics rely on the principle of representation, which is that the people do not decide issues, they decide who shall decide. And they decide by elections, not by drawing lots. Elections, unlike lotteries, are searches for certain special and scarce attributes. The attributes of worthy representatives involve more than a willingness to represent the public merely by re-presenting the public’s opinions back to itself.

Representation, properly practiced, involves responsibilities entailed by this fact: Public opinion rarely really exists independent of government actions and deliberations. Conservatives may be most comfortable taking the anti-constitutional position that politics is just the task of conforming policies to a particular set of interests. But if that is what they think, then all that distinguishes them from liberals is the interests on whose behalf they want government to be "responsive."

Is there a tension between the idea of government based on consent, and the idea of representation somewhat independent of opinion? Of course there is. But that tension is built into our regime; it is constitutional tension. The tension is inherent in the idea of popular government operating at a constitutional distance from the populace that legitimizes government by its consent. The tension is inherent in the idea that the deliberations of representative government will "refine and enlarge" the public mind. The tension is inherent in the idea of constitutional government as a formative experience—government as both agent and shaper of the people.

Our nation had a founding moment, which means it is founded on more than inertia. Our nation emerged not from forces obscured by the mists of the past, but from a clear, public act of choosing. Of the correctness of their choice, the Founders were breathtakingly confident. Think about this. The First Amendment forbids the establishment of religion because the Founders thought that religious truth was unknowable and so must remain an open question. But the Constitution guarantees the establishment of republican governments in all the states because the Founders considered the best form of government a closed question for our open society.

One measure of a political philosophy’s seriousness is what it requires of its adherents. Conservatives today are required to tell people that they should b e formed by respect for the Constitution. That is, they should be formed for a life of choosing not to choose all that government can offer, because those offerings come at a cost to the virtues of independence and moderation.

Which brings us back to what may be the cultural contradiction of conservatism: Conservatism depends on eliciting from citizens a public-spirited self-denial. But that is not easily elicited in a commercial republic of the sort conservatism celebrates, where individualism enjoys maximum scope for private pursuits.

Public-spirited self-denial can only be elicited by a conservatism standing for more than the sum of the demands of the groups in its coalition; it can only be elicited by respect for the Constitution, and hence for the virtues of self-reliance and self-restraint that our polity presupposes. As today’s conservative party struggles to develop a constitutional vocabulary for infusing self-government with self-restraint, it should remember this: The party first became a national factor because of one man’s refusal to accept popular sovereignty as a complete expression of the formative project of American politics. That is, the Republican Party’s intellectual pedigree traces directly to Lincoln’s denial that Kansans could choose to have slaves.

Lincoln’s noble insistence was that a great continental nation could be, indeed had to be, a single moral community. Conservatism’s task today is to demonstrate that the dignity of constitutional government depends on restraints of a sort that do not come easily to conservatives, or any other Americans. And these restraints will not come automatically or spontaneously from institutional arrangements—from federalism, or judicial review. The restraints requisite for limited government, and hence requisite for the citizens’ virtues that republican government presupposes, will come only as expressions of a thoughtful reverence for their nation’s founding, a reverence that not only honors the memory of the Founders but is thoughtful in understanding their principles.

The search for restraint is an American constant. It is a search in which liberalism is not helpful. Liberalism was born when the primary enemies of freedom were forces of order—oppressive governments and established churches. Hence liberalism’s breezy faith that the good life would flourish when the last king had been strangled in the entrails of the last priest. Today we know it is not that simple; we know that the good life is menaced by forces of disorder, and that big government has become one of those forces.

Fortunately, conservatism is on the case in the 1990s. We shall see if conservatism can give constitutional dignity to its message. One thing already is clear. In the 1990s, as in the 1850s and the 1790s, America cannot be accused of living an unexamined life. The exhilaration, and the essential goodness of our politics flow from the fact that we had a founding moment, presided over by thoughtful men. Their reflections resulted in documents—the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—the construing of which will drive our national conversation as long as we are recognizably the nation they founded. And we shall long endure.

But about all this I have talked long enough. So, practicing what I have preached about restraint, I shall now subside, remembering the cautionary story of Jim Kern and his manager. Kern was a pitcher for the Chicago White Sox. Once when his manager came to the mound to remove him from the game, Kern said, "But skipper, I’m not tired." To which the manager replied, "Jim, I know you’re not tired, but our outfielders are."

With gratitude to the American Enterprise Institute for this opportunity to tire you out, I thank you for hearing me out.

George F. Will is the recipient of the AEI Francis Boyer Award for 1995.