George Will Still Believes in Classical Liberalism.

Three years ago, George Will, America's foremost conservative newspaper columnist, officially quit the GOP over its acquiescence to Donald Trump. "This is not my party," he said then. It's even less so now.

Yet the erudite author and television commentator is not ready to give up on conservatism just yet. In his career-punctuating new book The Conservative Sensibility (Hachette Books), Will makes the forceful argument that the natural rights-based classical liberalism of James Madison is the antidote to authoritarianism found on both the Trumpian right and the progressive left.

In June, Reason's Matt Welch spoke with Will about the importance of rehabilitating America's withered constitutional architecture.

Q: Why, In 2019, do we need to be talking about the ideological battle between the legacies of James Madison and Woodrow Wilson?

A: Madison said that natural rights come first and government comes second, and that government's role is to protect natural rights. Woodrow Wilson said Madison's constitutional architecture, with its Newtonian equilibrium between the branches of government, was fine when there were 4 million of us and 80 percent of us lived within 20 miles of Atlantic tidewater. But he said we have reached a point of enlightenment and scientific knowledge that we don't need to worry about factions anymore. So when Wilson said we needed "more nimble government," one that can act with a force that is simply impossible under Madison's architecture, it flowed from that that we had to have presidential government.

Q: People have come to think you can jettison the nasty parts of Wilson's Progressive model and keep just the good stuff.

A: Alexis de Tocqueville said that historical amnesia is a systemic problem of democracies, which are forward-looking at all times. We decided, as you say, to keep the good parts of Progressivism, but the good parts of Progressivism bear a family resemblance to the bad parts, which is a sort of overbearingness.

Q: Your book talks about a lot of heroes of libertarianism, but it's called The Conservative Sensibility. Why is that?

A: Because American conservatism, rightly understood, is the legatee of classical liberalism. American liberals turned on their own legacy of limited government and resistance to authority, and conservatives like Barry Goldwater took that over by giving us a kind of American West conservatism. Conservatives who say they want to "make America great again" have imported European...