The syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer was interviewed by Bill Kristol as part of Conversations with Bill Kristol, the online interview program featuring videos of in-depth discussion with leading figures in public life.
The Krauthammer-Kristol discussion is fascinating and wide-ranging–on international events spanning from the Cold War to 9/11 and the Obama era; on life in the 1960s, growing up in Canada, and attending medical school; on Judaism, Israel, and his faith about God; and on political philosophy.
On the latter, Krauthammer talks about his time at Oxford, when he studied political philosophy and found himself repelled by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and attracted to John Stuart Mill. (Mill and Isaiah Berlin were significant shaping influences on Krauthammer’s political philosophy.) While liberally oriented as a young man, he was “cleansed of romanticism very early on.” Krauthammer went on to say this:
the interesting thing is you end up with this non-romantic, non-messianic view of human nature, exactly where the Founders started. And that’s what attracted me … I didn’t know a thing about America, that’s all self-taught, that came later when I was in college, and when I was at Oxford. But the Founding to me as a result of that, the Founding documents were enormously attractive. It wasn’t like I learned them rotely as a child, I discovered them later as an adult, and that’s exactly the kind of unromantic, unsentimental view of human nature, of the weaknesses, of the way you construct outside institutions to contain, to channel what is ultimately selfishness into creating a system that would balance itself, and moderate itself.
This nicely summarizes what is perhaps the most underappreciated quality of the Founders, which was their grasp of the nature of the human person. The journalist Walter Lippmann said at the core of every social, political, and economic system is a picture of human nature. It is America’s great gift that the Founders got the picture of human nature basically right–our capacity for moral excellence and depravity, the fact that most of us live fairly decent but unexceptional lives, and the awareness that within every human heart lies competing and sometimes contradictory moral impulses. The genius of the Federalist Founders, and James Madison in particular, was to create political institutions that channeled human nature in a constructive way. Until they came along, it had never really been done, or at least it had never been done nearly as well.
It was their unromantic, unsentimental, unflinching, and profoundly accurate view of human beings, and the system of government it gave rise to, that drew Krauthammer to the American Founders and informed and reinforced his own understanding of the world in which we live. This all becomes clear in a marvelous interview focused on what a friend of mine calls a love for the beauty of deep things.
