George Will's Road to Serfdom

 George Will argues that American politics is divided between conservatives, “who take their bearings from the individual’s right to a capacious, indeed indefinite, realm of freedom” and progressives “whose fundamental value is the right of the majority to have its way in making rules about which specified liberties shall be respected.” For Will, real conservatives favor an activist judiciary that will aggressively defend our “capacious, indeed indefinite realm of freedom” from the majority.

The distinction here, as the late Carey McWilliams explained, is between those who regard democracy as a means, and those who regard it as an end. Yet McWilliams tells a very different story about this distinction. America, from the beginning, has been a kind of dialectical tension between the democratic and libertarian “voices.” The dominant voice, which we hear in The Federalist, is about securing the conditions of liberty for the free and self-interested individual. The second voice, which originates with our Puritans, is about participatory, egalitarian idealism rooted in the Christian insight about the dignified equality of all creatures.