Philippe Boulet-Gercourt has a long article in the French magazine L’Obs (formerly Le Nouvel Observateur) entitled “The Ten Sins of Hillary.” He quotes me saying, “I see her as someone very sensitive to what is possible and what is not, you watch her thinking in real-time, seeking the right answer that takes all the constraints into account. … Her answers can be complex because she attempts to answer honestly. [She’s] a political junkie and, in a way, it is a mark of sincerity!” (I was interviewed in English, my words were translated into French, and here I translate back.)

I am open to objections to what I said. First, it could be that the center-left in the US imposes these constraints on itself unnecessarily, to its detriment. For instance, if you’re a “serious” politician, you never say that we should float bonds to pay for infrastructure. That is what economists would recommend, but you don’t say it because it’s supposed to be politically impossible to advocate borrowing and spending. By censoring yourself, you narrow the range of what actually is possible, and you come across as pervasively dishonest because it’s clear that you’re for things that you won’t defend. Arguably, HRC is Exhibit One of that phenomenon. Second, one could assemble a list of specific prevarications or evasions from her long career. Third, maybe people don’t trust her because of her gender.

But I still think that genuine efforts to be realistic can look dishonest, especially in contrast to passionate statements that pay no heed to constraints. In January 2003, I posted on this blog about my day’s work with a class of kids who were conducting an oral history project on the desegregation of Prince George’s County (MD) schools. They were all students of color, and they were exploring (with me) how their school had been de jure white until Brown v Board of Education, was then integrated for a time, and is now diverse but minus a substantial white population.

One interviewee [had been] the first African American student at the school. (He was still the only one when he graduated three years later). He said: “Initially I was actually hoping that it wouldn’t work. My parents had said that if there was a lot of violence, we would back up. … Instead of violence, there were three years of hostility.” His main motivation was to be “part of something bigger,” the Civil Rights Movement. He later became a successful chemical engineer. I found him enormously appealing—and easily understood what he meant in his understated way, but the kids took his reticence about his own emotions as evasiveness.

He wouldn’t say much about how he personally felt about integrating the school. Our next speaker was a current member of the County Council, a white man who was formerly a civil rights lawyer and who spoke very passionately about his commitment to integration. I was mildly suspicious of him; the kids loved him. Our reactions were different, probably not because of age or other demographics characteristic but just because assessments of character are subjective. But I do think it’s possible that I was right to trust the speaker who was guarded and private more than the guy who said exactly what his audience wanted to hear. The question is whether HRC faces the same problem.

Federal Judge Judge Thomas D. Schroeder has upheld a whole series of voting laws in North Carolina that, in my view, create barriers to participation. The plaintiffs included the NAACP, the League of Women Voters, and the United States Department of Justice. My colleague Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg and I submitted expert testimony about the impact of the laws on youth. We were both deposed in the case, and I testified in federal court last summer. I don’t have an informed comment on the judge’s decision, much of which concerns matters of constitutional interpretation on which I do not claim any expertise. It’s a disappointing result, but the struggle for equitable and accessible voting continues.

Although not a conservative, I have sincere respect for conservative thought, because I think its core insight is human limitation. We human beings are too frail cognitively and morally to change societies wholesale without bad consequences.

You can come to that insight from a religious background, thinking that human beings are sinful but that we receive invaluable guidance from the divine. You can be completely secular, like Friedrich von Hayek, and argue that people lack the cognitive capacity to understand or manipulate something as complicated as a modern society, so we shouldn’t try to manage it centrally. Or you can be a cultural traditionalist, like Edmund Burke, and presume that much trial-and-error is embedded in all local traditions, whereas novel ideas are likely to go wrong, especially when imposed from without or above.

Regardless of your entry point, the conservative premise of human limitation leads to certain biases or tendencies: against central governments, against radical reforms, and in favor of durable constitutions, markets, and common law.

Of course, there is another side to each of those arguments, and I often land on the progressive rather than conservative side. (Just for instance, I don’t think that modern capitalist economies are really distributed systems that avoid top-down control; I think they are disruptive forces run by a few arrogant people.) But the conservative perspective is always worth serious consideration.

By this light, Donald Trump is not only the least conservative candidate in the current field, but the most anti-conservative candidate I can think of in modern American history. His whole argument is against human limitation. He promises that he can make everything radically better by applying his own amazing brainpower. He acknowledges none of the constraints prized by conservatives: religious revelations, cultural norms, constitutional checks, limited government in a mixed economy, or common law. I think his strong support in the primaries underlines the fact that the Republican electorate had become anti-conservative in basic ways, although a genuinely conservative GOP core is horrified by his campaign. As they should be, because he is the diametrical opposite of what is most valuable in conservatism.

See also: What defines conservatism; Edmund Burke would vote Democratic; and the left has become Burkean.