The Conservative Sensibility
The Conservative Sensibility
March 2020
I first encountered George Will not through his columns but through his appearance as a contributor on ABC’s This Week with David Brinkley. Most pundits talk over their time or ramble. Will never did. He was clear, succinct and would often say more in two minutes than the rest of the panel combined. This prompted me to read his columns and what I found there was a mosaic of conservatism. Not a full picture but pieces and parts that combined to create a whole. As an avid reader, and TV viewer of George F Will, I awaited The Conservative Sensibility the way a Star Wars fan awaited The Force Awakens. In many ways this book exceeded expectations because it is far more than just a treatise on Conservative thinking but a full blooded history lesson on the founding of the American Republic. Reading Will I often feel like Salieri and Mozart. I am smart enough to see the genius but not smart enough to replicate.
It always seemed like a waste that Will would turn his considerable intellect towards subjects such as baseball, Pulitzers notwithstanding. That is why The Conservative Sensibility is so relevant. In an age of the Internet delivering news in real time, politics by tweet, and with traditional news outlets morphed into op ed sections, Will can appear out of fashion. Though in 600 pages of text he never once mentions Trump, the book is very much about current times. One of the consistent themes of the book is the growth of the “fourth” branch of government, the vast structure enabled by an over mighty executive and Congress that has abrogated its Constitutional responsibilities.
If this book does nothing else, it provides the core principle upon which modern American conservatism stands: “What do we seek to conserve? The proper answer is concise but deceptively simple: We seek to conserve the American Founding. What, however does it mean to conserve an event-or, more precisely, a congeries of event-that occurred almost 250 years ago? This book is my attempt to answer that question by showing the continuing pertinence of the Founding principles, and by tracing many of our myriad discontents to departures from those principles.”
Will proceeds to divide his book into sections that discuss the Founders vision and how the progressives delineated from the original course. Each of these chapters in and of themselves could be a small book or a large essay on Will’s vision of and for the Republic. For those readers of Will’s opinions and assertions over the years, this will be familiar ground.
In one of the more controversial aspects of the book, Will makes a spirited defense for the Judiciary. He also makes one of the most poignant statements in the book, “And governments are instituted to ‘secure’ our pre-existing rights, not to bestow them. As (political philosopher Randy Barnett insists), the great divide in America today is between the those who believe, as the Founders did, that ‘first come rights then come government’ and those who believe, as progressives do, that ‘first comes government and then comes rights.’” Later in the same chapter Will takes on one of the prized figures of the current conservative movement; Antonin Scalia. Will argues that the role of the judiciary is to be “active,” a word anathema to the school of originalists championed by Scalia before his death in 2016. As Will notes there is a group that “believe the judiciary has been too accommodating to legislatures that are too responsive to majorities.” By this Will means that legislatures, whether at the local, state or the US Congress, may create laws but that Judicial Review must determine whether the laws are constitutional not just in terms of the Constitution itself, but also in the spirit of the Declaration of Independence. If natural rights are threatened by those laws, the judiciary must serve as the protector of those rights, even in the face of popular majorities. This argument gets at the heart of those first three words “We the People.” Will believes that the people are individuals with their rights as opposed to people in their collectives. As usual Will’s logic is hard to challenge even if he does refute Bork and Scalia.
Later in his chapter entitled “Political Economy” Will provides the type of defense of capitalism that is weakly held by too many on the right and nowhere to be seen on the left. “One of contemporary conservatism’s services to society has been to refocus attention on an elemental fact that the Founders understood: Society is a crucible of character formation, and a capitalist society does not merely make us better off, it makes us better.” Will argues, and I strongly agree, that governmental entities have the opposite affects. The organizational life inherent in an ultimately social creature, disappears with too much government intrusion. Since the growth of government we have seen the destruction of churches, civic organizations, and lately, even the Boy Scouts. Later in the same chapter Will illustrates what so many progressives miss. The progressive would use the power of the government to fix inequalities whether those perceived inequalities are based on wealth, rights or opportunities. “Today what Jackson denounced and Madison feared is called rent-seeking and explains modern Washington, including the fact that five of the nation’s ten most affluent counties are in the Washington area.” And finally Will makes a very clear and necessary distinction about government funds. For the first 130 years of the Republic, big spending was in service to future generations at the expense of the current one. Our spending today is in service to the current generation at the expense of future ones.
In his “conditions” vs. “opportunities” argument, WIll believes that more than just opportunity needs to be considered, conditions must as well and then proceeds to use a Lyndon Johnson speech to back up his words. But how does one measure “condition?” For example would a male African American raised by two wealthy lawyers be better positioned to succeed than a white male raised by a poor single parent. And if the black man were a woman how would that change the condition. Does a Cuban American have a better condition than a Mexican American – again both assuming same genders, parental situation? And what about education, where they were raised and were they only children or had to compete with several siblings. It is this kind of sex, class and gender gymnastics that fuel the progressive identity and inequality narrative and it is interesting that Will challenges the condition, meaning identities, arguments head on, “ politics that is now so much at the heart of progressive thought. “The premise of such politics is that identities, and rights, should derive from group membership, and special rights are owed to grievance groups composed of America’s myriads and ever multiplying victims.”
The chapter relating to education paints a clear contrast with what should be the ultimate goal of education, “enable students to become critical and independent thinkers” against what actually exists today, “produce students who take their place in history’s vanguard.” In the progressive canon, history is an arc from the bad (racism, sexism, imperialism, nationalism, and classism) to the good which is an ill-defined utopian world. Conservatives would hue towards an integrated society in which the opportunities and the conditions are roughly equal. But for a progressive what does victory actually look like. If African Americans, lesbians or trans gender people are protected, than what does equality actually look like when compared with a straight white male. Progressives are convinced that their journey will reach the utopian end goal but cannot really define what that is. Conservatives see the end goal but would rather create the environment of critically thinking individual to make their own way to get there. Will goes onto to rue the “gangs” of identity that now seem to have as many terms as people in the Republic. In 2019, I attended a business roundtable and actually heard one of the panelist use the term “hetero-normative.” This was understood to be a white straight person but then have to assume that there are homo-normatives, hetero-abnormals, and everything in between. Even the currently in vogue term LBGTQI implies not the cohesive group that writers and marketers imply but rather six different identities an several more sub groups besides. Where in all of this group ID is there commonality of America?
And it is in his chapter of education that Will gets to the heart of the purpose for the Conservative Historian project. “America does this by indulging in the pleasure of known as presentism, which is the practice of judging the past by the standards of the present.” Within this context Jefferson, and his Declaration, is rendered useless because Jefferson owned slaves. Will goes onto to write, quoting historian David Harlan “’history as moral reflection’ has given way to history as cultural unmasking.” Part of this is the insertion of progressive ideology and part of this is the system itself. No history professor will be awarded tenure if he actually wrote of praise of America. Rather they have to find new ways to devalue the republic.
In the final chapter entitled “Borne Back” Will writes, “The truly conservative sensibility is always alert to the fact that time is, as Cervantes said, the ‘devourer and destroyer of all things.’” Will does not end with a ringing call to arms but rather…”pessimism.” Over the past 6 elections from 1992 through 2020, the left has provided an ever growing list of deliverables that must be done in the name of the Republic so that the bend of the arc of history may continue. Universal health care, free child care, free education, social equality, guaranteed income, and a Green New Deal. How to pay for this, and whether it will actually work are secondary. Rather the goal is the thing. In the face of all this loftiness, a little, or a lot of pessimism is warranted. And here will provides a clear take on the government and public opnion, “Today citizens receive more than ever from government, and government receives less respect than ever from them.”
If there is a criticism to the The Conservative Sensibility it is in its mere size. Will proves his points so well that it is sometimes unnecessary to continue additional anecdotes and citations. Even Pulitzer Prize winners can edited for compactness. There are few sentient and sane individuals who would question Will’s scholarship but sometimes, less is more.
One of the strengths about Will is that certain of his political philosophies have changed over the past 50 years but not his convictions. Will has gone through various periods, particularly with the retirement of David Brinkley and the election of 2016, where his brand of conservatism, once feted is no longer welcome. He does not seem to care either way. In that he is living his values in that the nature of being a conservative often means one is the outside looking in and only in certain circumstances is that role reversed. As noted above, this book is as much history lesson as political philosophy, as all great philosophies should be. In his final statement, Will further captures the ethos not just of a Conservative Sensibility, but of a Conservative History, “We cannot escape the challenge of living by the exacting principles of our Founding, so we should bear on, boats against many modern currents, borne back ceaselessly toward a still-usable past.”
This book is a must read in the conservative canon.