David Von Drehle celebrates George Will’s half-century of writing columns for the Washington Post. Three slices:
When George Will left the defeated senator’s office to become a writer, he had taken the measure of the president’s character. As Nixon’s fortunes rapidly sagged and Will’s explosively soared, a compelling new voice on the Washington scene poured enfilading fire on the Watergate White House from the president’s right flank.
“A year ago the reigning philosophy was survival of the fittest, and Mr. Nixon and his agents were feeling remarkably fit,” Will wrote in 1973 as a columnist for National Review, the conservative bible. “Today, Mr. Nixon has all the friends he has earned and deserves.”
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From the beginning, he confounded philosopher Isaiah Berlin’s famous taxonomy of thinkers. According to Berlin, foxlike thinkers know many things. Hedgehog thinkers know one big thing. Will is a crossbreed, neither and both. The many things he knows about — baseball, the Federalist Papers, Supreme Court jurisprudence, Bruce Springsteen, Joan of Arc, gerrymandering, criminal justice, macroeconomics, “the pleasure … of dry martinis at dusk” (really, the list seems endless) — march smartly through his copy thanks to the one big thing that organizes his ideas. He knows that Thomas Jefferson was onto something essential when he wrote that individual humans have certain unalienable rights, and that James Madison was uncommonly astute in constituting a government to protect and serve — but not overwhelm — those rights. With a dollop of Heraclitus mixed in (“Nothing is permanent except change,” which Will sometimes pares down to “nothing lasts”), the essential point emerged. America’s birth of freedom is in eternal tension with the threat of too much government. To preserve the former, one must resist the latter.
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In other words, freedom is a birthright, not a grant from government. A corollary followed close behind: Free people are more likely to improve themselves than to be improved by government initiatives.
Will traced this principle to the English philosopher John Locke and his disciples among the American Founders. Their philosophy — he called it “classical liberalism” in “The Conservative Sensibility” — “is the distinction between the public and the private spheres of life. On this distinction, freedom depends.” Strong and independent courts — another of Will’s foundational commitments — are necessary to defend private life against the whims and excesses of elected branches of government.
The first question for every self-described conservative is: conserving what? This was a hot debate when Will was starting out and is still disputed now. Flavors of conservative thought in the 1960s ran from the hierarchical — even authoritarian — conservatism of a bygone Catholic Europe, to the populist and cultural conservatism of white nationalists. Will chose the libertarian strain of conservative ideas associated with Barry Goldwater, the Arizona senator whose failed presidential bid in 1964 was the fire from which Reagan’s phoenix arose in 1980.
Will rejected the vaguely royalist conservatism epitomized by Russell Kirk and Whittaker Chambers, early influences on National Review, as “throne-and-altar, blood-and-soil nostalgia.” Describing himself as “an amiable, low-voltage atheist,” Will felt government could respect religious faith without preferring religious faith. The conservatism of populists like Patrick Buchanan was even less viable. Populism, Will wrote, was about emotions and movements, which tend to be antithetical to individual human rights.
David Henderson exposes yet another incident of bias from the media. A slice:
But here’s what is misleading: the subhead. It reads, “Fossil-fuel tycoons helped return the president-elect to Washington. Now they are seeking to lock in the use of their products for years to come.”
Wow, I thought. Are they trying to require people to use oil and natural gas? That would suck.
Actually, they aren’t. What they’re actually trying to do, according to Benoit Morenne and Collin Eaton, the story’s authors, is get the U.S. government to quit locking in use of energy not produced directly by oil and natural gas.
Phil Magness exposes yet another incident of bias from intellectuals. Two slices:
“It’s the cleanest, neatnest [sic] operating piece of social machinery I’ve ever seen. It makes me envious.” When Rexford Tugwell, an adviser to President Franklin Roosevelt, wrote these words in 1934, he was not referring to the New Deal programs in his purview. He was recording his thoughts on fascist Italy while awaiting an audience with Benito Mussolini. Tugwell reacted with similar awe upon touring the Soviet Union in 1928, penning an essay urging Americans to reflect on what they might adapt from Josef Stalin’s “experiment.”
For progressive historians who depict the New Deal as a “democratization” of the economy, Tugwell creates an unsettling complication. So do the many other leftist intellectuals who turned to the illiberal regimes of interwar Europe as models of economic planning. When conservative writer Jonah Goldberg assembled those episodes in his 2007 book Liberal Fascism,he struck a raw nerve with progressives. Taking America Back — a book from Yale University Press by David Austin Walsh, currently a postdoctoral researcher at Yale — emerged from a decadeslong fit of spite over Goldberg’s explorations of the undemocratic left.
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To Walsh, [William] Buckley was always a “stalwart defender of white supremacy in America.” This premise leads to a recurring mismatch between Walsh’s narrative and the archival sources he musters. He wants his readers to see “the purge that wasn’t”—a continuum of bigoted cranks in Buckley’s orbit who found themselves excluded only when their antics caused him embarrassment. Instead, Buckley’s letters reveal a genuine distaste for the antisemitic right and half a century of conscious moves to keep it at bay.
As even Walsh concedes, the crackpot elements were stunningly incompetent organizers, belying the notion that they brought any value to Buckley’s supposed “popular front.” [Merwin] Hart’s ineptitude made him a joke, even among other critics of the New Deal. [Russell] Maguire’s mismanagement of The American Mercury tanked the magazine’s reputation within a few years of his acquisition. [Revilo] Oliver destroyed his own academic career. [George Lincoln] Rockwell died at the hands of a fellow Nazi, his cause universally reviled by the public and his life in squalor.
Justin Zuckerman exposes yet another incident of economic ineptitude from the media. A slice:
Did the number of restaurant workers in Washington, D.C., go up after the city voted to increase the minimum wage in a citywide referendum? That’s what The New York Times reporter Priya Krishna claimed in an article that appeared in March, citing figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
She reported that the total number of workers in the industry had increased from 13,690 in 2022 to 14,168 by September of 2023.
These numbers are false. It turns out that Krishna misunderstood the data she was looking at. The chart she linked to in the article presented numbers “in the thousands,” meaning that the actual data were not 14,168 but 14,168,000, which also makes sense because Krishna didn’t realize she was reading national BLS data—not local figures.
