George F. Will's lamentations on 'Conservatism', in the pages of Politico.
Political Realist comments.
After reading Mr. Will’s interview at Politico:
Headline: Does ‘Conservatism’ Actually Mean Anything Anymore?
Sub-headline: George Will on the hijacking of conservatism, how politics became obsessed with things that politics cannot fix, and why he didn’t hear about the Tulsa massacre until 2020.
You’d be hard pressed to think of too many people more warmly ensconced in the “Washington establishment” than George Will.
Over the span of 48 years at the Washington Post, he has authored some 6,000 or so columns during 10 presidencies, won a Pulitzer Prize, and written 16 books — his latest, American Happiness and Discontents, is out this week. For at least a generation, he has been the most prominent intellectual conservative voice in mainstream media, so well-known that he was once the topic of a joke on “Seinfeld.” A week prior to President-elect Barack Obama’s inauguration, Will hosted the Illinois senator for dinner and had him drink from a cup that once belonged to Abraham Lincoln; dinner with Will was the ultimate outsider’s welcome to Washington — few could give a similar establishment-approved imprimatur.
And yet, in 2021, George Will is in some ways a man on the outside looking in. Yes, he still has one of the most prominent columns in one of the world’s most powerful newspapers. Yes, he is still part of the Washington scene. But politics have changed, and the intellectual conservatism he embodies is without an obvious political home.
The Trump years, Will told POLITICO in an interview this week, “made me realize that conservatism was a label that could be hijacked.” Conservatism, to Will, is a whole ethos with a proud intellectual tradition in American life. What it means to conserve, he says, is the American founding.
“That’s conservatism,” said Will. “And along comes Mr. Trump, who says, ‘No, conservatism is beating up on the Mexicans,’ or whatever he says.
…
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/09/17/future-politics-conservatism-george-will-512308
Patience is required for this Will political ramble! What is the ‘Conservatism’ that Mr. Will laments? The Reader just might begin with the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts in ‘64 and ‘65, that saw the Dixiecrat migration into the Republican Party: those facts would, and are not, a part of what Mr. Will reimagines ‘Conservatism’ to be. In the Will Political Universe the fact that Eisenhower sent troops into Little Rock, via the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board ,aren’t relevant to his lament! Or the ‘Free Speech’ movement at Berkley in 1964, and the great Mario Savio. Or the career of the bumptious S.I. Hayakawa! Reagan was a political beneficiary of this ‘unrest’.
The demonstrations against the Vietnam War were simply a reification of the ‘Left’s’ political disloyalty. Treason against the American Empire cemented in the ‘Conservative Mind’ that the Civil Rights Era unleashed a toxin.
One thing that politicians and other members of America’s Political Class can count on, is that Politico will treat them to the deference they feel entitled too. All the curious reader needs to do is read this 2004 essay by Will:
This essay titled 'An Optimist's Legacy', that sings the praises of Margaret Thatcher, Pope John Paul II and Reagan. Mr. Will being a ‘Conservative’, whose history made to measure, is predicated upon self-serving political memory, or to exercise a much needed bluntness, political fiction. He willfully 'forgets' Reagan's use, in both '76 & '80, the racist slur against "Welfare Queens Driving Cadillacs". And his declaration, in his first appearance, after his Convention win, at The Neshoba County Fair where he said 'I believe in States Rights'.
But here is just a part of Will's act of bad faith as regards Reagan:
'An Optimist's Legacy
…
That was true of Reagan, in this sense: He understood that when Americans have a happy stance toward life, confidence flows and good things happen. They raise families, crops, living standards and cultural values; they settle the land, make deserts bloom, destroy tyrannies
…
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/2004/06/06/an-optimists-legacy/8d2a02d7-b9d8-4d7d-bd33-f9d162671ab3/
Underneath all that intellectual garnish, Mr. Will is just another dull-witted apologist/propagandist for Reagan: who was the precursor to the toxic egoism of Trump.
Look to the concatenation of political forces: The Dixiecrat Migration, Neo-Liberalism, and it’s ‘Free Market’ fictions, in all its iterations, The New Democrats utter betrayal of The New Deal, The Contract with America, Obama’s utterly forgotten Simpson-Bowles, produced political monsters across that etiolated political spectrum, a fact that Mr. Will is incapable of confronting!
Will’s praise of Reagan was written for an audience of Readers, that are nostalgic for that ‘Morning in America’ shit that he peddled, while being an unalloyed racist, under an impasto pancake makeup!
Political Realist