The changing George F. Will
Jack Elbaum
“Change is life’s only constant,” veteran Washington Post columnist George Will quipped in the introduction of his bestselling volume on baseball, Men At Work. And how true that has turned out to be, not only for Will but also for the conservative intellectual tradition to which he has dedicated more than 50 years of his life.
I had the chance to sit down with Will earlier this year, and we spoke about his decadeslong intellectual transformation. When considered within the context of the conservative movement’s own evolution over that same period, Will’s journey is equal parts challenging and insightful, leaving us with yet more questions than answers.
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In 1983, Will published a robust defense of “strong-government conservatism” in his acclaimed book, Statecraft as Soulcraft: What Government Does. Based on a series of lectures he gave at Harvard University two years prior, Will concisely argued that law is not merely concerned with external behavior but rather with the “inner life of man.” He posited that “a real conservatism” is one that uses government to “cultivate the best persons and the best in persons.” This is done through legislating morality, a practice that Will wrote the state “should do more often.” And no domain of policy was to be immune, whether it was social or economic. It all should act as a mode of soulcraft (“something that shapes and modifies one’s soul or core being”).
But it is not that he simply wanted government to engage in soulcraft. Rather, he believed it was inevitable. The subtitle of Statecraft as Soulcraft, Will noted in our conversation, is What Government Does — “not what government should do but what government cannot help but do, which is have a shaping effect on the soul.” The relevant question, then, became what laws would have the best molding effect on the soul rather than if it is the government’s proper role to mold it in the first place.
Statecraft as Soulcraft, Will explained at the time, was supposed to serve as “an amendment to current conservatism.” He told me that he thought “conservatism at that time was a little bit too much Milton Friedman,” and he wanted to emphasize that “there was more to looking at politics than looking at economic growth, GDP, and happy consumers.” Additionally, he thought there was a deep defect in America’s founding philosophy: It was too focused on constraining self-interest, among the lowest common denominators of human passions, and not enough on nurturing virtue through law.
But with age, Will came to believe he may have been mistaken in his younger years. His 2019 tome, The Conservative Sensibility, corrects for what he saw as his prior errors.
First and foremost, Will has a new perspective on the American founding and, by extension, what he sees the job of conservatives to be. To address the second topic first: It is to conserve the philosophy of the American founding and, in so doing, be “the custodians of the classical liberal tradition.”
Will’s retreat from “strong-government conservatism” and toward classical liberalism, he told me, entails a far more “jaundiced view of government.” He arrived at such a view by seeing firsthand, over many decades, the ways in which expansive government power is used to enrich those involved with it. “Elizabeth Warren has a firm grip on half a point,” Will said: “Five of the 10 wealthiest counties in the United States by per capita income are in the Washington area, which is a lot considering we don’t make anything except laws, regulations, and trouble.” It can only be explained, he said, by the trillions of dollars “sloshing” through the area, being diverted every which way with significant influence from “well-funded, well-lawyered interest groups.” In other words, big government means big trouble. Seeing the repeated folly of government intervention and expansion allowed him to reevaluate his criticism of the American founding as not being ambitious enough. He has seen what government ambition means in practice, and he wants nothing to do with it.
Intimately connected to this was his shift on economics. The market-skeptical Will of 1983 underestimated, he told me, “the soulcraft effect of capitalism.” The Conservative Sensibility noted that a market society “does not merely make us better off, it makes us better.” How? He said, “It produces a certain kind of citizen and a certain kind of society. The shorthand is, it produces a polite society, a cooperative society, a society that doesn’t just presuppose trust, it enkindles trust.” This means a laissez-faire approach to economics actually promotes virtue. These days, “I take my Milton Friedman straight and on the rocks,” Will said, underscoring the shift with his characteristic wit.
What, then, in Will’s thinking has stayed the same? He believes today, just as he did in 1983, that government shapes the inner soul of the individual person and that soulcraft is the inevitable consequence of statecraft. Consequently, the phrase “value-neutral government” is a “contradiction in terms.” But as a practical matter, on general grounds of rule utilitarianism, Will believes a more “hands-off approach” results in more favorable outcomes. He came to believe the spontaneous order of an open society promotes the virtues he sees as crucial. But by achieving those virtues through only limited intervention, it is far more likely to succeed.
Succinctly, the George Will of 1983 is not the George Will of 2023.
Nor was the conservative movement of 1983 the conservative movement of 2023. After all, Will’s shift did not happen in a vacuum. In the same period that he went from a Burkean to a Madisonian, the rest of the conservative movement had its own transformation that was drastically different in kind.
In the early Reagan years, Will said, the conservative movement could be characterized by the beliefs that “the ’60s and ’70s had been full of self-refuting experiments” and that “if government would get out of the way of the creative energies of the American people, [then] wonderful things were going to happen.” There was a type of optimism that was at least partially a product of Reagan’s personality. Matthew Continetti pointed out in his book The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism that Reagan “believed in the innate goodness of people,” “had an uncanny ability to shrug off bad news,” and “distilled his approach in simple, clarifying language.”
But that era is now long gone. Today, there is “an itch on the part of conservatives to match the progressives in using government to advance the conservative agenda by punishing the liberal agenda,” Will said. They want to emulate the liberals in “gain[ing] power so they can wield it and wield it with a firm smack.” There is also a move toward interventionist economic policy among the ascendant “New Right” coalition, aimed at rebuilding Middle America from the top down — a position not substantially different in kind from that of liberals.
There are various compelling reasons that could explain this ideological shift. In his book Alienated America, the Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney detailed how the collapse of a vigorous civil society, a collapse he argued was brought on by the dual threats of hyperindividualism and hypercentralization, led to, well, alienation. Churches and other community institutions emptied out. Fewer people were getting married and having children. Anxiety, depression, drug addiction, and suicide rose. The blame was put at the feet of “the elites,” whether it was deserved or not, and therefore, a populist backlash became almost inevitable.
Will immediately shoots down the idea there was anything inevitable about the path the conservative movement took. When asked why he believed this shift has taken place, he said that “we’d have to have a deep dive into the political sociology” of the period since 2000. He added that no matter the cause, we can understand the modern Republican Party as being the party of people “who resent being condescended to,” are upset with the “allocation of status” in American society, and “found in Donald Trump a megaphone, someone who spoke to that feeling.” While Will did not specifically outline his views on the root causes, embedded in that answer seems to be an adequate explanation for the rise of the “New Right” that itself is not substantially different than Carney’s: It tries to address the phenomena that produced such resentment. The problem is it may also perpetuate that sense of victimhood in rhetoric while, despite its promises, having no realistic solution for it in policy. However, classical liberalism does not truly have an answer either. It is not clear how the virtues cultivated within the market, for example, do much to promote family, religion, or community. But any real alternative to the “New Right” must have something to say about the phenomena causing its ascent.
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It is clear, then, that both Will and the conservative movement have undergone significant transformations since the early 1980s yet ended up in quite different places. Will came to believe the dynamism inherent to an open society must be a cornerstone of a distinctly American conservative philosophy. Many others have moved in the exact opposite direction, closer philosophically to where Will was in 1983.
This leaves us with the question of how conservatives with an aversion to the rising intellectual currents, and dominant political ones, of today’s conservative movement ought to move forward and approach this particular moment. Will had some “good news about the bad news.” “The bad news,” he said, “is that Donald Trump showed how one person with no guardrails, one person with no inhibitions … can change the tone of the country and raise up a cohort that fills an echo chamber of people like him.” What this means on the flip side, though, is that “maybe a really much better kind of person can have a much better kind of effect.” The basis for such an idea lies in the fact that we have a “presidential-centric politics now.” As such, the president has an incredible ability not only to reflect the attitude of the country back on itself but actually shape it as well. In fact, just as government policy cannot help but shape the soul of the individual person, so too a president cannot help but shape the attitude and tone of the country.
I asked Will if he had any guidance for young conservatives in navigating this moment. In an age in which almost 40% of Gen Zers get their news from Instagram, Will’s message is simple: “Read the great texts: Tocqueville and the Federalist Papers.” And, maybe most importantly, “If you want to know basically what America is about, you have to immerse yourself in Abraham Lincoln.” The great insight that emerges from Lincoln’s thought and career, Will contended, is that “America is not about a process, majority rule. It is about a condition, liberty.” And to the extent people forget that certain questions, those concerning fundamental liberties, are “beyond the reach of majorities,” they forget what the substantive character of America is supposed to be.
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Will’s insight into the best ways to move forward is crucial. It would do us well to internalize them. Yet the prospects of Republican voters choosing an alternative to Trump, or there being a true renaissance of young people reading the “great texts,” seem to be getting worse, not better. It is one thing to diagnose what has gone wrong and tell people to do the opposite. It is an entirely different thing to have specific, actionable ideas on how to inspire people to do those things. It is not clear whether Will, or really anybody, for that matter, has brought such ideas to the fore. This is quite concerning, as are many of the other social trends of our era, but only time will tell how things will play out.
We already know “change is life’s only constant.” And there is no reason to think the next 40 years will be any different in that respect than the last 40. But one of the final reflections Will offered in our conversation was that “in a democracy, it’s [a system of] persuasion, and therefore, it requires patience.” And so, as he eloquently wrote at the end of The Conservative Sensibility, “we should beat on, boats against many modern currents, borne back ceaselessly toward a still-usable past.”
Jack Elbaum was a summer 2023 Washington Examiner fellow.