He has earned a rightful place in the pantheon of American journalism.
He has earned a rightful place in the pantheon of American journalism.
W hen he graced a packed-house university audience with an hour’s enlightenment a few years ago, George Will described his modus operandi thus: “To be open to the stimuli of this endlessly stimulating country, and to understand that there’s a lot more going on in the world than the Iowa caucuses.” For a half century, our country has offered no greater stimulus to our own inquisitiveness than George Will himself.
2024 marks Washington Post readers’ 50th anniversary as the first-crack beneficiaries of his singular wisdom and wit. Some of us, remembering where he got his journalistic training, consider him National Review’s missionary to the heathens. This is also the 50th year in which many of us wonder who out there can rival his contributions to our national understanding, or who might succeed him at the pinnacle of his craft.
Uniquely, Will has epitomized two rare talents: He is at once a genuine scholar and a readable, persuasive popular journalist. He could have excelled had he stayed closeted in the academy, as “merely” a great scholar. Or he could have contented himself simply to be a clever scribbler — as we say, a “pundit,” issuing topical, superficial critiques from a comfortable seat behind the dugout. Instead, he has led a life of constant study and inquiry, sharing what he learns with his readers in prose of exquisite charm and precision.
I can pay to George Will the strongest of compliments to a person of his chosen profession: He has often changed my mind. I submit three examples.
Raised in the American South of the 1950s, I was taught a sanitized, romanticized version of the American Civil War, and of the Confederacy’s most beloved figure, Robert E. Lee. Lee was presented not just in grade-school texts but in a wealth of academic literature as a good man in a bad cause. Then-recent presidents, including Roosevelt and Eisenhower, had lauded and celebrated him.
In one column, Will demolished that image. Summarizing a book we readers would likely never have encountered or taken time to read, he pronounced concise judgment: “Lee was unambiguously a traitor. . . . He also was a bore” who left behind no serious original thoughts.
Critically, Will reaches his conclusion not through the modern conceit of presentism, but by examining Lee within the norms and context of his time. The decision whether to keep to his oath to defend his nation and its Constitution was “a moral test. Lee flunked.” The removal of his statues was therefore appropriate. I changed my mind.
Will effected a similar alteration in my stance toward judicial activism. Offended by so many extra-constitutional inventions by judges of the left, I had embraced the blanket presumption that courts should maintain a posture of great deference, to statute and precedent as well as the Constitution. A 2014 Will column condemned trespasses of freedom by both Left and Right, both “perverse conservative populism” and authoritarian progressivism, and asserted that it is precisely the courts’ job to police such trespasses.
Noting that the Supreme Court has invalidated fewer than 1 percent of federal and state laws or regulations, he cements his contention with a typically accessible Will analogy: When faced with government infringements of personal liberty, judicial passivity is “no more sensible than saying that NFL referees should rarely penalize players for holding.” (Actually, George, it looks to me like two-thirds of NFL holding doesn’t get called, but I took the point, and changed my mind.)
On to something truly important: baseball’s rules changes. Differing with “traditionalists” critical of MLB’s pitch clock, enlarged base bags, and pickoff limitations, he argued that real conservatives should accept and applaud this “resurrection through reform.” His evidence, most notably an instant half-hour reduction in game length and surge of balls put in play, convinced this former traditionalist.
On that university stage, Will captured centuries of political thought with elegant economy: “Rights are not given to us by government. They’re given to us by our nature. They’re called ‘natural rights’ and government exists to secure them . . . [therefore] the most important word in the Declaration of Independence is ‘secure.’”
One can worry about the security of our personal liberties, but not about the security of George Will’s place in the pantheon of American journalism.
On April 17, the Liberty Fund will present the first George Will Award at a dinner in the city he has made his residential, if not always his philosophical, home. The award will seek to honor women and men who embody his rare combination of scholarship and popular engagement, erudition and punditry, in defense of human freedom.
One way others might join the celebration is by taking in George Will’s most recent — let us pray, not his final — book. The Conservative Sensibility, in both substance and style, fully merits the term “magnum opus.” I recommend it heartily, especially to those who find themselves in frequent disagreement with George Will’s viewpoints. It just might change your mind.