The Joy of Puritanism

A review of this book is almost anti- climactic, since it consists of columns that have already won their author everything up to and including a Pulitzer Prize. The acclaim is not unanimous: Jimmy Breslin has blasted George Will as a “tight white Protestant” for suggesting (in one of these columns) that it is reasonable to expect black people to refrain from looting during power failures. Of course most black people do refrain—and it is interesting a) that “Protestant” has become a derisive epithet and b) that Will, the individualist grandson of a Lutheran minister, seems abler than Breslin, the bluffer-than-thou scion of Irish-Catholic stock, to understand that blacks are fully capable of personal responsibility.

Will is often described as a puritan, and one may speculate whether there wasn’t an ancestral miscegenation with a Calvinist back there somewhere. He is an almost unabashed sourpuss, making a virtue of a perhaps predestinate necessity. Lone, crusty, skeptical, he surveys a world that is imperfect enough, though not so bad as the reformers think it is, and not quite so good as it might be with fewer reformers. And while he is eloquently conservative, he seems to be no kin to other conservatives: he makes no gestures of solidarity with them, seldom quotes them, and is openly disdainful of many of their concerns. His independence extends to nearly every real embodiment of political conservatism in recent years: he has been too fastidious to embrace not only Nixon and Wallace, but even Ford and Reagan. This is maddening to other conservatives, who feel like disowned relations. But Will really relishes the role of pundit, as some men are rapturously happy as celibates. He would probably feel compromised by commitment to anything more carnal than principle; not counting his family, of course, which he celebrates with copious affection.

JS

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Joseph Sobran

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A review of this book is almost anti- climactic, since it consists of columns that have already won their author everything up to and including a Pulitzer Prize. The acclaim is not unanimous: Jimmy Breslin has blasted George Will as a “tight white Protestant” for suggesting (in one of these columns) that it is reasonable to expect black people to refrain from looting during power failures. Of course most black people do refrain—and it is interesting a) that “Protestant” has become a derisive epithet and b) that Will, the individualist grandson of a Lutheran minister, seems abler than Breslin, the bluffer-than-thou scion of Irish-Catholic stock, to understand that blacks are fully capable of personal responsibility.

Will is often described as a puritan, and one may speculate whether there wasn’t an ancestral miscegenation with a Calvinist back there somewhere. He is an almost unabashed sourpuss, making a virtue of a perhaps predestinate necessity. Lone, crusty, skeptical, he surveys a world that is imperfect enough, though not so bad as the reformers think it is, and not quite so good as it might be with fewer reformers. And while he is eloquently conservative, he seems to be no kin to other conservatives: he makes no gestures of solidarity with them, seldom quotes them, and is openly disdainful of many of their concerns. His independence extends to nearly every real embodiment of political conservatism in recent years: he has been too fastidious to embrace not only Nixon and Wallace, but even Ford and Reagan. This is maddening to other conservatives, who feel like disowned relations. But Will really relishes the role of pundit, as some men are rapturously happy as celibates. He would probably feel compromised by commitment to anything more carnal than principle; not counting his family, of course, which he celebrates with copious affection.