A Liberal Conservative
The Pursuit of Happiness and Other Sobering Thoughts.
by George F. Will.
Harper & Row. 320 pp. $10.95.
George F. Will is unquestionably America’s finest political columnist. Anyone who doubts this judgment may easily confirm it by turning to Will’s recently published book, The Pursuit of Happiness and Other Sobering Thoughts, a compilation of more than 100 short pieces that previously appeared in Newsweek and the Washington Post. The political column is generally not a literary form that long endures or that readily bears consecutive reading. Even the most diligent academic researcher would be hard-pressed to make it through more than three or four old columns of, say, Tom Wicker or Evans and Novak. It is a remarkable tribute to Will’s gifts that one can effortlessly and pleasurably read as many as fifteen or twenty of his articles at a single sitting, and remain eager to return to the rest.
Will has aptly identified what distinguishes him from most of his fellow practitioners: “I have made it an aim of my life to die without ever having written a column about which presidential advisers are ascending and which are descending. I write about the ‘inside’ of public life in another sense. My subject is not what is secret, but what is latent, the kernel of principle and other significance that exists, recognized or not, inside events, actions, politics, and manners.” Will proves adept at locating and illuminating this kernel of significance in the most varied range of subjects—from Hubert Humphrey to Elvis Presley, from the Supreme Court to the Chicago Cubs, and from Churchill’s rhetoric to the Howard Johnson’s menu. Yet he rarely falls victim to the ponderosity that afflicts so many journalistic pundits. His wide learning and keen insight are leavened by a light touch and a graceful style.
But George Will’s claim to our attention extends beyond his literary skill and interesting sensibility. This collection of columns, he asserts in the introduction, presents the “contours” of a “coherent conservative philosophy.” Although those who are scrupulous about the use of the term “philosophy” may find this claim a bit inflated, there is no doubt that Will displays a distinctive and thoughtful political outlook that is worthy of serious consideration.
The easiest approach to the complex task of defining the character of George Will’s conservatism is to begin by indicating what it is not. For he not only directs his most caustic attacks against the political heroes of many American conservatives—Spiro Agnew, George Wallace, Richard Nixon, Robert Dole, the House Un-American Activities Committee—but also clearly rejects the two dominant strains of the contemporary American Right, populism and libertarianism. He speaks with evident distaste of the “constituency of resentment” cultivated by right-wing populists like Agnew and Wallace, and manifestly shows no trace of the nativist bigotry that has often been associated with this movement. Moreover, though he occasionally attacks the excesses and inanities of federal bureaucrats, Will is not given to indulging in generalized anti-Washington rhetoric or to hinting that “the people” are being victimized by some elitist conspiracy. Indeed, he argues that a major failing of government today is that it has become too responsive, stimulating endless popular demands that it cannot possibly fulfill.
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At the same time, Will is far from agreeing with those libertarian conservatives who want government to do as little as possible. While acknowledging the free market’s “remarkable ability to satisfy the desires of the day,” he insists that government “exists not merely to serve individuals’ immediate preferences, but to achieve collective purposes for an ongoing nation.” Hence he is not afraid to assert the propriety and the necessity of the state’s sometimes overriding—for the sake of the common good—the consumer preferences expressed in the marketplace. Similarly, he argues that government cannot be indifferent to the ways in which its citizens choose to pursue their own happiness, but must provide legal support for certain “essential values.”
This brings us closer to the positive core of Will’s conservatism. A favorite aphorism of his, repeated several times in The Pursuit of Happiness, emphasizes the connection between “statecraft” and “soulcraft.” In a free society, he argues, the statesman must be concerned with the souls of the citizens, because “self-government presupposes certain character traits, including moderation, reasonableness, discipline, and other attributes of mind.”
But these needed character traits are undermined, according to Will, by the dynamics of our capitalist economy, which “produces—indeed requires—a constant increase in consumption, and in appetites.” He takes American conservatism to task for having “uncritically worshipped” these free-market forces, despite the havoc they have wrought upon local attachments and traditional ways. When he speaks in this vein, expatiating on the evils of “commercial society,” Will sometimes sounds as if he belongs to the tradition of European reactionaries who would like to repeal the modern world. But notwithstanding his evident nostalgia for certain aspects of the past, it would be a serious error to consign him to this category.
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For George Will is not only a sincere friend of American liberal democracy; he is also an astute enough thinker to recognize that the commercial spirit, and the economic growth that it fosters, are essential to the success of the American system. He understands that it is above all the poor who would suffer from policies that would result in a slowing of economic growth. More generally, he realizes that liberal democracy “has existed rarely, and only during the two centuries of rapid economic growth in the West. It probably has been made possible by that growth, by the belief that a rising tide raises all boats, a belief that dampens the worst social conflicts.” And on a still deeper level, he is aware that the American polity itself, as definitively explained by James Madison in Federalist 51, is premised on the acceptance, if not the encouragement, of individual self-seeking.
Will rightly points out, however, that there is a tension between this teaching of Madison and the view that he expressed in Federalist 55: “As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust, so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence. Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form.” The burden of Will’s conservatism, then, is not so much to disparage the pursuit of private happiness and economic well-being as to insist that a nation devoted to this pursuit cannot remain free unless it also cultivates and conserves “other qualities in human nature.” In short, he reminds us of what the liberal democratic tradition has too often ignored or taken for granted—the “cultural prerequisites” of a free society. In this respect, Will’s conservatism—if that is the proper word for it—calls to mind the thought of Tocqueville, a writer to whom he (surprisingly) never refers.
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The Pursuit of Happiness contains very little in the way of specific policy prescriptions. George Will does not have the temperament of either a tinkerer or a zealot. (Indeed, at times he seems inclined to a highly pessimistic—not to say fatalistic—view of the future of American democracy.) Moreover, he knows that the moral and cultural problems about which he is most concerned will not easily yield to legislative remedies. Nonetheless, he defends the principle of employing legal proscriptions against such threats to public morals as pornography and the use of “recreational drugs.” And he clearly believes that our political leaders must do what they can to shore up those institutions (like the family) and moral standards that prevent a civilized society from degenerating into a mass of purely self-regarding individuals.
A generation ago it was easy for liberals to dismiss such concerns in their zeal to combat the evils of bigotry and intolerance. But today there is growing reason to believe that the gravest threat to the individual freedom that liberals cherish comes not from the Mrs. Grundys of this world but from the erosion of those moral habits and beliefs that hold together a free and self-governing country. Many liberals may thus find themselves prepared to give a fresh hearing to the arguments of a humane and intelligent writer like George Will—even if he calls himself a conservative.
