The Conservative Mind

The Pursuit of Happiness, and Other Sobering Thoughts, by George F. Will. Harper and Row, 333 pp., $10.95.

What is a conservative, and how does a conservative differ from a libertarian? Drawing the line between the two, and etching that line into the public’s consciousness are among the most pressing tasks facing libertarians today. The publication last year of many of the collected columns of George F. Will was therefore a very welcome event. Will, at least the peer of any conservative journalist around, is just as eager to distinguish his philosophy from ours as we should be.

Will is something of a phenomenon. There can’t be too many other columnists who pursued graduate studies at Princeton and Oxford. (At Oxford his conversion from left-liberalism was helped along by fellow-student Bruce Goldberg, who, a little before that, at Princeton, had pointed out to Bob Nozick that there were certain problems with his socialist ideology.) But Will soon found his real love—not scholarship, but politics. For a while he worked as a senatorial aide and wrote a Washington column for National Review. Within a few years, his talents, especially his graceful writing style, made him the Wunderkind of American political journalism. He is now a syndicated columnist for the Washington Post, a columnist for Newsweek, and a commentator on the Today Show; the year before last, he won the Pulitzer Prize for political commentary. The question has been raised, “Why do we need William Buckley now that we have George Will?” and one sees the point.

Without a doubt, Will is head and shoulders above the usual run of political journalists, and he often shows himself to be an intelligent and, occasionally, even a sensitive man. He has a considered and integrated political position which many people, in the present neoconservative climate, find congenial. I myself find it to be antipathetic and systematically wrong. Moreover, I think that a close examination of that position will uncover affinities to a quite different philosophy than libertarianism.

The title of Will’s collection of columns, The Pursuit of Happiness, and Other Sobering Thoughts, is deliberately chosen and is significant. At the very beginning, Will complains about our American preoccupation with happiness: “Modern Americans travel light, with little philosophical baggage other than a fervent belief in their right to the pursuit of happiness. But,” he adds ominously, “there is more to the political enterprise.”

Will is, in fact, the self-proclaimed champion of a “counter-cultural” point of view, one that exalts politics per se. He is careful to distinguish himself from others who are sometimes (mistakenly) called conservatives simply because they oppose government action in the economy. In an obvious attack on the libertarian strands within contemporary American conservatism, Will states: “Some of what passes for conservatism is a radically anti-political ideology, decayed Jeffersonianism characterized by a frivolous hostility toward the state, and lacking the traditional conservative appreciation of the political vocation and the grandeur of its responsibilities.” Some of the grandest of these responsibilities derive from the proposition that, as Will informs us, “statecraft is, inevitably, soulcraft.”

Will is at pains to recover American conservatives— themselves infected by the individualism that is the genius of our civilization— for a more strenuous, collectivist, and historically authentic form of their common philosophy. American conservatism, he asserts, often has been inarticulate about what to conserve, other than “free enterprise,” which is institutionalized restlessness, an engine of perpetual change. But to govern is to choose one social outcome over others, to impose a collective will on processes of change. Conservatism that does not extend beyond reverence for enterprise is unphilosophic, has little to do with government, and conserves little… Politics should be citizens expressing themselves as a people, a community of shared values, rather than merely a collection of competing private interests inhabiting the same country.

(Just by the way, that “competing” is odd, if not disingenuous. It’s probably intended to suggest that a ruthless Darwinian struggle prevails under free enterprise and within the voluntary sector. But don’t individuals and groups compete ruthlessly for political power? And aren’t free enterprise and other voluntary social arrangements based also on cooperation?)

In fact, one of the most interesting things about this conservative philosopher is how critical he is of the market. For Will, government is there, among other reasons, to make good the market’s inherent deficiencies. And these are not only of the grandiose kind— admittedly, the market has no way of proclaiming “shared values.” Even in allocating resources among competing uses, the market can misfunction disastrously, Will thinks, since it cannot deal with long-range future needs.

In one column in the spring of 1977, during the hullabaloo about the “energy crisis,” Will addressed the question of the government mandating the production of compact, energy-efficient cars, and discouraging the production of more powerful cars. He poses the question, “What entitles the government to censor consumer preferences?” and supplies the answer:

Government exists not merely to serve individuals’ immediate preferences, but to achieve collective purposes for an ongoing nation. Government, unlike the free market, has a duty to look far down the road and consider the interests of citizens yet unborn. The market has a remarkable ability to satisfy the desires of the day. But the government has other, graver responsibilities, which include planning for the energy needs, military and economic, of the future.

Let us leave aside the implied claim that the market is able to serve only the desires of the day. We can debate that with Will after he’s read something on the function of speculators in a market economy—the pertinent chapter, say, in Frank Knight’s The Economic Organization. It would be helpful, though, if we could find out—Will himself gives us no clues—what leads him to think that the government is able to plan for long-term energy needs. On March 18, the New York Times reported that, “The Department of Energy says—Energy Secretary James R. Schlesinger testified so last week—that the nation is short 500,000 barrels a day, and creeping toward 800,000 barrels. The Congressional Research Service says the shortage is only 80,000 barrels a day.” Since the government’s experts can’t even get current statistics right, why does Will believe they are likely to be correct in their forecasts of conditions twenty or forty years from now? Their record in predicting their own inflation rate and their own budget deficits even one year ahead of time isn’t exactly awe-inspiring. Furthermore, the fiasco of the strategic oil reserve (Inquiry, April 16) gives every promise of being merely the first of an endless series of spectacular blunders. And yet, after devoting all of 800 words to the subject, Will, with stunning irresponsibility, proposes entrusting the government with the entire energy field for the indefinite future.

In thus delivering over the American energy industries to the soulcrafting politicians, Will betrays not only his own frivolous infatuation with the state, but also the most apolitical perspective possible. He gives no evidence at all of grasping what government energy planning actually entails in the context of the system of and regulations whose function it will be to amass fortunes for the privileged and liquidate them for the unprivileged. If Will doesn’t know that, then what’s the point of living in Washington?

There is worse to come. Will concludes this particular column, vindicating the state’s right to censor consumer preferences in automobiles, by placing it in the framework of the government’s overall responsibility: “Washington is the city of government and is

George F. Will state-corporate capitalism whose blessings we presently enjoy. Riddled with favoritism and corruption, the prey of contending packs of predators, the Commissariat of Energy will busy itself with issuing decrees responsible for stipulating the national interest. So, increasingly, it will discourage some ways of pursuing happiness.” Increasingly? Up until what point? Just what sort of future does Will have in mind for Americans? Given Will’s view of politics, it is not surprising that he should be today’s leading journalistic exalter of the office of the Presidency. It happens that certain recent well-known events—like Vietnam and Watergate— have taken the wind out of the liberals’ traditional enthusiasm for presidential power, while radical scholars have demonstrated that presidentially-directed spying on and harassment of political dissidents certainly didn’t begin with Watergate (they go back at least to Franklin Roosevelt). But Will remains unaffected by suspicions that the office has become a dangerously powerful one. On the contrary. In this myth of politics as the working out of the Common Good and the National Interest, the President is accorded the hero’s role: “To the extent that the government has an engine, the presidency is it; to the extent that the nation has a political will, the President expresses it.” The President is “the articulator of collective aspirations, or he is not much,” Will complains regarding Gerald Ford, who was not much of an articulator. When Nixon decided to dress up the White House guards in outlandish, semi-Prussian uniforms, Will was the only journalist (to my knowledge) to defend the move, probably recalling some fragments of Bagehot on the symbolic functions of the head of state. The idea, he lamented, deserved a better tailor.

But, for all his talk about politics as the arena where men express their better natures—where they forget, for a while, the selfish pursuit of their own piddling happiness and attend to higher and nobler things— the ironic but predictable fact is that nowhere in his whole book does Will ever show that this ideal has even the slightest connection with politics as it actually exists. In fact, he never gives us the meagerest reason to believe that any recent American political figure ever attained the moral level of your average furniture salesman. Where is there any trace of nobility or “the grandeur of statesmanship” in his descriptions of the American political scene and its real-life inhabitants: the Lyndon Johnsons and the Hubert Humphreys, the Richard Nixons and the Spiro Agnews, the Jimmy Carters and the Walter Mondales (and those are the top of the line!)? Thus, there is a strange fantasy quality about Will’s political philosophy; and if one wanted to psychologize him, as he is so ready to psychologize New Leftists, his evident deep need to validate the status quo would be the obvious starting-point.

As it happens, Will himself gives us, though inadvertently, a close look at how politics works in reality, what his high-sounding principles mean in the concrete. This occurs in the sentimental column he wrote following a farewell party for Senator Gordon Allott, a Republican from Colorado, on whose staff Will served from 1970 to 1973. Will entitled the column, “Gordon Allott: Not a Malleable Man,” for, as he states, Allott “is not the sort of malleable man who finds it easy to pour himself into new molds.”

Allott’s years in the Senate were well-spent, Will finds; among other things, “He helped bring Colorado light technological industry that does not use Colorado’s most precious resource, water.” But those noble years of public service are now ended, and there is a great bitterness in the piece over that fact. For Will feels that Allott, who lost by a small margin, was defeated for reelection in 1972 because Nixon refused a request to stop off in Colorado for a campaign appearance with him. “For twenty years,” as Will says, “Allott had been a supporter of Nixon. For four years he had been an especially loyal supporter of even President Nixon’s dumbest causes—the SST, Judge Carswell. But when it came time to do Allott a favor, all Allott got was an evasive, dishonest and, in the end, contemptuous refusal.”

Can someone who for twenty years was a supporter of Richard Nixon be considered notably “unmalleable”? Are we really being asked to view a man who was “an especially loyal supporter” of Nixon’s “dumbest causes” as a Gibraltar of principle? Okay— so chalk it up to Will’s loyalty to his friend and benefactor, an example, if you want, of conservatism in life rather than in philosophy.

But consider the case of Gordon Allott, as he was and as Will depicts him: a middle-of-the-road Republican politician, with all that implies of years spent in the service of state-corporate capitalism, in the perpetual scramble for boondoggles and tax-funded rip-offs (it would be interesting to have details on exactly how Senator Allott helped bring light technological industry to Colorado). In that dog-eat-dog world of coercion and theft, Allott bound himself to an upwardly-mobile weasel, Richard Nixon; he promoted his liege-lord’s ambitions, made a habit of casting aside the judgment of his own mind, and counted on political favors in return.

Thus, despite himself, Will has furnished us with a microcosm of American politics: this is what it is all about. And in all of it, where is there the slightest hint of a reason to think that politics is a more honorable way to spend a life than running a brothel?

But Will nonetheless remains confident that the political process must override the voluntary choices of individuals, lest society decay into a festering, putrescent heap. This view is expressed in the column he chooses to place first in the section of his book on “Issues.” The piece is on the gay rights movement, specifically the famous 1977 Miami ordinance that pro-pelled Anita Bryant and the whole battle to national attention. In its own way, Will’s treatment of this issue is as irresponsible as his casual endorsement, discussed earlier, of energy dictatorship.

Will rejects the Miami ordinance (which established “civil rights” for homosexuals in private employment, housing, and public accommodations), but not on the libertarian grounds that such legislation is an infringement of the rights of anti-gays. Naturally, if he did that, then he would have to concede that such legislation is equally unjustified in the case of blacks, Jews, women, etc. Instead, his grounds are that “surely homosexuality is an injury to healthy functioning, a distortion of personality.” As such, the preeminent rights of society come into play: “A traditional function of law is to point people toward more human ways of living,” Will asserts, “to shore up what the community considers essential values. . . . True, a liberal society considers itself with a minimum of essentials, but surely healthy sexuality is one.” (When, by the way, did the word “surely” become in itself an argument?)

Now, Will is aware that purely voluntary homosexual relations between adults is still a criminal offense in about two-thirds of the states. Yet there is not a word in this column suggesting that, while he opposes civil rights legislation for gays, he also favors eliminating laws interfering with such consensual relations (the libertarian position). This has become the standpoint of a number of other conservatives, who now favor a certain amount of liberalization in this area, just so long as homosexuals don’t “flaunt” their preferences (i.e., don’t act as if they had the same rights as other people have). Will’s position is that homosexuality “often reduces sex to the physical” and is “based on brief, barren assignations;” therefore, the law must show society the way, by continuing the systematic denial of equal rights to homosexuals and the police harassment and persecution that are an everyday affair for them.

What Will is offering us is an exemplary case of the heartlessness of politics. My guess is that he is not particularly interested in homosexuality, even as a social or moral phenomenon. He has a few opinions on the subject, uninformed, partial, arrogant. But he is wholly incapable of arguing the question at any length. What, for instance, does the fact that homosexual relations are “often” reduced to the physical prove? “Often” they’re not; and “often” heterosexual relations aren’t on any higher level. Moreover, lesbians in particular “often” cherish an affection for their mates that is rare enough in this loveless world. And yet, unprepared as he is to examine the issue rationally, Will has no qualms about endorsing the whole system of state-enforced social inferiority that has blighted the lives of countless homosexual men and women rather finer than George Will. Here we have a much more accurate model of politics in action than Will’s fantasy of “statesmanship” and “soulcraft” —the sideswiping of innocent lives by the state-machine, set in motion by the likes of Will, smug would-be dictators with little understanding of what they are doing, and no real concern.

The ignorance, smugness, and superficiality Will displays on the gay rights issue by no means stand alone in his writings; rather, they’re endemic to them. Here’s a more or less random list, culled both from the present work and from columns not included in it:

He believes that minimum wage laws are a cause of inflation, and writes—in a column that is a paean to the U.S. Department of Agriculture: “American agriculture is one of American government’s success stories, the product of energetic development policies.” He favors zoning laws because they protect against the depreciation of real estate values, apparently unaware of the case against zoning elaborated by economists and lawyers like Bernard Siegen. In order at least to slow down our slide toward total self-indulgent solipsism, Will is anxious to conjure up heroes and heroic causes for us. One such heroic cause is, predictably enough, the valiant little David-State in the Middle East, about whose coming into being—that small matter of the displaced Palestinians—he appears to know nothing at all. Just as predictably, the great hero turns out to be Winston Churchill. Will thinks that those of us who harbor a strong dislike for Churchill do not do so because he was an imperialist and warmonger, the Butcher of Dresden and the man who helped embroil America in two world wars. Rather, it’s because we’re (steady now) shabby egalitarians, and so resent Churchill, who was “too vivid—and too excellent—by half.”

Sometimes Will’s judgments get ludicrously philistine: Eric Severeid, he pompously tells us, “brought a touch of class to print and broadcast journalism” (Eric Severeid?). And in the true spirit of Commentary-kitsch, he holds that the Holocaust— not even the Nazi atrocities in general, including the massacre of Poles, Russians, and others, but the Holocaust—“was not just the central event of the twentieth century, it was the hinge of modern history.” Why not the Gulag?

His scorn for untraditional attempts at self-liberation knows no bounds, and in mocking them Will occasionally becomes uncharacteristically cheap. Thus he states of Gletkin, the NKVD interrogator in Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, that he “is gifted at mind bending—or, as it is known today, ‘consciousness raising’—” as if there were no significant difference between a women’s group meeting in a flat in Berkeley and a conversation taking place in a cell in Lubianka.

One could go on and on; and it is a desperate thought that we have another thirty-five years of this sort of stuff to look forward to. The fact is that Will has opinions on anything you want to name, and it is his delight (so he has said) to have these various views published in dozens of newspapers and read by thousands or millions of people. But more important than his biased and kitschy opinions is his overall political philosophy.

The following is not, I think, an unfair summary of some of its chief features:

State direction and planning of an economy based on private ownership. The indispensable role of the government in making a place for its nation in the international economy. The head of state as the voice of the national community. Patriotism understood as the healthy instinct to enhance the power and influence of one’s own state throughout the world. Disparagement of personal happiness, and glorification of self-sacrifice for higher, state-determined ends. Anxiety at the unhampered workings of the market, which creates a world of constant flux, permits people to do what they want, and thus produces a culture of decadence. Heart-felt contempt for critical intelligence applied to questions of value, and for “rootless” intellectuals, and deep admiration for those trained to believe and obey, for those who love the old ways. As the core principle, subordination of the individual to society.

Now, there is a political philosophy that features all of these ideas, as well as some others. It’s called fascism. Oh, I don’t mean the nasty, “biological” fascism of the Nazis, or even the operatic fascism of Mussolini, but rather the “classy” French fascism of men like Drieu La Rochelle, Brasillach, and Maurice Bardèche. As one historian of that movement, Robert J. Soucy, has written: “What preoccupied one French fascist writer after another—and what was one of the most distinctive features of their ideology—was their overwhelming sense of national decadence, their feeling that France was debilitated and weak, that it was sunk in torpor and somnolance . . . Like Drieu, most French fascists conceived their revolution to be essentially a spiritual revolution,” since they felt that the problem with liberal society is that it “produces human beings who can read but have no morality, who seek comfort and security rather than the heroic life, who are petty individualists rather than members of a community devoted to something greater than themselves.” Am I saying that Will is a fascist? No. But the resemblances are demonstrable—and disquieting, especially when we consider that fascism can be defined as conservatism in crisis. Crisis is what, in all likelihood, we face in the next few years, in a world of government energy “planning,” trade-wars, hyperinflation to finance the warfare-welfare state, and collision between those who are determined to live their own lives in their own way and those who will “increasingly” not permit them to do so. When the crunch comes, will George Will discover that, faced with quite analogous problems, some fascists found some very interesting solutions?

Ralph Raico is senior editor of Inquiry.