Progress of a Conservative

George Will's magnum opus The Conservative Sensibility is, among many things, a timely defense of the excellence of the American founding.  A legendary conservative commentator, Will has been the longstanding pen and face of conservatism from his perches as an award-winning columnist at the Washington Post and an analyst on ABC's weekend television program This Week. At over 500 pages, Will's book is an “unapologetic presentation to unbelievers, who are a majority of contemporary Americans . . . [of] why they should recur to the wisdom of the nation's founding.” As our author asks and answers in the Introduction: “The proper question for conservatives is: What do you seek to conserve?” Answer: the American founding. But how? As Will himself wonders, “What, however, does it mean to conserve an event—or, more precisely, a congeries of events—that occurred almost 250 years ago?” 

Central to the defense of American principle is Will's Madisonian conservatism. And defending Madison requires grappling with the 28th President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson. Wilsonian doctrine features a federal government limited by pragmatism not constitutionalism, an economy comprehensively regulated by the state, and a war-like politics that aims to make us all one thing, as Progress demands.  Wilson's progressivism was fundamental, Will observes, in removing the “Madisonian persuasion” from its dominant position that once shaped our country as one governed by small and limited government, with a leapfrog growth economy, vibrant associational life, and a relatively fixed constitutional order. Our politics is best understood, Will intones, as a continuing debate between Madison and Wilson in the policy choices we face. And that means the “conservative sensibility” must tangle with actual situations and dilemmas we find ourselves in. This demands “statesmanship” Will notes, using a term democratic audiences struggle with, but which is necessary for an ideologically clotted age such as ours, so that we might understand “the application of general principles to untidy realities.”