A dying breed

In the new world of body-slamming right-wing politics, what's a snooty, fake-patrician über-WASP conservative like George Will to do?

By Louis Bayard

Oct 3, 2002 | "And so we beat on," F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote, "boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

Leading with a quote is surely the appropriate thing to do when reviewing the notoriously allusive George F. Will. But this quote seems particularly relevant to defining the oddly poignant figure that Will cuts at this stage in his career. Two decades ago, he was secretly prepping Ronald Reagan for debates (albeit with briefing papers swiped from the Carter White House), lunching with Nancy Reagan, and guarding the right wing's intellectual flank like a one-headed, four-eyed Cerberus. With his starched shirts and bow ties, with his impassive demeanor and ecclesiastical gestures and the ever-ready epigram squeezing through his pursed lips, he had the feel of his very own establishment -- permanent and immovable.

And in fact, he hasn't moved much in the past two decades; it's just the rest of the establishment that has. Conservative policy is no longer hashed out in the gray pages of the National Review but in the fractious, jangling confines of talk radio and the Fox News Network. The genteel harrumphs of William F. Buckley and James J. Kilpatrick have given way to the braying outrage of Rush Limbaugh and Brit Hume, and in this new higher-decibel culture, Will, always a throwback, has been thrown so far back as to seem irrelevant.

The White House is no longer requesting talking points, Laura Bush is not calling for lunch, beloved mentors like Meg Greenfield have passed on, nimbler colleagues like Bill Kristol are dancing rings around him on TV, and shriller colleagues like Charles Krauthammer and Michael Kelly are drowning him out on the Op-Ed pages. It's a Roger Ailes world we live in, and the pundits who ascend most rapidly are the ones who most closely resemble psychotic toddlers. (Oh, let's just use Ann Coulter as an example.)

All of which raises an interesting question: Is there any longer a place for George F. Will and what he represents in the Republican republic?

For answer, we have the partial, occluded evidence of his columns, highly burnished artifacts that reflect their creator more vividly than he knows. The last five years' worth have now been gathered into a volume awkwardly titled "With a Happy Eye But ..." and subtitled "America and the World (1997-2002)," which pretty much covers it all, as far as I can see. Before we address what the author has to say, however, let us see how he is holding up.

The cover photograph finds him in the expected Brooks Brothers suit -- navy-blue pinstripes -- the once-ubiquitous bow tie now exchanged for a less eccentric rep tie. Arms folded, he poses against an ecru pilaster and paisley-patterned ecru wallpaper, leaning (ever so slightly) on a buffed wooden stair rail. The setting is archetypal gentry, but Will's body language is unique to him and unmistakable. In his own wry, ascetic fashion, he is trying to hold the barbarians at the gate.

But what is this castle he is defending? That takes actually plowing through the columns, and the plowing is, for the most part, easy work. Will may be too arch by half -- his favored adjective for Bill Clinton is "glandular" -- and years of writing for deadline have imparted their tics, but the prose continually refreshes with its grace and nimbleness and its easy range of reference. Blowhards like William Bennett make lots of noise on behalf of the Western canon without actually imparting very much of it. I can't think of any other mass-media columnist who can so readily avail himself of civilization's contents as Will does.

This is not simply a matter of quoting famous dead people (G.K. Chesterton is a favorite), but of building synthetic bridges between past and present. Will can discourse knowledgeably on everything from the Hegelian theory of history to the rape of Nanking and make it all seem uniquely relevant. He can, with no apparent strain, extrapolate lessons from John Adams, William Tecumseh Sherman and Hannah Arendt. He can produce an assessment of the controversial modern ethicist Peter Singer (then a new hire at Princeton) that is a small masterpiece of intellectual exposition, locating Singer in a utilitarian line that extends back to Jeremy Bentham and coming to a surprisingly equivocal conclusion: "[Singer] will do more to stimulate serious reflection -- and more to stimulate opposition to his (literally) homicidal ideas -- than he will to make his ideas acceptable. Which is to say, Princeton can justify his appointment by utilitarian arithmetic."

This is as thoughtful as it is elegantly turned, and it is of no small significance that Princeton is the occasion for it, this being the institution that sanctified Will's vocation by awarding him a doctorate in politics. Little wonder, then, that Princeton should be the citadel from which he surveys the enemy position and that his most definitive declaration of war should come in an address commemorating Old Nassau's 250th anniversary.

"Vulgarians are thick on the ground in the nation's capital," he announces. Not a new development, he quickly concedes, but he nevertheless speaks darkly of "the thinning of the common culture" and harks back to the days when "The Old Curiosity Shop" and "Uncle Tom's Cabin" (rather bad books, but never mind) were "part of the shared vocabulary, the casual discourse" of family life, when everyday people could make allusions to the Bible and the classics with the full expectation that they would be understood by other people.

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