The Nation's Pulse / Good Will
Ferguson, Tim W.
Good Will by Tim W. Ferguson 4 4 oc nservative" is an expansive term—even Garry Wills and Kevin Phillips have been so described. And George Will was, by his own acknowledgment, a Big Government...
...The tendentiousness, the outright lying...
...But then came the summer of 1987...
...But when Bush began his retreat into nothingness near the end of the Gulf War, whew...
...This is not a crisis...
...And that has happened...
...Clearly he'd been surprised by how it all turned out...
...He devoted a section of his book Suddenly to his columns from those weeks...
...This is the country made by the Report on Manufactures...
...Why [was it] so important that people would lie, and act like Stalinists...
...I suppose I shouldn't have been...
...question is, should the government borrow $300 billion or should it tax $300 billion, borrow it...
...The way I phrased it in a recent column is that compassion nowadays is 98 percent condescension...
...For twenty years, including a stint on Capitol Hill as an aide to a conservative Colorado senator, he had never been alarmed at the fundamental nature of the nation's ruling class...
...Not a good idea, but not a crisis...
...If this is a crisis, what's left...
...He is thus probably regarded as a "values" conservative, but not so reliably a social one...
...They really like being out ofpower...
...The true left may never have liked him—he was an anti-Communist, after all—but aside from some sniping over his quiet assistance to candidate Ronald Reagan in prepping for a debate, the parlor liberals of the capital have always thought him proper company...
...And I spend a lot of time watching ESPN and being a normal guy...
...What resources in the English language are left if that is a catastrophe...
...Although he would concede that some evils are enduring—Communism was one, and Hillary's health plan appears to be another—he gives the appearance of not brooding in his baseball-cap-andbook-lined study over civilization's plight...
...I voted for a 10 percent change, which is about what he did...
...But most of what it does you can undo, you just have to win the argument next time...
...So what about Bush...
...That, too, would be news, I submit...
...I let it go at that...
...They may not like hearing that at the Eagle Forum...
...But if I'm wrong, that's all right, too...
...That lends a certain grimness to the struggle...
...4 4 n0 e of the ways conservatives get carried away," he says, is in their singlemindedness...
...The proper rate for the capital gains tax is probably zero...
...Will traces his "surrender of swords" to two great struggles of the 1980s...
...He admires the elements of democracy that "ennoble" the citizenry, but seems to view the rest as basically just fancy, subject to correction...
...From behind a massive partner's desk that he drums in the manner of (dare I say) Rush Limbaugh, the wispy Will recollects his disdain for the true believers of 1980-81...
...But there has been, at least until Reagan and for many even in the wake of his "revolution," the sort of bleak horizon that Whittaker Chambers saw in contesting Communism...
...That's what makes it fun...
...I was struck by the frenzy of the opposition to Bork," he says...
...Properly understood (as he is wont to say, but didn't), this phenomenon is "the greatest and best change in America in my lifetime," excepting the end of racial segregation...
...Remarkably, it has escaped the notice of his hometown press corps that the nation's most influential pundit has turned starkly to the right in the 1990s, or, as he prefers to put it, has a new "edge...
...I remember when Cronkite came on and referred to the `catastrophe at Three-Mile Island.' What catastrophe...
...The wise old senator won Will's affirmation with the view that "men die for territory, flag, women, but taxes...
...His most memorable sentiment: Americans are undertaxed...
...The sort who tried to ride into Washington with Ronald Reagan were "people who enjoy rather too much being a church militant in an unconverted world...
...A gusher of revenue to government will prevent emergence of the deficit...
...But there is also a sincere surprise at the political zealotry of the Bork-haters...
...That's still true...
...I asked him what he thought of the significance of feminism to families and the overall culture...
...Government that exists on the shifting sands of public opinion doesn't have any—or very few—lasting calamities or lasting crimes...
...The other pivotal event was Robert Bork's Supreme Court confirmation debacle, which made Will understand that the culture of the 1960s that he had always detested had taken firm root in the nation's capital...
...Economists agreed that if you ran $300 billion deficits, you certainly couldn't have declining inflation and declining interest rates...
...71 The American Spectator February 1994 65...
...We talk like Jeffersonians and we build big shiny alabaster monuments to 64 The American Spectator February 1994 Jefferson but we have a tiny statue of Hamilton [on Washington's Treasury Place...
...W ill's easygoing disinclination to take politics too seriously may be a key to the equanimity with which he has viewed the state and its gathering force...
...Wasn't his downer of a term, which so preoccupied Will, an inspiration for the highbrow's rebuff of Washington centrism...
...To a question about who from history might set Washington straight, Will responds, "I'm not sure I'd want to live in a capital, least of all that of a great nation, where some guy walking into town makes a difference...
...While he delighted many with his natty and contrary Toryism, he was frustrating and even infuriating to the ranks of Reaganites...
...Surely not taxes...
...Bill Clinton is not a crisis...
...And George Will was, by his own acknowledgment, a Big Government Conservative through much of the 1980s...
...The conservative movement is still full of people Will disdains (like Oliver North, to cite one of his least favorites), who worry that each defeat is lasting and each victory fleeting...
...Zero public health consequences...
...Will is content to "follow James Q. Wilson, tardily, in all things," one of which would surely be the Harvard-UCLA sage's desire for secular moral authority in areas such as drug abuse...
...I now, however, believe, partly on the basis of certain things that didn't happen in the eighties, that if the Tim W. Ferguson is "Business World" columnist for the Wall Street Journal...
...In the present case, it is dread of being on the losing side of a long march toward decadent socialism (forget thetemporary victories at home and abroad...
...My position when I said we were undertaxed was simply that the revenue code as it existed didn't come close to covering the political appetites we were determined to vote...
...From his academic background, which began with a professor father and proceeded through a Princeton doctorate in politics and a teaching stint, Will had been "taught, rightly, that politics is a great and stately jurisdiction...
...If the sixties mentality was catching in some quarters, "I didn't think it was an insoluble problem...
...When I'd first contacted Will, he'd suggested the fight over Bork was what had broken his back...
...He has apologized, with panache, to some of the supply-side faithful at an Arthur Laffer gathering...
...I'm not saying it's changed the aspiration of the Democratic Party, but it's changed the way they talk about it, the tactics...
...I swear, there's a tone of voice: you can hear it in Naderites"—and in "certain conservatives," he hastens to add...
...As soon as the New Will begins to sound comfortable as a partisan, the Old Will reasserts himself...
...Coming up through Strauss and political philosophy, rather than Von Mises as the final answer, I was prepared to look for uses for the government, for conservative ends...
...In his Washington Post editorials, Newsweek essays, and weekly appearances on ABC's David Brinkley program, Will is nearly always slashing away at Clinton and congressional liberalism and embracing the passions of movement conservatives, from school choice to term limits...
...But it isn't that important, really...
...Unemployment at 25 percent, crisis...
...Look," he says, "I'm a happy guy...
...In conversation, Will is more visceral about the "uses that can be made of the modern state by the political class, both the elected political class [and] people who just enjoy bossing other people around...
...He still rejects the notion of "seeking office in government solely in order to take it down brick by brick...
...Long-in-thetooth Young Republicans who sing songs at conventions," this bunch was...
...And I was eager to try and be a Hamiltonian, because this is the country Hamilton made...
...Inertia is a great savior of societies—the fact that they can't be jerked around...
...Theirs is a kind of feckless radicalism...
...like others, he'd written initially of the jurist's invincible qualifications...
...Maybe that was what made the result so powerful: surprise at the adversary's power...
...Let me get back to you on that," he says, which is of course not what he means...
...Today, Will is in the Madisonian middle of the Founder spectrum, even "a lot more Jeffersonian than I used to be...
...Increasing my taxes to 39 percent, not a crisis...
...They now advance national socialized medicine as a deficit-reduction device...
...Because if you run $200 billion deficits—then a horror and now an aspiration—you shall change the conversation of the country for a generation...
...For even if Will traces his conversion to events in 1987 or thereabouts, we didn't feel the full force of his guns until they were trained on the "most popular president of modern times...
...The first was economic...
...I really have a more relaxed view...
...Hitler at the Channel, crisis...
...His writings on abortion have excoriated Roe v. Wade but sought a legislated middle ground...
...Principled conservatism has not had a stronger voice than Will's ever since...
...It's his country...
...At first it was because Bush did something conservatives liked ("read my lips") as well as things too many of them countenanced (the flag-waving campaign of 1988...
...But support for term limits, the centerpiece of his 1992 book Restoration, has done the most to unite Will with many of his former detractors...
...Or perhaps the sharpened edge is, on that old score, being sheathed in mercy...
...Most of what democratic government does is bound to be irrational, because it exists to respond to organized appetites and passions...
...Maybe this socially acceptable conservative just doesn't want to be the party bore...
...The emancipation of career women "adds to the stress of life, the exertion, but also to the excitement...
...W hat, then, was George Bush...
...It didn't matter that much...
...They've been trained from I don't know when, certainly from college on, that their function in life is to regulate other people's lives, spend other people's money because (a) other people aren't very good at it, and (b) they are good at it...
...Well, we did and we did...
...Which does change the context of the argument a lot...
...Someone asked Pat Moynihan, who is the liberal he most likes to quote, whether a forthcoming tax tussle would be a "fight to the death...
...Ronald Reagan had the `revolution.' I didn't vote for a revolution...
...But beyond that, Reagan was right when I believe he said: I hope my tax revenues will be self-financing...
Vol. 27 • February 1994 • No. 2
