In early June, I was on the lovely campus of Princeton University reading George F. Will’s excellent new book, The Conservative Sensibility. Will is a Princeton graduate. His book begins with a meditation on Princeton and the Battle of Princeton in the Revolutionary War, and it conceives of the great American political debate as a conversation between two prominent Princetonians: James Madison, class of 1771, and Woodrow Wilson, who was the president of Princeton from 1902 to 1910. That’s a concentrated dose of Princeton.
I was thinking about what I would write in my review, and as I was doing so, Will himself was just across the campus at the Princeton chapel giving the baccalaureate address. His subject was intelligent praise: “Intelligent praising is a talent. It is learned. Like all virtues, it is habitual. … It is the virtue of recognizing virtue, and saluting it. Today, however, we live in what Arthur Brooks calls a ‘culture of contempt.'”
He said this to the backsides of some hundred or so expensively educated blockheads who had stood up and turned their backs on their fellow Princetonian, an act of protest against, oh, I don’t know, and I have stopped pretending to care. Elsewhere on campus, an undergraduate gave the traditional Latin address, and the program contained directions about when to laugh and when to applaud, in order to keep up the Ivy League pretense that the undergraduates understand Latin. I hope that young graduate surveyed the crowd and began: “Qui sunt hae simiae?”
No, no. That will not do. I should listen to Will and heed: “Today, there is a serrated edge to America life. The nation is awash in expressions of contempt and condescension. What are called ‘social media’ — and which might more accurately be called anti-social media — seem to encourage snarky expressions of disdain. In this age of rage, disparagement is the default setting for many Americans. They seem to think that expressing admiration for someone or something is evidence of deficient critical faculties. To these habitual disparagers, maturity means a relentlessly exercised capacity for contempt. … Praise, Brooks says, is how we articulate admiration. And developing a talent for admiration is how we become less susceptible to feeling envy, which stokes anger. We are apt to be happiest when we are least envious, because envy is the only one of the seven deadly sins that does not give the sinner even momentary pleasure.”
The Conservative Sensibility is organized around pairs in opposition — Madison against Wilson, the Republican Constitution against the Democratic Constitution, organic society against scientistic planning, the pursuit of happiness against the New Deal — as well as pairs in apposition: Niccolò Machiavelli and Martin Luther, Teddy Roosevelt and Robert Moses, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. From these relationships and their tensions, Will constructs an understanding of the American situation, its politics, and its prospects.
Because we live in an age of wonders, I can note without morbidity that Will is only 78 years old; he has had something of a late-career renaissance in the past several years, having been energized by the Trump era and its shenanigans. That being said, there is a sense of finality in The Conservative Sensibility, as though Will is offering his ultimate statement if not his last word. And true to his title, what Will here limns and amplifies is not an ideology or a philosophy or a party platform, but a sensibility.
Russell Kirk insisted that conservatism is not an ideology but “the negation of ideology,” an attempt to achieve “the reconciliation of authority with the altered circumstances of our present life.” Acknowledgment of those “altered circumstances,” and of the fact that such alterations are and should be beyond the control of any prince or potentate, is what distinguishes conservatism from a politics that is merely reactionary or sentimental. American conservatism, Will writes, “is a perpetually unfolding response to real situations that require statesmanship — the application of general principles to untidy realities. Conservatism does not float above all ties and places. The conservative sensibility is relevant to all times and places, but it is lived and revealed locally, in the conversation of a specific polity. … American conservatism has a clear mission: It is to conserve, by articulating and demonstrating the continuing pertinence of, the Founders’ thinking.”
Hence the confusion that causes so much mischief in our political discourse. Because what they seek to conserve is the substance of the revolution and the founding, Will writes, “American conservatives are the custodians of the classical liberal tradition.” What is it American conservatives seek to conserve? Liberalism: the liberalism of John Locke, Adam Smith, and James Madison, and of Friedrich Hayek and his school. In this, the European political vocabulary is more accurate, identifying as it does the commonalities between the schools of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and the outlook of, say, The Economist as liberalism or, because we love ominous prefixes, neoliberalism.
That some American rightists, such as the gentlemen over at First Things, have set upon more exotic fascinations — ultramontane Catholicism, anti-liberalism, reconstituted Francoism, etc., depending on how far down the rabbit hole you want to go; my National Review colleagues sometimes joke that a true conservative prays devoutly for the revival of the Habsburg Empire — demonstrates only that no political movement is immune from folly and error or from the thirst for novelty. Will argues that American conservatism is, in the age of Trump, a sensibility without a political home, and in this he is correct. The politics of conservatism must be understood as separate from the politics of the Republican Party and as distinct from the politics of Republican™-branded entertainment figures holding court on Fox News and hawking freeze-dried apocalypse cutlets and miracle vitamins on talk radio.
And there, of course, is Will’s problem and conservatives’ problem. The American Right has all but abandoned the conservative sensibility, and the sneer artists on the airwaves and dank habitués of social media have much more in common with those sophomoric seniors at Princeton than they do with those who would with decency, humility, and good cheer work to conserve the legacy of the founding. You can be sure that they will do more than turn their backs on Will. They already have.
Will has produced one of the best books about American conservatism ever to have been written, and he deserves better enemies.
Kevin D. Williamson is the roving correspondent for National Review and author of the forthcoming book The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in an Age of Mob Politics.
