Matt McManus on George Will's "The Conservative Sensibility"

NOTE: I recently saw Matt McManus arguing with a conservative on Twitter, who told him that the problem is that Matt just doesn’t understand where conservatives are coming from, and recommended that he read George Will’s “The Conservative Sensibility.” Matt told his interlocutor that he had indeed read the book and written a review of it years ago for the now-defunct magazine Areo. He generously offered to email the guy a copy, but the whole thing made me curious to read it, and I offered to reprint it here for anyone else who’s curious. Thanks to the erstwhile Areo editor and custodian of that archive, Iona Italia, for giving us permission to rerun this here.

George F. Will’s The Conservative Sensibility (2019) is a gigantic book that makes a case for why American conservatives should commit to defending right-wing liberalism. It is also intended to seal up the cracks in red-state America between those committed to an older, more genteel, more libertarian conservatism and those adhering to Trump-style populism and illiberal quasi-democracy. It is easily the best defence of right-wing American liberalism in recent memory: erudite, analytically deep, powerfully literary—and much more sophisticated and engaging than other recent post-Reaganite books on similar topics. Even those who disagree with Will’s overall view can enjoy his insights and learning. Nevertheless, in both its hagiography of past glories and its predictions of a brighter future, The Conservative Sensibility is unconvincing.

Government Is the Problem: George F. Will’s Defence of Right-Wing Liberalism

Politics is usually driven by competing worries. Today, conservatives are more radically worried than are progressives concerning conditions in America’s government and culture. Conservatives worry about the relationships they think they discern between government and culture. Progressives still express their worries in an essentially 1930s vocabulary of distributive justice understood in economic, meaning material, terms. This assumes a reassuringly mundane politics of splittable differences—how much concrete to pour, how many crops to subsidize by how much, which factions shall get what.

Conservatives worry in a more contemporary vocabulary, questioning the power and ambitions of the post-New Deal state, and finding a causal connection between those ambitions and the fraying of the culture. Many of today’s conservatives believe, or say they do (their actions in office often say otherwise), that the nation needs to rethink the proper scope and actual competence of government.

—George F. Will, The Conservative Sensibility

Although modern conservatism is