The Woven Figure: Conservatism and America's Fabric

National Review, March 9, 1998 by Matthew Scully

Mr. Scully is a writer in Washington, D.C.

BACK in 1992 George Will predicted that a Clinton Presidency would make things more interesting in the column trade. The Bush Administration had been "bored to tears and boring," Will told Brian Lamb on Booknotes. He had a point, and perhaps for that reason the Bush years didn't bring out the best in Will himself: he got on his "taxophobia" kick, many times reminding us that America was "a nation undertaxed." There was a case to be made for this -- Will feared a ruinous deficit -- but it was more his tone that grated: "To those who are liberals and to those who call themselves conservatives, I say: Politics is more difficult than you think."

In 1990 he famously called Bush a "lapdog" with a "tinny little arf," an event in Washington not because the crack was all that devastating but because it was George Will saying it. And never mind that Bush's biggest mistake was finally to agree with Will that America was, after all, undertaxed. As a political writer, Will seemed at times to suffer from a case of loftyism: government was "governance," America "the polity," politics "soulcraft," underlying the welfare state "an ethic of common provision." You could agree or disagree with Will's "conservatism, properly understood." But there could be a slightly overwrought quality to his copy that sometimes made it hard to figure out what the argument was about.

Two things stand out from a reading of The Woven Figure: Conservatism and America's Fabric, Will's ninth book and fifth collection of columns. Conservatism, properly understood, has undergone some notable changes in the Clinton years. And the changes have done wonders for Will's columns.

"Taxophobia" makes a couple of appearances here ("California, although taxophobic . . ."), as also "soulcraft," but with quite a shift in emphasis. Will in his 1983 Statecraft as Soulcraft: "If conservatism is to engage itself with the way we live now, it must address government's graver purposes with an affirmative doctrine of the welfare state." The Woven Figure: "So the central political problem for conservatives is to get the public to consent to government that censors their desires, refusing to fulfill many of them." Soulcraft: "A conservative doctrine of the welfare state is required if conservatives are even to be included in the contemporary political conversation." Woven Figure: "Does conservatism have the steely resolve required to tell the country the hard truth about how radically it has gone wrong in its thinking about, and expectations of, government?"

In the last few years Will has moved on to targets worthier of his gifts, as in a column last year after the Inaugural Address: "Clinton's wish was the father of that thought, as it appeared, somewhat hedged, in his Inaugural Address: 'We have resolved for our time a great debate over the role of government.' 'Our time' ends this week."

From a 1994 column after Will had visited a New York ghetto: "In the 1950s, in the name of 'urban renewal,' planners had the lunatic idea of piling up poor people 14 stories deep in apartment blocks built where organic neighborhoods were bulldozed to make room. The result, startling only to planners, is concentrated misery."

From a 1995 piece after the Federal Government closed during a budget impasse: "In Washington's darkest hour since the secession crisis, the government was shut down, a calamity noticed by people who needed new passports."

Will's 1997 RIP to "beat" poet Allen Ginsberg:

[H]is reward for a career of execrating American values and works was a six-figure contract for a volume of his collected poetry. It is a distinctive American genius, this ability to transmute attempted subversion into a marketable commodity. . . . With a talent that rarely rose to mediocrity, but with a flair for vulgar exhibitionism, Ginsberg shrewdly advertised his persona as a symptom of a dysfunctional society. He died full of honors, including a front-page . . . obituary in the New York Times, a symptom to the end.

The Will style is still there, but it strikes one as genuine indignation and not mere pique -- particularly that sendoff to Ginsberg, the kind of swift and summary thrashing at which Will is unrivaled. None of those self-consciously stately turns of phrase. He doesn't have time for that because he's writing from the gut. He is the rare case of a writer actually improved by anger.

The first Will column I remember reading was a 1983 piece on the "Infant Doe" case in Bloomington, Indiana, in which a baby with Down's Syndrome had been left alone to die in a hospital room. Titled "The Short Life and Long Dying of Infant Doe," it had an eloquence and ferocious integrity that set Will apart in the overstocked pundit market. He may have wandered afield now and then, but he has never lost that. "Pro-abortion extremists object to that name," he writes in a 1997 column on partial-birth abortion, "preferring 'intact dilation and evacuation,' for the same reason the pro-abortion movement prefers to be called 'pro-choice.' What is 'intact' is a baby."