As George Will nears his 80th birthday, he has produced The Conservative Sensibility, the summa of his long career in opinion journalism. Unlike his periodic collections of topical columns, this big book is written to last for many seasons to come. (The name “Trump” does not appear once.) A close look at the sweep of Will’s career reveals subtle changes in his political outlook, reflecting the maturation of his own views but also of American conservatism. An impressive achievement, The Conservative Sensibility deserves to take its place with such classics as Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944) and Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences (1948).
In 1981, on the occasion of his 40th birthday, Will whimsically remarked that “I have been eagerly anticipating my ‘mid-life crisis,’ that moment when the middle-aged male does something peculiar.” It was not forthcoming, and he quickly admitted that “my mid-life crisis is that I am not having a mid-life crisis.” But arguably he did have a slow-moving midlife intellectual crisis: The Conservative Sensibility shows him working it out at last. Will’s midlife intellectual crisis, and its resolution, mirrors the midlife crisis of post-Reagan conservatism, which is still working itself out even as it recalibrates its meaning in relation to Donald Trump’s presidency.
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