In a recent interview promoting his new book, “The Conservative Sensibility,” George Will left no room for interpretation when asked whether conservatives would be better served by a Donald Trump defeat in 2020.
“Yes, yes and yes,” he told the Daily Beast. “There’s no question about that.”
What a significant comment. Coming from one of the nation’s most iconic conservatives, it speaks to the level to which the president and his supporters have driven the Republican Party to extremism.
Will, famously, is no longer a member of the party. He exited it in 2016 over its then-presumptive nomination of Trump, and now says the GOP has become a cult of personality amid an “absence of ideas.”
This is a sad commentary on the state of the Republican Party. Like him or not, Will is a standard-bearer for a thoughtful and intellectual brand of conservatism that once formed the GOP’s philosophical bedrock.
He still carries that torch, as he demonstrates in “The Conservative Sensibility.” The 700-page book is clearly an attempt by Will to rescue conservatism from the slag pit that is the GOP under the likes of Trump, Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller.
Notably, the book contains no mention of Trump. As Will has explained, he left Trump out of it for the same reason he also doesn’t include Charlemagne, Doris Day or Humphrey Bogart.
“None of them have anything to do with conservatism,” Will said in an interview with The Guardian.
Certainly, today’s Republican Party is in some ways unrecognizable compared with previous iterations. Fiscal conservatism has been tossed out the window in favor of policies driving the national debt to ridiculous proportions. A party that once claimed the high moral ground on personal character — though a dubious claim, to be sure — is now led by a rank vulgarian, misogynist and racist. Once the champion of free trade, the GOP now supports a tariff-happy president whose reckless trade wars are hurting Americans and weakening relations with allies. Members of a party that has preached free trade now wring their hands as Trump uses Twitter to attack individual American companies that have displeased him.
Will has watched all of this in obvious horror. He has said Trump’s divisive rhetoric, hatefulness and destructive policies were more harmful to the nation than Watergate.
“I believe that what this president has done to our culture, to our civic discourse ... you cannot unring these bells and you cannot unsay what he has said, and you cannot change that he has now in a very short time made it seem normal for schoolboy taunts and obvious lies to be spun out in a constant stream. I think this will do more lasting damage than Richard Nixon’s surreptitious burglaries did,” he said.
If there’s any good news in this, it’s that Will — and hopefully many other conservatives — recognize the GOP’s current path as a threat to our democracy. Conservatives who don’t see it that way would be well advised to read Will’s book.