Sam Francis is proven correct—again.
“Why are you writing about George Will?” asked a 30-something friend when I told him I was working on this article. That is a perfectly natural question. Many people his age do not know there was a time when George Will may have been the most prominent conservative in the United States. In the pre-internet days of the early 1990s—when I was looking for alternatives to the dominant leftism that seemed to infest every institution—Mr. Will may have been challenged only by William F. Buckley as the nation’s best-known conservative.
With columns in the Washington Post and Newsweek, and weekly appearances on ABC’s Sunday news show This Week with David Brinkley, Mr. Will was everywhere. The Pulitzer Prize winner was sharp, well-spoken and, to his credit, often unafraid to take on (however tepidly) leftist issues such as affirmative action and campus political correctness. Today, Mr. Will still has a column in the Washington Post and is a commentator on MSNBC, but he is hardly ever quoted or mentioned unless he is criticizing President Trump or conservatives. Even then, his opinions are basically a footnote. Rush Limbaugh spent less than a minute brushing aside Mr. Will’s recent comment that he hopes Democrats win the 2018 mid-term elections.
How did one of America’s leading conservative pundits fall so far and so fast? The answer can be found in a 1986 article in Modern Age. Written by a then little-known Samuel Francis, this was a review of Mr. Will’s first book, Statecraft as Soulcraft: What Government Does, but Francis also critiqued “conservatism properly understood,” to use one of Mr. Will’s favorite phrases. ...
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