George Will grew up in Champaign, Illinois, the son of a professor of philosophy who specialized in epistemology, so you can kind of see why he’d describe himself as an “amiable, low-voltage atheist.” His impatience with the otherworldly was probably bolstered while he was pursuing degrees at Trinity, Oxford and Princeton. But, you know, I actually care less about George Will’s rigorous rationalism than his willingness to doubt the scientific consensus on climate change. The fact that he misused data from his father’s university just makes it all the more of a headscratcher.
It used to be a lot easier to be a non-believing conservative. Will may have done his undergrad work at Trinity, but he never believed in the Trinity and yet that didn’t prevent him from attaining mass syndication and a place in the highest firmaments of the Republican commentariat by the mid-1970s.
By the 1990s, when Larry David had Cosmo Kramer mock George Will for being so incredibly handsome and yet not very bright, it was funny precisely because it was the reverse of his reputation. Or, if you were really in the know, it was funny because Will knows what bright is supposed to be, but has never been quite up to snuff in that department.
The real heyday for Will was during the Reagan administration. He got on Reagan’s good side by inappropriately helping him prepare for his debate with Jimmy Carter. But his real in was with Nancy Reagan, with whom he maintained a close relationship throughout the Reagan presidency and thereafter. It’s fair to say that George Will has been one of the Reagans’ biggest and more devoted cheerleaders.
And that’s interesting because Reagan has become the role model for every modern day Republican but George Will cannot stand modern day Republicans. He loathes Sarah Palin and his opinion of Donald Trump could not be any lower.
In fact, he has just penned a column that amounts to a full-throated endorsement of Hillary Clinton.
No, I am not kidding.
Columnists don’t write their own headlines, but this one is accurate and quite telling: If Trump is nominated, the GOP must keep him out of the White House.
Yes, that is actually what Will argues. And he comes out swinging with this opening graf:
Donald Trump’s damage to the Republican Party, although already extensive, has barely begun. Republican quislings will multiply, slinking into support of the most anti-conservative presidential aspirant in their party’s history. These collaborationists will render themselves ineligible to participate in the party’s reconstruction.
When a conservative calls you a quisling and a collaborator, that’s 98mph high cheese aimed right at your head. Notice, also, that there’s a premise laid down here that the party is going to be in need of reconstruction. George Will plans on being present at the creation of this reconstruction team, and anyone who shirked their duty to oppose Trump will be unwelcome.
But that’s all in the future. What about a good conservative’s task right now?
Were [Trump] to be nominated, conservatives would have two tasks. One would be to help him lose 50 states — condign punishment for his comprehensive disdain for conservative essentials, including the manners and grace that should lubricate the nation’s civic life. Second, conservatives can try to save from the anti-Trump undertow as many senators, representatives, governors and state legislators as possible.
Those are strong words. Conservatives should help Trump lose 50 states, meaning presumably that they should speak against him everywhere from the Delta of Mississippi to the mountains of Idaho. That’s a hard charge to give when you’re simultaneously trying to save as many down-ticket Republicans as possible.
If Trump is nominated, Republicans working to purge him and his manner from public life will reap the considerable satisfaction of preserving the identity of their 162-year-old party while working to see that they forgo only four years of the enjoyment of executive power.
Will holds out the hope that Hillary Clinton will go down in 2020, the same way that LBJ and George Herbert Walker Bush went down despite coming into office in considerable positions of strength. For him, the best way to keep that possibility alive is for Trump to lose as badly as is possible. He’s more than willing to throw in the towel on the 2016 election. He’s actually demanding this. Four more years in the executive wilderness is a small price to pay for “preserving the identity of their 162-year-old party.”
This Big Ten professor’s baby obviously has an enormous problem with Donald Trump, and he gives away the game with his remark that Trump getting slaughtered in the general election will be “condign punishment for his comprehensive disdain for conservative essentials, including the manners and grace that should lubricate the nation’s civic life.”
It’s true that Will seems to give equal weight to Trump’s conservative apostasy and his boorish manners, but let’s not forget that this atheistic son of an epistemologist isn’t exactly a down-the-line conservative himself. What does he care about the social conservatives’ agenda? When it suits him to humor them, he humors them, but he’s not a Buchananite or Falwell follower.
Will is embarrassed by Trump’s anti-intellectualism and offended by his crudeness. If Trumpism is what conservatism has become, then he could not be more off the reservation.
And Will is hardly alone. He’s just one of the more outspoken ones who will be openly rooting for Hillary Clinton to win the general election. Sure, it’s true that he sees this as a necessary compromise that will ultimately save the Republican Party to fight another day. But it still means something in the short-term, which is that the GOP has lost control of its central nervous system and has no access to its cerebral cortex.
George Will is widely syndicated and fairly influential, as least as far as columnists can be influential. But, by himself, this wouldn’t be all that consequential.
The problem is that he’s not by himself. He’s not even close to being by himself.
So, Clinton will enter the general election with much of the right-wing intelligentsia rooting her on. And that’s going to be hard for Trump to overcome, no matter what he says.
