The Weekly Wrap takes a break from its usual format this week to focus on one topic: paying tribute to George Will’s remarkable career and enduring influence as the 50-year dean of Anglo-American conservative columnists.
Somewhat counterintuitively, there’s been a lot of change in Anglo-American conservatism over the past 50 years—including the intellectual victories of the Reagan-Thatcher-Mulroney era, the intellectual and institutional challenges of the movement’s maturity in the twenty-first century age of terrorism and globalization, and then, of course, the rise of right-wing populism personified by Donald Trump.
During this period of ferment and tumult, there’s been one constant: the principled and thoughtful reflections of the Washington Post’s conservative columnist George Will.
This week, Will celebrated an extraordinary milestone. He has now written columns from his perch at the Washington Post for a half-century. That means he published his first words there when the current Canadian prime minister’s father was still imposing price and wage controls on the Canadian economy.
In hindsight, that episode with government-imposed prices and wages which started under the Nixon administration in the United States and soon extended here in Canada was a major political economy moment. It represented the height of technocratic arrogance—the fatal conceit, as Fredrich Hayek famously put it—of the big-government, Keynesian consensus that dominated post-Second World War thinking.
Within two years, Hayek had won the Nobel Prize in economics. Five years later, Margaret Thatcher was elected in Great Britain. And before the 1980s were over, the Berlin Wall had fallen. Capitalism and democracy had won. So had conservatism.
Will was a key figure in these major intellectual and political developments as he has been throughout his career. He’s helped more than two generations of conservatives to situate contemporary politics in a broader philosophical understanding rooted in his training as a political philosopher and even a brief stint as a philosophy professor at the University of Toronto. His role in the public conversation over the past five decades can be summed up in the title of conservative scholar Richard Weaver’s 1948 book, Ideas Have Consequences.
Will’s principled conservatism has persisted during the Trump era. He’s one of a declining number of American conservative thinkers and writers who have refused to subordinate their attachment to long-standing ideas to partisan fidelity to the Republican Party or Trump himself. It probably means that his intellectual influence has waned somewhat over the past decade or so. But his columns from this era will endure as a historical record of principled opposition—as a note to posterity that not all conservatives chose the path of least resistance during these tumultuous years.
On a personal note, I’ve been a huge admirer of Will since I was a teenager. Our local newspaper in Thunder Bay, the Chronicle Journal, used to regularly syndicate his columns. It was a huge thrill to read him, even if it often required a dictionary. I also made a point to watch him each Sunday in his regular seat on ABC’s political show, This Week.
I’ve always loved his witty defence of conservative ideas. I still remember for instance a debate with former Democratic congressman Barney Frank on markets and capitalism in which Will quipped that his opponent was “a pyromaniac in the field of strawman.” Or his moving column about his son, Jon, who has Down syndrome, on his 40th birthday.
One of the joys of the first three-and-a-half years at The Hub is that I’ve twice had the chance to interview Will. The most recent interview was in November 2023 on the margins of the Munk Debates. We discussed, among other topics, what it means to be a North American conservative and the role of analytics in baseball.
The first time was in October 2021 before the Hub Dialogues podcast had even launched. We released the exchange as a Q&A transcript in which we discussed the evolution of Will’s own thinking on the limits of government and the role of the judiciary.
Notwithstanding his extraordinary longevity, there isn’t much evidence that Will is slowing down. He’s still writing a regular column and giving speeches and media interviews. That’s good because the world isn’t getting any less complicated. We still need him to help make sense of it all—to, as he beautifully put it this week in his 50th-anniversary column, “discern the small kernels of large philosophical principles lurking in the welter of events.”
Sean Speer is The Hub's Editor-at-Large. He is also a university lecturer at the University of Toronto and Carleton University, as well…
