The Woven Figure

Digging deep into the bookshelf and not happy about it...

The Sunday morning political talk shows used to be part of the ether. Whether it was Meet the Press on NBC, ABC's This Week, or Sunday Morning on CBS, it was the place to go if you wanted to hear about politics. Ours was an ABC house for the most part, so we typically got local and national news from there.

To say that these shows are in anyway relevant to my life since the untimely passing of MTP host Tim Russert would be a major exaggeration. I’ve watched approximately 1-2 hours of these shows in the intervening years.

More to the point, David Brinkley, Sam Donaldson, Cokie Roberts, Bill Kristol, and George Will were the folks I remembered most. After the dawn of the new century, the ABC show lost any gravitas it had with me. Heck, I still consider George Stephanopoulos the "new guy" and he has hosted the show more or less since 2002, already a way longer tenure than original host, Brinkley.

Aside from the loathsome Kristol, of whom I cannot find anything good to say, I either liked or tolerated the rest of them. I always found Kristol pretty dumb and way too arrogant—a common yet dangerous combination within the Beltway Elite.

George Will was the "likeable conservative," much like the branding of David Brooks, who assumed that role later. It was neat that Will liked baseball and was not a pinko commie. He looked intelligent with his smart suits, round frame glasses, and bow ties (though that routine eventually ran its course).

I remember reading Men at Work, Will's 1990 best-seller about baseball. It was okay. For all the hype it got about how smart Will was and how much he loved baseball, it should have been better.

Same thing with the widely praised PBS documentary, Baseball, by Ken Burns. As one of the interview subjects, Will pontificates and preens about baseball and its history, but it's not all that enlightening and usually rather boring.

In his own right, Burns happens to fill a similar cultural role to Will, though from the left. Those who consider themselves educated and are mildly right of center or even "centrist" in their politics tend to love the stuff Burns puts out. While he is a talented filmmaker, Burns has little grasp of history and serves as a wonderful propagandist for the regime.

Even knowing these aspects about Burns and Will, I didn't much care. Furthermore, I did not have any outlet that I knew of to voice such displeasure. Well, here I am.

I would have let sleeping dogs lie, for I never paid Will a whole lot of mind. He was the house conservative, expected to give opinions that were against the mainstream progressive narrative, but guaranteed not to ruffle too many feathers unless it was the plumage of those further to the right of Will.

He played his role magnificently. Still does in fact.

As a man with "conservative principles" he ticked all the boxes.

• Diverse: A midwestern family man with three children with an ostensibly southern wife

• Erudite: Uses big words when small ones will do

• Religiously Aware: A former Episcopalian, but now a "low-voltage atheist"

• Educated: Masters and PhD from Princeton

• Professionally Elite: A Washington Post columnist

• Politically Aware: Originally a left-winger but at some point saw the errors of his ways and a die-hard Republican (up until the intolerable MAGA uprising of 2016)

Now, I have a few George F. Will books here in my library and the spine of one of them has been taunting me for days, so I finally opened it this morning. The Woven Figure (1997).

I asked myself before I opened the book:

Am I wrong about Will? Is he really an orthodox conservative or is he just a hand-manservant of the regime? What did he think about certain key issues in the mid-1990s, right about the time I was really becoming aware of politics?

I was not wrong. Some things Will has to say are right on the money things that only crazy people and Democrats could dispute. The book is nearly 400 pages and not all of it is nonsense, of course.

But this being a collection of his columns by-and-large and the subtitle "Conservatism and America's Fabric, 1994-1997," I figured I had to apply my own quick litmus test to see if Will was indeed "conservative" as is his contention.

First of all, I don't particularly care about labels. It has both bothered me and emboldened me in the past when someone labeled me a "conservative." Now I tell people, "If Jonah Goldberg considers himself a conservative, than I cannot consider myself one."

But the self-labeling is a problem with political identification. If you want to be called a conservative, you are one. Libertarian? It's self-gloss as well. The liberals are better gatekeepers, but the progressives disown you if you do not fall in lockstep with their culture-destroying ethos.

That being said, my litmus test is to first see in the appendix if and when a conservative so-called, writing a book specifically about conservatism, mentions Russell Kirk. And if he does, how often and what does he have to say about the Sage of Mecosta and his ideas?

Unsurprisingly, Kirk is not referenced in the appendix even once. And if you don't know who Kirk was, well he had perhaps the biggest influence on conservatism—surely in an academic sense—of any man in the 20th Century. Also not surprisingly, I was not aware of Kirk until my mid-20s when I figured I had to do more than regurgitate what I was told in school and what hits me on the "news" and in the papers.

Second part of my test is to see if he mentions Pat Buchanan. A zeroing-out of Buchanan, particularly in those years when he was twice a presidential candidate ('92 & '96), would have given Will no standing with me. However, he does invoke Buchanan on 7 pages throughout.

Will, however, essentially mocks Buchanan—both as a "conservative" and as a serious man. Reflexively, this is laughable. For I can think of no other man in the world of politics over the last half-century or more who has been more of a Kirkian conservative than Patrick J. Buchanan.

Buchanan was Nixon's "ambassador to the conservatives," after all. We could go on, but Will's conception of conservatism is a bunch of milquetoast Republican policy positions. Buchanan focused on real life Americans and making their lives better.

Buchanan rallied toward "conservatives of the heart" and they rallied to him back in his presidential runs. Will mocks Buchanan from his February 18, 1996 column, saying

"conservativism with a heart" (i.e., conservatism thinking with the wrong organ) is protectionism and other ingredients of what liberals celebrate as "industrial policy." President Buchanan would pick the industries that should flourish even though they cannot flourish without the subsidy of protection, and to finance his picks he would tax (by tariffs) American consumers.

Will's is a lecture straight out of Boomercon 101. Even liberals wouldn't be as dense to call Pat Buchanan one of their own.

Many more such cases throughout the book.

I hadn't read it in a while and I've poked around it in the past, apparently. Bookmarks and marginalia would suggest so, anyway. The Woven Figure is a nice peek into the mind of the conservative establishment that was anything but. One of the talking heads that looked smart but was indeed dumb.

Anyhow, I’ve gone on longer than I had planned. Much more to talk about on this front…

Though, one more thing…

Before I dared cracking Will’s book open, I saw the SPECIAL VALUE sticker on the front of the dustjacket. $5.98. Original Price $25.00. I hoped that I had gotten this thing for free somewhere, really, but I can’t remember.

It’s funny what we consider “fair value,” particularly when it comes to books and educational materials.

I’ve paid over $300 for a regular book a couple of times. Somewhat for the collector’s value, but really for the information inside—unavailable for lower prices.

Same thing goes with informational products. I am a subscriber to several products that have dramatically fewer pages but cost monumentally more than even the retail price of The Woven Figure.

I get value out of those things. In a lot of cases, I’ve made my money back and more. Something I cannot say about reading the treacle that came out of George F. Will’s word processor.

One of the products that I’ve gotten the most benefit out of is the Jim Camp Master Negotiator Interview Series. I reviewed 4 lessons again today. (Big day on the information intake side, as you can already gather.)

Michael Senoff interviews Jim Camp for over 7 hours and talks to him about more than 174 topics related to negotiation. Senoff sells this product for $597 on his website. He found out that I am a Jim Camp Evangelist and we negotiated a deal to sell the product to the people who read this newsletter for the princely sum of $177.

That’s over $400 off. And worth it.

Having used the product—which includes PDF transcripts of all the interviews and more—it has easily surpassed in value the original price I paid.

But … the screaming deal ends next Saturday … and I’ll be writing more about it over the next few days.

As always,

Brian

george will conservatism