George Will
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George Will (born May 4, 1941, Champaign, Illinois, U.S.) is an American journalist and pundit known for espousing political conservatism, particularly in his columns for The Washington Post and Newsweek.
Will was, along with a sister, raised in Champaign, where his father taught philosophy at the University of Illinois and his mother edited children’s encyclopaedias while managing the household. He was awarded a full scholarship to Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and there earned a bachelor’s degree in religion (1962). He then attended Magdalen College, Oxford, obtaining a degree in philosophy, politics, and economics (PPE) in 1964. Will proceeded to Princeton University, graduating with a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in politics in 1968. He later taught political science at Michigan State University and at the University of Toronto. In 1970 he became a writer on the staff of Republican U.S. Sen. Gordon Allott (Colorado), having during his Oxford years moved from the liberal politics of his upbringing to a more conservative perspective.
In early 1973 Will became the Washington editor for the conservative biweekly National Review—having previously published material there—and later that year began writing for The Washington Post as well. He then joined the incipient conservative writers’ group formed by the Post, which in 1974 began syndicating his columns nationwide. That year he also began making appearances on the political talk show Agronsky & Co. In 1975 he left the National Review to become a contributing editor for Newsweek, and the next year he began publishing a biweekly column in the magazine; he left the magazine in 2011. His columns for the Post earned him a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1977. He began appearing regularly as a panelist on ABC’s This Week program in 1981.
In 1983 it emerged that Will had, during the 1980 U.S. presidential campaign, assisted the Republican candidate, Ronald Reagan, in preparing for a debate with incumbent Democrat Jimmy Carter and had viewed a purloined briefing book belonging to Carter. After the debate, Will praised Reagan’s performance without disclosing that he had helped him to prepare, an omission some critics characterized as a breach of ethics. Will maintained that he was unaware that the briefing book had been stolen and that he had dismissed it as useless in any case.
Will accrued substantial cachet among conservatives with his nuanced and erudite analyses of contemporary issues, which were typically tinged with wry humour. His positions—particularly his support of free market capitalism and emphasis on the maintenance of traditional religious and social conventions—were largely in line with those of the Republican Party. However, he drew the ire of his cohort by characterizing the free market as a necessarily government-sponsored project and by arguing that permissive attitudes toward phenomena objectionable to conservatives—promiscuity, abortion, pornography—were in fact directly attributable to capitalism. He further diverged from doctrinaire conservatism in his promotion of some social welfare programs, particularly those aimed at improving education. The relative moderation of such perspectives accounted for his small following in liberal circles. In 2016 he announced that he had left the Republican Party because of his dissatisfaction with GOP support for the divisive Donald Trump, the party’s presumptive nominee for president. He reregistered as an unaffiliated voter.
Will’s columns for the Post and for Newsweek were, along with additional material, collected as The Pursuit of Happiness, and Other Sobering Thoughts (1978), The Pursuit of Virtue and Other Tory Notions (1982), Suddenly: The American Ideal Abroad and at Home, 1986–1990 (1990), The Leveling Wind: Politics, the Culture, and Other News, 1990–1994 (1994), With a Happy Eye But—America and the World, 1997–2002 (2002), One Man’s America: The Pleasures and Provocations of Our Singular Nation (2008), and American Happiness and Discontents: The Unruly Torrent, 2008–2020 (2021). Will expounded upon his political philosophies further in Statecraft as Soulcraft: What Government Does (1983), The New Season: A Spectator’s Guide to the 1988 Election (1987), Restoration: Congress, Term Limits, and the Recovery of Deliberative Democracy (1992), and The Conservative Sensibility (2019).
An avid supporter of the Chicago Cubs, Will also wrote several volumes on baseball: Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball (1990), Bunts: Curt Flood, Camden Yards, Pete Rose, and Other Reflections on Baseball (1998), and A Nice Little Place on the North Side: Wrigley Field at One Hundred (2014). He appeared in Ken Burns’s documentary Baseball (1994).
