True conservative

To the editor:

I don’t admire George Will as a writer. He began as a conservative Republican Party shill with a thesaurus, then shifted to journalism without appreciable shift in rhetoric. He never lost his nasty taste for the ad hominem (see his recent put-down of Eugene McCarthy), nor his often specious reasoning. Yet I have come to admire his steadfastness, amounting perhaps to courage. While his party drifts far to the right, he remains a true conservative. Most recently (Dec. 20, Journal-World) he stated the obvious: The president shouldn’t spy on Americans illegally. In other columns he has defended evolution and limited judicial activism.

The word conservative once meant (and among thoughtful people still means) one who seeks to conserve existing resources, laws, institutions, relationships and traditions. True conservatives understand that things change, and therefore sometimes support gentle reform to conserve what they have, but above all, oppose radical reform. Will is that kind of conservative.

The Republican Party has been captured by right-wing radical reformers. They call themselves conservatives but conserve nothing. Some are reactionaries, dreaming of return to a mythical past in which the government encouraged fundamentalist Christianity and women obeyed their husbands and cowboys kept the peace. Some are utopians, looking forward to a laissez faire world with government reduced to a residual police force. None can point with any satisfaction to the family life, public culture, politics, law, science, education or religion actually experienced by majorities of Americans. Soon these radicals will turn on George Will.

David Burress,

Lawrence