From The American Spectator, December 1983

"George Will: An Exchange," under the heading of "Special Correspondence."
A reply to Joseph Sobran's attack on George Will in the October issue of The American Spectator. With reference to Will's Statecraft as Soulcraft. December 1983, Vol. 16. No. 12, pp. 45-46. Copyright 1983 by the Alternative Educational Foundation.

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As a polemicist wielding his axe against sentimental humanitarian cant, Mr. Joseph Sobran has been useful to conservatism. But Dr. George Will, a journalist who is also a philosopher, redefining conservatism and staking a claim for legitimate humanitarianism in his book Statecraft as Soulcraft, has blunted Mr. Sobran's axe with nice distinctions. Enraged that this former academic should render his role as executioner superfluous, Mr. Sobran has hurled his blade at the neck of Dr. Will.

How sad and miserable it is for conservatism and for Mr. Sobran himself that he should so easily find access to print only to gratify his meanness. Of course he has much cause to envy Dr. Will: a popular newspaper column, a Pulitzer Prize, riches, fame, and favor with the President even without slavish submission to Republican ideology. Then again, Mr. Sobran's persistence may also be the rage before the dying of the light: the relevance of his position is expiring before his eyes. It belonged to conservatism's half-century of opposition and rhetorical irresponsibility, which Dr. Will has described as "cranky and recriminatory." Moreover the vindictiveness of this conservative enforcer bodes ill for anyone hoping to make a serious contribution to public philosophy through conservative journalism; and it shows how "intellectual conservatism" is suffering from hardening of the arteries, impervious to new ideas, repeating itself, and getting downright nasty.

Dr. Will has associated himself with the name of a faction strange to American ears, Toryism. But, in all truth, it is a simple matter to perceive Mr. Sobran as a Whig—I will not say a vile Whig, though Whiggery is what it is.

No matter what Eliot said of the futility of following an antique drum, the names of some factions retain an eternal significance, especially when enshrined in great literary texts. But Johnson defined only Whiggism as a faction; the Tories represented the national interest. Whiggery, as one of Yeats's seven sages defined it, is

A levelling, rancorous, rational sort of mind
That never looked out of the eye of a saint
Or out of a drunkard's eye.

Mr. Sobran may recoil in surprise at the suggestion that he holds levelling doctrines; but in rejecting Dr. Will's critique of American conservatism, he rejects the attack on philosophies and systems that would reduce man to the predictable level of his worst and ignore the possible level of his best. Whiggery envies excellence, and two centuries of it will accomplish the same as a decade of Jacobinism: the destruction of natural aristocracy. In defending the Madisonian calculus of conflicting factions, Mr. Sobran chooses the regime of mediocrity over the regime of excellence. Naturally, the man who denies excellence proceeds to call the advocate of excellence a humbug; whereas Samuel Johnson recommended that, if a man denies the existence of virtue, we should count our spoons, Sobran suggests that, if a man exhorts us to virtue, we should look to his mistress.

Whigs have always been uncomfortable with appeals to principle; themselves a faction, they have always depended for their support upon fragile coalitions of factions, whose politics, severally or in concert, would not bear examination. Johnson considered the "notion of liberty" as cried up continually by the Whigs irrelevant to the private lives of most Englishmen, serving only to "amuse" them and to "keep off the tedium vitae." During the American Revolution, "Tories" were Loyalists. The Whigs were composed of the heretical zealots of religious persecution in New England and the would-be squires of the South who fancied themselves gentlemen even though the tillers of their estates were not tenants but slaves. Johnson, in his pamphlet Taxation No Tyranny, pointed to the Americans' hypocrisy in opposing the British toleration of Popery in Quebec, and then asked, "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?" As a twentieth-century Whig, Mr. Sobran would have the pseudo-philosophical pretexts of an impious eighteenth-century colonial rebellion strangle our political discourse and prevent it from attaining the level of genuine political philosophy.

And who were the American rebels but transplanted English Whigs? Republicans all, the Old Whigs of ancient families traditionally jealous of royal power looked back fondly on Athens and Rome; the stock-jobbers and shopkeepers of the self-made middle class, who outnumbered the Old Whigs, idolized modern Venice's empire of avarice; the religious enthusiasts desired a messianic regime of the elect. Jonathan Swift characterized them as "an odd mixture of mankind taking in every heterodox professor either in religion or government"—a good description also of the menagerie gathered under the Neo-Whig banner of "Fusionism" for which Sobran speaks: libertarians, strict constructionists, Jaffite Straussians, sleazy literary modernists, romantic individualists, democratic theists, Southern Agrarians, gold-bugs. Perhaps each enthusiast possesses some small portion of the truth, but the sum of the parts does not equal the whole. At the bottom of the pile, the Toryism of American Tories is supposed to lie suffocated while economic Muggletonians and the Sweet Singers of Rothbard run wild. If the Tories begin to make noises about the moral use of power, they are to be shouted down with cries of "Statism!" If they say a word in behalf of welfare, they are to be ostracized as crypto-liberals.

Of all the conservative crankinesses that Sobran holds to in defiance of Tory Will, the most ridiculous is the myth of "limited government." As Johnson says,

In sovereignty there are no gradations. There
may be limited royalty, there may be limited
consulship; but there can be no limited gov-
ernment. There must in every society be some
power or other from which there is no appeal,
which admits no restrictions, which pervades
the whole mass of the community, regulates
and adjusts all subordination, enacts laws or
repeals them, erects or annuls judicatures,
extends or contracts privileges, exempt itself
from question or control, and bounded only
by physical necessity.

This is not totalitarianism, but nature; and nature abhors a vacuum, especially a vacuum of power. This is the idea of sovereignty, an elementary principle of political science stated years in advance of Count de Maistre by a moralist who did not wear a mask, a political philosopher who had been a parliamentary correspondent for years and who ghostwrote the law lectures of Blackstone's successor at Oxford, a shrewd observer of humanity whose works Mr. Sobran has read with less frequency, or with less understanding, than he pretends.

Dr. Will's crime of crimes, nevertheless, is to defend welfare. As Mrs. Thrale recalled, "severity towards the poor was, in Dr. Johnson's opinion, an undoubted and constant attendant or consequence upon Whiggism." As he said himself, "a decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization." Of course he knew that poverty is a relative condition; but this defender of the pyramid of social subordination, who knew it from the bottom, and who had studied envy as a moral problem, knew also that class envy is a political problem.

I submit that, for better or worse, one of the formulae of Republican demagogy is to arouse the middle class's resentment of the welfare class, leading to an emotional justification for the belief that welfare should be abolished. Dr. Will has asked serious questions without providing answers, and that may be his worst offense of all: he has not provided the defenders of conservative orthodoxy with quite enough evidence to damn him. Will's ultimate purpose is philosophical. As I read his book, it only aspires to build bridges for political conversation. If it is only building bridges for the greater glory of Dr. Will, we shall have to wait and see.

Mr. Sobran seems to score a minor debating point by quoting Burke's Thoughts On Scarcity. I am not so sure he is entitled to that point. But if he wants Burke so badly, then let him have Burke. Burke was a Whig.

—T. John Jamieson

Joseph Sobran replies:

[After first addressing the criticism of one Professor Robinson]

. . . In blackening my character and insulting my intelligence, Mr. Jamieson is on firmer ground. I regret that he has chosen to pass so lightly over my total contempt for the poor, but I suppose that we must make some allowance for limitations of space. Alas, he ruins a perfectly good ad hominem attack by trying to construct a rational argument with a little help from Dr. Johnson. As it happens, he has managed to select one of the few specious passages in Johnson's writings. On Johnson and the theory of sovereignty, see C.S. Lewis's introduction, "New Learning and New Ignorance," in English Literature in the Sixteenth Century. Defending the welfare state—even on conservative premises—is one thing, and I don't mind that. A sneering dismissal of vast stretches of conservative thought is something else again. Having said this, I should add that I remain a George Will fan six days a week. No question, I'd like to have his success; but I'd rather have his gifts. [end]