George F. Will has come back onto the radar of the chattering classes, no longer as one of them, but as a sort of elder sage, a chattering fellow whose chattering has been elevated. In that capacity he seems to be interested in enunciating a "conservative sensibility" that will be able to survive the coming wreckage of the Republican Party after Trump passes from the scene one way or another. I liked this bit in a recent interview in his book tour. The interviewer said, "You refer to Barry Goldwater as an important intellectual failure, electorally but then setting the stage for Reagan." "George Will: It would be a stretch to refer to Barry as an intellectual precursor. But, to me, Barry was an amiable--as someone described, as a 'cheerful malcontent.' But, what he wanted to do was to revive the vocabulary of wide-open spaces, Southwestern individualism; and the Founders. Which he did. He famously did not write but presumably read The Con...
