Durable, disciplined liberty

It's hard to remember when
George Will was a serious political thinker and not a shill for the latest
Republican talking point. E. J. Dionne and the folks at Front Porch Republic are among several
commentators who recalled those happier days as they confronted Will's recent, incomprehensible claim that consumer advocate and
Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren has a "collectivist" agenda because she
thinks that individual fates in modern society are deeply interconnected and that nobody "got rich on his own."

As Dionne and others point
out, Will once used Warren's very own terms to define what conservatism is.
Back in the 1980s, he wrote powerfully on behalf of a political conservativism
that was distinctly anti-individualistic and anti-libertarian. "Real conservatism is about balancing many
competing values," Will wrote back then,

and
always requires resistance to libertarianism (the doctrine of maximum freedom
for private appetites) because libertarianism is a recipe for the dissolution
of public authority, social and religious traditions, and other restraints
needed to prevent license from replacing durable, disciplined liberty.