The sad, sorry decline of George F. Will

The longtime Washington Post columnist was once an intellectual force to be reckoned with. No more.

George Will
(Image credit: (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite))

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It's become a classic of political commentary: a center-left lament about the decline in the quality of conservative intellectual life. (Here's a recent example.) Where once William F. Buckley debated fellow intellectuals on Firing Line, where once richly erudite thinkers like Leo Strauss, Russell Kirk, and Milton Friedman crafted meticulous arguments in culturally literate essays, today conservatives either treat ideas as weapons to bludgeon their ideological opponents, or craft them into slogans to whip up enthusiasm at the endless populist pep rally on talk radio, partisan websites, and cable news.

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Damon Linker

Damon Linker is a senior correspondent at TheWeek.com. He is also a former contributing editor at The New Republic and the author of The Theocons and The Religious Test.