In an interview on Conservatism and Culture

Garry Wills himself remains a conservative through all of this in a deeper sense, which brings us to your last book, Confessions of a Conservative. He’s not breaking with the conservative movement, it’s breaking with him, is that the message here?

This book was published in 1979. It’s a very small, slender book and I recommend it to people all the time because it’s so easy to read. It’s broken into two parts. The first is a series of very winning profiles of Buckley, of Kendall, and of Frank Meyer – another intellectual ideologue on the right. Then, in the second half of the book, he makes a series of arguments about conservatism. When I first read it, it was the portraits that interested me most – because I’m a biographer and his accounts of Kendall and Buckley are brilliant and rich. But now it’s the second part of the book that interests me, because there what he does is make a defence of government, and of politicians. He explains, for instance, that politicians are, by nature, supposed to be compromisers. The best politician is not the leader of a movement, but the statesman who finds the middle way between competing and conflicting ideas, the Burkean notion of government. He also explains how regulatory agencies, which are routinely mocked by the right, actually create the confidence that most of us have in the markets. For instance, if you don’t have an FDA, people wouldn’t feel there’s a kind of imprimatur placed on the food or the drugs that they buy. That if there wasn’t a motor vehicle safety department, then you’d be a little nervous about buying a car… And business knows this too. So much of the anti-government rhetoric that we have is simply that, rhetoric.