Henry Adams, about whom Garry Wills has written at length, concluded upon observing politics up close that "power is poison." Garry Wills appears to have reached the same conclusion regarding Barack Obama.

A few weeks back, Garry Wills, the renowned historian, published an angry lament in the New York Review of Books blog in which he expressed his total disillusionment with President Barack Obama.

If we had wanted Bush's wars, and contractors, and corruption, we could have voted for John McCain. At least we would have seen our foe facing us, not felt him at our back, as now we do. The Republicans are given a great boon by this new war. They can use its cost to say that domestic needs are too expensive to be met — health care, education, infrastructure. They can say that military recruitments from the poor make job creation unnecessary. They can call it Obama's war when it is really theirs. They can attack it and support it at the same time, with equal advantage.

I cannot vote for any Republican. But Obama will not get another penny from me, or another word of praise, after this betrayal. And in all this I know that my disappointment does not matter. What really matters are the lives of the young men and women he is sending off to senseless deaths.

This is dogmatic stuff, even for an intellectual prone to judge others harshly. There is no room for honest disagreement about how to best counter terrorists who continue to target innocent people around the world. There is the implication that Republicans "chose" this war, when any fair observer knows that the war, however difficult the going, was thrust upon us after 9/11. (You might make the argument that the Bush administration "chose" the Iraq war, but to make such an argument about the war in Afghanistan is to lose all capacity for relevant distinctions.)  And then there are the gratuitous swipes at Republicans and the elevation of politics over national security as a critical consideration.

Wills was not always so uncompromising in his rhetoric. Back in 1977, he criticized Gloria Emerson in the New York Review of Books, long after his leftward turn, for her caricature of the Vietnam War. Wrote Wills: "But Emerson herself shows a groupie tendency for all those connected with the war . . . sees malice where there was little, and saintliness where there was little, and has no mind at all for sorting out various kinds of mindlessness on both sides."

These words surely could be ascribed to Mr. Wills in today's context.

Wills is a disillusioned man, but then disillusionment seems to be the one constant theme in his intellectual story. Once a self-described conservative, he broke with William F. Buckley Jr. and National Review. Having openly admired Whittaker Chambers' Witness, he later reversed himself, calling the book and its author superficial. He turned to the right to find Reagan, Nixon, the Bushes and even John Wayne all wanting and then turned leftward to exercise his disillusionment at the expense of the Kennedys and President Clinton. He began his career impressed with G.K. Chesterton, but that didn't last. He apparently still worships as a Catholic when he is not trying to overturn what he considers 2,000 years of tyranny under papal edict.

And now, in what appears to be his most disillusioned moment of all, he has broken with the darling of the left-liberal literati – President Obama. What is one to make of it all?

Henry Adams, about whom Mr. Wills has written at length, concluded upon observing politics up close that "power is poison." There are parallels between Wills and Adams worth exploring. Both men were acclaimed writers and historians. Both men broke with their intellectual past — Adams with his own family, Wills with his mentor and friend Buckley. Both are distinguished by their profound disillusionment with much, if not all, that transpires around them. Wills, like Adams, has turned increasingly toward spiritual topics, writing a trilogy on Christianity and several books on St. Augustine, just as Adams turned his gaze to Chartres and Mont-Saint-Michel and then the Virgin — both men clearly in search of some sustaining idea that would make sense of the human condition.

As someone who has always read Wills with interest and admiration for his industry and style, if not his political conclusions, it nevertheless must be said that Wills is not to be taken seriously as a fair-minded commentator. Politics, after all, is the art of the possible. He shows little interest in what is possible; he is interested mostly in moral absolutes. And the high-handed moralizing that suffuses so much of his work, so often at the expense of imperfect people who have done much good, becomes, after a while, grating.

It is as if Mr. Wills were a perpetual college student — always disenchanted by the real world choices that shatter his fragile idealism. Or as one friend observed of Adams, he reduces everything to ashes.

One comes to expect this from academic types, tenured, safe and secure on the college campus, living comfortably if not extravagantly in a world where they are master. Always averse to the rude calculations of commerce and politics, they pontificate from on high about the disappointing world below — ah, if only we ruled, things would be better, and then off to the college dining hall for Cappuccino and that evening's lecture by Noam Chomsky.

I always hoped for more from Garry Wills. He is a man of immense gifts and it is hard not to be impressed by the body of his work. His love of the classics and his celebrated critical skills have made him a rare creature in American letters – a polished essayist, reviewer and journalist who has also reached the pinnacle as a scholar and historian.

Yet, his intellectual journey is instructive, for it underscores the lure of leftism, the romance with the state (military issues aside), and here the parallels with Adams end, for Adams was politically unpredictable, calling himself a "conservative anarchist." Conservatives and liberals of varying degrees have laid claim to him. (See, for example, the final chapter of James Young's study: Henry Adams, The Historian as Political Theorist.)

Wills, on the other hand, has quite predictably become a captive of the Left, his pronounced breaks with the political order driving him deeper and deeper into the murky depths of left thinking. Where Adams cast his impressive critical skills across the landscape in search of a theory of history, and reached arresting cultural conclusions about the great struggles between modernity and tradition, Wills has shown surprisingly little interest in the important ideological struggles being waged in historiography. He has instead been content to publish popular surveys, journalistic in tone, that rarely delve beneath the surface. For a historian whose reputation is built on his knowledge of the classics and the broad themes of history, his work as a whole has been surprisingly shallow.

That the political person who receives his highest praise is Jimmy Carter speaks volumes about Wills' journey into political purgatory.

The intellectual journey

Wills' most celebrated and interesting works have been his studies of American history. Inventing America explores the writing and influences that made the Declaration of Independence, and Explaining America performs a similar feat on the Constitution. He has written highly readable books on George Washington (Cincinnatus) and another on James Madison. His most acclaimed history, of course, was his treatment of Lincoln's Gettysburg address, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize. A recent book, Negro President, documents the role of slave power in the early American Republic. Finally, we have his book-length analysis of Henry Adams' history of the Jefferson and Madison administrations.  

Religion also has been a preoccupation almost since the day he arrived on the public scene. His first major work, Man and Mask (republished as Chesterton), dealt with the life and thinking of G.K. Chesterton, whose work Wills continues to cite even as he distances himself from most of the great man's conclusions. Wills' religious concerns, until recently, served mostly to document his alienation from his own church and the religious right. Papal Sins is his indictment of the entrenched establishment of the Catholic Church in Rome. Bare Ruined Choirs is a rambling book (written in the 1970s) that portrays the Catholic Church in America as an anachronism. Under God is a history of religion in American politics, with an obvious leftward tilt, and Why I am a Catholic attempts to answer a question posed those curious to know why Wills remains in a church whose traditions he so obviously disdains. More recently he has taken on religion in its more pure distillation, writing book-length studies of St. Augustine, St. Paul, Jesus and the Gospels, but these too are attempts to create an ideal, in this case a faith of Mr. Wills' own devising.

In the political analysis category, Wills has written Nixon Agonistes, Reagan's America: Innocents Abroad (on Reagan's political ascent); The Kennedy Imprisonment, John Wayne's America, Confessions of a Conservative, The Second Civil War, and Lead Time, the latter being a collection of Wills' journalism during the 1970s. We also have Wills' argument for the empowered state, A Necessary Evil. There is a book on Jack Ruby, thrown in for good measure. And this does not exhaust the interests of this prolific writer. He has explored leadership, the rosary, and Shakespeare even as he has regularly contributed to the New York Review of Books and many other esteemed liberal journals and publications. In short, he has been one of the most visible men of letters in America since he broke with Buckley and National Review forty years ago.

His literary style weaves back and forth through the various genres of popular prose – confessionals, new journalism, detached histories, first person political commentaries, cultural observations, all infused with that tone of psycho-analysis that positions Mr. Wills as the analyst and his subjects as the patients on the couch. This is particularly true in his biographical studies, but even his histories presume a near omniscient certainty about the motivations of those he writes about.

The most important book concerning his political odyssey is the Confessions of a Conservative, written in the late 1970s. I have read the book several times and I am always astonished by the adolescence and maturity that exist there side by side. It is a work of a man in transition, of course, for it describes Wills' journey from conservative to radical. And I say radical knowingly because, for a time, he was quite the radical, even going so far as to predict race war in the United States back in the 1970s. (See The Second Civil War.)

The book begins with Wills' years with Bill Buckley, who discovered him, mentored him and elevated him, only to have Wills break ranks over Vietnam and the Civil Rights movement. In a 1975 column, Buckley would comment with some sarcasm on Mr. Wills' ideological break with the Right.

His great transformation seems to have occurred in Chicago in 1968, when he saw the Kids flinging their poop at the cops. His consciousness raised, he wrote a book in homage to his young exemplars, meanwhile dismissing Richard Nixon as "the last liberal." The others have mostly grown up now, but Garry is still out there, flinging away: the last Kid.

He remains, like the General Assembly, enamored of all those words — "racist," "fascist," "genocidal" — that should have gone with Jerry Rubin, wherever he went. The embarrassment of his own political conversion, preceded as it was by his own philosophical conservatism, may have given him another incentive to excess. It became necessary for him to shout down his former self, lacking new reasons to supersede the old. Like a man vowing eternal constancy to his fifth wife, he no doubt felt he had to affect a special ardor in his utterances, to show it was the real thing this time. And vileness, in the fever swamps of the Left, is the outward and visible sign of what is called authenticity.

This was written a couple of years before Wills wrote his "confessions," and he wasted little time getting even, dwelling at some length on Buckley's glib style and mannerisms. But it is a rambling book, like much of Wills' work during this period. It begins with his recounting of his meeting Buckley and the National Review crowd. About fifty or sixty pages in, one begins to detect the fissures that would lead to what became a bitter break. Buckley and NR were stridently and rightly anti-communist, but Wills observes: "One does not have to condone communism in order to condemn the kind of crusade America mounted against communism in the 1940s and 1950s."

Wills acknowledges that he, too, applauded that crusade for a time, but he clearly came to regret his enthusiasm. The belief that communists who apologized for Stalin were the real victims of the Cold War is a fascinating pathology of many leftists, who rarely managed to work up a similar passion or compassion for the victims of Stalin's murderous brutalities.

When Wills got into trouble at John Hopkins for writing columns of a conservative bent, he was denied tenure by the head of his department. Interestingly, Wills uses the episode not to assail the bias against conservatives on college campuses, which is the real point of the drama, but to reference the need for John Hopkins to hire more minorities. It simply did not occur to him that he could have done both because that would have won him few favors in the liberal salons, which is increasingly where he wanted to be. Within a couple of years, largely thanks to Buckley, he had lined up a gig with Esquire magazine; his career made, Wills' days as a conservative were over.

Understand, of course, that during this period academia and the media establishment – television, publishing, newspapers, magazines – were the domain of liberalism. Buckley was the sole conservative with any notable national following. The only sure path to a career as a celebrated writer and scholar was through liberal orthodoxy and one could hardly blame Wills if convenience and principle merged to launch him in a new direction.

And so he moved leftward in a 1960s-1970s context – defended even the extreme edges of the civil rights movement, applauded James Baldwin, embraced Martin Luther King, turned into an anti-war activist, regretted his anti-communism, took to the streets to document the heroes of the New Left, always virulent in reminding the Right of its hypocrisies. It was quite a journey, and yet ironically his best philosophical essay in the period was published as part of Buckley's collection on conservative thought, Have You Ever Seen a Dream Walking.

In that essay, "The Convenient State," Wills described the vital distinction between statists and those who embrace the idea of limited government. The liberal sees the state as a critical player in the pursuit of justice, whereas a conservative sees the state in more minimalist terms – its primary function being to ensure individual liberty. There is nothing mysterious about the conservative suspicion of a state in pursuit of justice – for a state so devoted is one that accumulates, at the cost of liberty, an increasing share of power in the name of eliminating injustice. And counted among those injustices, sooner or later, will be transgressions of thought, resistance to extant or emerging power, and finally resistance to the state itself. The history of socialism and fascism underscores this lesson and nothing Wills has written in the ensuing 40 years contradicts the essential truth of his argument. Reality didn't change; only Garry Wills changed.

And this is the irony of the man. He accused Buckley of striking poses and making his own personality his barter and trade. Yet, Buckley still served ideas which he celebrated and cherished. Mr. Wills writes about everything and celebrates little. Virtually no modern institution or person escapes his glaring disapproval. It is as if he is intentionally cultivating the political isolation of Adams, but without the courage to reexamine his own narrow liberalism.

Now, we could all go about our lives happily reading his interesting if imperfect histories, were it not for the fact that his reputation as an historian is the platform on which his political commentary stands. James McPherson in his collection of Civil War writings, Drawn by the Sword, concluded one of his essays thus:

The new birth of freedom, the positive liberty invoked by Lincoln in the 1860s, finally reached fruition in the 1960s. But in the 1990s the spirit of negative liberty, stripped of its humanistic liberalism, has forged into renewed prominence. Lincoln's melding of humanistic liberalism and reform liberalism is in danger of being rent in twain by the party he helped to found and which he led to victory in 1860.
– DS, p. 191

It may or may not be a coincidence that McPherson, a renowned historian himself, felt compelled to gratuitously attack the modern Republican Party while reviewing Wills' book, Lincoln at Gettysburg. That he chose to do so in gratuitous fashion is nevertheless interesting and underscores how elite historians who pride themselves on intellectual independence will bend to the wheel of the liberal academic fraternity.

Regrettably, Wills' liberal orthodoxy has rendered him impotent on a host of critical intellectual issues about which he might have had constructive things to say. He has never taken on the tendentious claims of Howard Zinn or Chomsky, the postmodern movement led by Michel Foucault, the dogmatic discourse of Richard Rorty or the leftist corruption of the American classroom. This is a shame, because Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., for example, whose liberal attachments were never in question, had the courage to fight such battles.

Wills is incapable of questioning with any real commitment even the most destructive elements of the leftist worldview. Unlike more original cultural critics who share some of his political sensitivities — Wendell Berry, Christopher Lasch and Neil Postman come to mind — Wills instead cranks out the tinny cliches of a liberal conformist, and when he writes in this mode he loses those analytical skills that made him one of our most preeminent icons in American letters.

Take his denunciation of President Obama. Wills could have found any number of issues with which to disagree with the President, even from a liberal perspective — subsidies to Wall Street, big business bailouts, political bartering and corruption, continued mismanagement of the economy and an elitist air that to any objective observer seems disconnected with everyday realities. Had Bush handled Haiti the way Obama has, for example, the liberal media would have eaten him alive, as they did in the wake of Katrina.

But none of this is what brought Wills to his revelation that Obama was not the sun god. No, it was Afghanistan, and this is strange because 1) Obama never claimed the war in Afghanistan was immoral or wrong; 2) it is, in fact, the place where the Democrat mainstream has long argued we should have been focusing our military efforts; and 3) it is where 9/11 plans were hatched.

It verifies the fears some of us had about Obama, that he was an empty page on which millions of Americans wrote their own story – Wills' story being the one about a principled anti-war president who would roll back American empire and magically dissipate bad feelings around the globe created by the nefarious Bush. One might applaud Wills for breaking with Obama, as a sign of independent thinking, were it not that his reasoning is so difficult to follow. He offers no analysis of whether the strategy will work, what that strategy ought to be, or how we might better disarm our enemies; no, just the rat-a-tat-tat about all evils Bush.

This obsession with Bush infects much of what Wills writes. In November of 2004, he wrote an essay for the New York Review of Books under the striking headline: "The Day the Enlightenment Went Out" — this from the man who once accused Whittaker Chambers of being melodramatic?

Wills' fears were rooted in Mr. Bush's reelection and the role the religious right played in his victory. It is almost amusing, a mere six years later, to read this dark gloss on the state of American culture. Wills clearly felt we had reached a dramatic turning point in history, with the right-wing barbarians firmly in control. He breathlessly wrote: "Can a people that believes more fervently in the Virgin Birth than in evolution be called an Enlightenment nation?"

The answer is obviously yes, but not if you insist — as Wills does — that enlightenment requires that you embrace the right to an abortion agenda of the Democrat Party, same-sex marriage, a large federal government, the welfare state, with all its demoralizing effects, and so on. You must not mind that people burn or desecrate the flag. You must be tolerant of every bizarre form of expression known to man or beast except, of course, a Nativity Scene on public property. And, most interesting of all, you must accept the Clarence Darrow view of evolution and be cynical (apparently) about the Virgin birth, one of the fundamental beliefs of Christianity.

It did not occur to Wills, at least at the time, that one can celebrate traditional values while also accommodating modernity. America is an enlightenment nation. Yes, we celebrate Christmas and embrace traditional faith, but we also question from time to time the arrogance of both evangelicals and scientists. That seems healthy to me.

We also adapt more quickly to technology, science and new ideas than any people in history. This is a far cry from much of the Arab world, for example, which, according to the Syrian poet Adonis, embraces the product of science but rejects its methods. There is simply no evidence that this is a widespread problem in the United States, where scientists practice their profession with a liberality that Newton and Einstein could only envy, and where atheists and fundamentalists live side by side with far less animosity than European soccer fans.

So what is Wills up to? Why is it that he, like many on the left, is so fearful of Christians who actually believe what the Bible says? And what is contradiction in Wills that he can on the one hand comment derisively about belief in the Virgin birth, and on the other write a book called Why I am a Catholic?

Interestingly, in his book, What Jesus Meant, Wills comments on the Jefferson Bible. This is the Bible as Jefferson would have edited it — all the miracles, claims of divinity and strange stuff removed. Jefferson's main accomplishment is to make Jesus less interesting, a result Wills clearly does not endorse. So on the one hand he condemns Americans for believing in a miracle, on the other he laments that Jefferson, America's apostle of the enlightenment, sought to strip Jesus of his miraculous powers.

It is a bit confusing.

What we do know, a mere half decade after Mr. Wills wrote his essay implying that a new dark age was about to descend upon America, is that nothing much has happened to roll back science, destroy minority rights or limit federal spending. His party is in power, the evil Republicans are marginalized and all is right with world, right?

Alas, no.

Other political wisdom from Wills

In reviewing Jimmy Carter's book, Our Endangered Values, Wills concluded:

Carter is a patriot. He lists all the things that Americans have to be proud of. That is why he is so concerned that we are squandering our treasures, moral even more than economic. He has come to the defense of our national values, which he finds endangered. He proves that a devout Christian does not need to be a fundamentalist or fanatic, any more than a patriotic American has to be punitive, narrow, and self righteous.

And so on.

While even liberals are applauding, retrospectively, Reagan's management of the Cold War and John Paul's restoration of the human spirit, Garry Wills has embraced the once and past minimalist president, a man so ineffectual that his own party disowned him for nearly a decade. But if you lament the exercise of strong executive power, which is clearly where Wills has landed, it is understandable that the president you would most admire is one who never mastered the art of politics or the effective use of power.

And they share the same moralizing tone they accused George W. Bush and the religious right of exhibiting, only in their case in the service of more leftist ideas. In addition to accusing Bush administration of being the worst ever, being overly solicitous to dictators in North Korea and Cuba, and ignoring Reagan's contributions to ending the Cold War in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Carter once claimed: "Republicans are men of narrow vision, who are afraid of the future." 

On this point, and many others, both men are in concordance.

The most interesting development in the Garry Wills story from a conservative perspective was his rekindled friendship with Bill Buckley. After Buckley's death, Wills seemed genuinely moved and on several television broadcasts spoke kindly of his former mentor and editor. This reconciliation of friendship, not ideology, was laudable and speaks to a fundamental decency in both men. I had some hope, however fleeting, that Wills might figure out that his reactionary move to the left was not necessary. The fundamental issues outlined in his essay, The Convenient State, remain valid and civil rights, limited government and a restrained foreign policy are fully consistent with mainstream conservative thought.

Instead, as he sails into the sunset of his own life, we can only imagine where he might travel, all of his ideological anchors having been pulled up. He clings tenuously to his outrage and his scruples, but what core principles or concerns guide him?

Is he a old-style Jeffersonian shocked by the great concentrations of power on Wall Street and in Washington: clearly not, for he supported Obama and his domestic program. Is he a Pat Buchanan or William Appleman Williams disciple in wanting to roll back American empire? One can appreciate the sentiment (which I partially share), but then what is the plan for rolling back terrorists who exploited on 9/11 precisely a passive policy as practiced by the Clinton administration?

Does he have anything meaningful to say to Iranian protesters, desperate for freedom, given the tepid response of the Democrats? Has he embraced the state, on the domestic front at least, as the critical arbiter of human justice and opportunity? What then are his notions of justice and liberty and how do they take shape in a political and economic framework that does not create despondency, passivity and victimization as a way of life?

In a recent book, Bomb Power, Wills resurrects a popular theme among America's critics: the breadth and depth of nuclear power and the concomitant national security state. How much power does the United States need to wield and how is our huge military power distorting our government and our Constitution? These are fair questions that a half-century ago, President Eisenhower raised eloquently as he left office. He called it the military industrial complex and they remain issues this nation must debate in a post-Cold War world. 

But even here, Wills cannot shake his anti-Republican, anti-Bush obsession. He launches this book with Bush in his sights, but like most critics of Bush's handling of the terrorism threat, Wills is long on aspersions and short on solutions. It is predictable that the liberal establishment is anxious about the imperial presidency and the relative weakness of Congress mainly when conservatives or Republicans are, or recently were, in power. Wills at least is more consistent on this regard, as he has been a consistent skeptic about increasing presidential power.

You can be sure that Wills is left of field when the reviewer of Bomb Power for the liberal Los Angeles Times criticizes him from the right. Tim Rutten calls Wills "a reflexive Thomist." Writes Rutten: "That has made him very discerning of first causes and alive to the deeper meanings of texts, like the Constitution. It's not an outlook, though, that copes well with the reality of historical contingency, and that is where this book is least satisfying. We did not build the bomb on a strategic whim: We built it because some of the world's best physicists, including the instinctual pacifist Albert Einstein, told President Franklin Roosevelt that if we didn't, the Nazis would."

Wills nevertheless calls the Manhatten project unconstitutional. He laments the creation of the CIA. He minimizes the role of the Soviet Union – "whose activities," Rutten reports, "we now know were more extensive and effective than anyone realized at the time." Wills even argues that the Marshall Plan was mainly aimed at projecting American power in Europe, but Rutten asks the obvious question – even if true, would Wills have preferred that Western Europe fall under the domination of the Soviets?

In short, we ache to see Mr. Wills move beyond his knee jerk approach to politics in history. Yes, hard choices are made, even wrong choices, but a fair-minded assessment must take into account the complex forces that are always at play in international affairs. By all means let's have a vigorous debate about the role America and our military should play in the world, but let's not distort how we arrived where we are.

Perhaps weariness has set in, and one can appreciate this. Wills is 75 now. If he has not given up totally on the affairs of men, he certainly seems more focused lately on the spiritual realm; yet, that, too, is a hard journey. Not content to embrace the Jesus of doctrine, Wills has set out to recast to his own liking the Western tradition of faith. It is a fascinating exercise and one worthy of a religious scholar. One can only wish him well, the paths to God being truly infinite.

It must be observed, however, with some regret, that his intellectual political journey — which began with Chesterton, Chambers, Buckley, and Meyer — has brought him perilously close to Chomsky and Vidal. Poor Garry, Buckley once told Charlie Rose with a wink and a smile, I fear he sailed in the wrong direction.