Confessions of a Conservative

by Garry Wills

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. He makes a defence of government, and of politicians. He explains, for instance, that politicians are, by nature, supposed to be compromisers. 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.