Daily Inspiration Quote by George Will

A neat little indictment disguised as a definition, George Will's line lands because it flips conservatism from an ideology into a posture. "Define themselves" is the blade: it suggests not just tactical opposition to particular policies, but an identity built around resistance itself. Will isn't arguing that conservatives oppose things; he's arguing they need opposition to know who they are. That's a more existential critique, and it's why the sentence feels both clinical and accusatory.

The subtext is intramural. Will has spent a career inside conservative intellectual circles, and the remark reads like a warning about what happens when a movement's animating energy is reactive rather than constructive. If your selfhood comes from "no", you become dependent on a permanent antagonist: the liberal state, cultural elites, universities, Hollywood, "wokeness". The enemy can't disappear without taking your organizing principle with it. That dynamic helps explain why conservative politics so often drifts toward grievance, outrage media, and symbolic battles: they're renewable sources of opposition.

Context matters because American conservatism has repeatedly been most coherent when it had a clear object to resist: the New Deal order, the civil rights revolution, the counterculture, the Great Society, communism abroad, then later Clinton-era liberalism, Obama-era technocracy, and the cultural shifts around gender and race. Will's jab implies a paradox: conservatism claims to defend inherited institutions, yet in practice can become addicted to conflict, which corrodes those same institutions. The sentence works as a rebuke precisely because it comes from a friendly witness, not an external critic.