He is reluctant to predict who will win the nomination, but admits that if he had to bet, he would bet on Reagan--"but I wouldn't bet much." He gives Reagan the edge mainly because of the sort of people who vote in presidential primaries. Reagan, Will says, "is more fun, and basically politics at the nominating level is dominated by comfortable, middle-class, leisured people. They do it for fun, not because they're being ground into the dust by the iron heel of tyranny." Asked his own preference between Ford and Reagan, Will pauses as if he had never considered the question before. "I don't know," he finally replies. "I'm not that interested. I suppose one of these days I'm going to have to get serious about this and face the fact that it's going to be one of those two." He shakes his head. "Oh, I don't care. I suppose Ford in a sense. Maybe Reagan in a sense. I don't know."

In any case, Will doubts that it will make much difference who the GOP nominates, and predicts a fairly easy Democratic victory. "This is the ultimate challenge to the Democratic party. If they can kick this one away, they have really raised it to an art form," he says, chuckling. The depleted numbers of the Republican Party and the poor health of the economy, he thinks, will make it almost impossible for any Republican to be elected President next year.

But Will's pessimism goes far beyond the Republican Party's prospects in the '76 elections. He broods gloomily over the future of American society and of the world itself. "I think the most depressing and, in the long run, alarming, tendency in the world today is the mindless attack on what is called elitism," he says. "It's an attack on quality and excellence. The levelling attack on excellence is the threat to what I value, which is a sort of reasonableness and quality--in everything. There are a lot of forces loose in the world against quality, in favor of uniformity--which is always a lowering of quality."

The problem, in Will's view, goes beyond even that trend. For all his insistence on calling himself a conservative in the Burkean tradition, Will is strongly attached to the values of 18th and 19th century liberalism, with its emphasis on individual freedom, decentralized and limited government, and economic laissez-faire. He is not preoccupied by the traditional conservative ideals, order and tradition. He shows little concern for the decline of religion or the undermining of authority, unlike more traditional conservatives like those at National Review.

Will is frank about the reasons for his general pessimism: "We've only had liberal, bourgeois civilization for about 200 years. That's not very long--it's a mere blink. No reason it will last forever. If you look at the depressing sweep of human history, I see no reason to believe that free societies, which took so long to come around and are so rare today--and indeed, are fewer today than they were ten years ago--I see no reason to believe that they're the wave of the future. They're certainly not the wave of the past."

Will has not completely given up to despair but he sees little chance of reversing the decay of the liberal, bourgeois civilization he cherishes. "The question," he says, "is how is it possible to have a quickened sense of anxiety, in the public at large, about the growing power of the state, the growing ugliness of life, and the general undisciplined nature of public and private appetites." He shakes his head. "And I'm not very hopeful about that."