George Will is the kind of conservative I love to hate: the right-wing authoritarian. (And it certainly helps that he’s such an obviously uptight nerd: he thinks, for example, that The Godfather is a terrible movie because everyone in it is some sort of criminal!)

So there should be nothing surprising in “Will’s insinuation that [Ron] Paul is an eccentric out of touch with the glorious modern world of the Leviathan state.” Nor in the claim that “Will has always been a big-government man.”

What’s surprising, in fact, is Ralph Raico’s claim that Will was once, however briefly, a libertarian:

As it happened, at Princeton Bruce [Goldberg] also came to know another grad student, this time in political science, named George Will. Will was another run-of-the-mill member of the American intelligentsia, a “liberal” in the mold of his father, a well thought of professor of philosophy at Champaign/Urbana. Bruce, then the dynamic, genial propagator of our ideas, converted Will as well. Temporarily. Will left to study at Oxford, where he was seduced by the tradition of Tory paternalism he discovered there. Cecil Rhodes would have been pleased.