The confirmation process has followed the crumbling, descending path the rest of American politics has taken into the depths of cynicism, faux outrage and pandering to the parties’ hysterical bases….
In recent decades, all civilian institutions important to national governance — Congress, the presidency, the parties, the bureaucracy, the media — have, by their ignorance and arrogance, earned the disdain that now engulfs them.
—George Will, 21 September 2018
Inherent in Will's corresponding observations is the intellectual dullness of both-sidesism, which is one step 
up from blaming Democrats exclusively for America's ills; a step down from any fair, detached assessment; and the distressing embodiment of one intellectual's pseudo-sincerity.
As a student of American politics and its history, Will knows better. Both sides are scarcely responsible, in equal parts, for the "descending path" of our politics. The work of American pols has always leaned to the squalid — as C. Dickens put it transatlantically in The Pickwick Papers, "each [has] darkly hinted his suspicions that the electors in the opposite interest had certain swinish and besotted infirmities which rendered them unfit for the exercise of the important duties they were called upon to discharge" — i.e., voting.
Voters' infirmities are merely reflections of voters' political leaders, hence swinishness and besottedness have always trickled down and then back up again "in the opposite interest." To entrust the nation's many treasures to the hands of rubes and rednecks or elitists and effete bleeding hearts is the biannual foolishness of American politics. To hear office-seeking tub-thumpers tell it, our country's welfare hangs entirely, every two years, on the patriotic virtues of only one side. Whence, then, the laziness or dodge of both-sidesism? And why does only one side hustle the peculiar fallacy of coextensive, two-party stupidity?
Also inherent in Will's weekly writings is a partial but substantial answer to our query. The Washington Post columnist is no longer a Republican, yet for him to acknowledge the historical sins of the Republican Party would be tantamount to acknowledging his own. Will has been on the inner periphery of conservative politics since the early 1970s; he was there, rooting the GOP on, from the New Right to Reaganism to the Gingrich Revolution — then on to Bushism and much less rooting, and finally, to Trumpism, which irreparably broke his partisan loyalties. Yet the line from the 70s' New Rightism to 21st-century Trumpism is a straight, and straightforwardly disgraceful, one. For the murmurs of the New Right were in fact the embryonic murmurs of Republican populism, about which Will's Post colleague, Sebastian Mallaby, wrote last week: "Do not be surprised if the populists are temporarily popular: Popularity is what they crave most, after all. But recall that, everywhere and throughout history, the populists’ folly is unmasked in the end."
This unshakable truism, the intellectual George Will either forgot, ignored, or fooled himself into disbelieving. Populist hogwash (laded with racism) delivered the white working class into the GOP's beguiling hands; the party was suddenly a party of true widespread appeal, no longer merely "the grass roots of a thousand country clubs,” as Alice Roosevelt Longworth once quipped. And in time, it was the irrepressible contradiction of conservative populism that bit Will in the butt.
For years he cheered the very demon that would destroy his Republican Party — that which pioneered "the crumbling, descending path" of American politics, that pursued "the depths of cynicism, faux outrage and pandering to the [party's] hysterical" base, that "by [its] ignorance and arrogance, earned the disdain that now engulfs" it.
All this, Will either cannot or will not acknowledge as his own, co-conspirator's doing. Nor can virtually every other prominent conservative commentator; they are in denial, or in a state of outward mass deception, or in the even deeper rot of profound self-deception. Until they awake from their Kantian dogmatic slumber, of a sort, America's intellectual conservatives will continue to be relevant to absolutely no one but themselves.