George Will, the Washington Post columnist and TV personality who recently made a much-publicized switch from ABC to Fox News, loves talking about government: how it works, why it fails, and the know-it-alls who run it. During my recent visit to his office, a converted townhouse in Georgetown, he gleefully dropped a copy of the Senate’s immigration bill on his desk. It was approximately the size of the Oxford English Dictionary. He then handed me a printout of “one of the half-dozen most important pieces of legislation ever passed,” the Homestead Act of 1862. It was two pages. His explanation for the discrepancy: Washington is now full of condescending elites. “It has to be that long, because they know everything,” he said.

Will himself could easily be mistaken for one of those inside-the-Beltway know-it-alls. For more than 30 years, he has been a regular presence on the Sunday morning political shows, exhibiting his signature brand of bow-tied erudition. Watch clips of him on television during the Reagan years and compare them with those from today: Will, 72, barely seems to have changed. The hair is still neatly in place, the sentences are still crisp, the anecdotes about sports tumble out with the same enthusiasm (his third book about baseball lands next month), and the reliance on famous quotes from Great Men is as firm as ever. He seems to have remained the caricature of himself that Dana Carvey played on “Saturday Night Live” back in the early ’90s, when, as Will, Carvey would respond to questions about baseball with answers such as: “The exhilarating tension between being and becoming.”

The affectations remain as stiff as ever, but Will is finally having something like his own version of 1960s-era personal liberation. One of the most important figures in American conservatism has quietly been breaking with movement orthodoxy and evolving into a far different character.

While the extremism of Ted Cruz and his ilk has caused some veteran conservative columnists to be either ejected from the movement for heresy (think David Frum) or forced into uncomfortable contortions (see: Brooks, David), Will happily spouts Tea Party talking points on government overreach and Washington elitism. He has also been counseling his fellow Republicans to become less doctrinaire on social issues, several of which he has evolved on. Asked whether he was cheered by the rise of gay marriage, he coyly told me, “I’m not depressed” and described himself as an “amiable, low-voltage atheist.”

Will is a political dinosaur, but he has more than survived the Tea Party Ice Age; his writing—even at its most outlandish—is capturing the right-wing zeitgeist in a way that it never did under Ronald Reagan or the Bushes.