Will’s Attempt to Criticize Trump’s Foreign Policy Takes a Turn
Come for the shots fired at the cabinet, stay for the weird digression.
George Will’s column, A sickening moral slum of an administration, mainly criticizing the Trump administration’s foreign policy on both the Caribbean and Ukraine, scores some hits on its targets.
On Hegseth and the Caribbean:
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth seems to be a war criminal. Without a war. An interesting achievement.
On Rubio and Ukraine:
Rubio, whose well-known versatility of convictions is perhaps not infinite, told some of his alarmed former Senate colleagues that the plan was just an opening gambit from Russia — although Trump demanded that Ukraine accept it within days. South Dakota Republican Sen. Mike Rounds, a precise and measured speaker, reported that, in a conference call with a bipartisan group of senators, Rubio said the plan was a Russian proposal: “He made it very clear to us that we are the recipients of a proposal that was delivered to one of our representatives. It is not our recommendation. It is not our peace plan.” Hours later, however, Rubio reversed himself, saying on social media that the United States “authored” the plan.
Will then shifts in a truly Willian fashion, referencing Daniel Bell’s 1976 book,The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism as a means of pivoting thusly.
Today’s cultural contradictions of democracy are: Majorities vote themselves government benefits funded by deficits, which conscript the wealth of future generations who will inherit the national debt. Entitlements crowd out provisions for national security. And an anesthetizing dependency on government produces an inward-turning obliviousness to external dangers, and a flinching from hard truths.
This has got to be one of the fanciest non sequiturs I have seen in a while, but it does make me realize that that the “fancy non sequitur” is a trait of many a George Will column. I mean, it all ultimately makes no sense, but he sounds so darn educated doing it!
I have deep problems with the notion that that our government is the direct result of a democracy that empowers majorties, but setting that aside, the presence of a welfare state, or even deficit-fueld tax cuts for the wealthy have precisely zero to do with the moral vacuity in the Trump cabinet.
Worse, it is utterly ahistorical claptrap.
A couple of big examples:
- The New Deal policies were propagated by FDR in the mid-1930s; FDR led us into WWII in 1941.
- The Great Society, which expanded the welfare state, and the deepening of US involvement in Vietnam, were both directed by LBJ.
- The man who was a proponent of massive deficit-funded tax cuts and two major US wars was GWB.
The obvious conclusion one can draw from all of this is that presidents who can be known by initials often spend a lot of money domestically at the same time they are hardly isolationists while doing so.
Or, perhaps more to the point, all of American history in the post WWII era makes the statement “Entitlements crowd out provisions for national security. And an anesthetizing dependency on government produces an inward-turning obliviousness to external dangers, and a flinching from hard truths” utterly nonsensical. Will riding an ideological hobby horse into a column that should have remained focused on the intellectual and moral failing of the Trump administration].
It may also be a reminder of why I so rarely read Will these days.
Will has always been notorious for some pseudo intellectual quotes. So much so that Garry Trudeau used to mock Will in his cartoons with Will yelling for his “quote boy”.
I didn’t even know, until I read this, that he still has a column.
A riddle:
Is calling Will milquetoast an insult to Brooks, or is it the other way around?
The versatility of convictions line is decent, but I think it is inaccurate.
At some point it would be more accurate and an act of public service if Will, et al. would identify Rubio, Stefanik, and Vance as not having any convictions at all.
I’d say the current moral turpitude in government is a result of long moral decay in the right for the past 45 years and counting.
Take the matter of deficits. They clearly begin to become large and unmanageable with the Reagan tax cuts in the 80s. Then decline to even a small surplus in the 90s, and there are several reasons for this. But they explode again, spectacularly, at the confluence of the Bush tax cuts and the start of the forever wars in Asia and the Middle East. It goes down a bit until the 2008 Great Recession. Since then it’s been over 1 trillion every year. It got a lot worse with the trump pandemic, though justifiably so. Biden got it to reduce a little, and then El Taco increased it.
IMO there must be a direct correlation between deficits on one hand, and wealth acucumulation at the top on the other.
Isn’t that just a fancy, dressed-up in erudition way of saying, “but I caaaan’t support Democrats because they have cooties!!!”
@Steven, I see George Will’s column as an indicator that your ongoing project to illuminate what is in front of our noses to fence-sitting independents and lightly committed Trumpists may sadly be doomed to fail. Will is no Trump supporter – he publicly endorsed Harris in 2024 – but he is ostensibly a conservative intellectual.
Yet, while he is quick to criticize the Trump administration as morally deficient, he can’t bring himself to condemn Trump and his enabling Cabinet and Congress as the racists and fascists they are. He can’t stomach calling out most of the rightist political party for bending the knee to this authoritarianism. He slinks back to some intellectual safe zone criticizing affluent democracies generally, so he doesn’t have to face his specific cowardice.
If someone with a megaphone the size of Will’s is willing to provide cover to the evil we are facing, how can we expect the modest voter to reconsider their support?
@Jay L. Gischer:
Exactly. Back before I cancelled my subscription it seemed like the conservative columnists at WAPO all had contract clauses requiring that any criticism of Republicans be balanced with a whuttabout or a Murc’s Law effort to blame it on Dems. I haven’t read Will since my subscription expired, but before that I only read him only occasionally, mostly to point and laugh. I quit reading him regularly in the 70s when he was in Newsweek*. The breaking point was a column that I swear said: post-Vietnam the military are having recruiting problems, they especially can’t get people with the skills for more technical non-combat roles, therefore we shouldn’t allow women in the military.
Somebody years ago did a study of the accuracy of pundits on verifiable predictions. IIRC Krugman was the most accurate and Cal Thomas the least. They saw a strong correlation between financial success and accuracy, the more successful, the less accurate. Will is a very successful pundit.
* I miss news weeklies. They summarized the week’s news without a lot of the chaff and were able to go more deeply into subjects
@Scott F.: I would guess – I don’t know because I don’t pay attention to George Will – that this administration, this year, has accomplished goals that George Will admires and desires.
He probably celebrates the teardown of USAID. And of VOA. And so on. He’s probably delighted with the ass-kicking of the academic world. It seems likely that he was delighted with Trump’s SCOTUS picks and how that has all played out.
But maybe he thinks this is all he is going to get, and so it’s time to turn up the moral outrage.
I’m guessing there are a lot of the better-educated Republicans thinking this way.
By the way, that’s what I think George Will’s income plan is. Say things that other Republicans would like to have validated. Say those things in a way that overtly conveys that you are very smart and very educated. Hence, your readers will feel very validated by what you say, and want some more of that.
Sadly, I can see this pattern all over the place with pundits – serving all sorts of constituents. Sometimes it works with “funny” rather than “smart”. Hell, I watch Steven Colbert because of the funny.
This is what fuels the correlation mentioned by @gVOR10 upthread. People come back for the validation. Truth is much harder to come by. Truth involves finding out one was wrong about something. This is not fun. This is painful. Not a lot, but painful. You do not go back to this day after day unless you are really unusual (and maybe have a bit of a kink).
@Jay L. Gischer:
I’ve always thought that the old-school conservative opinionista like George Will like what’s happening but they’re not happy with the style-points here. That is, they don’t like Trump, but … they definitely like the tear-down that is in progress.
People like David Brooks and George Will present themselves as ‘reasonable’ conservatives who are now waiting for the ‘normal’ non-MAGA person who will take the Republican mantle once Trump fails to ace his next MRI. Marco Rubio and JD Vance are seemingly logical next-up alternatives. Both have no firm principles so both might be acceptable to MAGA and non-MAGA constituents.
@Jay L. Gischer:
The study I was referencing said, IIRC, the path to success for a pundit is to find an audience and tell them what they want to hear. Kind of the FOX “News” plan.
@al Ameda:
I think they both made marketing decisions to not go MAGA. They had found their audience and Trumpism wasn’t what their audiences wanted. But I think there was also a psychological matter of thinking that Republican conservatives represented the best people, the Republic as opposed to the democracy mob, and that feeling of being the best people was impossible to maintain with Trump.
@gVOR10:
I don’t think it’s a marketing decision, I think it’s wishful thinking and/or hubris. Both Brooks and Wills, like my father, think that this MAGA wing is an aberration/fever dream, which will fade as quickly as they perceive it came on. There is a willful blindness on the part of a certain faction of Republicans who seem to think that if they can *just get past this awfulness*, the ship will right (literally) itself.
I think it is utterly delusional and I saw the first seeds of this MAGA ugliness when I worked in politics back in the early ’90s. There are a LOT of Republicans who planted their heads rather firmly in the sand and kept them there.
George Will has been an odd bird for a long time, not necessarily because of his actual views, but because of his aesthetics. In America, the pompous, stuffy conservative who acts like he’s smarter than everyone because he uses big words and cites arcane facts regardless of relevance to the point at issue is a brand that died quite a while before the actual death of the famed sesquipidi…. you know, the one who had that infamous blowup at Gore Vidal, which his fans loved but which he reportedly regretted. And you have to love the irony that the way he delivered that rhetorical sucker-punch was just so….effete?
Long before Trump, this style has lived on in Will’s commentary in about the same way a zombie lives on.
@Jen:
I’ve been thinking about this. I’ve come to the conclusion the people you quote above are the children being eaten by their revolution. As per the aphorism that revolutions eat their children.
Often extremists are merely the more consistent in an ideological group.
@Kurtz: Kind of a punditry ouroboros.
@Kylopod: Good point about the stylistics in question.