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.
