George F. Will: The Morning After: American Successes and Excesses, 1981-1986. New York: The Free Press, 1987.
Originally published in the New York Tribune, February 18, 1987.
“The morning after” means—here—the years since Ronald Reagan’s 1981 inauguration as President of the United States. 1986 is “midday,” when the euphoria of the victory party has worn off and, depending upon how much one indulged, the mind begins to recollect itself. Perhaps ominously, the metaphor also suggests nightfall to come and, indeed, political columnist George Will sees scarcely a photon of daylight in the minds of the president’s would-be successors. Reagan himself earns only the most measured praise and some sharp criticism—as he must, in a book that begins with the sentence, “Happiness is not all it’s cracked up to be.”
In America, happiness usually means the satisfaction of private desires, not public ambitions. This accounts for the comparative peaceableness of our politics, but also for their demoralizing pettiness. A too-inspiring politics might lead to worse vices, however, so Will aims at the center, with sobering thoughts on such honorable but unspectacular virtues as responsibility, prudence, restraint, and patience. Some years ago, the political scientist Robert Goldwin lamented the difficulty of inventing a rhetoric of moderation: moderation “is not the kind of cause for which people devise banners and slogans.” It still isn’t, but a newspaper column will do, and George Will has invented both a style and a persona that make moderation attractive. The style is gin, tonic, and a twist of lime, savored once daily, and just before dinner. The persona is the thinker-as-parent, not a philosopher (they don’t drive station wagons full of kids) but the son of a philosophy professor–filial piety but with some irony showing. It is a rhetoric of judicious mixture.
Will conceives of nature itself as a judicious mixture. One’s desires collide with those of others. (Will to his two-year-old daughter: “What is your name?” Daughter dearest: “No!”) Such realities make libertarianism fantastic. Contemporary liberalism combines erotic libertarianism (that is, freedom of ‘expression’ and of sexual passion), selfish righteousness (whereby “jurisprudence attempts to translate every unhappiness into a justiciable conflict of individual rights”), and state intervention in the economy in order to serve ‘justice,’ by which liberalism means egalitarianism. No governing thought or sentiment can make these unstable elements cohere. Conservatives err when they endorse a different libertarianism, economic libertarianism.
Will argues that liberals are right to want a strong but non-tyrannical state; they are wrong in their self-contradictory attempt to make that necessarily hierarchical structure serve egalitarianism. The state must exist because libertarianism is unreal. It should not betray itself by aspiring, or pretending, to egalitarianism; it rather should set the conditions for the human excellences or virtues. “The fundamental human right is to good government,” and “the fundamental problem of democracy is to get people to consent to that.”
Will’s policy recommendations follow from these principles. He opposes both pornography and violence in entertainment, Madonna and Dirty Harry, not so much because he feats they will be imitated but because he foresees a nation of dis-couraged, de-moralized persons “who respond only to depictions of excess.” He favors punishment over therapy because “a criminal has a right to be dealt with in a way that respects the integrity of his personality” by holding him responsible instead of deeming him sick. He advocates increased public spending for handicapped children, financed by taxes on consumption. He prefers baseball to boxing and, it should be needless to say, to football. He praises Ronald Reagan for “restoring trust in that which he distrusts—government,” and must find the president’s current (and probably transient) difficulties with the Iran-Contra investigations to be especially regrettable.
Some of those consumption tax revenues would also go to the military, but money alone won’t help. Will rightly criticizes the American “delusion” that the United States and the Soviet Union “share a frame of reference” that makes plausible appeals to such fictions as ‘détente,’ ‘international law,’ and trade-to-build-bridges-to-the Soviets. On this last piece of folly, Will remarks that the Reagan Administration “loves commerce more than it loathes communism,” and therefore countenances such cynical appeals to cowardice as that of Mr. Don Kendall, Chief Executive Officer of PepsiCo Inc., who calls nuclear holocaust the alternative to increased U.S.-Soviet trade, that is, to increased profits for PepsiCo.
Almost alone among his contemporaries, Will has noticed that Leonid Brezhnev “was the most effective politician of the last two decades,” building his arsenal and extending his empire while mouthing the slogans of peace. As for the Gorbachevs, Mikhail “is going to be around for a long time, and it is apt to seem like a long time”: professorial Raisa “is what passes for a philosopher in a society where the humanities are illegal.” Every Soviet ruler “has been thoroughly marinated in the ideology that legitimizes him,” and that ideology teaches contempt for political liberty and the denial of the religious and philosophic convictions that make genuinely human communities possible. In the book’s most brilliant essay, Will shows how Hitler’s rightist totalitarianism, because extreme, presents a pure example of all totalitarian regimes in this century, including those the commercial republics are up against now.
“Defense of democracy depends on pessimists who are not defeatists,” that is, it depends upon “spirited realists.” “Today the West is unevenly divided between those of us who are and most persons who are not preoccupied, even obsessed, by the fact that the stakes of politics were forever transformed by the eruption in our century of the radical evil of totalitarianism, and by the necessity to make anti-totalitarianism the touchstone of all politics.” Conservative who carp at Will because he calls Americans “undertaxed” should remind themselves that tax policy doesn’t much matter in the face of the Gulag.
In his recent book, American Conservatism and the American Founding, Professor Harry V. Jaffa makes a more telling criticism. Will contends that the American Founders, James Madison in particular, believed “that America’s system can work without anyone having good motives—without public-spiritedness.” Jaffa properly corrects Will on this; the pledge the signers of the Declaration of Independence—”we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor”—makes no sense as a cri de commerce. Were Madison alive now, he would understand the need for statesmanship alone with sound institutions, just as he did in his own time.
Even with Jaffa’s correction, the question remains: How can statesmen in commercial republics overcome the combination of fear and complacency that often numbs their countrymen? George Will has an uncommon talent for political-philosophic portraiture, of which Plutarch’s Parallel Lives stands as the greatest example. Perhaps some future book of his will portray twentieth-century statesmen and tyrants as they have defended and assaulted human nature in our time.
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