When I talked with George Will the other day, he was wearing a Princeton tie. He referred to the university as “a basketball factory located in New Jersey.” The Princeton basketball team is now in the Sweet 16.
Anyway, I have recorded a podcast with Will — a Q&A — here. Under discussion are many topics.
Wokeness, or political correctness, is a curse on campus. “As our society becomes more secular,” says Will, “we seem to be producing more and more blasphemy laws. Blasphemy without God — only in America.”
It took about 800 years, says Will, to evolve the great research universities of the Western world. We evolved them “through thickets of political and ecclesiastical interference.” And these universities are “in some ways the finest ornaments of Western civilization.”
Guess what? “You can kick it all away in a generation, and we’re in the process of doing so.”
About America’s two major political parties, Will is gloomy. (So are many of us.) The Democratic Party is “firmly in the control of its progressive wing,” says Will. The Democrats have gone “from the party of the New Deal to the party of new genders and new pronouns.”
And the Republicans? Well, there is a lot to say. Will left his old party in the summer of 2016. Someone asked him, “Why did you leave the Republican Party?” He answered, “For the same reason I joined it: I’m a conservative.”
In our Q&A, we talk about Republicans and the Ukraine war. The present time is “a huge, defining moment,” says Will. It’s “like 1952 all over again.” Where will the Republicans be, in the area of foreign policy, defense, and the big, broad, dangerous world?
Republicans are apt to oppose aid to Ukraine for two reasons, says Will: (1) Biden’s for it. (2) This is a way of distancing themselves from what they call “zombie Reaganism” (about which, more in a moment).
Will believes that Joe Biden ought not to run for president again. He himself is older than Biden, he notes. Yet “people age in different ways at different tempos.” Will is not convinced that Biden will run again. It would be statesmanlike if he did not, Will says.
On the subject of Biden in general, he is very interesting, of course. He engages in some what-ifs.
In recent weeks, Will has written about two former governors — one R and one D. The R is Doug Ducey, of Arizona. The D is Gina Raimondo, of Rhode Island. It is hard to imagine either one as a presidential candidate — because their parties’ electorates would not put up with them.
Ducey said that Trump lost Arizona in 2020, which he did. Raimondo stood up to public-employee unions. Big no-nos, in the respective parties.
In the course of our podcast, Will and I talk about Fox News, and also a related topic, namely opinion journalism. Will does not like the phrase “opinion journalism,” at least as applied to him and his work. “My columns are 95 percent facts.” The opinion should be like a good dollop of caviar, not the whole meal.
He has received two compliments that he likes a lot. One came from Priscilla Buckley. When George was working at National Review, Priscilla said to him, “I would know your copy even if it had no name on it. You have a voice.” The other compliment came from a fact-checker at the Washington Post. “You know, before I became a fact-checker, I had no idea your columns had so many facts in them.”
In 1990, Will published Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball. It is one of the best-selling sports books of all time. As Will points out in our podcast, someone said, “There are only two seasons: baseball season and the void.” For baseball devotees, the void is about to end. Major League Baseball begins on March 30.
There are many rules changes in place this season. Will approves of them all, heartily. “And for a very conservative reason,” he says. “Conservatives are forever being told, ‘You can’t turn back the clock.’ The hell you can’t, and baseball just did it.” He then, of course, explains.
(Sample: “Baseball responded to a problem in a Madisonian way — by changing the incentives for behavior.”)
People charge conservatives such as Will with “zombie Reaganism.” The truth is, the principles and values associated with Reagan existed long, long before that president, and will exist always, whether people embrace them or not. Is Will a “zombie Reaganite”? You might as well call him a zombie Lockean, a zombie Madisonian, a zombie Lincoln man.
“We are in the company of giant zombies,” or zombie giants, he says.
Let government be limited. Let order be spontaneous. Let the market be respected. Let life be as depoliticized as possible. Let wealth and opportunity be allocated by the cooperation of freely contracting individuals, not politics.
George F. Will is for that kind of thing. He knows why. And he is a superb explainer of it all. Again, for this latest podcast, go here.