On Thursday afternoon, I did a Q&A podcast with George F. Will — which you can find here. We covered many subjects, grave and lighter. I will mention a few things.
Will has written several columns about the midterm elections and their candidates. He still likes the game — the game of politics. He’s a sports fan, he says. And political races are akin to sports.
But is the game more pleasurable when you have a team to root for? Sure. Will has been without a team — without a party — since the summer of 2016. But that has its compensations, he says.
I have long remembered a New Republic cover that appeared in 1985 — shortly after President Reagan’s second inauguration. It showed Reagan throwing his head back in laughter. And the cover said, “Is He All There?” (The article was by Carl Bernstein.)
As a passionate young Reaganite, I burned at this. In our podcast, I ask George Will about the incumbent: “Is he all there?”
No, says Will. He is reluctant to say it, and he has never said it before, publicly. But the president had a bad episode recently — when he was completely confused about his student-debt move.
If, or when, the Republicans retake both houses of Congress, will Congress continue to aid and arm Ukraine? Will has doubts about Kevin McCarthy in the House. But he has no doubts about Mitch McConnell in the Senate. The latter will “not go wobbly,” says Will (borrowing a phrase from Margaret Thatcher).
He also says that the Democratic speaker, Nancy Pelosi, has been “sensationally strong and good about Taiwan, and she has been likewise about Ukraine.” (I agree.)
Later in our conversation, I say the F-word — “fascism.” Will is interesting on this subject, as on all. Fascism, he says, “has some claim to being the most successful ideology of the 20th century.” And yet it was not quite an ideology, the way Marxism-Leninism was. It was heavily performative. Theatrical. Attitudinal. It involved rallies, jackboots, Leni Riefenstahl — all that.
America has had episodes of fascism, or semi-fascism, and Will goes through a few of them (including Huey Long in Louisiana). (By the way, All the King’s Men is one helluvan instructive read.)
We further discuss “America First,” an old concept — at least an early-1940s concept — new again. Last year, alumni of the Trump administration started an “America First Policy Institute.” Lindsey Graham speaks of an “America First agenda.”
Do the echoers know what they are echoing? Some do, some don’t.
(In our podcast, Will mentions the speech that Charles Lindbergh gave in Des Moines, in September 1941. It makes for interesting reading today, or any day, really. Go here.)
What’s a “liberal”? What’s a “conservative”? What’s a “libertarian,” “nationalist,” and “populist”? Will gets into some defining. But he says “it’s a little late in the game to tidy up our untidy political vocabulary.” It sure is.
In Will’s view, an American conservative is interested in conserving the Founding, with its Enlightenment premises. Conservatives are children of the Enlightenment, and defenders of liberalism, as it was once understood.
Today, there are people who call themselves “national conservatives.” As Will sees it, “they’re just progressives with a slightly different agenda.” They in turn knock the likes of Will as “zombie Reaganites.” Will is just as content to be called a “zombie Madisonian.”
Will also cites James Parton, the 19th-century biographer. “If Jefferson was wrong, America is wrong,” wrote Parton. “If America is right, Jefferson was right.” Will thinks he was. It was Jefferson’s view that men have natural rights, and that it’s government’s job to secure them.
George Will is known for baseball. Indeed, he is one of the most famous baseball writers in history. Yet, in this podcast, he talks football (as well as baseball). Football, he says, has become irredeemably violent, and must go the way of boxing. “The kinetic energy of the sport now exceeds the capacity of the human body to cope with it.”
About baseball, Will fields several questions. Is the regular major-league season discounted? Do the post-season series mean too much? What about the paucity of black Americans in baseball? Is Shohei Ohtani today’s Babe Ruth? Who ought to be regarded as the single-season homerun champion?
According to Will, the answer to that last question is “Aaron Judge.”
Many have been starstruck by George F. Will. Has he ever been starstruck by anyone? Yes — by Isaiah Berlin, at Oxford. (Will was a student there.) But Berlin was so down-to-earth, says Will, you could not remain starstruck for long.
By the way, I once asked Charles Krauthammer how he had arrived at his views. When he was 19, he said, he read Berlin’s Four Essays on Liberty. He thought, That’s what I believe. This is true. And he never wavered from it.
In the new podcast, I ask Will about Johnny Carson. Did he ever meet him? Yes. Johnny came to Washington and asked to have dinner with him. “A witty, quick Midwesterner,” says Will. “I liked his style.” (Johnny was from Nebraska, Will is from Illinois.) “He was intensely competitive,” Will continues. “He was a perfectionist about his broadcasting. Only someone meticulous about details could look so offhand.”
True.
Someone asked Bill Buckley, “How did you get to know Herbert Hoover?” “He was a bit of a fan,” answered Bill, slightly sheepishly. Well, that’s how Will got to know Johnny.
How about David Letterman? Another Midwesterner, says Will (Indiana), and another sharp one. “I don’t think you can be witty without being intelligent. Humor is seeing incongruities, and it takes intelligence to see them.”
Pat Moynihan was damn funny, and smart, of course. I found him maddening. I never knew him — only as a politician. But friends of mine who knew him — loved him. Will says that he has now spent 53 years in Washington. And the highlight of those years, if he had to pick only one thing, was getting to know Moynihan, whose company he “relished.” They were best of friends.
We talk some about the writing life. “It’s astonishing fun putting sentences and paragraphs together,” says Will. And we end our podcast with the subject of Ukraine.
In my view, Ukraine is the most important thing in the world right now. A great deal is riding on that war. Will says he agrees. “Well into the 21st century,” he says, Russian forces are “trying to revise the borders of the largest nation in Europe.” And they are doing it by “committing unambiguous war crimes.”
If Putin “gets away with this,” says Will, “all hell will break loose.” And he if gets away with it by getting away with a nuclear threat, he will do it again — will threaten again, at another time convenient to him. And other autocrats will have “a clear incentive” to develop their own nuclear weapons.
Will then cites Harvey Mansfield, to the effect that the purpose of education is to learn how to praise. To learn to recognize high standards and praise those who approach them. “Our capacity for praise often atrophies from disuse,” says Will. “It’s time to sit back and praise Zelensky. This is what a hero looks like.”
Yes. And Zelensky is further distinguished by those who hate and resent him. Who sniff at him, and bite at his ankles, while he is trying to save his country, and win a war for the forces of decency everywhere.