George Will

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In his 2006 book American Theocracy, Kevin Phillips — the former Republican adviser to Richard Nixon and the man who coined the term “Sunbelt” to describe the South and Southwestern U.S. — wrote that during the last two presidential elections, the GOP has undergone major change, becoming “the first religious party in U.S. history.”

I thought of Phillips while reading a batch of recent columns by George Will. Will — iconic conservative columnist and longtime scourge of the Democratic party — has obtained a measure of affection from the left since he began criticizing the Bush administration’s handling of the Iraq War, and since he started questioning the influence of the Christian right on the GOP. Will’s newly contrarian spirit has led some political observers to postulate that he, along with William F. Buckley and William Safire, represents a forgotten wing of the Republican Party, one that is fiscally conservative and socially forward thinking. Indeed, I briefly wondered if Will would have felt a glimmer of recognition when Phillips dedicated his book to the “millions of Republicans, present and lapsed” who have found themselves alienated by the Bush administration.

It seems unlikely. Will’s post-facto criticism of the administration’s handling of the war smells distinctly opportunistic. In an August 2006 speech to the conservative Cato Institute, in which he openly attacked the administration for the first time, he began by saying, “I’m not here to rehearse the arguments about how we got in [to Iraq] and all the rest.” That may be because, in March 2003, Will had this to say, in a Washington Post column: “The war against Iraq has begun. … Soon the bow wave created by the movement of the great ship America into full-scale war will wash away Lilliputian nuisances, such as French diplomacy …”

“I am fascinated,” Will declaimed in his Cato speech, “by the assumption we made that after … decapitating the Hussein regime, the rest would be easy — the assumption that liberty is easy.” In contrast, again from March 2003: “Let’s suppose the war is over in two months … all of these micro-frictions are not going to matter. The brute fact of changing the regime of a nation of that size and complexity is going to radiate through the Middle East.”

By way of a quaint baseball metaphor, Will told his Cato audience that Iraq is “just four people from paradise.” Those people are George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Marshall. The impression one gets of Will’s shifting pronouncements on Iraq, in other words, is of extreme superciliousness and hypocrisy.

But what of Will’s domestic politics? Soon after delving into his columns, I made the startling discovery that his chief criticism of the Bush administration is that it is not conservative enough. According to Will, the current tax code “incentivizes … perverse behavior.” What sort of perverse behavior? “The top one percent of income tax payers pay 35 percent of the income tax; the top 5 percent pay 55 percent; the bottom 50 percent of income earners in the country pay less than 4 percent of the income tax …” To those who point out, for example, the top one percent owns 33 percent of America’s wealth, while the bottom 50 owns just 3 percent, or that in the ’50s — a time conservatives like Will idealize — the wealthiest Americans paid 91 percent of the income tax, Will has a ready rebuttal. They are engaging in “the politics of envy.” One recalls Ronald Reagan’s famous quote: “We were told that 17 million people went to bed hungry each night. … Well, that was probably true. They were all on a diet.”

Will celebrates “market-based” healthcare, and derides the universal healthcare embraced by the rest of the Western world as a species of socialism. He believes, he recently said, “there is no greater threat to liberty in this country than campaign finance reform.” Environmental issues do not seem to concern Will unduly, and he is skeptical that human activity is causing the atmosphere to warm with potentially catastrophic consequences. Indeed, Will has decided that the real problem, vis-à-vis climate change, is “big crusading journalism.” To back up his contrarian take on the consensus of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, he has cited pop novelist Michael Crichton, and Bjørn Lomborg — a Danish game theorist much loved by the right whose most recent book on climate change was compared in a review in the international science journal Nature to “bad term papers,” and described by Scientific American as “at times fictional.”

A few years ago, University of California statistician Philip Tetlock published the results of a comprehensive study of professional punditry. Tetlock found that on average, monkeys were better than political experts at predicting the political future. He also found that the greater the pundit’s self-confidence and celebrity, the more frequently he or she was wrong. During the past quarter-century, it’s fair to say that no pundit has expressed himself with greater confidence, more consistently, than George F. Will.

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