The Lightweight Philosopher
Blumenthal, Sidney
The Lightweight Philosopher by Sidney Blumenthal Where there's a Will there's a Bartlett's George Will once compared himself to Walter Lippmann, the model philosopher-columnist, for his...
...Two words are key to his thought—!`decent" and "civility"—his shorthand for different political mentalities...
...Baseball is indeed a wonderful game, and Will has rightly called it "noble," but his metaphor trivializes what he wishes to speak of solemnly and withdraws the gravity he implicitly imputes to himself...
...His authorities remain consistent, but he does not...
...One seldom feels in the presence of an independent mind, one that considers factual counterarguments or unexpected events...
...In Statecraft As Soulcraft he argued that American conservatism, if it were to endure, required a more Burkean deference to established custom and institutions...
...The Lightweight Philosopher by Sidney Blumenthal Where there's a Will there's a Bartlett's George Will once compared himself to Walter Lippmann, the model philosopher-columnist, for his "various relationships with presidents...
...In The New Season, he writes without a trace of selfconsciousness or irony...
...Unlike Lippmann, Will has proved his expertise in nothing in particular...
...The George Will of 1984 wrote: "Springsteen's fans say his message affirms the right values...
...The comic effect was underlined by Will's affectless piety...
...it also suggests compassion and patience...
...A symptom is the use of words like 'decent' . . .as in 'a decent society requires this or that...
...pseudolegal static in the system...a non-law"—far more vicious and emotional than any criticism he ventured about the scandal's participants...
...In The New Season, Will more clearly reveals than in any other work that his analysis flows from a priori assumptions...
...Decent" arises in his language as something bad about Democrats: "There hangs about the Democratic party an aura of moral overreaching...
...V. ...There still is nothing quite like being born in the U.S.A ." Never does Will weigh empirical evidence that might ruffle his dogmatic confidence...
...his logic, or more accurately, his logic-chopping, follows...
...But Will neglected to acknowledge one of his principal sources...
...Will's method is inimitable...
...ten no original work of moral philosophy recognized by moral philosophers, as Lippmann did in A Preface to Morals...
...Now comes naughty Norman Ornstein to use history to rehabilitate Congress . . .Chris Matthews, a prodigy among Democratic political operators...
...The author of The New Season is attempting to show that he is a man for all seasons, particularly the one after Reagan...
...In Statecraft As Soulcraft, the consequence was a shambles...
...Will's argument depended upon meshing Strauss and Burke...
...These accomplishments, he wrote in the book, translated into Republican control of the White House as far into the future as the human mind could contemplate: "At the presidential level, realignment is a fact ." As 1988 approaches, Reagan's fall from the Will firmament has been swift...
...Will's tone of infallibility suggests that his expertise can be reliably followed on any subject from rockets to rock...
...Dickens's message," wrote Will, "which found an avid audience on Broadway, is that the worthiest cause is kindness, and it is timeless...
...Abroad, Will wrote in a 1986 column, Reagan achieved his "finest hour" at the Reykjavik summit, securing for himself "a high place in history...
...Then he quotes: "Mr...
...Reagan at Galileo's restaurant on P Street or the Jockey Club in the RitzCarlton Hotel or the Middleburg Inn in Virginia hunt country do not certify him as a Lippmann...
...Then, they will gain back the voters they lost to Reagan...
...Decent" connotes a tempered moral position, one that carefully avoids righteous absolutism...
...Will has privately boasted of his association with the president's wife to distinguished journalists, who were taken aback by what they felt was crass status-seeking...
...Will stands like a butler at the door, announcing the entrance of distinguished guests: "No one knows more about American politics than Michael Barone...
...Much of this slight book is filled with commonplaces that can be gleaned from the daily newspaper: "In 1980 the nation was ripe for what Republicans do best...
...Perhaps Will believed that the personal connection to Nancy Reagan was a measure of his standing at the apex of the Washington pecking order...
...Earlier in the book, he writes, "The Irancontra affair involved various attempts to evade or subvert laws, established procedures, and intragovernmental traditions (thin reeds, these) of civility...
...He is no whiner, and the recitation of closed factories and other problems always seems punctuated by a grand, cheerful affirmation: 'Born in the U.S.A...
...To avoid being regarded as agents of appeasement, Will urges the Democrats to support the contras...
...The New Season is no departure for Will, but is written as if it were further proof of his 1969 doctoral thesis: "A specter is haunting American liberals, the specter of confident politics...
...Finally, he holds the Democrats up to scorn: ". . . it recently has seemed that if you believe the Democrats, nothing is vital" Thus the Will method, applied in case after case: first the verdict, then the trial...
...Then there is Will's dauntless assessment of Bruce Springsteen...
...And the Republicans, among their other vices, are soft on communism...
...The New Season neglects the difficult questions of, for example, dealignment, decomposition of the party system, the permanent campaign and its effects on governing, the influence of money, and the role of rising and declining elites...
...it is more an unspoken social, rather than ethical, code...
...As a result, the toughest version of the Boland amendment was passed by Congress, saying that "no funds available" to any agency "involved in intelligence activities" could be used to aid the contras, "directly or indirectly...
...For example, just a year ago, in The Morning After, Will proclaimed the Reagan presidency a success...
...In The New Season, spectator Will is Walter Lippmann as Mel Allen...
...Horace Busby, a wise political consultant whose pocket calculator never sleeps...
...Then they will keep the voters Reagan attracted...
...But the meaning of these words, as Will uses them, is broader...
...Instead, he tried to reconcile the irreconcilable by gratuitously assigning Burke to the "ancients...
...Civility is manners masquerading as morals, a category of form referring less to the rule of law than to the rule of etiquette...
...But which laws...
...Will's method is unyielding—assertion, appeal to authority, snide dismissal of an opposing view...
...In his essay on Charles Dickens he defined the essence of the great novelist's sensibility as "decent" In an age of totalitarians, Dickens's message was still contemporary...
...With the title of his new book, The New Season: A Spectator's Guide to the 1988 Election, he no longer describes himself as the serious man, but as a.casual "spectator," scorecard in hand, simply delighted to observe the competition...
...Or, more exact, the Will team, comprised completely of spectators...
...If they follow this advice, they will move closer to the center of gravity: the Will party...
...It is not so much that he is generously giving the candidates a clean slate, as he is giving himself one...
...In his self-revisions, offered as fresh revelation, Will must be banking on his readers' amnesia...
...A bit of the scandal's background may cast some light on Will's attitude toward facts when they contradict his assumptions...
...As with the politicians Will set out to study, his words must be taken seriously...
...One random paragraph, for example, was filled with the sayings of David Hume, Benedict Spinoza, William Penn, Adam Smith, and Thomas Jefferson...
...And there is some history behind the word and its content...
...He writes in his final paragraph: "A philosopher once said: `People have more fun than anybody.' Quite right, and Americans have more fun than any other people, in part because their politics—their collective conversation—is so astonishingly amicable and, all things considered, intelligent ." But the word "fun" gives away a fundamental problem, which is not that Will inflates his subject when he borrows others' phrases, but that he deflates it when he uses his own...
...If the Boland amendment was "a non-law," then what laws does Will believe were evaded and subverted...
...Will presents their insights without acknowledging their differences...
...Inflation, apparently, had nothing to do with the financing of the Vietnam war and the oil shocks...
...But one wonders, if there is a relationship between "a collapsing capacity for discipline" and America's fall from grace, whether it could be seen in statistics on personal turmoil...
...To Will, the Democrats must shed their permissive attitude toward immoral behavior and gluttonous constituency groups...
...Will has made no original contributions to the study of public opinion or foreign affairs...
...19.95...
...Reagan...
...Will, however, offers assertion, not illustration...
...If he had openly discussed Strauss, the problem of Strauss's and Burke's basic incompatibility would at least have been apparent...
...He has served the Reagans as a social liaison, as a political adviser and, for the First Lady, as an occasional luncheon companion...
...But, in his preference for civility over decency, Will demonstrates that Dickens—and Orwell—did not make a lasting impression on him...
...For all his quotesmanship, Will seems generally unfamiliar with much of the terrain of political science...
...Certainly his manner does...
...Civility," according to Will, is what will be restored when the Iran-contra scandal is swept away...
...Rather, it is merely pleasure for its own sake...
...By contrast, decency, which Will belittles, actually is about morals...
...He has written no book based on actual observation of events, as Lippmann did in the case of the Scopes trial...
...Will's comment on the evasion and subversion of law is on the order of Vice President George Bush's passive and inspecific remark: "Mistakes were made...
...Will has done this before...
...While the real Lippmann may not have been all his admirers have said, he still towers over his pretenders...
...He has writ*The New Season...
...Almost invariably, his conclusions are imposed at the beginning...
...the kind of open mind the liberal favors is a political menace...
...The conflict between the executive and legislative branches Will decried was precisely due to the administration's breach of "established procedures," to which the Boland amendment was the response...
...This ground idea has enabled him to sustain a running commentary far more intellectually coherent than most columnists...
...Orwell wrote: "The central problem—how to prevent power from being abused—remains unsolved...
...If men would behave decently the world would be decent' is not such a platitude as it sounds :' Since Orwell's use of the word, a number of liberal intellectuals and reformers have taken it up...
...if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe...
...He does not say...
...Or others...
...The word is precisely the opposite of elite condescension, the opposite of hauteur...
...And the contra-diversion was precisely intended to evade this measure...
...At home, Reagan was "saving" the welfare state "by tempering its excesses...
...The preceding paragraph cited Alexis de Tocqueville, William Blackstone and Oliver Wendell Holmes...
...Mostly, though, Will treads water, recycling the rhetoric of Statecraft As Soulcraft: "The infantilism...
...Typically, he ascribes unworthy motives— "infantilism," etc.—to those with whom he disagrees...
...Many topics, in the meantime, receive superficial treatment: Will argues, without any supporting empirical evidence, that political advertising cannot sway elections...
...The Republicans, for their part, must relinquish their distaste for government and embrace the welfare state...
...there never is heard a discouraging word...
...Though Will obscured his thesis in Statecraft As Soulcraft with promiscuous ancestor worship, it could be found by a dogged reader: government should act as society's moral tutor...
...But this merely revealed Will's frequent substitution of bald assertion for actual scholarship...
...Since Will appeared on the scene, he has presented himself as a passionate advocate, a serious man engaged with serious things...
...Then he quotes Lord Salisbury: "If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome...
...Politics, in his book, is a cross between a spectacle and a sport...
...He does not review any of the candidates...
...As a work of philosophy, Will's book was unconvincing...
...On the contras, for example, he states his own position: pro...
...But, Will claimed, what was also needed was a sense of moral absolutes...
...The Democrats, among their other vices, are soft on communism...
...The underlying message of the baseball metaphor is that there is no distinction between being a citizen and being a fan...
...George F. Will Simon & Schuster...
...In Statecraft As Soulcraft, Will wrote: "My thesis is that the most important task confronting Americans as a polity is, in part, a philosopher's task ." With little reluctance Will has wrapped himself in the philosopher's mantle and taken up a relationship with President and, especially, Mrs...
...In The New Season Will asserts that Springsteen's "songs of stress, vulnerability, and precariousness are counterpoints to the Morning in America goo of overripe Reaganism ." Consider now the Will of 1984, who tried to claim Springsteen for the Reagan campaign, an effort that resulted in Reagan's approving reference to Springsteen in a stump speech...
...A Spectator's Guide to the 1988 Election...
...In particular, he suggested, the right-wing ought to take a more benign attitude toward the welfare state...
...Dooley, Finley Peter Dunne's fictional barkeep, 'Politics ain't beanbag ." As Will sees it, the Republican and the Democratic parties are both stupid parties that fail to measure up to the standards of the Will party...
...even allowing for the genial hyperbole of American politics and journalism, Reagan's consequences, although substantial, have not been as bold—as revolutionary, if you must—as those of FDR or LBJ...
...impatience...
...Both parties must be more resolute in confronting Moscow...
...His premise, if his explanation of inflation is to make any sense, must be that the private is the public: what happens in the bedrooms is directly reflected in politics and the economy...
...In spite of Will's absolutism, his prospectus of the upcoming campaign remains fundamentally cautious...
...The introduction of the word "decent" into the political vocabulary can be attributed to George Orwell...
...Will suggests that the ultimate claim of the American political system upon our participation is not natural law or hallowed tradition...
...It was ripe for a campaign condemning the government ?' Or: "It is problematic for a party to come off eight years in power and present itself as an agent of change!' Or: "A theme of this book is that politicians' words—the most public acts of public people— matter and should be taken seriously by serious students of politics:' Most annoying of all, Will puts forth this boilerplate as if it were derived from a close reading of Aristotle...
...In January 1984, the CIA mined the harbors of Nicaragua without informing the Senate and House intelligence committees...
...After the Iran-contra scandal was exposed, in May 1987, Will launched an attack on the Boland amendment—"unconstitutional in intent...
...if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent...
...but in explaining his continuing approach to column-writing it was a success...
...But he does not pause...
...Yet Strauss, in Natural Right and History, cast Burke into the netherworld of despised moderns as one who "paves the way for the 'historical school.' " Burke's appeals to the glorious past undermined moral absolutes that, according to Strauss, existed independent of history...
...Sidney Blumenthal is a staff writer for The Washington Post...
...Will's passionate support of the Vietnam war, which precipitated the inflation of the 1970s, would seem to deprive him of capital to spend on this issue...
...He never acknowledges that he has changed a single imperious opinion...
...In Statecraft As Soulcraft, Will failed to face the central conundrum he had raised...
...Nor has Will helped promote the ideas of a more interesting mind, as Lippmann did with Keynes's in The Method of Freedom...
...Correct behavior may make the good possible, it is not goodness itself...
...The wholesale lifting of Strauss's semantics, without citation, by a writer who made a fetish of quotations, was a telling sign of Will's authenticity and originality...
...A recent advertisement for Newsweek showed Will as he obviously wants to present himself, in his study, seated at his antique desk, Waterman fountain pen in hand, bone-china cup and saucer nearby, with thick volumes of Churchilliana resting on the bookcase...
...Oddly, Orwell's essay on Dickens was cited by Will in his 1981 column on the Royal Shakespere production of Nicholas Nickleby...
...inability to defer gratification—that produced the cultural dissolution of the Sixties helped give rise to the inflation of the Seventies" This coarse relegation of an economic trend—inflation—to a state of mind—infantilism—is curious...
...hedonism...
...And so he continues his furious assault on the "menace" of the "open mind" and the "moral overreaching" of the "decent...
...His tale of Western civilization's fall described the supplanting of worthy "ancients" such as Aristotle by cynical "moderns" such as Machiavelli, categories entirely derived from the work of philosopher Leo Strauss, but unacknowledged...
...Will's brief philosophical work, Statecraft as Soulcraft, with its clotted mass of quotations, reads in long stretches like Monty Python's shooting script of Bartlett's...
...Whatever his motivation, his teteatetes with Mrs...
Vol. 19 • October 1987 • No. 9
