Already shedding subscribers for its craven decision to not endorse a presidential candidate, the Washington Post on Friday published a piece by George Will under the heading: “Opinion | Voters face the worst presidential choice in U.S. history”
Will, and the Post’s headline writers, ensure the reader does not miss the point by adding the subheading: “There have been mediocrities and scoundrels in the 59 previous presidential elections. But nothing like this.”
I have no issue with major national newspapers offering a range of opinions. But why WaPo continues to feature a writer whose opaque writing cannot hide his clear embrace of fact-free nonsense is puzzling.
Will was once good at his job. He won a Pulitzer for commentary — in 1977. But despite still being able to write a structurally sound essay, he has long ago given up on original thinking. Crabby has replaced creative. And sophistry has triumphed over sense. The man no longer has the intellectual flexibility to allow facts to shape his opinions. He has made his mind up, and that is a sufficient reality for him.
Even the way he writes is redolent of tweed, mothballs, and mid-century men-only educational turgidity.
Bearing that in mind let’s parse Will’s prose. (Click HERE for the full text — the paywall should be down) He starts:
“Of this mercifully truncated presidential campaign we may say what Samuel Johnson said of Milton’s “Paradise Lost”: No one ever wished it longer. Why prolong this incineration of the nation’s dignity?”
Why prolong the pomposity of the first paragraph? I don’t know. But Will does.
“Donald Trump, a volcano of stray thoughts and tantrums, is painfully well known. There is nothing to know about Kamala Harris, other than this: Her versatility of conviction means that she might shed her new catechism as blithely as she acquired its progressive predecessor.”
Why not just write “Kamala Harris is a flip-flopper.” Also, if this is all Will thinks we need to know about Harris, why does he go on to tell us more about her? And what’s up with “might.” Kamala ‘might’ do anything.
George continues:
The Democratic Party’s reckless disingenuousness regarding the president’s frailty persisted until, in 90 June minutes, the truth became public. Then, with the nimbleness of those without the ballast of seriousness about anything other than hoarding power, his party foisted on the electorate a Play-Doh candidate. Her manipulators made her malleability into her platform. Prudence is a virtue, so do not fault her handlers for mostly shielding her from public interactions more challenging than interviews with grammar school newspapers.
- Pretentious lies (or orotund inveracity, if Will prefers).
- “… until, in 90 June minutes”? What’s wrong with “until the debate”
- All candidates are ‘foisted’ on the electorate — if by foisted Will means ‘selected by the party’. If he wants to slime the passing of the baton from Biden to Harris he should have written that Harris was ‘foisted on Democratic voters’. Although a survey of those voters, at this point, will find few dissenters.
- “Malleability”? Will has been writing about politics since God was a boy. This cannot be the first time he has noticed that presidential candidates tailor their message for a national audience. Besides, what evidence does he present that Harris herself did not decide her current positions?
- Harris has done more than talk to a “grammar school newspaper.” Is Will so blinded by his vainglorious rhetoric he hasn't noticed Harris has faced down a hostile Fox News interviewer and answered tough questions on 60 Minutes?
Serene in his unfounded self-satisfaction, Will sails on.
Her sole notable decision as a candidate has been the choice of a running mate whose self-description (“knucklehead”) is more astute than his flippancies about serious matters (the electoral college is icky, socialism is “neighborliness,” etc.) and his self-celebratory fictions about his past. Tim Walz’s achievement during his pirouette in the spotlight has been to make his counterpart, JD Vance, resemble Aristotle.
- How does Will know that picking a US Governor as a running mate is Harris’s “sole notable decision”?
- “Knucklehead”? Self-deprecation is a value of the intellectually unpretentious. Will should know. He was involved in Ronald Reagan’s debate prep. A candidate who made a career out of folksy digs at his own age, short attention span, and supposed tendency to nap. “I have left orders to be awakened at any time during national emergency, even if I'm in a cabinet meeting.”
- Like all politicians, Walz may have “ill-phrased” some details of his autobiography. But, by the standards of the class, his spin is minor-league.
- “Pirouette”? This a word deliberately chosen to demean. Sadly, all it proves is that Will is a ‘scratch your eyes out’ philosopher given to sniggering behind the bike shed with his fellow betas.
- As Aristotle said women are “by nature” subordinate to men (Politics) and “deformed males” (Generation of Animals), Will is spot on in comparing the VP wannabe to the Greek philosopher. (Credit where credit is due.)
In his attempt to be even-handed, Will then aims his rhetorical blunderbuss at JD.
Or perhaps one of the Brothers Grimm: Vance’s scary fairy tales (he calls them “stories”) about kitten-cooking Haitians, etc., are, he says, intended to be didactic. They might be if he, a bristling porcupine of certitudes, candidly demarcated his fictions from reality.
Why not just write, “Vance insists he tells false stories about kitten-cooking Haitians simply to instruct the base. But that rationale is weak as the prickly bastard doesn’t tell his listeners when he is, or is not, lying.”
In fairness, I do like “a bristling porcupine of certitudes.” But Will doesn’t understand that often ‘less is more.’ And he should stop over-egging the pudding.
Next, he criticizes Biden’s pick of Harris in 2020 as being as reckless as Trump’s pick of Vance in 2024. Which is silly. Harris is part of the team that has made America’s recovery from COVID the world’s best. While Vance has done what? Besides losing the GOP even more support from women.
Will continues with a sweeping condemnation.
“Many of the nation’s 59 prior presidential elections have been choices between mediocrities, with some scoundrels thrown in (and into office). This year’s choice is, however, the worst ever.”
For once Will is a model of clarity — even as he further severs his ties with reality. No sane thinker disputes that mediocrity would be a promotion for Trump. However, it takes a mind lost to ideology to think Harris is worse than Harding, Hoover, Nixon, or Bush Jr. — and half of the C.19th offerings.
Will then claims his candidate analysis is,
“[A] measured judgment … validated by pondering, one by one, previous elections. To understand how far the nation has defined mediocrity down, consider the campaign’s pitiless exposure of the candidates’ peculiar promises and reprehensible silences.
- Writing that your judgment is “measured” points to an unmeasured judgment. Will should heed the advice, “Show don’t tell.”
- Trump is as Will describes. However, can George tell us of any political campaign that doesn’t make promises? And he offers no example of one that is “peculiar.”
- “Reprehensible silences”? I cannot turn on my phone without hearing a candidate's speech, interview, or ad. Silence only comes with the power-off button.
Will goes on to say,
“On foreign policy, Trump and Harris have different styles of being incomprehensible.”
This is unfair to both candidates. We know exactly where they stand. Trump is pro-Russia and pro-Israel (no questions asked). Harris is pro-western liberal democracy and pro-Israel (while threatening military aid if they keep killing civilians).
Will then contradicts his position that Harris is laconic and doesn’t do serious interviews by writing,
“She is loquacious, as when explaining the Middle East to CBS’s “60 Minutes”
He offers a cherry-picked Harris quote that is indeed tortuous. But the convoluted Will is hypocritical in criticizing someone else for not keeping it simple.
He then criticizes both candidates for not doing anything about the national debt. Which hardly sets either of them apart from the herd. The federal government has run a surplus in only 4 of the last 55 years.
He then equates Harris and Trump by saying neither is going to balance the budget by slashing Social Security or Medicare. But the two are not the same. Trump wants to worsen the deficit by cutting taxes again. Harris wants to raise taxes on the plutocrats who have the wealthy’s largest share of the nation’s assets in at least a century. Not because they are smarter than previous generations of rich people. But because Will’s teammates keep showering them with cash.
Next Will draws another false equivalency by saying both candidates are hyperbolic in their warnings that democracy is on the ropes
“Trump and Harris also agree that American democracy is a papier-mâché shambles. He says elections are “rigged.” She says democracy’s protectors (the Constitution, Congress, the courts, the people) are so flimsy that only she can prevent Trump from demolishing what George Washington founded and Abraham Lincoln preserved.”
Trump is a liar. His rigged election claim has been judged false by scores of courts. On the other hand, hundreds have been convicted of heeding Trump’s call to insurrection. And the man himself is criminally indicted for trying to slit democracy’s throat. Worse, Trump has promised to be a dictator. And has promised to use the state to crush his opponents.
A sensible person, for example Harris, would take Trump at his word. But Will prefers to cling to the ‘it can’t happen here’ thinking prevalent in 1932 Germany.
Will then presumes to speak for ‘the nation.’
Whomever wins, both parties should be penitential about what they have put the country through. And both should begin planning 2028 nomination processes that will spare the nation a choice that will be greeted, as this year’s has been, by grimaces from sea to shining sea.
Using “whomever” is both pretentious and wrong. The word is the subject of “win” so “whoever” is correct. Or does Will think, “Whom won?” would be correct?
As for substance, each side may think that the other’s candidate is the worst ever. But that is politics — and subjective. So let’s consider objective measures. Trump faces 91 criminal charges. And has already been found guilty on 34 of them. He could (theoretically) be the first President to start his term in prison.
Harris has been a city DA, a state AG, a US Senator, and a successful VP.
Will may be impressed by his verbosity. But as an analyst of the current state of political affairs, he is (to put it in his terms) a superannuated solipsist intoxicated by the low-proof sophistry of his casuistry. Or, as regular folk might say, a fecking eejit.
