 Arguing about the nature of the country is as American as frozen apple pie with a slice of processed cheese says the aspirationally acute 80-year-old Pulitzer Prize winner George Will now in his sixth decade as a leading voice in debates over culture, politics, and ideas. If you don't like arguing, he says, you picked the wrong country. Will's newest book is American Happiness and Discontents, a collection of columns called from 2008 to 2020. They cover the Great Recession in the Obama years to what he calls the crybaby presidency of Donald J. Trump and the rise of identity politics as a major force in contemporary America. Though he started out firmly on the conservative right, Will has become more and more libertarian, especially in his insistence that mere politics should never be the all-consuming passion of human endeavor and that America remains a place dedicated to a future that is better than the present. If we can rein in our appetite for government to dispense benefits, he says, and replace it with a government that defends the shores, fills the potholes, and otherwise gets out of the way, we're going to see again the creativity of the American people. Here is the Reason Interview with George Will. George Will, thanks for talking to reason. Glad to be with you. So your new book, American Happiness and Discontents, the unruly torrent collection columns from 2008 to 2020. Let's talk about this concept of the unruly torrent. What do you mean by that? And why is that a kind of controlling image for this parcel of interesting columns that you've collected? Well, it's unruly in the sense that it is a torrent. Most of reality is not governed. Most of the time, that's a very good thing. It's been well said that the essence of a Bible reduced to one sentence is God created man and woman and promptly lost control of events. Those of us with a libertarian streak, some streaks broader than others, but mine is broad enough, believe that things being out of control is exactly what we want. We want a spontaneous order up from the bottom creativity rather than down from the top command structures. However, events can be unruly and turbulent in dangerous as well as constructive ways. And I think we're seeing the dangerous side in the list in that period that my book covers. Before we get to the dangerous side and the discontent, let's talk about the title, American happiness. What over the past 15 years do Americans have to be happy about that either we aren't quite celebrating or we just kind of take for granted? Well, first of all, we're speaking shortly after the 20th anniversary of 9-11, and we can be happy that there's been no other mass casualty terrorist attack, not for one of trying on the part of the terrorists. Terrorist attacks that are preempted or forestalled in other ways don't get noticed by definition and therefore we tend not to credit those who are in the business of preventing them. I have a son as an FBI agent encounter terrorism, so I'm a little sensitive to this non-allocation of credit, but so there is that. Second, the American economy continues to whore along in spite of the government's best attempts to stop it. Third, we've just gone through a pandemic in which Big Pharma, the villain du jour most days, Big Pharma stepped up and with amazing dispatch produced several vaccines that are safe, reliable, effective, and free essentially. So we have that the basic creativity of the Western society showed itself here. You think there is something inherent and I, you know, I reject as you do a kind of blood and soil national identity particularly when it's related to America, but is there something in the American DNA where we cannot stay happy? You know, there's that great scene in Key Largo, the Humphrey Bogart, Edward G. Robinson movie where at one point Rocky, the bad guy played by Edward G. Robinson, asked like, what do you want? And he says, I want more. I want more. Is there something about America where some of the things that you just rattled off, you know, it's like, yeah, okay, but what else do you have? You know, it seems as if among, you know, many of our insatiable appetites is we're never very happy for very long. Yeah, that's what's called someone called it the joyless pursuit of joy. I'll match your pop culture with one of my own. And by the way, I want to point out that a reference to Key Largo pop culture is I think that might be ancient history by now, but I'm sure I'll get, but mine's even more ancient. Long ago, there was a radio show called Fibre McGee and Molly. And Molly would say to her husband, Fibre, if it makes you happy to be unhappy, then be unhappy. Right. Yeah. And there's a certain kind of American who's not happy unless he or she is furious these days, indignant, set upon, aggrieved. It's worse than usual. Yeah. And it's totally bipartisan too, or not bipartisan across the political and ideological stuff. Absolutely. Donald Trump sort of perfected and became the avatar of crybaby conservatism. Everyone's picking on media, Hollywood, academia, et cetera. Pity the billionaire, right? Exactly. And the left today feels set upon by big corporations and money, other than George Soros's money and politics and all that stuff. So whining is the national anthem these days. There is the wonderful book by Harvard English historian or literature historian, Sakvan Burkovich, calling the American Jeremiah as our basic national genre. Yeah. Yeah. You know, and by the way, about pop culture in your book, one thing that I learned just in passing in every page has a couple of these wonderful nuggets in that, that the phrase it's a doozy refers to a Duesenberg, which was, you know, a the ultimate luxury car of its time because it costs the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars. And so when you say something, it's a doozy and that that's still around. So this is part of what makes the book just endlessly fascinating reading. One of the other refrains in the book as well, I guess, let's let's turn to the discontents then, you know, of the title. You talk about how people want to, you know, people are angry and they feed on their anger. This is, you know, more than coffee, you know, we're done with coffee. We're now just on an indignation all the time. Talk about the limits of that. And you mentioned it's bigger now than ever. What are the primary causes driving this, you know, universal sense of indignation and outrage? Well, first, let's contrast whatever is making us unhappy today. It's not at all like what made America unhappy to the point of breaking apart in the 19th century. Then we argued about slavery, whether human beings could own other human beings and whether or not this practice of owning human beings could be expanded into the territories before they became states. Today, we're arguing, I think, mostly about status, about the sense of condescension on the part of many people that they're being condescended to. And on the part of the condescenders, there's a sense that they are forced to inhabit a country and share the country with people who are unworthy. They're not intellectually up to snuff. They're not properly educated. They don't have the manners of proper citizens. So there's a sense of mutual incomprehension mixed with distaste that fuels this. Because if you ask, okay, you're unhappy, you're on the right, what law could we pass that would make you cheerful? I think you'll get an echo in silence. And the same is true on the left. Now, left was a well, if we could just pass this or that $3 trillion bill, we will thereby achieve equality as we understand it, which means everyone equally dependent for their material well-being on the government. That would make them happy, but what would make them temporarily happy? Because they'll keep moving the goalposts. And you say you've mentioned the word status. I mean, how much of this is almost, you know, this may be too libertarian or too utopian, but in many ways, we're in a post-scarcity economy and a post-scarcity world where, you know, I'm thinking, you know, there's this the 19th century, but even in the 20th century, my parents were born and raised in the 20s and during the Depression and were poor. I mean, they did not know where their next meals were coming from. That kind of material consideration is no longer a factor. Thank God. But then it's status and it's identifying yourself through the things that you consume, the sports that you like, the cars that you drive, et cetera. Is there any way out of that? Because we, you know, taste cultures are always going to be very different and they're going to mean a lot to people. How do we, you know, I think even in the 90s, people were happy to celebrate radical differences and individualist kind of lifestyles and things like that. Now that kind of proliferating lifestyle seems to be only cause for anger and at times even violence. Oh, you used the magic phrase. Lifestyle has become a political statement, not a choice, not an eccentricity, not a peculiarity, not a whim, but a stance, a stance affirming certain implicit or occasionally explicit principles about how to live and what virtue consists of. Again, what strikes me is that these discontents are not amenable to political action as we normally understand political action. Problem in Tennessee Valley, well, let's create the Tennessee Valley authority and we'll ameliorate conditions. I don't see how you do that nowadays. And one of the themes of your columns, which I think is, and I'm sure we'll come back to this, is that politics obviously is important, but it cannot be most of what we're doing or how we address most of our issues, most of our problems because it's just not up to the tax. Yes. And that is totalizing politics. The phrase that began, I don't know, what was it, 15, 20 years ago, the personal is political. If the personal is political, everything is politics. And that's the definition of totalitarianism. A mistake people commonly make about totalitarian societies, they say, no, totalitarian society, you're not allowed to participate in politics. No, no. In a totalitarian society, you can't not participate in politics. I remember when I first entered East Berlin, my first site of a totalitarian society, what struck me was, A, the absence of advertising, which I missed instantly, and B, the presence of the big red banners saying, victory for socialismists. That is, we were conscripted into political vocabularies everywhere. And that's the problem. And that's of course, why that's of course, why we're fighting so much about the teaching of American history. George Orwell says in 1984, he who controls the past controls the future, and who controls the present controls the past. Hence the New York Times 1619 farce, saying if we can just reframe, as I like to put it, reframe American history, we can control the future by saying, stipulating, I won't say they argue it even, but by stipulating that America began, was conceived not in liberty, as Lincoln said at Gettysburg, but in slavery and sin in 1619. By the same token, isn't it a good thing for us to be arguing over what America stands for and what America means? And also to recognize that, oh, say Lincoln in the 19th century was describing a different country than, you know, JFK in the late 50s wrote a book, or ghost wrote, maybe he read it, we don't know, book about American immigrants and about America as an immigrant country, because 100 years later, what America, you know, we are going to need to update and we should update and re interrogate the past and come to a new consensus. Is the problem with something like the 1619 project is that it is not a good faith argument about what America stands for? Or is it that it is, you know, flatly wrong in its particulars or some mix of both? Arguing about the nature of the country is as American as frozen apple pie with a slice of processed cheese, it just is. If you don't like arguing, you pick the wrong country. So let's argue what's wrong with the 1619 project is it is factually preposterous. The essence of the story is that Americans fought the American Revolution because Lord Dunsmore said that slaves fighting on the British side would be emancipated. Well, he said that I think it was November 1775 after Lexington and Concord, after the Boston Tea Party, after the Boston massacre, after the Stamp Act. The war was up and running under the command after George Washington had been put in charge of the troops. So it is factually illiterate to say this. And that is why, to use your term, it's not a good faith kind of argument. It's an argument of its tendentious, merititious and propagandistic. This is before the period covered in this collection. But do you feel like Newt Gingrich is he's kind of the forgotten man of contemporary American politics, who in many ways weaponized American history. He really ramped up on the Republican and the conservative side very successfully. A kind of total war where it was about as much about cultural issues and about cultural reflections. There was never a murder by somebody like Susan Smith, the South Carolina woman who killed her children and then blamed it on black men. And then he accused her of having Democrat values. Woody Allen had Democrat values, etc. Is he kind of the lurking ghost of contemporary American politics? And I think that's true. I think he is. People forget what produced him and what produced him was 40 years of Democratic control of the House of Representatives. Think of that. That's two generations ended by Gingrich. If I may, and I think you'll enjoy this analogy, growing up in the 60s and 70s, it was as sure that Democrats would run Congress as the National League would win the All-Star Game. It was inconceivable that the AL would ever actually win a game. And this produced frustration and a kind of bitterness and a feeling that politics as normally practiced would not break the log jam. So he gave us new ways of practicing politics. Not on balance and certainly not entirely a bad thing. But since then, we've seen a fairly frequent oscillation of the control of the House of Representatives and of Congress as a whole. And that's excellent. Well, do you think it is excellent? I mean, this is a political scientist Morris Fiorina talks about the last 20 years and possibly the next 20 years as an era of no decision similar to the late 19th and early 20th century. From a libertarian point of view or from a dogmatic libertarian point of view, I want to say, yeah, this is good because it means neither party can really put their agenda in place. But it also means with every election, each flip of the switch, it seems the pendulum gets more and more extreme. Instead of settling in the middle, it's going out wider and wider. And it's a wrecking ball. It's not a pendulum. And it's just smashing more and more aspects of government. Do you think the inability of us as a nation to kind of find a political consensus, which we did more or less for the Cold War period and even briefly in the 90s when the Europe big government was over, is it destructive to not be able to fashion an actual governing consensus? It can be because what it does is it convinces the American people that elections don't matter. And what happens as a result of that is executive government. That is Congress can go back and forth with narrow majorities on both sides. What really changes, what really infuses energy and action is executive orders from the president. Look what Joe Biden did in his first weeks in office, a flurry, a blizzard of executive orders. That is not healthy. I believe that the most alarming thing in American government is the present, the modern presidency, which is essentially untethered from constitutional restraints. People say, the presidents have usurped the powers of Congress. If only they'd had to usurp them. Congress has hands away powers on a silver salver. It's so eager to get rid of them and say they don't really pass laws anymore. They pass little velities that say we really ought to have good education. You folks over there in the education department fill in the details. So what you get is, to make this very timely, the Centers for Disease Control says, okay, well, we're going to control disease. We're going to seize landlords property and make them house tenants free while they go on paying their mortgage, interest, taxes, etc. Or, to be even more timely, the president says, therefore, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration is hereby directed to order 80 million private sector employees to be vaccinated. Two things are wrong with that. Either Congress intended that, in which case the Supreme Court should step in and say that violates the non-delegation doctrine, that is, you have delegated to the executive branch essentially legislative powers, or Congress did not intend that, in which case the statute's being misapplied. I keep coming back to the fact, and there's a large chunk of my book is about this, that all stands between us and even worse government than we normally have is the judicial branch. The president will not limit himself. Congress will not limit itself. Only the judiciary can police the outskirts of limited government. Do you feel confident that the Supreme Court has actually been pretty good on speech, certainly over the past 30 or 40 years, on a number of business regulations? Not completely. They blew things like the kilo decision. I think the race decision, I mean, they've signed off on the Obamacare decisions that interstate commerce can mean you are chewing a particular piece of gum somewhere and that affects interstate commerce. And so Congress or the government can regulate it, but are you confident that the judiciary is going to be a pretty good bulwark against expansion? I'm not confident, but I'm far more confident in it than I am in the executive or other branches. It seems to me today, the most interesting argument in American politics isn't between the right and the left, it's within the right, and it's about the role of the judiciary. Four years, and I was guilty in this, four years, conservatives recoiling against some of the more imaginative, essentially legislative exercises of the Earl Warren Court, conservatives said what we want is judicial restraint. Under the tutelage of Clark Neely and some other fine scholars, I have come around to the view that what we need is what they call judicial engagement, that judicial deference to the legislative branch or to the executive branch is more often than not a dereliction of duty. And it is the duty to throw the penalty when infractions, the penalty flag, when infractions are committed by the other branches of government, which they are daily. One of the most fascinating parts of the book or the collection, the themes, I think it comes up at least a couple of times in the collection, but you definitely use this phrase or you quote this phrase, the past is a different country. And I think one of the, to me, you're kind of like Funest and Memorias, the Borges short story character who is a librarian who remembers everything and ultimately dies of congestion of the lungs because he's remembered too much. But one of the things that is great about your book is that you focus consistently on what is happening today in the context of the past, particularly you write a lot about the kind of legacies or what was going on during World War II, the Holocaust, things like the Japanese internment. I guess a general question first, and then I want to ask some specifics about those particular periods. What is the what is the great benefit of recalling the past in the present day? Well, it spares you from the delusion that things new are happening all the time, that things are unprecedented. How often in the daily journalism do you see the phrase unprecedented? One of the advantages, and I'm not sure there are other, but one of the advantages of being 80 is that you really, you sit back and say, what was it, had me so excited during the Carter administration? What did I think was so earthshaking about what they were doing? In fact, the big things have happened before, big things are going to happen again, that we are, no matter how situated politically, we are coping with an unruly torrent of events, and coping, the title of a collection of writings by my former best friend, Pat Moynihan, we are coping. That's what you do in life as you cope. You don't plan, you know the old saying, if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans, it's not going to happen. So get used to turning, get used to turmoil, get used to creative destruction and all the rest. I've read that you consider yourself a low wattage or a low voltage atheist, but you're sounding kind of like Buddha right now, right? Who tells the leader who asks him to say something that will make him happy when he is sad and sad when he's happy, and says the Buddha says this too will pass. Let's talk though about the Holocaust, because a number of the collected essays focus on just a wide range of stories that continue to come out about the Holocaust that are haunting, important. What for you is the main message that we need to keep at the forefront as we're going about all of our business to look back at this event 70 years ago, 75 years ago, and keep it in our forefront? Primo Levi, a Holocaust survivor in Italian, said it happened once, it can happen again. It didn't just happen once, it happened over and over again in Rwanda and elsewhere. It happened in the Balkans, but the Holocaust happened in Europe's most cultivated, most highest educated nation, Germany. And it happened so swiftly. A book that I read not long ago called Hitler's First Hundred Days really should be read because Hitler's First Hundred Days saw such an enormous and swift transformation of public attitudes. Just weeks after Hitler becomes chancellor on the 30th of January 1933, mobs were walking through the streets beating Jews up, and people were walking past them that this was the new normal. How fast a new normal can insinuate itself into our lives? That's one of the lessons of the Holocaust. In contemporary America, what are the analogues that have you worried? What mobs are we walking past that we should be stopping or stopping at and kind of dispersing? I think the fact that Mr. Trump's successful indoctrination of scores of millions of Americans with the belief that widespread voter fraud stole a 2020 election is a frightening example of how easy it is to change the consciousness of large swaths of the American people. There's no evidence for what he says. He doesn't really bother to provide evidence or point to evidence or suggest where the evidence is. You know, it's a little bit like the crazy people who got obsessed with the Kennedy assassination, and their argument was proof of how vast and thorough the conspiracy was is that there's no evidence left of it at all. I love the Kennedy assassination comes up from time to time and you mentioned in passing in one column that one thing that is true that all the conspiracy theorists, they have to get Lee Harvey Oswald off the stage really quickly. He confounds it not just for the conspiracy freaks, but for mainstream media. There's a column where you talk about the response to Kennedy being killed from the New York Times and from kind of the establishment media was that, no, it wasn't Lee Harvey Oswald who killed JFK. It was a climate of hate. It was right-wing people, et cetera. A morning after he died. He died at noon in the morning after his New York Times, which means this story had to be written eight hours after he died. Scotty Reston, the revered bureau chief of the New York Times, front page story said he was killed by a climate of hate in Dallas. So they'd already said Goldwater did it essentially. Yeah, climates of hate don't kill people, ex-marines who defected to the Soviet Union, and won a couple of marksman badges. Or as Jackie Kennedy said, a little communist. Yeah, one of the fantastic columns that goes back to World War II you wrote, this is from July 26, 2020. You wrote, it was the title is something like a year that was as disruptive as 2020. And you're talking about the year of 1942. Can you talk a little bit about, this is a moment when people look back, it's after Pearl Harbor, it's after the United States had gone from being an isolationist country. However, we wanted to find that to one that was firmly united behind the World War II effort. What was going on in the country that should give us all pause when we look back at the past as some kind of golden age of unity and sense of purpose? Well, first race relations got worse in part because as we geared up to be the arsenal of democracy, usually in northern manufacturing cities, Detroit particularly, but Chicago and Pittsburgh, etc. African Americans made the great migration from the deep south to the cities. And these became tinderboxes of racial animosity. We had some huge awful race riots and lynchings, frankly, in cities from Detroit, St. Louis and others. And the idea that everyone said, well, we're all in this together. Let's get Tojo and Hitler. Now we were fighting over where to fight first, who to fight. Could we trust the German speakers in Milwaukee? Could we trust the Asian Americans and Japanese Americans and the West Coast? So the idea that all was harmony and star-spangled banner is just false. Now the nation behaved well and and won with dispatch and did prodigies of production to make really to make it possible for the Red Army to win the war in the Eastern Front. But we have much to be proud about, but there's no need to view this through rose-tinted glasses. I think you have a couple of columns that deal with the Japanese internment camps or more specifically with people who either were or had their families interned, who then went on to fight, typically in Europe, because Japanese Americans, Japanese American citizens who may have been in this whose family were in this country longer than my family has been in this country, were not allowed to fight in the Pacific. Can you talk a little bit about what is the lesson that we can learn from people who were systematically and legally cut out from full participation in American society before being put in internment camps and then go fight and help America? What does that tell us about an American story? In a way is that a validation of a 1619 project model of America as a horrible country or is it or is it a refutation of it? Well, I think it refutes it because the 1944 Karamatsu decision whereby the Supreme Court to its, I was going to say everlasting, but that's not true because it corrected itself, to its shame, ratified the internment of these people, two-thirds of whom were American citizens, half of whom were women and children. However, in 1983, I believe it was, the Supreme Court said, we repudiate that decision. Reparations were paid voted by Congress, which refutes the idea that Americans are too squeamish to look at their, the disagreeable parts of their past. But what the episode, to me, indicates is, A, the dangers of executive power again, the ability of presidents wielding wartime power to pick up these powers, to use the Attorney General and then later Justice Robert Jackson's raise, like a looted gun sitting there on the table to be picked up. When the General Dewitt is really the villain of the piece, who was in charge of West Coast Defense, said, we have to do something about these potentially disloyal Japanese Americans. People said, well, what evidence do you have? He says it's very suspicious because there's no evidence, whatever, shows you just how sinister and deep secret their plotting is. It makes QAnon seem like a responsible investigative conspiracy because at least they're producing fake evidence. It's the will to believe that people want to believe things, they will believe them. And again, this is a recurring problem in any society, but I think particularly in mass societies with mass communications that can cater to these delusions. In passing in some of the work on particularly on World War II in the 30s, you note, this is something I'd never thought of before, but that fascism ultimately was a young man's game. And you talk about how young Mussolini, Franco, and Hitler were when they got going. Donald Trump, who's not a fascist, but is definitely an authoritarian, has an authoritarian temperament is old, but he delivered us into what you called in an interview that you did with Reason with myself and Matt Welch in 2016. You correctly prophesied in February of 2016 that we were entering an authoritarian moment far from the libertarian moment that Reason has tried to conjure like an Alistair Crowley devotee. We're doing all the magic rituals we can to conjure the libertarian moment, but the authoritarian moment has shown up. What do you think? Are we still in the authoritarian moment and what are its main causes and what are its main manifestations that are still with us? Its main cause is that most Americans are result oriented. Most human beings are result oriented. Don't bother them with procedural niceties. For example, I go back to Mr. Biden's mandate for vaccines. Most Americans like it. I don't blame them for that. I think vaccine resistance is lunacy at this point. But there are lots of things you can't do, even if the danger you're doing to forestall is serious. The war on terror, we had to sit down and say, wait, there are limits to what we're going to do to prevent another terrorist attack. Limits having to do with torture and having to do with rendition and having to do with surveillance. Similarly, people, I'm not going to say that people like authoritarianism, but they don't recoil from it if the authoritarianism promotes an end that they like. So this is Mussolini making the trains run on time means you'll put up with Mussolini for some time. Yes, not just put up with Mussolini, but it sort of validates Mussolini. And the Germans said unemployment is going down and the autobahns are being built and we're being more respected in international affairs. And if people are sufficiently results oriented, they then say as a natural next step that the end justifies the means. And since the means are what we call rule of law and constitutional government that suffers. Do you think the lack of results then, whether it's in terms of economic performance or getting COVID under the type of control that politicians are trying to promise but failing to deliver? Is that the beginning of the end of the authoritarian moment where Trump promised a lot of stuff. He was not even able to build his wall, which was so central to his projection of bare chested victory. Is the failure of first Trump couldn't even get reelected? Biden seems to be floundering in many significant ways. Is that is that a necessary precondition for an unwinding of an authoritarian moment? Too soon to say it could be a prelude to an increased authoritarianism saying the dosage isn't high enough. I can see that being at least as plausible a response to this. You know, before we concede the fact that nothing gets done in Washington. The Obama administration, which supposedly was afflicted by this obstructionism passed the most important financial regulation legislation since the 1930s in Dodd-Frank. The largest enrichment of the welfare state menu, the enhancement of the so-called safety net in Obamacare and the expansion of Medicaid, which I think was probably the most important part of it. So things get done. They just get done slowly. Or they don't get acknowledged as such, right? Because we're told all the time Congress can't get anything done because we need to get rid of the filibuster. Maybe we just need a plurality rule, but in fact, government spending has gone up consistently. Government regulations and as you're saying, major legislation has been passed even along strictly partisan lines, whether it's the Republican tax cuts under Trump or all of the stuff you were talking about under Obama. Furthermore, remember that the basis of the Republican tax cut under Trump was to cut the corporate tax rate and Barack Obama wanted to cut the corporate tax rate. So it was a question of degree anyway. Do you think you had also said in that 2016 interview with Reason that if Trump succeeds, gets into office and whatnot, that the Republican Party will be reduced to a husk? Where are you on that now? The Republican Party, certainly it took a shellacking in the 2020 presidential election along the way. It lost control of Congress, which it seems poised to retake actually, or at least the House in 2022. Is the Republican Party reduced to a husk? How long-lasting do you think the damage that Donald Trump has inflicted on the Grand Ball Party? How bad is that? It's bad. It's not just a husk. It's not really in the normal sense the term a political party because it is entirely a cult of personality. And it's a cult of personality because most Republican office holders at the national level at least are frightened of their voters, which means they don't like their voters very much. And it means they don't respect their voters because they think one tweet from Mar-Lago can sick 25, 30%, 40% depending on the constituency of these people on the office holder. So they're walking on eggshells at all times. They're desperately unhappy because they don't feel that there's dignity to their position or their work right now. And again, what is Trump's agenda? Might Trump run again in 2024? I don't guess. No, maybe. But what's he want? Build a wall? We've been down that road. It seems to me an entertainer really has to change his act because the one thing Mr. Trump is beginning to look like is a one-trick pony. And I don't know what he says for an encore. So he needs to be more like Bob Dylan and reinvent himself. While he's reinvented himself as a born-again Christian already, so he's gone down that Dylan trap. He needs to go someplace else. What about the Democratic Party though? They are also because Joe Biden won and won decisively because they took control of the House and then the Senate clearly because of Trump's prolonged, you know, hissy fit from November through January. Yet they are also pretty fractious at this point. There is an insurgent group led by Bernie Sanders and the Senate and other people in the House who are even more progressive and have that young, you know, they're in the young fascism phase, right? They're under 45, under 50. What is the Democratic Party looking like? Because they too are riven by populism and by kind of lack of coherence and unity at this point. They're riven, but history is made by intense compact minorities and the intense... Are you calling Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a compact minority? I'm saying that she and her squad, her cohort, have the energy in the Democratic Party. A lot of people say, gee whiz, I did not know Biden was this far left. He's not left. He's not a progressive. He's a Democrat and he goes where his party goes and his party is being pulled just as, to be fair, if I will cite the man for whom I cast my first presidential vote, just as Barry Goldwater and his intense compact minority in the Republican Party pulled the party permanently to the right. So here's the difference. In 1933, Franklin Roosevelt set out to change the relationship of the citizen to the central government and he did so having one lopsided legislative majorities in the House and in the Senate. 1965, Lyndon Johnson, having won a landslide victory against my man Goldwater, had lopsided majorities in the House and the Senate and set out to complete, as he saw it, the New Deal agenda with Medicare and Medicaid and all the rest. It's very different to do what Biden is doing. He's violating Jefferson's axiom, do not undertake great departures on slender majorities. The country didn't vote for this. The country doesn't want it. The country finds modern monetary theory implausible, which is that as long as the interest rate is lower than the rate of growth, you could borrow and spend forever with an asterisk because the economists say interest rates are going to be remained low for the foreseeable future and a hierarchy on epistemic folly is being committed. You remember in May 2008, the foreseeable future didn't extend to September 2008 when Lehman Brothers and all the other unpleasantness happened. What do you think about in the 21st century, it seems that in the 90s, Bill Clinton, after he got shellacked in 1994 and the Republicans really staged a comeback that really nobody saw coming, but it was decisive and important. There was a reigning consensus. There was bipartisanship. A bunch of things got done. We can always argue about whether or not they were as effective as their champions say they were, etc., but there was that George W. Bush got in on the slimmest of presidential majorities, did a bunch of bipartisan stuff early on, not including things like the Patriot Act, which is there's bipartisanship and then when you get to a point where there are only one or two no votes, something is very bad. Unanimity is probably a sign of something gone off the rails, but he worked with Ted Kennedy to pass No Child Left Behind. They worked to push Medicare Part D, but over time, Bush became less and less willing. He would exert executive branch power or use republic slim majorities in order to get his way. Obama completely used the slimmest of democratic majorities in order to pass what he called transformative legislation, things like Obamacare on a strict party line vote. Trump did something similar with Republicans. There was no democratic support for anything that he accomplished. Biden doing this now. How do we change that so that at least major legislation is reflective of a large consensus as opposed to merely setting up the next extreme counterreaction to what just happened two or four years before? Let me answer that by telling you why I think the Biden administration's infrastructure bill is a great missed opportunity. Infrastructure is about jobs and every congressional district has a construction firm and it has construction workers. Infrastructure are big shiny things like airports that you can see and say look government did that and we're glad they did it instead. The Biden administration too clever by half said, by the way infrastructure means everything. Infrastructure means school lunches because healthy children are part of the infrastructure of a strong economy etc etc and it looks cynical and infrastructure became a distinction without a difference. A category that no longer categorizes doesn't classify anything and it looked like just another example of the Washington blob out of control. Find some issues that are issues of splitable differences. I don't think we should subsidize crops but if we do let's argue about how much. I mean you can split the difference. Abortion is hard to split the difference on abortion. It's hard to split on cultural issues but start with things that you can actually tell people there's something in it for you and we're going to bargain. Now legislative bargaining is inherently additive. It leads to the growth of government. You support my projects A, B, and C. I'll support your projects D, E, and F. Government grows. That's a transaction cost of democracy get over. And you don't think we're going to be reeling in that kind of I guess Jonathan Rauch and other people pulling off of Mansor Olson and other theorists talks about that as demo sclerosis and whatnot. This is how republics turn either into empires or bankrupt former empires. Yes Mansor Olson rightly said that interventionist stable governments tend to acquire like barnacles on a ship interest groups that become deeply invested in rent seeking and in the status quo. And they lose their energy over time and sometimes you need great disruptions. Pandemics can be that the Black Death was a terrific disruptor. Bits deep in its cost but still wars, revolutions, things like that. Do you think anything that we've seen over the past? Well, you know, I mean, is it in the 21st century that the problem is we've had too many disruptions, whether it's 9 11, whether it's the financial crisis, whether it's COVID. It's almost, you know, we barely are catching our breath from the last disruption. And now we, I mean, we two or a year ago in 2019, we spent about $4.9 trillion, which was a record. In 2020, we spent $6 trillion in this year, we're spending $6 trillion. This isn't going to be real back anytime soon. No, but reality has a way of biting sooner or later. And the idea that, you know, it's an old axiom. The first rule of economics is scarcity is real. The first rule of politics is to ignore the first rule of economics. So we're doing that now. Yeah. And the idea that you can simply print money, which we now do this Fed does it with clicks on a machine, limitlessly without consequences is false. We don't know where the point is reached where the consequences come. We don't know what the consequences are going to be, but there is a point and there will be consequences. And that will change the way people think about money. Do you think then, you know, kind of continuing with this authoritarian moment, which, you know, is housed somewhat in the White House or largely, but it kind of is a cultural motif of just wanting to get things done and to follow a strong leader. You know, Biden then is less of a course correction and he's more of a, you know, maybe he's, well, he did those ads where he drove around in his father's corvette or something, but is he, I mean, he's driving in the same direction in a slightly different vehicle than Trump was. I don't think he's driving. I think he's following his party. That's what I meant a moment ago when I said he's not a progressive. He's a Democrat and he'll go where the party goes. And the party is being driven by other people. Do you, what is your sense of the overall performance of the government with the pandemic? And this is something under Trump and under Biden, you know, the CDC eviction moratorium started under Trump. It was extended by Biden. You know, one thing that Trump did well was Operation Warp Speed, helping to bring, you know, to buy large amounts and incentivize, you know, safe, effective and ubiquitous vaccines. Things like that. How would you rate the response to the federal response to the pandemic and then is that exacerbating a loss of trust and confidence in government? Or is it something else? I would actually give the government a B plus vote on this. It doesn't get an A because of an important failure and that's of messaging. And it continues to this day. Too many voices, too many voices, too many of the voices practicing and almost saying that they're practicing what Plato called the noble lie. We have to scare people in order to get them to do X, Y and Z. I am staggered by the fact that as recently as just the other day in his speech announcing the mandate to vaccine mandate, the president said, A, it's irrational not to be vaccinated because it's effective. But B, even the vaccinated are threatened by the unvaccinated. Well, if the unvaccinated threaten the vaccinated, what's the point of getting vaccinated? So the messaging continues to be incoherent and a lot of people throw up their hands. Do you think it would be a better policy not to mandate vaccines and then to, you know, people have more information and then allow individuals, employers, companies, states and localities maybe to actually determine what kind of policy would be best? That's not only a better policy. It's the only constitutional policy. The Constitution gives plenary police powers to the states and not at all to the federal government. Congress could not do what OSHA is now purporting to do. Which is impose a mandate. I just don't think the courts would put up with that. You know, when the Obamacare was being litigated and it was a question of whether or not Congress could require the American people to purchase insurance. Someone said, well, could Congress require that we eat our broccoli to make us healthy? People say, we've got to be ridiculous. I think the CDC thinks it could order us to eat broccoli. And because there's no limiting principle, so far as I can tell, to their exercise of power to fight diseases. How you mentioned you're 80 years old. You're the Cal Ripken Jr. of newspaper columnists. I don't know if you have set the actual records. You know, maybe Joey Adams, strictly for laughs, might have had a longer run. I don't know. But you are 80 years old. You have children who range in age from being members of Gen X to being millennials. How do you reach younger people? America has always revered at young. It's always been scared of it, young. But how do you reach younger people to give them a sense of the scope and depth and breath and meaning of history? Make it interesting. And right. Well, there's nothing in the world more optional than reading a column. Therefore, it had better be fun. And it's not going to be fun if it's just rhetoric. The nicest compliment I can recall receiving was a fact checker at the Washington Post Writers Group that syndicates my column saying until she became a fact checker, she had no idea how many facts there were in my columns. And that's what I want. I mean, it says the opinion page. But I want my column to be 95% stuff, information facts. Yeah, I'll throw in one of those facts which I had not encountered before. And I've read every, I think every Kennedy Conspiracy, Kennedy assassination book that I could, but that Kennedy was on his way when he was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, a lone gunman. But he was on his way to deliver a speech where he was going to talk about cutting taxes for corporations and individuals. History cut short. Kennedy was a supply sider before we had the term. You also, he seems to be, I mean, I guess at 80, you are technically not a baby boomer. That's correct. I was born in 41 and baby boomers were 45 on. Yeah. But one of the things that is bracing about your book, and I mean that like a nice slap in the morning of Aqua Galva, is that you talk about puncturing the kind of political mythology, particularly that comes out of DC. You mentioned a little bit about Scotty Reston of The New York Times, but Camelot as a general rule, do you feel like people over time, there's no question people in America are more cynical or seem to be more cynical than they used to be. Does that cynicism give rise to a kind of deep media literacy or is it actually, does it make us suckers to believe anything that we think confirms our existing bias? I don't want to encourage cynicism. Remember Lily Tomlin, the comedian had a character called the bag lady who said, no matter how cynical you get, you can't keep up. I don't feel that way. I've lived in Washington for 52 years. It's my home and I love Washington. I go out of my way when driving around to drive past the monuments. It's a beautiful city and it's full of references to the nobility of this country, what it's done and what it's aspired to be. That said, that view of mine is compatible with public choice theory with James Buchanan, who won a Nobel Prize for this, wrote a wonderful essay against the romance of government. Public choice theory reduced to its nugget of essence is people in public life are like people in private life. In private life, people in economic life try to maximize profits. In public life, they try to maximize their power. They're both aggrandizing creatures. So let's not get sentimental about them. He and Gordon Tullock would characterize it as saying public choice economics is politics without romance. What is the type of romance that we need in order to inspire and to create a spree decor or a national feeling? Because to go back to things like the 1619 project, some of the very best columns in your book talk about the exclusion, both the Dejeure and de facto exclusion of blacks from things like baseball. You have a great column about it. It's like heartbreaking to hear a team in Georgia in the 50s that couldn't play in literally baseball because they were a black team and no white teams would play against them. You talk about Japanese people being excluded. All sorts of minorities. How do we come up with a national narrative that acknowledges our past but also kind of acknowledges the corrections that we've made and kind of hurries us up to become the better version of America that we sometimes celebrate on the 4th of July? By consulting the great historians currently writing the Gordon Woods and the Sean Molenses who say slavery didn't begin in the United States. Slavery was as old as a human experience. What began in the United States was organized anti-slavery politics. That's what we gave to the world. I think the way you began, I keep going back to the beginning, to the American founding. I think the founding of the United States is the best thing that ever happened anywhere. I think the American founding is luminous and the shortcomings of our pursuit of the ideals affirmed back then doesn't discount the nobility of the attempt. Your children are growing up in a radically different world and your oldest son, you write movingly in a series of columns that are included in the book about him having Down syndrome. He was born in 1972, if I recall, and you talk about how people with Down syndrome were even then called Mongoloid, that they had something like a 20-year life expectancy. It's now 60 or in the early 60s. In many ways, he is growing up in a better world, although it is also true that different advancements make it less likely that children who are conceived with Down syndrome make it to life. Is the future better? I guess that's kind of an odd way to ask this question. For your children and for people under the age of 40, is their future bright? Or is it this kind of darkness that starts over the past 20 years with 9-11 and goes through the financial crisis, through COVID, through just awful, at every level, it seems, many of our idols, whether in the public sector or in the private sector, have been revealed to be contemptible human beings. How do you orient towards the future? Do you think your kids are going to live in a better world than the one that you have lived in? There's a lot of darkness out there. I particularly think of China, which is perfecting forms of authoritarianism undreamt of because unimagined before, because the technologies that make it imaginable didn't exist. That said, go back to John for a moment. When John was born, the first question we were asked by the hospital, Georgetown Hospital, was whether we were going to take him home. And I said, I thought that's what people did with their children. You took them home. On the other hand, and the world is better today because more accepting of people like John once they're born. However, because of prenatal testing, far the largest share of women who are fine through prenatal testing that they have a downed child have them aborted. I don't want to use two inflammatory languages, that's called genocide, there's an attempt underway really encouraged by doctors to eliminate a category of people, that's called genocide. And I think it's a shame because I think John's kind of nice. Other people like him are really quite pleasant. So on the one hand, the society has been very accepting of John. On the other hand, it's not accepting of Down syndrome people. So it's a mixture, but I do think that if we can restore a kind of rein in our appetites for public services, for government dispense benefits, rein in government's tendency to tolerate indeed encourage rent seeking, to get a leaner or serious more competent government that delivers the mail if we still need a mail service. I think we've worked around that one. I think we have. Defends the shores, fills the potholes, and otherwise gets out of the way. We're going to see again the astonishing creativity of the American people. A last comment and to bring it back to another personal note, the last column in the collection American happiness and discontents involves your assistant, Sarah Walton, whose husband graduated from a service academy in 1989 and was killed in Afghanistan in 2008. And you talk about the sacrifice that both he and she gave. Is there a way to honor the people who serve and give their lives for the country without necessarily also embarking? You've been critical of American foreign policy, particularly the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. How do we grow up as a country where we can honor people and also and their sacrifice and immense, you know, just the ultimate without incurring more and more of those sacrifices? Well, first of all, you begin by saying that what they do is demonstrate valor. And once you value valor, you don't want it squandered. And we've had far too much squandered valor. I think that the invasion of Iraq in 2003 is the worst foreign policy blunder in American history. I don't think we've paid even half the price of it in terms of difficulties down the road. Save your valor for causes that deserve it. And nation building, again, epistemic humility from Mr. Hyer. Know what you know and know what you can't know. And what you cannot know is nation building because it's a phrase as preposterous as orchid building. Nations are like orchids. They are organic growths. And when we send to Afghanistan a general, I won't use his name, a general who says we're going to bring government in a box for Afghanistan, we know you're about to squander valor. We're going to leave it there. George Will, thank you for the past 50 years of columns. And I look forward to the next 50. People can read them a collection from 2008 to 2020 in American happiness and discontents, the unruly torrent. George Will, thanks for talking to reason. Thank you. I always enjoy talking to reason as I avidly read it. I appreciate that. And so do my colleagues. Thank you.