George Will, Nowhere Man

It is not pleasant to contemplate the mind and character of George Will. Has there ever been such an insufferable combination of airless smug superiority and indifference to the concerns of ordinary humanity? Here’s the final paragraph of his latest column:

The cost of [the House GOP’s opposition to Bush’s amnesty and “guest worker” bill], paid in the coin of lost support among Latinos, the nation’s largest and fastest-growing minority, may be reckoned later, for years. Remember this: Out West, feelings of all sorts about immigration policy are particularly intense, and if John Kerry had won a total of 127,014 more votes in New Mexico, Nevada and Colorado, states with burgeoning Latino populations, he would have carried those states and won the election. But for now, the minds of Republican candidates are concentrated on a shorter time horizon—the next 4 1/2 months.

See? Those Republicans are only thinking in the short term, they’re selfish jerks who only care about being re-elected in 2006. But George Will, oh yeah, he’s the prim and proper adult. He’s got realism in mind, he’s got the long term in mind. And what is this long term? Here it is: If the Republican party wants to survive, it must yield to the desires of Mexicans and other Hispanics that the U.S. have open borders for Hispanic immigration, including amnesty for all illegals. If, Will argues, the GOP resists the desire of Mexicans to conquer the United States via demographic invasion, then the GOP will displease Hispanics, and so consign itself to electoral oblivion. But if the GOP surrenders to the desire of Hispanics to conquer the United Stated via demographic invasion, then the GOP will be assured … uh, what? Well, a United States conquered by Hispanics. And that’s George Will’s notion of the political summum bonum, or whatever fussy little notion he has in his big head this week.

Is there any limit to the treasonous idiocy to which Will is ready to descend? No. Because if you’re an abstract human being like Will, and if you also see your country as an abstraction, then there’s no reality you are actually bound to, in your heart or in your head, and everything is just some weird mental game, in which the only object is to assert your superiority over everyone else, except, of course, Mexicans.

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Reader N. writes:

Because George Will has long taken the Inside-the-Beltway position on “gun control,” and thus has generally supported, or refused to oppose, every “gun control” stupidity to come down the pike since the late 1970s, it’s been obvious to me for decades that he’s an abstractionist. That is, he likes to pretend that he thinks in high level, abstract, ways. The reality is just the opposite. Often, Will DOES NOT THINK AT ALL, but merely reacts in a knee-jerk, nearly Pavlovian fashion to whatever the salons of DC are chattering about.

I once thought he was a conservative in part because of his love of baseball, but sometime in the late 80’s I read one of his articles on the game and realized that it was eerily similar to paeans written by leftwingers back in the 1930s about the Yankees. Then I realized he loves the game in an abstract, pseudo-patrician way, not in a gut-level “fan” way. He loves the idea of baseball, in some sort of pseudo-Platonic abstract way.

Will is a liberal, and has been for a long time, this can be seen in his propositionalist approach to the country, to baseball, to government, and who knows what else.

LA writes:

Will was a champion and friend of Reagan in the ’70s. Wonder what happened.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 21, 2006 01:00 AM | Send