George Will: China’s precarious future
Demography does not dictate any nation’s destiny, but it shapes every nation’s trajectory, so attention must be paid to Nicholas Eberstadt. He knows things that should occasion some American worries, but also knows more important things that should assuage some worries regarding Russia and China. Writing in the July/August issue...
George Will: Weak political parties smooth the way for demagogues
WASHINGTON There are political moments, and this might be one, in which worse is better. Moments, that is, when a society’s per capita quantity of conspicuous stupidity is so high and public manners are so low that a critical mass of people are jolted into saying “enough, already.” Looking on...
George Will: Elizabeth Warren not suited to push swing voters away from Trump
WASHINGTON Along New York’s East River, which is not really a river (it is a 16-mile-long tidal estuary), perhaps 20,000 people actually chose to spend a gorgeous autumn afternoon Saturday listening to socialist Bernie Sanders, who is not really a socialist — he just wants to confiscate capitalism’s bounty to...
George Will: ‘Texodus’ bodes badly for Republicans
WASHINGTON “I am a classically trained engineer,” says Rep. Will Hurd, a Texas Republican, “and I firmly believe in regression to the mean.” Applying a concept from statistics to the randomness of today’s politics is problematic. In any case, Hurd, 42, is not waiting for the regression of our politics...
George Will: Progressives too willing to cut constitutional corners
WASHINGTON — Presidential aspirant Beto O’Rourke, thrashing about in an attempt to be noticed, says tax exemptions should be denied to churches and other institutions that oppose same-sex marriage. O’Rourke’s suggestion, and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s plan to tax the “excessive” exercise of a First Amendment right, and the NBA’s...
George Will: Spiraling president adds self-impeachment to repertoire
WASHINGTON Donald Trump, an ongoing eruption of self-refuting statements (“I’m a very stable genius” with “a very good brain”), is adding self-impeachment to his repertoire. Spiraling downward in a tightening gyre, his increasingly unhinged public performances (Google the one with Finland’s dumbfounded president looking on) are as alarming as they...
George Will: Tangled web of college diversity
The judge took 130 pages to explain that Harvard’s “holistic review” admissions policies — which include ascribing particular attributes to certain ethnicities, such as Asian Americans, and assessing the value to Harvard of those attributes — are, considering 41 years of Supreme Court precedents, permissibly race-conscious. She said the policies...
George Will: Supreme Court to decide whether ‘sex’ includes sexual orientation
WASHINGTON The beginning of the Supreme Court’s term this week includes momentous oral arguments on Tuesday in two cases that illustrate clashing theories about how statutes should be construed. If properly decided, the cases will nudge Congress to act like a legislative body. At issue is whether workplace discrimination based...
George Will: Korean Peninsula a dangerous neighborhood
SEOUL, South Korea In 1950, when Han Sung-joo was 10, shrapnel from an artillery shell lodged in his hip. This happened as Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s troops, fresh from the bold Incheon landing, were retaking this city — it would be lost and retaken again — after North Korea’s June invasion....
George Will: Best antidote for a bad election is a better election
WASHINGTON If Donald Trump were to tweet that 9 is a prime number, that Minneapolis is in Idaho, and that the sun revolves around the Earth, — “Make Earth Great Again!” — would even five Republican senators publicly disagree with even one of the tweets? This matters in assessing the...
George Will: Time is on Taiwan’s side — but it needs U.S. support
TAIPEI, Taiwan Now only 15 flags in the Foreign Ministry’s foyer represent the nations that have not yet succumbed to Beijing’s financial blandishments — targeted at governments and individual politicians — and other pressures to sever diplomatic relations with this island nation. There were 17 flags a few weeks ago....
George Will: Hong Kong’s resistance offers lessons for Taiwan
TAIPEI, Taiwan What happens on Hong Kong does not stay there. The ongoing tsunami of discontent washes over this island, which, like Hong Kong, is navigating the choppy waters of relations with the same large and menacing mainland neighbor. This nation — which is such psychologically, if not in diplomatic...
George Will: Hong Kong stands athwart an increasingly nasty regime
HONG KONG — Lee Cheuk-yan, unlike most Americans, remembers and reveres Lane Kirkland, a hero of the first Cold War. During 16 years as leader of the AFL-CIO, 1979-95, Kirkland gave crucial support, both material and moral, to Lech Walesa and the Solidarity movement in Poland, where it was an...
George Will: Hong Kong’s summer of heroic dissent
HONG KONG — The masked men who recently tossed firebombs at Jimmy Lai’s home targeted one of this city’s foremost democracy advocates. Lai, a 71-year-old media billionaire, calls this summer’s ongoing protest “a martyrdom movement” and “a last-straw movement.” It has an intensity and dynamic that bewilders the protesters’ opponents...
George Will: All-too-real parable of ‘privilege-hoarding’
WASHINGTON Nestled on the Front Range of the Rockies, the city of Crystal was a largely upper-middle-class paradise, chock full of health-conscious and socially conscious — meaning, of course, impeccably progressive —Coloradans. Then in slithered a serpent in the form of a proposal for a new school, to be called...
George Will: National Popular Vote gimmick won’t work
WASHINGTON Let us now praise an insufficiently famous man, Nevada’s Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak, who in May gave his party’s presidential aspirants a much-needed example of prudence. With the national media mesmerized by those aspirants’ festival of pandering, scant attention was given to Sisolak’s good deed. He vetoed legislation that...
George Will: Trade war shows reality of ‘America First’ in action
WASHINGTON In a trade war, as in a real one, people are wounded by friendly fire from their side. Consider some casualties in Donald Trump’s “easy to win” — his promise — trade war. Begin with the company whose green machines bear the name of the blacksmith who, in the...
George Will: ‘The Nickel Boys’ : A searing reminder of what’s not unthinkable
WASHINGTON Because of the investigation led by three University of South Florida researchers, and because of exemplary journalism by the Tampa Bay Times, we now have an intensely discomforting but welcome enrichment of American literature. It requires artistry to write beautifully about children suffering at the hands of evil men,...
George Will: Amash’s independence shows voters they don’t have to settle for binary choice
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. It is difficult to discourage and impossible to manage Justin Amash because he, unusual among politicians, does not want much and wants nothing inordinately. He would like to win a sixth term as congressman from this culturally distinctive slice of the Midwest. He does not, however, want...
George Will: ‘National conservatism’ is ‘Elizabeth Warren conservatism’
WASHINGTON Regimes, however intellectually disreputable, rarely are unable to attract intellectuals eager to rationalize the regimes’ behavior. America’s current administration has “national conservatives.” They advocate unprecedented expansion of government in order to purge America of excessive respect for market forces, and to affirm robust confidence in government as a social...
George Will: Shootings and the causes of violence
WASHINGTON — It is 1,218 miles from the Aaron Bessant Park Amphitheater in Panama City Beach, Fla., to the Walmart at 7101 Gateway Blvd. in El Paso. It was in that park that Donald Trump, on May 8, was amused by the answer someone in his audience shouted in response...
George Will: For the Democrats, it’s winnowing time
Winnow: verb. To expose (grain or other substances) to the wind or to a current of air so that the lighter particles (as chaff or other refuse matter) are separated or blown away. — Oxford English Dictionary WASHINGTON It is time to dust off this marvelously appropriate verb for its...
George Will: Are the Democrats trying to lose?
WASHINGTON Watching Democratic presidential aspirants is like watching, a century ago, the 1919 World Series, when discerning spectators thought: Some of the White Sox are trying to lose. Michael Boskin, chairman of President George H.W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers and currently at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, pays the Democrats the...
George Will: Repeal of ‘Cadillac tax’ shows hazard of bipartisanship
WASHINGTON Acting on the principle “Why put it off until tomorrow when you can do the wrong thing today?” the House of Representatives last week voted to repeal a tax that is not scheduled to take effect until 2022. The vote against the “Cadillac tax” was 419-6, a reminder that...
George Will: The puzzling problem of vaping
SAN FRANCISCO A 29-story office building at 123 Mission St. illustrates the policy puzzles that fester because of these facts: For centuries, tobacco has been a widely used legal consumer good that does serious and often lethal harm when used as it is intended to be used. And its harmfulness...
