George Will Reflects on His Career, Liberalism, and America’s ‘Most Dangerous Moment’ since WWII

George Will visited Toronto in early November to participate in the biannual Munk Debates. He’d lived in the city for a short period as a professor and planned on staying in academia like his father. But the death of Senator Everett Dirksen (R., Ill.), who served as minority leader from January 1959 until his passing in September 1969, forever changed Will’s life.

Dirksen’s departure set off a chain reaction across Capitol Hill as Republicans sought to shuffle the Senate leadership. “The third-ranking chairman of the policy committee became a Colorado senator of whom I’d never heard: Gordon Allott. He said, ‘I want to hire a Republican academic right now,’” Will recalled. “Then, as now, there weren’t any Republican academics except me, and I was up here!” he joked, referring to Canada. “But through serendipity, we got together. I went to Washington intending to go back to Toronto.”

Fortunately, that never happened, and American conservatism became the great beneficiary of Will’s contributions and insights over the last 50 years. “I would’ve been a retired academic by now,” the Washington Post columnist reflected lightheartedly over lunch. “Which means I’d be dead right now because I can’t stand the idea of retirement.”

With the glitzy debate just hours away, Will exuded a quiet air of confidence. “I’m going to take a nap,” he said nonchalantly as the interview wrapped. When asked how he prepared to defend the sweeping proposition that liberalism has been a success, Will referenced some keywords scribbled down on a handful of “three by five cards.” His fluency with history, religion, politics, and philosophy — buttressed by graduate studies at Oxford and Princeton — would fill in the rest.

Will, 82, had the energy of a Gen Z kid as he spoke about life, journalism, international affairs, Donald Trump, and the Biden presidency. The following is a lightly edited version of Will’s conversation with National Review.

Ari Blaff: How have you read the developments of the last four years with what is going on in the United States? When you put your finger to the wind, how does it feel?

George Will: I’m mildly encouraged about cancel culture and all that because they’ve gone so far. The fiscal incontinence of the United States is staggering, now that interest rates are back to something like the norm of 5 percent. We’re going to be borrowing money to pay the interest on the money required, and they’re going to take it out of defense. But if your problem is the width of the Pacific away, you’d better have an ace. The failure of the political market is devastating. There’s enormous, powerful, bipartisan demand for something other than Biden and Trump.

AB: Ray Dalio, the investment banker, recently argued that this is the most politically unstable environment he has ever witnessed in his lifetime. What do you think of that?

GW: Well, in my column that was in the paper yesterday, I said it’s, this is the most dangerous moment since the Second World War. More dangerous than the Cuban Missile Crisis. We had one mistake [made] by one erratic, but not irrational [person], Khrushchev. But, we had one near-peer adversary. I mean, we could’ve had a disaster, but it was a mismatch. This [by comparison] is terrible.

AB: Do you see signs of encouragement around the world? Are there emerging actors you’re impressed by?

GW: I do. [The Russia–Ukraine war] has really strengthened NATO, and lengthened Russia’s border with NATO by about 800 miles, with Finland and Sweden. The Europeans have been pretty good. Biden and Blinken, I think, are A minus.”

AB: Where are your thoughts on the direction of Israel right now? What do you think is going to happen over there?

GW: The premise of Israel, the reason for Israel, is that Jews said: “Never again.” And what they meant by never again was never be dependent on others for your safety. I think they’ll go ahead [and destroy Hamas]. Definitely. Definitely.

AB: The levels of antisemitism have been surprising. We knew it was bad, but many didn’t realize the extent of the anti-Jewish bigotry lurking beneath the surface.

GW: It’s blatant because it’s been spoon-fed to people by the DEI crowd. The DEI crowd says the world is binary. There are oppressors and the oppressed. The Jews are oppressors.

AB: Do you think American Jews are going to wake up?

GW: About 20 years ago, I was giving a talk in Chicago to a group of the Chosen People. I think it was a UJA event. I said in the course of the question period that something momentous was happening; antisemitism was migrating from the right to the left. One of the leaders was so incensed, he came charging up on the stage and took exception to what I said.

AB: I have interviewed a lot of Israelis in the aftermath of October 7, and they said that when they saw Biden’s first speech, they said they’ve never been more proud of an American president. Many were brought to tears when they heard what he said.

GW: No president since the invention of broadcasting has needed good speechwriters more than Biden, and no president has had worse speechwriters. The speech he gave in Atlanta — “Jim Crow 2.0” and that idiotic one he gave in Philadelphia with the Nazi lights. He has no sense of the English language.

AB: There was a big article in the Atlantic by Jeffrey Goldberg confirming that Trump did, in fact, disparage veterans and military service members. It’s really strange how his supporters would excuse that type of behavior, especially people who formerly prided themselves on respecting the armed forces. It’s a bizarre phenomenon. How do you explain that? Do you think they forgive Trump because he’s anti-elite?

GW: It’s part tribalism, the shirts and skins we’re playing now. A certain cohort, the hard-core Trump people, like him for his vulgarity and his dishonesty. It’s norm-breaking, and they fancy themselves rebels.

AB: Do you feel Trump, at a foreign-policy level, did anything to keep the world safe?

GW: On Day One, he made probably the worst mistake of his presidency by abandoning the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), opening all that stuff to China. People say, “Well, the judges!” But any Republican president would pick judges from lists vetted by the Federalists. Anyone would. My problem with Trump isn’t that he doesn’t know this or that. It’s that he doesn’t know that he doesn’t know this and that. He doesn’t know what it is to know something. There’s an epistemological vacuum.

AB: When you were observing American politics in the ’70s with Nixon, did you have similar fears about constitutional violations?

GW: The Constitution took care of itself. The legislative branch got involved. The courts behaved well about the [Nixon] tapes. There was no constitutional crisis. There isn’t a constitutional crisis now. The problem is not with the Constitution. It’s with the American public.

AB: Can you share a preview of what you’re going to be talking about during the debate? What are your major arguments?

GW: My first point that I will make is liberalism doesn’t answer the big questions, which is why we like it. It’s not there to iron out the human condition. It’s there to keep the peace.  That’s what liberalism does. The big political problem, everywhere — certainly in an open society — is that human beings are (a), opinionated, and (b), egotistical.

How do you get these people to live together? You do it with liberalism. You do it by not establishing religion, for example.

AB: Why do you think liberalism has soured so much in recent years?

GW: On campuses, I understand what the problem is. Liberalism, and this is its second virtue, is boring. It has no grand narrative. They may say, ‘The arc of the universe points toward justice,’ but in good liberalism, there’s no arc. That’s not the thing.

Almost all the criticisms of liberalism are virtues. It produces inequality. Good. We want inequality. Robert Frost said, “I don’t want to live in a homogenized society. I want the cream to rise.” That’s what liberalism does. They say, well, liberalism is untidy, disorderly. Good. It’s called the fecundity of freedom.

AB: Is there are reason that message no longer resonates with kids under 30?

GW: They have been taught to see the world in binary terms: the oppressors and the oppressed. In a way, they reject liberalism, and in another way, liberalism is unintelligible to them. They just don’t get it.

AB: Are there people in the Republican field you’re heartened [by]? Is there anyone that stands out to you?

GW: Well, my wife is in the Tim Scott campaign right now. I recently wrote a column that got a lot of attention because of a heading that said, “Mari Will, an adviser to Republican presidential candidate Sen. Tim Scott (S.C.), disagrees with this column.”

[The column urged Scott to drop out and endorse Nikki Haley. Scott announced last night that he was suspending his campaign.]

Everyone else is static. DeSantis has been going down, and she’s [Haley] up to 16. As Rick Santorum showed, as Mike Huckabee showed, people can come out of nowhere in Iowa. Very quickly.

AB: Where do you get your inspiration from? How do you always find something to write about?

GW: When I first decided to go into this business, I asked Bill Buckley what I now know is a common question to ask us [journalists]: ‘How do you come up with things to write about?’ Bill said, the world irritates me three times a week. The world irritates me, it amazes me, it piques my curiosity twice a week.