This Man Needs an Editor
Today's George F. Will column is completely incoherent. Why the Post, and dozens of other newspapers, would want to publish an op-ed criticizing the New Deal is beyond me. Um, it's called a newspaper, and the New Deal is hardly new. Maybe Will doesn't want to grapple with any of the actual issues of the day.
But there are a few examples of incoherence of thought, and errors of fact, that deserve special mention. First, there's this:
Before Roosevelt, the federal government was unimpressive relative to the private sector. Under Calvin Coolidge, the last pre-Depression president, its revenue averaged 4 percent of gross domestic product, compared with 18.6 percent today. In 1910, Congress legislated height limits for Washington buildings, limits that prevented skyscrapers, symbols of mighty business, from overshadowing the Capitol, the symbol of government.
First, can anyone explain to me the apparent non sequitor about Congress limiting the height of buildings in the District in 1910? Was the evil supervillain FDR able to go back in time to 1910 and impose his statist vision on a Republican Congress? How is that related to the rest of the paragraph?
Does Will want the height-restriction lifted? If so, that's not very conservative. Is it?
Second, another reason why government revenues as a share of the economy may have grown since the Coolidge Administration is that, um, under Coolidge the United States was not the greatest military superpower the world had ever seen. It was a second-rate power, a regional power, able to intervene from time to time in Latin America and the Far East, but not the United States military-industrial complex of today. It's true that entitlements make up a much larger part of the federal budget than they did in the 1920s, but so does military spending. And Will barely mentions military spending or affairs in the piece, other than to restate the truism that the Second World War lifted the United States out of the Depression (i.e., not the New Deal), and to say, I believe non-ironically, that war is the health of the state (more on that in a moment).
OK, so how about a factual error? Here's one: In 1938, when the New Deal's failure to spark recovery made Roosevelt increasingly frantic, he attempted to enlarge the Supreme Court so he could pack it with compliant justices. Where to begin? I've never seen anything that would make me think that the court-packing plan was motivated by the failure of New Deal programs, in policy terms. It was clearly motivated by Supreme Court decisions (which, I guess, Will would agree with, btw) striking down New Deal policies under now-discredited constitutional doctrines.
More tellingly, though, FDR introduced his court-packing plan in . . . 1937, after his landslide reelection in 1936. In February 1937, to be exact. By 1938, the plan had generated stiff resistance and was basically doomed to defeat. So not only does Will get the motivation wrong, he places the plan in the wrong year. This is either bald-faced dishonesty or a demonstration that Will doesn't know what he's talking about.
Finally, there's this: War, as has been said -- and as George W. Bush's assertion of vast presidential powers attests -- is the health of the state. But as Roosevelt demonstrated and Shlaes reminds us, compassion, understood as making the "insecure" securely dependent, also makes the state flourish.
How are we to read that first sentence? Not clear. It could be that Will, an anti-statist, opposes Bush's assertions of vast power, and that he is opposed to the "health of the state." Maybe, but he could make that point more clearly. And, if he doesn't like Bush's assertions "of vast presidential powers," maybe he could have written a column on that, ahem, more timely topic.
Whatever that sentence means--and I have to say, I have to admit, I don't know what Will means to say--it is clear that this man needs an editor. Or a fact-checker. Maybe both.
posted by Number Three @ 7:29 AM
4 Comments:
Nice takedown. I think that conservative commentators (I'm lookin' at you Brooks) have gotten so used to operating in a reality- and logic-free zone for so long that they no longer even try very hard anymore. Like old men who fear they're losing their identity in rapidly changing times, they just repeat ideological mantras over and over to remind themselves of who they used to think they were, even as those narratives look to all the world like the bizarre rantings of a mental patient.
As for the court packing plan, by the time it had fallen apart, the court had already pulled its "switch," making this somewhat of a moot point (after all, FDR really didn't care about adding justices, he just wanted the court to rethink its idiotic decisions in Adkins, Schecter, etc.). One thing that always gets left out of this story when wingnuts like Will tell it is that the switch itself was made by the great conservative hero (and one-time GOP pres. nominee) Charles Evans Hughes, who didn't just tepidly change his vote but gave a thundering endorsement to the new jurisprudence, even making his decision BEFORE FDR announced his court packing plan. Dems and Republicans worked together on this change, and were opposed only by the court's 4 horse's asses of reaction.
Dude, you're getting as bad as TMcD with the Fox news things; just quit reading Will already! Good gravy. (And while you're at it, quit watching Bill Kristol.)
But let me see if I can answer some of your questions here.
First, why write about the New Deal? Well, I think it's because GW often writes value-added book reviews. So, using a recent book as a jumping off point, he gives his own opinion on the subject. I think that's pretty standard for opinion columnists. And this is certainly no less topical than the time in 1997 he wrote about Cold Mountain.
His point is that one of our great presidents presided over a horrible economy while our current president in presiding over one, by historical standards, that is outstanding but is portrayed as bad. (So, he's saying: "You want to see bad, check this out...") That's an issue of the day, even if you don't think he's right about it.
And I bet the WaPo (and the rest of the newspapers he's syndicated in) pretty much don't care what he writes about.
And I don't know about all that fancy book learning stuff with facts and such, but I can spot a non-sequitor when I see one. And that ain't one in the paragraph you quote. Here's what he means:
Before FDR, the government felt so flimsy in comparison to the private sector that it wanted to make sure that the seat of government, at least, would remain un-overshadowed.
That seems like a perfectly apt and understandable point. Just re-read it.
You're probably right about the rest of that stuff.
What a naive idea that the U.S. government might ever avoid (even symbolically) being overshadowed by the private sector. Outside the height limit restrictions, Arlington buildings tower over official Washington. Running on the mall one is always struck by the fact that the real city looks to be across the river in Virginia. And, of course, it IS!
I agree with Lex’s reading on what Will was trying to say with his feeble metaphor. The problem with it, of course, was that the building height restrictions were enacted as a matter of long-standing architectural practice for public spaces, especially capitals. A capital city, whose architecture was meant to be enjoyed by the public it serves, would never be seen if its vistas were blocked by taller, private buildings or advertisements. But I guess Will and his ilk won’t be satisfied until the entire publica of our Res Publica has been wiped away or bill-boarded over to become a Res Privata (which he and his set naturally control even more than they do now). I wonder what Will would think about building a bunch of sky-scrappers around the Pentagon? Symbolically I suppose they would be a good place to relocate the Halliburton headquarters.
PS: From the pedantic copy editor's desk: sequitur.
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