The Dispatch Podcast - Why Bother to Vote | Interview: George Will

Episode Date: June 3, 2024

Washington Post columnist George Will joins Jamie to discuss the Trump verdict, the state of American politics, Israel’s predicament, the influence of college campuses, foreign policy, and the future of the Republican Party. Show Notes: —Will's Washington Post column on not voting in November —Will's Washington Post column on nuclear annihilation Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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I'm Jamie Weinstein. My guest today is legendary Washington post columnist George Will. We talk about everything that you might imagine. The Donald Trump verdict, the 2024 election, is real, what is going on on college campuses, and much more. I think you're going to find this conversation fascinating. So without further ado, I give you, Mr. George Will. George Will, welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'd have to be with you. George, it is my third time interviewing you, usually around a book, and it is always an honor for me to interview you because you are one of the reasons that I got into interviewing people

and writing, watching you on this week when I was very young. So it is an honor to get to interview for a third time. I want to begin, I guess, at the news of the week, or the news of the day. Yesterday, we're recording this on Friday. A jury in New York found Donald Trump guilty. I wonder what your reaction to the verdict was. First one of sadness, because it's a tremendous embarrassment for our country. I think this was a flimsy case, a transparently political case.

I have, of course, nothing good to say about the former president, but I have a feeling, Here's a thought experiment for you. If you took each juror one at a time, put them in a chair in front of you and said, describe the crime for which Mr. Trump has been convicted. I'll bet you'd get 12 different answers and 12 of them wrong. I think almost all campaign finance laws are unconstitutional. They all have to do with regulating the quantity, timing, and content in some case of political speech. The 34 felony counts are, of course, absurd.

they are one felony count of bad bookkeeping, naughty bookkeeping, if you will, chopped up into 34 discrete units so it can make a better headline. And then they were all misdemeanors with a two-year statute of limitation on them. So they inflated it into a felony by saying it was done in the service of a crime. The crime, it turns out, was that Trump was trying to influence a federal election in which he was a candidate, for Pete's sake. That's sort of what candidates do is influence federal elections. I actually spend a good part of my adult life trying to influence federal elections to no effect, I should say.

But still, it's sort of an American right to try and influence federal elections. The idea that this was a campaign finance violation, the only good thing about this is it will, I think, help further discredit the whole idea of regulating campaign finances. I wonder if your view is shared. I was going to read back to you a quote from your colleague at the Washington Post, Megan McCartle, who seems to share your view that the other cases seem legitimate where this one was the least legitimate regarding Trump. And I wonder, hey, if that's your view, you think the other cases would have been better to try first?

Bragg ran for elective office. I'm against electing prosecutors. I'm against electing judges. he ran for office saying, I'll get Trump. He didn't say for what, and he's still as far as I can tell us trying to figure out for what. Here we are at a moment when the incumbent president of the United States and his allies divide their time between saying they are all that stand between us and the end of democracy and, on the other hand, trying to put the current incumbent,

the incumbent president's principal opponent in president. Maybe the cognitive dissonance is all on my part, but I don't think so. I think this is an embarrassment, a national embarrassment of considerable proportions. How much do you think it weakens the case, which I think is quite strong against Trump, that he is out of the normal and a threat to democracy when what you're saying here that you think in some ways this is out of the normal, that trying a former president for charges that you got elected for seems unusual in America. politics. This is true, and I blame Trump in part for Trump's own sufferings because he has so

lowered the tone and the manners of American public life that this now passes for normal. I will never vote for Trump. I don't want him to be president again. But one of the things we've learned from Trump is that it's very difficult to have only one healthy party. When the Republican Party went off the rails, the Democratic Party followed suit very quickly. You have the Democrats now divided between their sympathy for Hamas, their echoing of the campus council culture and the wokeness and all that, both parties are repulsive right now. As I say, you can't have just one healthy party in our country. And how we get back to health for two parties, I do not know. But Mr. Biden says he's going to run for re-election saying he stands between us and tyranny.

I have a much stronger faith in the vitality and durability of American institutions than Mr. Biden does. Mr. Trump, who is supposedly an authoritarian and waiting, campaign most dramatically and specifically in 2016 and 2020, to build a wall. He can build a wall for each sake, let alone get Mexico to pay for it. How is he going to make all of American institutions buckle under his preferences? Even if he weren't scattered-brained, and even if he weren't suffering, obviously, from ADD, he just doesn't have the means to bend our sturdy institutions. I'm thinking particularly of the judiciary. It is amazing that Democrats and progressives, who on the one hand are saying we face an existential,

God, I hate that word, an existential crisis of democracy in America, but we also should join in their attempt to de-legitimize the Supreme Court and, inferentially, the appellate judiciary also. It is the courts that are going to be particularly important in styming any that Mr. Trump would try and engage in. Mr. Biden, his campaign, after the jury came in yesterday in New York, said, well, this is a great victory for the rule of law. That would be more important if Joe Biden had a transparently tried to violate constitutional law, ignoring the appropriations clause with $405 billion worth of student loan deferment. And when the Supreme Court said, you can't do that, he gave a speech saying, the Supreme Court tried to block me, but I'm doing it anyway. And he has.

He just keeps now doing the same serial lawlessness in smaller trenches. Mark me down as dyspeptic about the whole conversation right now. Let me ask you, you know, the financier Ray Dalio wrote a book a couple years ago or a year ago, warning of a risk of civil war, many commentators on the right, especially after the verdict, raised the prospect of violence in this election. Do you find that rhetoric overblown, or are you worried maybe for the first time in your lifetime of real violence in an election, particularly if, you know, there is, I guess, some chance that Donald Trump could be sent to jail before the election. I guess it's unlikely,

but I guess theoretically, not impossible. Well, first, let me get to that first. The idea that a first-time offender committing the lowest possible felony would go to jail, that would be the final discrediting of this whole enterprise. It will not happen, it seems to me. Yes, I think the rhetoric is overblown when these people who talk this way have spent any time with normal Americans these days. Look, there are 333 million of us in this country. A handful of them are stark raving mad. A lot of them showed up at the Capitol on January 6th. There are these internet armies out there, but they're not real armies. Civil War. Look, I live in Washington across the river from Robert Lee's house. The Army of Northern Virginia,

is what a civil war looks like. Thomas Jackson and those guys. Not these people with horns and their helmets wandering through the Capitol with Confederate flags. We've heard an experience with actual civil war in this country, and it's complicated, and it takes large figures to bring it off. Not this rabble. We are in no danger of civil war, none zero.

A few weeks ago, you made the case in your Washington Post column for not voting for president. You wrote in part, voters eloquent abstention would say that they still, they will return to the political marketplace when offered something better than a choice between two Edsels. Does that mean that unlike 2020 when you said you were going to vote for Biden, that this election, you will choose not to vote for either candidate? Now, I carefully wrote that as a hypothesis. It's still possible I won't vote. But the point I wanted to make was, elections or mechanisms for recording opinions and not voting as an opinion. Even if you do so only out of sloth, ignorance, and lassitude, it's an opinion that it doesn't matter to you.

Go ahead and record that opinion. Or you could record the opinion that you just quoted from me, which is that when the political market is failing to produce acceptable products to choose from, tell them we're going away and tell them there's maybe 20 million of us out here, it's not a trivial consumer base who are looking for something better. And maybe, maybe one of the parties would respond. Is it fair to say then, I think earlier you said you wouldn't vote for Donald Trump? And since you said, you're still not certain you would vote for nobody, that you're still leaning towards Joe Biden. And if so, if that is the case, the issues that you mentioned associated with him, do they pale in comparison to, is it January 6th that stands out

or Trump's intemperance? How do you weigh? How do you weigh? these two bad options? I'm not leaning toward Biden at this point, Matt. Biden's lawlessness, his use of executive power, which is going to get worse and worse. And to be fair, I mean, most modern presidents have behaved this way. Biden running as a candidate in 2020 said he wouldn't. He didn't tell the truth. He said, I'm not going to use executive orders.

We need consensus in this country. I mean, he has succumbed, as they all do, to the idea that the presidency is just whatever you want to make of it. Woodrow Wilson, the root of all evil in these matters, said a president should be free to be as large as he can be. Well, that's what this looks like. And I don't blame just presidents, because Congress has been fully complicit. The executive has usurped our power. Usurped, I mean, that Congress has handed over their powers as the one a silver salver to presidents, scoop them up, who can now do almost anything under some emergency or other.

Now, I think there are 41 emergencies currently in existence, some of them decades old, long since forgotten, but still out there shimmering as emergencies just to find executive action. Well, so let me just, I guess, sum up this part. So where do you stand going in November? Do you, are you still trying to figure out, you know, what are your options, voting third party then, not voting at all? What are, what are your options? voting of all, I suppose, the most important outcome of this very close election is already known. We know that the winner of this election is going to be someone who's radically unsuited to be president. The suspense, in that case, the suspense has gone out of this election.

And so my inclination at the moment is to not vote, but I'll wait and see which one of them is even worse than I expected for the next six months or five or whatever it is. You mentioned the Democratic Party's stance in Israel, and as you said, pro-Hamas elements, or at least supportive elements within the party. You have been a strong supporter of Israel throughout your career, often eloquently so. I wonder, a follower of Israel's fight and struggles, I wonder how, from your perspective, covering Israel for over 40 years, you place its current predicament compared to the other many wars it has fought in other situations

it's been in. How does this current moment compare to those? October 7 was the worst day in Jewish history since the Holocaust. They are still surrounded, not just in Gaza, but in the north and with Iran over the horizon by people who want to kill them. And who are not bashful about it, they say what they're doing. The only redeeming feature of real serious totalitarians is they generally say what they mean. When Hitler talked about World War II would mean the destruction of European jury. He meant the destruction of European jury. People said, gosh, wonder what he meant by that.

Sometimes we should take them up their words. When people criticize, and I understand why they do, because war is just ghastly. But when they criticize Israel's tactics in Gaza, they are. really criticizing whether they know it or not Israel's war aim. Its war aim is to extinguish Hamas. Just as our war aim in the Second World War was unconditional surrender in the pursuit of which we did Hamburg, Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki. That is, the ends dictated the tactics. I do not fault Israel for saying we will never again live next to an entity in which Hamas figures prominently.

Are you surprised at all by the rhetoric that the other side is using? Genocide seems to have come to the fore as an accusation against Israel. I mean, even I saw Eric Clapton, the singer, claiming Israel controls the world. Are you surprised by any of this coming to the forefront after, as you said, the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust? I'm not, because hyperbole is the defense. fault rhetorical mode in our era when people clamoring to get attention and to be noticed in the era of social media when the only way to be noticed is to be a damn fool. Speaking of Robert De Niro, he stands outside a courthouse and talks about the death

of democracy. Robert DeNiro, excellent actor, and a damn fool. And that's perfectly normal for all kinds of people. I mean, look, I'm a baseball nut. I would hate to see, to hear many of my baseball, the people I admire in baseball, opining on the Middle East. That's not what they're good at. And so am I surprised by hyperbole?

No, it's the lingua franca of our time. I presume that over the years, since your career is correspondent with the rise of Benjamin Netanyahu through politics, that you've met him over the years and probably have interviewed him. How do you think he has handled this moment? Are you happy with his performance? Do you think that he has harmed himself by staying in power so long? I've known BB for 40 years. He's probably been in power for too long, but changing horses in midstream, as they say,

in the middle of a war is not easy to do. I don't understand, never bothered to get to understand the, I gather quite serious argument against him regarding the independence of the Israeli judiciary and all the rest. I do know this. Israel's first, second, third, fourth, and fifth most important issues are national security. And he's been pretty good on that. There will be commissions and there will be investigations about the failures of intelligence prior to October 7 and we'll all learn from that. Right now, they're in a war against people who want to butcher Jews worldwide. He strikes me as the right man to be there at this moment. Not long ago, I saw some

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first purchase of a website or domain. You mentioned it earlier, and you've written about what's going on on college campuses. One of the themes of the recent episodes of the show has been tried to figure out how we got pro homas demonstrators on campus. We had Harvey George on and Harvey Mansfield and George Packer, who's written about this to try to figure that out. How do you think, is this something different in kind, or is this something that university students always produce? Or how, I mean, how can we explain how we have a generation of campus activists who are not only maybe effectively pro-Moss, but sometimes very loudly pro-Moss? Now, this is different. This is in 1968 when you had the United States fighting a ground war of attrition on the mainland of Asia with a conscript army for ill-defined purposes. At that point, we had teach-ins. Interesting. Teach-ins on campuses where they got together and talked. Now we have people chanting, kind of Neo-Nornebergian vanners out there in these mindless chants. Palestine free from the river to the sea. Someone early on in this,

episode had the inspired idea of going out and asking some of these demonstrators, what river, what sea? And of course, they said, the Nile, the Euphrates. I don't think anyone said the Mississippi, but they were pretty confused about the geography of the place. What sea? The Arabian Sea. There's a childishness about this that is obscured by the viciousness of the rhetoric. This is different. And I think it owes something to the fact that, A, we have a lot of people in college. You have no business being there. They're only there for defensive reasons. That is, they need to go to college to get a credential, and they're sullen and they're bored. And we know from all kinds of social science surveys

that they're not studying as hard, reading as much, writing as much as they used to be. They got up a lot of time on their hands in which to leaven their boredom with political activities. Furthermore, they are taught that the world is binary. There are, are oppressors and the oppressed and that all the great and the good are on the side of the oppressed and Jews are oppressing Palestinians. So it's a fairly short, simple bit of logic to get to what you hear canted on these college campuses. I guess my question to you is how does, I mean, that seems like a real risk that you have these students going from the campus to, you know, elite campuses to elite institutions.

in American life and changing those institutions. And I'm here in D.C., George, and I've seen the ideological education, even at the elite preschools in D.C., starting at three and four years old, it seems like a steady stream up to college to get what we have today for Homas demonstrators. How does that change? How do you change this system, which right now seems to be controlled by people that have this worldview? Yes. And the problem is that the common academic culture spread like honey on toast across this country

is the same at the Harvard Graduate School or kindergarten and Flagstaff, Arizona. It's all the same. The ungodly expensive K-through-3 school that my children, one of my children went to, has a DEI officer. Age 3, I mean, age 7 and 8 and 9, a DEI officer. We have larded up the academic institutions of the country from K through graduate school with people who are parasitic off the actual scholarly enterprise. They're not teachers. They don't do research. They exist to massage the students to make sure they're happy and contented and not distressed about anything. And also to make sure that they have, that they purge them of false consciousness.

Is the only solution, or what do you make of the solution that Bill Buckley proposed many years ago and God and Man at Yale, where trustees have to get involved and, you know, figure out what's going on, whether it's the college campus or, in some cases, preschool trustees of these elite schools. Well, the problem is, first of all, trustees are often big donors. At the really elite schools, they don't need the big donors anymore. I mean, someone has described Harvard as a hedge fund. with a library. It's got an endowment of, what is it, $54 billion now. I mean, the richest alum of Harvard can't threaten Harvard. I was a trustee of Princeton for four years. Princeton board was to say no more. A, it was too large. It was about 38, I think. And it was not a threat to the administration. So I don't think you can look to that. The real hope is that someone will say we're spending $85,000, $100,000 a year to get a Columbia University diploma, and it's not a luxury good anymore. It's a punchline. The leakage of prestige

from the formerly prestigious institutions such as Harvard and Columbia is very much in the national interest for people to say there's some, you know, I guess Orwell did say, That there are some idea so stupid that only the highly educated can believe them. We're getting a lesson in that right now. And when some judges on appellate courts around the country said that Stanford University law students and Columbia law students need not apply, that's helpful. Very helpful. Let me ask you a foreign policy question outside of Israel, George. I think it's fair to say following you, and please correct me if I'm wrong, is that you were quicker to turn.

than a lot of in the conservative movement and the projects in Iraq and Afghanistan as being debacles. One, considering watching that opinion, might think that, oh, you would be more likely to not support Ukraine because this would be a greater debacle, but you have written that not supporting aid to Ukraine endangered civilization. So I guess one is how does endanger civilization and how would you map your foreign policy worldview? Someone who saw Iraq and Afghanistan as debacles, but believes that we have to support Ukraine and its fight against Russia. What I said about Iraq was this. Iraq reminds me of the baseball manager who was spring training says, we're just two players short of the World Series. Unfortunately, they're Ruth and

Garrick. Iraq, as I just said, was just about three people short of success. They needed a George Washington, a unifying temperate leader. They needed a James Madison, a genius of the architect, of free institutions. They needed a John Marshall to adjudicate their disputes. And they needed the political culture of Virginia in the 19th century to produce people like Madison and Washington and Marshall, which was, they weren't even close. Ukraine is an honest to goodness nation with its own culture, its language, its traditions. This is the biggest land war in Europe since 1945, this is armored troops crossing international borders for the avowed purpose of extinguishing a sovereign nation. This is really easy. Life's full of close calls. This isn't one of them.

And Putin again, listen to Putin. He tells us what he's about. He's about reestablishing, undoing what he called the great geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century, which is the disappearance of the Soviet Union. We can help the Ukrainians with their own fight and their own blood, or we can join in with our treasure and blood when he comes for Lithuania, Estonia, et cetera. Again, life's full of agonizing choices. This is one of them. And the idea that we are somehow burdened by spending 5% of our defense budget,

helping other people fight for their own liberty, is risible. The good thing that we've learned from Ukraine for our own edification is how lax we've been in preparing for wars that look a lot the way wars usually have looked, that is, mass engagements in which artillery and bullets matter. So we better have enough of each. Let me tie some of the questions I had today together. By quoting one of your columns, which may be the scariest column I've read in some time. It was a column earlier in May on the menace of nuclear annihilation based off historian Annie Jacobson's book, Nuclear War, a scenario. You wrote, everything, everything depends on deterrence holding forever. It succeeded in keeping

the U.S. Soviet conflict from becoming hot during the Cold War, but conventional forces failed to deter Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine, and he possessing the world's largest arsenal of nuclear weapons and perhaps the world's smallest reluctance to use them, has used nuclear deterrence to dissuade Ukraine's allies from delivering sufficient timely assistance. Otherwise, U.S. and European Union resources could by now have saved Ukraine, but then a non-nuclear Russia might not have risk in invasion. You go on. The author Jacobson cannot be faulted for not proposing solutions to the dilemma of living with what physics hath wrought. Her point is that for for a while now, and from now on, humanity's survival depends on statementship and luck,

as much the latter as the former. Remember that on November 5th. It raises three questions, all tied to a lot of the themes we discussed here. One is, given the risk that you say here, and remember November 7th, how can one decide not to vote when, if this is the risk of nuclear civilization, you have to take two bad choices and decide who is less likely to to make the wrong decision if the moment comes. Yeah, that's a very fair, very acute question. And I suppose it will depend somewhat on who seems to be likely to staff a Trump administration. Mr. Biden has been dilatory and he's been progressive in the sense of progressives

really gave us and conducted the Vietnam War. It was the professor's war, and they were very subtle these progressives. They were professors named Bundy and Rostow and all the rest, and they said, we're going to send signals to North Vietnam about slow escalations and in our target selection and our tempo of activities, we will signal to them and we will nudge them to the negotiating table. Trouble is, I know I didn't want to get to the negotiating table. only one to get to Saigon, which is now Hocelyn City. Mr. Biden, Teddy Roosevelt, one son of William Howard Taft, he means well feebly. And Biden means well feebly in Ukraine because, now just

today or yesterday, he said, okay, there will be now occasions in which that Ukraine can use its weapons that it gets from the West to strike targets in Russia. which seems to me, again, way overdue, but better late than never. So if one erases everything else and concentrates solely on the question of who's at least apt to incinerate the world, probably that's a case for Biden. But if, for example, someone like Pompeo, who is a quite serious man with serious experience, were to be close to Mr. Trump, That would be mildly reassuring.

The second question raised by that, what would you make to someone who said, based on maybe just those two graphs, which are scary, but the whole column is even scary if they read it, it would be the case not to aid Ukraine and maybe not to aid Taiwan if they were invaded because those two fissure points are the most likely place where a nuclear war would come. come from. That if, that, you know, as you mentioned, striking with inside Russia, you know, and if Putin is the least likely to be reluctant to use nuclear weapons, isn't that the greatest threat to nuclear annihilation? Sure. But it's also a recipe for steady, steadily feeding the crocodile and the hopes that will be the last meal it wants. It's... Winston Churchill behind me. Exactly. It's a recipe for surrendering, the globe to the totalitarians, and it's not worth it. And the final question it raises is, is I remember the first time I interviewed you,

I think I asked you about Iran and you thought Iran was certain to get nuclear weapons. Doesn't it suggest that especially maybe when Iran attacked Israel, that the U.S. and Israel should do whatever it can, even military strikes, to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons, because then they may become the least reluctant to use nuclear weapons, on their religious ideology. Well, Israel, as I think we can safely say we know, Israel has been physically violently attacking Iran's nuclear program, taking out Iran's borrowed physicists in their Paris hotel rooms

to sabotaging the mechanisms by which the uranium is refined into weapons grade and all the rest. Trying to stop Iran has been worth doing. If looking at the history, it was probably going to be futile. China was a small peasant society in the 1960s when it got nuclear weapons. North Korea can make neither shoes nor butter nor poetry, and it can make nuclear weapons. Pakistan had a per capita income of, what, $800 a year when it got nuclear weapons. Any nation that really wants them, can get them. I mean, any decent American University Physics Department can tell you how to build one. The rest is hardware.

The nuclear nonproliferation regime has been worth trying. It's been remarkably successful. Jack Kennedy expected 20 to 30 nuclear weapons and nuclear powers in the mid-1960s. That was wrong. But one of the problems with our approach to Putin in Ukraine is we, We have allowed Putin to demonstrate by our hesitancy the efficacy of possessing nuclear weapons. Bad people around the world said, hey, look at that.

He said, all they have to do is talk about vague and not so vague threats of nuclear weapons and the West flinches. The West changes its behavior. That's what was really wrong here. I think you kind of answered this question just a moment ago when you're talking about Mike Pompeo. But there is a debate between people who, like you, never liked Donald Trump. or thought he was erratic, that good people shouldn't go work for him. They should boycott him.

Given that he is, you know, very reasonably going to be the next president of the United States, there has a very decent chance of being president again. If Glenn Yonkin came to you and said, George, I respect you, would you advise me, Donald Trump just offered me the vice presidential role? Or Mike Pompeo came to you and said, Donald Trump offered me to take over the defense department. Would you advise these figures to take a job with Donald Trump? Yes, I would. We need as much experience and intelligence in the government as possible. Look at noon, January 20th, 2025, this enormous blob of a government is going to be handed over to someone, and we better have as much talent as possible in its ranks. So definitely, if by hook or by crook or by accident,

Trump winds up attracting good people, please, tell him to go to work. Let me close with this question, George. If Trump exited the stage, you know, let's say after his second term or after he loses the election in, let's say after he loses the election if he lost the election in November, can you imagine by 2028 the Republican Party nominating a more normal candidate that the Republican Party gets back to. normalcy, or do you think it's going to be a prolonged period of, I don't know how you would say it, of MAGA-type ideology, MAGA-type characters? I think that the MAGA stain, if I may call it that, is going to stay for a long time, but were Donald Trump to lose, or were he to be elected and survives through 2028, they will be a wonderfully interesting and consequential fight for the Republican Party.

Josh Hawley signed his eighth grade yearbook, Holly, President 2024. So he's already late, his timetable. The Hollies, the Bances, the mini-trumps may think they have a lock on the future of the Republican Party. I think the future is open. That is why I recently wrote a column saying that Kerry Lake, I understand the importance of winning the Senate. I understand how bad it would be for the Democrats to control the Senate and change the Senate rules radically. I still don't want Kerry Lake in the Senate because she'll be there maybe one term, too.

That's 12 years with people like this setting the tone in the Republican Party. Same is true with the Republican nominee in Ohio. It's just not worth it to sacrifice the future of the Republican Party. Again, both parties are at stake here by having these people just to control the Senate for two years. George Will, thank you for joining the Dispatch podcast. I enjoy it. Thanks for having me. Thank you.