Columnist and television commentator George F. Will GS '68 spoke last night in McCosh 10 about American politics and society, saying that many Americans forget that many current problems are rooted in American culture and have been faced before.
Will, who has a twice-weekly column syndicated in roughly 500 newspapers and has appeared on ABC's "This Week" for the last 21 years, began his lecture by comparing baseball and politics.
"Baseball . . . is a game where small increments over a long season make the difference," he said, suggesting this is equivalent to a conservative outlook in politics.
Will praised the conduct of America's war on terrorism and the recent conflict in Iraq.
"We have acted with amazing speed in responding to 9/11," he said.
He said that U.S. involvement abroad is necessary to provide security from terrorist attacks.
"You cannot fight these dangers at our shore," he said. "The fact is we must go to their source."
The war in Iraq "is going remarkably well and remarkably in national character," he said.
He added that one of the most notable aspects of the war was that American power has become so flexible and so precise that it was possible for the United States to adopt assassination as a tool of national policy, although the administration did not use that term. Assassination of leaders is an appropriate strategy in wartime, he said.
The American political scene today is characterized by consensus, though many fail to recognize it, he said. This consensus was evident in the last presidential election, when both Bush and Gore agreed that the first task was to strengthen Social Security and the second priority was to fix Medicaid, Will said.
Conservatism as it used to be defined, in the era of the New Deal and Great Society reforms, "has no purchase on the American public any longer," he said. "There's no constituency in this country for small government."
Will said some of the government's "welfare entitlements" need to be reexamined.
"In terms of our welfare state, we have been careless," he said. "We're going to have to rethink some of what we've done."
He advocated the partial privatization of Social Security and said that cutting the Social Security tax would provide an economic stimulus.
He added that despite some problems, if the United States continues to have steady economic growth, it can afford to support "an ethic of common provision which we are clearly committed to as a people."
Will also suggested that the changes brought about by the "new" digital economy and the Internet are not as significant as some have said. The railroad and automobile revolutions were far more transformative than the Internet revolution, he said. "This is the fifth new economy in our country," he added.
In the question-and-answer period, Will said that immigration revitalizes the country. "Immigration . . . is a brave act," he said. "I want these people here, and I want a lot of them."
National quotas for immigration were a "national embarrassment" and should be abolished, he added.
The lecture was sponsored by the College Republicans, the Princeton Tory and the American Whig-Cliosophic Society.
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