This volume, the fifth collection of George F. Will's essays on America's political tumults and cultural controversies, makes clear that he deserves to be ranked in the American tradition of high journalism, a tradition that extends back through Walter Lippmann and H. L. Mencken to Edwin Lawrence Godkin.
With wit, erudition, and craftsmanship that readers of 480 newspapers and Newsweek have enjoyed for twenty years, Will assesses the triumphs, misadventures, and foibles of the past four years. During this period George Bush's presidency, filled with "verbal fender-benders" and policy disappointments, paved the way for the ebullient Bill Clinton, that enthusiast of government of whom Will says, "American government is failing at such fundamental tasks as providing streets free of gunfire and schools with high standards, and yet at this moment, when government's reputation is deservedly rotten, Clinton says that it is competent to plan the future."
Many of the institutions that should sustain our fraying society, says Will, have been populated by men and women like the Clintons who came of age in the 1960s, a decade that gave legitimacy to a "perverse premise - that the social order is an infringement on freedom rather than freedom's foundation."
"The idea is abroad," writes Will, "that there is no moral heritage worth 'imposing' on children, respect for whom requires that their 'values' be regarded as a matter of taste." We are, Will observes, increasingly unable to talk about race, or equality, or art, or literature without using these subjects as "a mere index of who has power and whom the powerful victimize."
Of today's confused political goals and public ideals, Will says, "The age that pushes hard against [us] is not something that has just befallen us. We made it; are making it. Much of it comes from the top down, a trickle-down culture that begins with the idea that the good life consists of satisfying every impulse. Many intellectuals have helped supplant the moral categories essential to civilized living, replacing them with a thin-gruel vocabulary of 'lifestyles' and 'values' and 'self-esteem.'"
In this moment of diminished vision and cloudy moral precepts, "society's forces for order are no match for today's popular culture." Will reminds us, through vivid portraits of Americans striving hard to knit the social fabric back together, and through his witty, memorable stories of watching his own children grow, that we disregard society's seamlessness at our peril. His hopeful conclusion is that the human decency that abounds in America is our primary bulwark against "the accelerating failure to (in the Constitution's words) insure domestic tranquility."
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Book details

• Format Hardcover
• Pages473 pages
• LanguageEnglish
• ISBN100670860212
• ISBN139780670860210