Will and Poor Testament

Much like his predecessor as America's most incisive public conservative thinker -- a term loosely used -- George Will emulates William F. Buckley in that he is routinely thumped for his variegated crimes against logic by people who actually think. Lately Will has been at times cogent and at others not so, and while I did enjoyed his slapping of John McCain for what is sure to be some flagrant hypocrisy on the subject of campaign finance, Will's most recent effort, advocating for open, free "market-based" campaign financing, employed a fallacious argument that could not be allowed to pass without comment.

Will argues that a large majority of the American public have expressed opposition to public campaign financing because only a small percentage of taxpayers check off the contribution box on tax returns. While drawing such a conclusion from that statistic might seem dubious to you or I, it is axiomatic to George Will. The argument not only employs an enormous logical leap, it is, at its utmost, entirely specious. Will employs here the classic argumentative tactic of conflating correlation with causation.

Even though the checkoff does not increase the individual's tax bill, support peaked in 1981, when 28.7 percent of taxpayers used it. So even then it was opposed by more than 70 percent of taxpayers. In 1994 Congress responded by increasing the checkoff's value to $3. This empowered fewer people to divert more money from the government's pool of revenue collected from all taxpayers. All this to fuel a program opposed by the vast majority of taxpayers, a program that subsidizes political advocacy that most taxpayers do not endorse.

As readers can see from this, Will's crime against logic is far worse than simply arriving at an unsupported conclusion. He arrives at an unsupported conclusion based on an unsupported premise, which is assumed to be fact: not checking the box on a tax return means you, as a taxpayer, oppose public financing. It might surprise many taxpayers to learn of their surprisingly strong opposition to public campaign financing as it was probably hitherto unknown to them until George Will finally pointed it out.

In fact, Will, as he often does, fails to account for any external factors that are, in all likelihood, far more influential in this matter than opposition to public financing of presidential campaigns, such as simple apathy or downright disdain for the political process. With Congressional approval dipping to new, low levels, it would appear to be a far more reasonable conclusion that most people simply won't contribute money to a political system they largely regard as populated by a lying, thieving bunch of as-yet-unarrested criminals. That the American political class is viewed this way by a nearly equally large majority of Americans Will thinks "oppose" public campaign financing, is due in no small part to the fact that political campaigns in this country are extremely beholden to big money influence. While Americans view Congress as corrupt and choose not to contribute to the political campaign circus, Will interprets this as "opposition" to public funding and, as corollary, support for privately financed campaigns. I doubt one could come up with a more wrong-headed conclusion regarding the current political climate.

To illustrate the absurdity of Will's causistic reasoning, we could very easily draw the conclusion that, because most elections (until the 2004 presidential one) see a majority of Americans choosing not to vote, the majority of the citizens of this country oppose democracy. Is that really what Americans are saying by not voting? It is if you draw conclusions the way George Will does -- with a big, fat, giant, red crayon. There has been much written about why Americans are so thoroughly apathetic about their own democratic processes, much of it centering on disenchantment with the political process and the corruption that has been introduced by the now enormous money flows.

The larger issue of the tawdriness of the American campaign spectacle is left untouched by Will, for it hardly serves his purpose to acknowledge the shameful state of monied politics today. While most other democracies have hard and strict limits on the length of election campaigns, in the US, the campaigning never stops. So much time is now spent by national candidates humping for money at fund raising events -- and doing so on the tax payer nickel -- nothing of much serious thought is ever conducted within the halls of Congress or the White House.

By this I do not mean that serious things do not arise, but that they generally do so because so little attention is paid by elected officials, who are now pressured by increasing demands for time on the fund-raising and campaign trail. You need only look at the current state of things to see that that is a truism. Iraq, torture and NSA spying are due in no small part to the fact that elected officials were cursory and brief in their treatment and oversight. We have astounding debts and trade imbalances because elected officials failed in fiscal oversight of the Treasury and catered to corporate interests at the same time they were off attending their own fiscal conditions.

Indeed, most of the activity we see Congress engaged in these days is simply reactive; what does the latest poll show? what did the White House just do? what, in god's name, did the NY Times just print? And these reactive strikes are carried out from only one perspective: election or re-election prospects. You need only watch Bill Frist tell Americans that now -- right now -- gay marriage and flag burning are the country's two biggest concerns, when what they really are is the latest, desperate move by a Senate Majority leader, worried about poor poll numbers and a looming election, pandering to an ever-diminishing GOP "base."

The political class in this country is now entirely invested in one thing and one thing alone: ensuring their next electoral victory. This has never not been true but today money -- not policies or ideas -- is the dominant factor in elections. And what conservatives like Will, who think that politics, and therefore government, ought to function as a "free market," continously fail to acknowledge is that, in a free market, the goods will always go to the highest bidder.