Politics & Power Quote by George Will

Advertising doesn’t just sell products here; it colonizes the way a country thinks out loud. George Will’s line lands like a diagnosis of cultural drift: when “blather” becomes “the nation’s normal idiom,” the problem isn’t merely bad copywriting, it’s a public vocabulary trained to value volume over meaning. The phrase “normal idiom” is doing quiet, nasty work. It suggests a baseline, a default setting, a shared register. If that register is ad-speak, then persuasion becomes our native tongue and sincerity starts to sound like a foreign accent.

Will’s sharpest move is the demotion of language from tool to byproduct: “printed noise.” Not lies, not even propaganda - noise, the deadened output of systems optimized for attention. He’s pointing at a media ecosystem where words are engineered to trigger, flatter, and repeat, not to clarify. “Printed” matters, too: this isn’t only a complaint about TV spots or jingles. It’s an indictment of how journalism, politics, and corporate messaging converge on the same template - slogan, talking point, brand voice - until prose turns into a kind of ambient static.

The subtext is conservative in the old-school sense: a fear that a democracy can’t deliberate if its citizens are trained to consume rhetoric the way they consume cereal. When every sentence is a pitch, language stops being a medium for thought and becomes an instrument for compliance. Will isn’t mourning elegance; he’s warning that degraded speech degrades the public mind.