The Leveling Wind: Politics, the Culture and Other News 1990-1994

Overview

George Will’s The Leveling Wind gathers his syndicated columns from 1990 to 1994, a hinge period when the Cold War ended, the United States fought the Gulf War, and domestic politics realigned around new cultural and constitutional disputes. The title evokes a gust of egalitarian pressure sweeping through institutions and norms, flattening distinctions in the name of populism, a phenomenon Will both dissects and resists. The result is a panoramic chronicle of early-1990s America, written from a classically conservative vantage that prizes constitutional limits, civic virtue, and the sustaining power of tradition.

Scope and Structure

The collection ranges across foreign policy, jurisprudence, legislative politics, and cultural commentary. Will moves from the fall of the Soviet Union and the first war with Iraq to Supreme Court battles and congressional reform, then outward to education, arts funding, and the grammar of everyday manners. The breadth turns the book into a time capsule of argument, tracing how post-Cold War optimism met the frictions of domestic policy and the anxieties of cultural change.

Politics after the Cold War

Will treats victory in the Cold War as a moral and strategic vindication but warns against triumphalism. The Gulf War is praised as a restoration of order with limited aims, a model of prudential statecraft grounded in coalition-building and constitutional process. At home, he examines the 1992 presidential race and the early Clinton years through the lens of institutional balance: executive ambition, congressional habits, and the public’s appetite for government activism. NAFTA, deficit politics, and the first stirrings of congressional term limits become tests of whether the country can discipline itself without sacrificing dynamism. He is skeptical of grand designs and federal improvisation, especially the 1993, 94 health care plan, arguing that complexity and coercion are poor substitutes for incremental reform and voluntary association.

Courts, Federalism, and the Constitution

Judicial confirmation wars, especially the Clarence Thomas hearings, provide an arena to criticize the politics of character assassination and the corrosion of deliberation. Will contends that constitutionalism requires both restraint and courage: courts should be wary of discovering new rights untethered from text and history, and legislators should not outsource moral controversy to judges. Abortion jurisprudence, campaign finance regulation, and the commerce power are recurring touchstones for his argument about limits, federalism, and the dangers of rule by administrative fiat.

Culture, Education, and Standards

The “leveling wind” blows hardest, in Will’s telling, across culture. He decries the flattening of standards under the banners of relativism and therapeutic politics: campus speech codes and canon wars, arts controversies surrounding public subsidies, the decline of civility and shared civic vocabulary. Debates over school choice, curriculum, and merit are framed as battles over whether excellence can be honored without apology. His columns on sports, especially baseball, function as moral essays, celebrating rules, patience, and earned authority as civic virtues in miniature.

Style and Perspective

Will writes with aphoristic compression, stitching together history, literature, and constitutional theory into arguments that are principled rather than partisan. Tocqueville, Madison, Burke, and Lincoln are recurring presences, not as fetishes but as guides for thinking about majority rule, mediating institutions, and the discipline of self-government. The tone is unsentimental yet hopeful: a defense of limited government made on behalf of a robust civil society.

Significance

As a document of 1990, 1994, the book captures both the release of post-Cold War possibility and the rise of cultural disputes that would define politics long after. It continues Will’s long project of arguing that freedom endures only where law, manners, and institutions resist the gusts that would level everything to appetite or fashion.