George Will's Flip-flop

My previous post, "George Will: Driving a Wedge" was re-posted late last Thursday on the Energy Bulletin site. It received a few comments from Energy Bulletin readers; among them was a comment from Eddiejoe67: "George Will was for high speed rail before he was against it." Eddiejoe's comment linked to an article in Grist published on March 4 and written by cities editor Sarah Goodyear. Goodyear mentions a reader who "tipped [them] off" to an article Will had written almost ten years earlier, shortly after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Goodyear writes:

In the dark days immediately after 9/11, Will seems to have had a revelation about how a certain mode of transportation could help our nation be stronger and more secure. In an Oct. 1, 2001 column syndicated in the Jewish World Review, Will recommended three steps in response to the attack that the nation had just sustained. First, buy more B-2 bombers. Second, cut corporate taxes. And third? Let Will speak for himself (emphasis mine):

Third, build high-speed rail service.
Two months ago this columnist wrote: "A government study concludes that for trips of 500 miles or less -- a majority of flights; 40 percent are of 300 miles or less -- automotive travel is as fast or faster than air travel, door to door. Columnist Robert Kuttner sensibly says that fact strengthens the case for high-speed trains. If such trains replaced air shuttles in the Boston-New York-Washington corridor, Kuttner says that would free about 60 takeoff and landing slots per hour."

Thinning air traffic in the Boston-New York-Washington air corridor has acquired new urgency. Read Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker essay on the deadly dialectic between the technological advances in making air travel safer and the adaptations to these advances by terrorists.

"Airport-security measures," writes Gladwell, "have simply chased out the amateurs and left the clever and the audacious." This is why, although the number of terrorist attacks has been falling for many years, fatalities from hijackings and bombings have increased. As an Israeli terrorism expert says, "the history of attacks on commercial aviation reveals that new terrorist methods of attack have virtually never been foreseen by security authorities."

The lesson to be learned is not defeatism. Security improvements can steadily complicate terrorists' tasks and increase the likelihood of defeating them on the ground. However, shifting more travelers away from the busiest airports to trains would reduce the number of flights that have to be protected and the number of sensitive judgments that have to be made, on the spot, quickly, about individual travelers. Congress should not adjourn without funding the nine-state Midwest Regional Rail Initiative.

So long before passenger trains turned into a tool for socialist control, Will thought they might be useful both as a transportation and as a national security solution.

It's really a tragedy that a writer as intelligent and incisive as Will can be is apparently unwilling to counter the right-wing echo chamber.

George Will: Driving a Wedge

On February 27, Newsweek published a column written by George F. Will titled "High Speed to Insolvency: Why Liberals Love Trains", in which he lambastes the Obama administration for proposing to build (and fund) a nationwide high-speed rail network. Will goes on to ridicule "liberals" for supporting taxpayer-subsidized passenger rail service in general. While Will repeats many of the shibboleths that commonly trip off the lips and pens of all passenger rail opponents (it will  drain our public treasuries, nobody will ride them, people prefer to drive, etc.), he goes a step further by presupposing an ideological divide over the issue. It's "liberals" who want trains, and, further, the real reason these "liberals" want trains is to use them to modify the public's behavior. These seditious "liberals," after all, want to "[diminish] Americans' individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism."

It's quite unfortunate that Will would frame his complaint in ideological terms, because doing so only drives another wedge between Americans. The simple fact is that those of us who want to see a nationwide passenger rail network re-established believe that restoring rail transportation in the USA is a practical necessity. We don't want trains for ideological reasons; we're only seeking solutions to pressing transportation and energy problems.

Will's argument that train travel would somehow lead the American public to embrace collectivism is extremely weak. I wonder whether, during the heyday of rail transportation in the USA in the early 20th century, anyone thought that trains were leading people down the socialist track. I wonder if the commuters waiting for the Metro in DC, the subway in New York, the T in Boston, or the Metra in Chicago experience pangs of worry that their support of public transportation is subverting American values. And since air travel, like train travel, forces passengers to abide by timetables and only takes people to predetermined destinations, I wonder if air travel might already be corrupting our individualism the way Will maintains that rail travel would.

The facts are these, in case Mr. Will is interested: we have a serious energy crisis and an even graver potential crisis. Petroleum resources are depleting worldwide, and new reserves aren't coming into production fast enough to offset the rate of depletion. Fuel prices are once again on the rise. Many people can't afford to operate their automobiles now, and it's likely to get worse. The civil unrest in the Middle East threatens to disrupt the flow of petroleum and, thus, torpedo our global economy (This column by Michael Klare details how, historically, oil producing nations that have gone through political or social upheavals never return to their previous level of production). In this age of energy instability, do we really want to say no to rebuilding our passenger rail capabilities?

Of course, George Will can disagree with the Obama adminstration's high speed rail plan if he wishes. (Even some rail advocates, most famously James Howard Kunstler, believe "high speed rail" is a pipe dream and that the money would be far better spent, not to mention go further, if we used it to rebuild a standard-speed system.) Will has the right to disgree with taxpayer-funded rail transportation altogether. But if he wishes to oppose passenger rail, he ought to give us his real arguments. In the Newsweek column, Will dismisses the arguments offered by rail advocates as "flimsy" and claims they point to an ideological purpose. I'm sorry to tell Mr. Will, but that doesn't work. He need to answer our arguments; if they're really as flimsy as he maintains, he should have no trouble whatsoever countering them. But because he offers us his ideological red herring instead, I suspect that he doesn't really have any substantive rebuttals to our reasoning.