Different types of will

Julian Sanchez is lumping:

In politics, Matt Yglesias has identified the neocon's version of the Care Bear Stare, which he's dubbed the Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics. It holds that, like a Green Lantern's power ring, the American military can produce just about any effect imaginable if only the Will of the American People is strong enough. When any foreign intervention fails, this is proof that our will was insufficient, presumably due to the malign influence of fifth columnists in the media.

The left, of course, has its own version, which can be seen in claims that we know perfectly well how to solve problem X, if only we cared enough or had the political will to address it.

This is a category error and as near as I can tell it arises because the phrases "Will of the American People" in paragraph one and "political will" in paragraph two both have the word "will" in them. When liberal people talk about problems--climate change, say, or the uninsured--that could be solved if only the political will existed, we're usually talking about votes. It's not an insufficient amount of will that's perpetuating the climate crisis, it's the carbon, and what we lack is the will power to regulate that substance. If we regulated carbon smartly, the problem would be solved. If we regulated it poorly, all the "will" or "nice thoughts" or "whatever" in the world wouldn't help. We'd have to fix the regulations or accept the consequences.

The Green Lantern Theory, by contrast, holds that insoluble problems don't become soluble simply by adding more will--of either type, concrete or abstract--into the mix. More will, in this case, might mean high approval ratings, or it might mean the votes necessary to institute a draft, conscript hundreds of thousands of soldiers into the army, deploy them all to Iraq and hope that the policy change solved the problem. What I and other adherents to the GLT believe is that infinite amounts of either kind of will--concrete or abstract--won't fix this. Add high popularity and 300,000 troops into the mix and Iraq would still be "unwinnable" in the way people thought we'd "win" in the Spring of 2003.