By Jonah Goldberg
Saturday, June 27, 2015
In my column yesterday I noted that we now live in a
world where Bobby Jindal is a fake Indian, but it’s racist to say Elizabeth
Warren isn’t a real Indian. It’s okay for the press to mock Ted Cruz for
boasting Cuban heritage, but it’s outrageous that Jindal and Nikki Haley aren’t
boasting about their heritage enough.
But, as the surprisingly communicative prison bully said
to his new cellmate, “Hold on, it gets worse.”
Big corporations — the very same corporations we are
constantly told are “Right-wing” — have been falling over themselves to erase
any hint of Confederate flags from their inventories. Walmart proclaimed, “We
never want to offend anyone with the products that we offer.” eBay said they
don’t want to sell anything that promotes “divisiveness.” Amazon quickly
followed suit with similar pabulum.
As a business proposition, it’s hard for me to fault
them. With the mobs desperate to sack any citadel that even hints at being a
holdout, best to defenestrate the Confederate flags and fly the white ones.
But this standard of no “divisive” products isn’t
actually a standard. It is a political fiction, a marketing myth, an invocation
one must offer as one shovels the cursed wares of the day down the memory hole,
like so many kilos of heroin with cops at the door.
Goodbye to All That
“Memory hole” is a term from Orwell’s 1984. It was
literally a series of pipes one could throw documents down, so as to whisk them
to the furnace as quickly as possible. (Fortunately for Hillary Clinton, that
can be done digitally these days.)
Taken seriously, this new standard of anti-divisiveness
would require cramming so many things down the memory hole it would be the
functional equivalent of shoving a whole Thanksgiving turkey, uncooked, into
the garbage disposal. Everywhere one looks, there are divisive things. The gay
pride rainbow flag? Shvvvuuumph! Down the memory hole! Nazi memorabilia (still
widely available at Amazon and Ebay)? Thwwwwwwwwwooosshh! Down the memory hole!
Communist flags? Muslim Crescents? Christian Crucifixes? Stars of David (never
mind Israeli flags)? Get ready for a long, grinding, thwarararammmmmfitang as
the disciples of blackwhite thinking — and those who fear them — squeeze the
polarizing bric-a-brac into the wheezing pneumatic tubery.
These of course are just the symbols. Then there are the
books that must be hurled into the maw of forgetting. For the last few years,
Huckleberry Finn’s place in American life has been shrinking, thanks to the
stark terror it inflicts in an educrat class that insists on denouncing
America’s racist past, but is too scared to actually engage it maturely for
fear of triggering someone.
Gone With the Asininity
Already, a film critic at the New York Post (!) wants to
dustbin Gone With The Wind (though he at least concedes it could be interred at
a museum). I’m no partisan of the Confederacy, but I’m also no partisan of
Communism. I understand why so many glower when they see the Confederate flag
fly, I am hard pressed to understand why so few glare when they see the Hammer
and Sickle grace dorm room walls or the midriffs of bearded, burly hipsters who
apparently got a memo it’s okay to wear transgressive T-shirts so long as
they’re so tight people get a glimpse of your belly hairs.
I’d say it’s almost as if they don’t know that the
Communists were the greatest revivers of the institution of slavery in the 20th
century, except I am fairly certain they don’t know that (as we speak — so to
speak — ISIS is giving away sex-slaves to the winners of Koran-memorization
contests, but this arouses far less passion in Americans than the thought that
someone somewhere might want to buy a civil war chess set from Walmart).
I said above that if this standard were taken seriously
so much would have to go down the memory hole. But that’s the rub. This isn’t a
standard that is being taken seriously. It isn’t a standard at all. It’s a
cudgel. A rhetorical nightstick used in service to the politics of revenge and
forgetting.
When I was growing up (“How’s that going? Seems like
you’ve got a ways to go…” — The Couch), it seemed like lots of people talked
about post-modernism, critical-race theory and all that junk. Today, it seems
like no one talks about it, but everyone lives it — or is being forced to live
with it.
I’ll always remember that line from Wendy Doniger when
McCain picked Sarah Palin for veep: “Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense
that she is a woman.”
Whatever criticisms you might have for Palin, there was a
time when the one thing everyone could agree on is that she’s, you know, a
woman. But now we live in an age where we must say Bruce Jenner is a woman, but
only Right-wing cranks like me bother to complain that a professor at the
University of Chicago could write that Sarah Palin isn’t one.
The Center Will Not Hold
My real fear isn’t that the Left will win. I still have
some faith that the American people, including large portions of the Democratic
base, don’t actually buy all of this nonsense, or at the very least it’s
reasonable to assume they won’t continue to buy it for long. Why? Because it’s
exhausting. What’s the correct word today? What are we allowed to think? How
long must we discuss a world that doesn’t bear much resemblance to the one we
actually live in? Most people don’t want to be politically engaged constantly.
We won’t all be assimilated by the Borg. (Though it is kind of amazing that the
Swedish Chef on The Muppet Show had been warning us about this for so long and
we never listened; “borg-a-borg-borg-borg!”)
No my real fear is that the center will not hold. I’ve
discussed this a bit when it comes to the debate over Islam. I don’t like the
practice of insulting Muslims — or anybody — just to prove a point. But what I
like even less is the suggestion that Muslim fanatics have the assassin’s veto
over what we can say or do. So I am forced to choose sides, and when forced, I
will stand with the insulters over the beheaders. But that is not an ideal
scenario. That is the Leninist thinking of “the worse, the better.”
So what I fear is something similar in our own society;
that the Left gets what it’s been asking for: Total Identity Politics
Armageddon. Everyone to your tribe, literal or figurative.
Spending as much time as I do on the internet, it’s easy
to think this world has already arrived. It’s basically how political twitter
operates. But what I fear is that it spills over into real life, like when
characters from The Matrix walk among us.
The Left’s identity-politics game is a bit like the
welfare states of Europe, which exist solely by living off borrowed capital and
unrequited generosity. Europeans can only have their lavish entitlements
because they benefit from our military might and our technological innovation.
Left to their own devices, they’d have to live quite differently.
Similarly, identity politics is fueled by generous
subsidies from higher education, foundations, and other institutions designed
to transfer resources to the Griping Industry. But if you spend enough time
teaching people to think that way, guess what? They’ll think that way.
Cruz v. Clinton Ragnarok
The other night I was on Special Report with Senator Ted
Cruz as our guest in the “Center Seat.” On the broadcast show I got to ask a
total of one question — Cruz is a brilliant filibusterer.
Anyway, after he left the online show (where we chatted
more), I remarked that his professed general election strategy — should he get
the nomination — is to run on uniting conservatives and to get the
conservatives who allegedly didn’t show up for McCain and Romney to show up for
him. He almost explicitly says he wants to run a Goldwateresque campaign:
all-choice, no echo. Galvanize the base, forget about everyone else.
Now, I’m not sure I really believe this would actually be
his game plan if he were to win the nomination, but I understand why he’s
saying it now. He wants to be the One True Conservative in the race and that’s
what his constituency wants to hear. Fair enough.
But it occurs to me that Cruz’s bet that a full-throated
conservative can beat a full-throated liberal in a general election is very
much the mirror image of Hillary Clinton’s strategy (though Hillary’s approach
seems vastly more shameless and transparent, perhaps because, unlike Cruz,
she’s an awful politician).
Her plan is to rally the Obama Coalition and forget about
the middle. Cruz’s plan is to rally what he calls the Reagan coalition and
forget about everyone else. As a matter of pure electoral mechanics and
mathematics, I’m pretty dubious about that. But it would move the country
further down the course I’m worried about. Obviously, for me, the choice
between Ted Cruz and Hillary Clinton is no choice at all. I’d vote for Cruz in
a heartbeat. My only point here is that when one side plays the identity
politics game so aggressively, it forces others to play it as well. Those of us
who want politics to mean less in life are forced to choose a side.
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