By Kevin D. Williamson
Sunday, February 25, 2018
Conservatives used to boast that the Right has ideas,
while the Left has only an enemies list. There was a time when that was true,
but it isn’t true anymore.
My colleague Jonah Goldberg has done great work
illuminating the progressive mode of politics captured by the phrase “the moral
equivalent of war.” War is not necessarily ennobling or even unifying (see
Iraq), but the two great wars of the 20th century illustrated that the
industrial and economic might of the United States can, at least for a time, be
turned by the state toward a single national purpose. (We romanticize those
wars, especially the second, but our war provisioning was in reality marked by
the incompetence, corruption, and profiteering one would expect with any big
federal spending project.) As Goldberg writes in Liberal Fascism, “War socialism under Wilson was an entirely
progressive project, and long after the war it remained the liberal ideal.”
After both wars, there were those in government who argued that Washington
should maintain its extraordinary wartime powers in order to turn them to such
peaceful ends as a “war on poverty.” Warren G. Harding ran on the opposite idea
— his “return to normalcy” — as Dwight Eisenhower did in a less insistent way.
(Indeed, Eisenhower’s dismissal of the conservative project seeking a return to
the prewar, pre–New Deal settlement was the proximate cause for the founding of
this magazine and the modern conservative movement; American conservatives have
always been running against the
Republican party.)
“The moral equivalent of war” (which is really the political equivalent of war) is more
useful as rhetoric than as an actual model for organizing domestic reforms, as
evidenced by the failed war on drugs and the failed war on poverty. It is a way
to move one’s pet issue, whatever it may be, to the front of the line, and
perhaps to suspend ordinary legal and constitutional constraints in the pursuit
of one’s most pressing political agenda items. Wilson desired to see the
presidency invested with autocratic power giving the executive (under expert
guidance of course; progressives treat government as a branch of science) the
power to command the domestic resources of the United States the way a general
commands those of an army. Modern progressivism, with its “moral equivalent of
war” mentality, is Wilsonian war socialism on the installment plan: one
emergency at a time. That’s how you get people who think of themselves as good
ACLU liberals arguing that we should suspend the constitutional rights of
American citizens based on their being on a secret government list, without due
process or appeal, as many of our well-intentioned progressive friends seek to
do in forbidding firearms purchases by those on various terrorism watch-lists.
(In the case of the no-fly list, that would include many people who simply
share a name with someone suspected of being connected to terrorism.) There’s
no time for due-process considerations in an emergency, when you’re under the
gun, when you’re at war, when it’s the moral equivalent of war.
The “moral equivalent of war” mentality is useful when it
comes to organizing and funding large projects that are truly national: the Apollo project, rural
electrification, the canals and other infrastructure programs that Lincoln
described as “improvements.” That has always been the attraction of classical
progressivism: the idea that government can step in, take charge, and execute
large and complex programs to improve our common life in ways that the market
and private actors can’t or won’t. Understanding why that rarely works out as
intended is conservatism. It isn’t only economists who must “demonstrate to men
how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”
The Right has its own moral equivalents of war: the war
on drugs, famously, but also various big-ticket infrastructure programs and
Keynesian stimulus measures that Republican officeholders convince themselves
are somehow connected to national security. Senator Rubio ridiculously argued
that subsidies for Florida sugar barons are a national-security measure, but
conservatives have made very similar arguments about commodities such as steel.
(Lenovo’s acquisition of IBM’s personal-computer business, its later
acquisition of IBM’s x86 server business, and its purchase of Motorola from
Google all were denounced as national-security threats.) President Eisenhower,
who had found American roads wanting during cross-country military exercises in
1919, sold the national highway system as a national-security measure; its
formal name is the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and
Defense Highways. The freeways to suburbia are the American war machine in
repose.
The interstate highway system was a mistake, poorly
planned and corruptly executed, but it is easy to see the attraction of such
big, national projects, which present ideologues and partisans (and experts and
cranks) the opportunity to rebuild the country in their own image, at least in
part. Lyndon Johnson was a moral monster and a cynical political calculator,
but he was genuine in his belief that the poor in America, especially the rural
poor, were simply dealt an unfair hand, and that government could (and
therefore should) step in and make some of that right. He had the experience of
the New Deal to draw on and, like most Southern Democrats, he was a New Deal
man through and through. (The popularity of the New Deal in rural Texas would
be difficult to overestimate: In 1949, when the tiny railroad town of Monroe,
Texas, finally got a post office, the town fathers discovered that there
already was a Monroe, Texas, and the town was renamed New Deal, the name it and
three other nearby municipalities had given to their consolidated school
district in 1935.) The problem is that there are not a great many big,
inspiring, and truly national tasks
waiting to be done. Even the perennial push for a big federal infrastructure
package mainly amounts to national subsidies for local pothole repairs.
And many political manias do not fit easily into the
World War II model. Mass killings such as the one in Florida are a
distressingly regular feature of American life, but they do not add up to very
much in the annals of American homicide. (They are sharks
in a world full of moose.) Violence against transgender people is to be
deplored and prosecuted, but the nation is hardly convulsed over the condition
of transgender people in 2018 the way it was over, say, the condition of
African Americans in 1954. The parades of charismatic victims and poster-ready
faces of hot-button social issues (the Parkland students, Caitlyn Jenner, the
DACA families) is intended to communicate a moral
emergency, but efforts to create national crusades around these issues have
proved ineffective. In 2016, the Gallup poll found that support for a ban on
so-called assault weapons had hit an all-time low; a recent Quinnipiac poll
found that far more people (77 percent vs. 58 percent) believed that
mental-health reform might have prevented the Parkland massacre than believed
that additional gun control was likely to have been effective. Millennials are
less likely to support banning semiautomatic weapons than are their parents and
grandparents. There’s no draft for the war on semiautomatic rifles, and there
isn’t any rush to volunteer, either.
When the moral equivalent of World War II is not
available, then the next best thing is the moral equivalent of Hitler. This is
the style of political rhetoric that insists that those who hold different
views do not simply disagree and are not simply wrong but instead are evildoers
doing evil. “You know who else would
have laughed at my preferred pronouns? Hitler.” “You know who else would have opposed same-sex
marriage? Hitler.” “You know who else
didn’t like pineapple on his pizza? Hitler.” Hence the current Democratic style
of insisting that Republicans are not simply people with different political
preferences but are in fact anti-intellectual bigots. Democrats insist that
Republicans are driven by racism, religious bigotry, sexism, hatred of
homosexuals, hatred of Muslims, etc., or else that they are acting out of greed
in the service of some obscure program of self-enrichment. When you hear a
Democrat say that some Texas conservative supports gun rights because the NRA
pays him to, what you’re hearing is: “That guy is Hitler.”
Republicans have never been entirely immune to that sort
of thing, of course: “Pink right down to her underwear,” welfare queens, etc.
Republican appeals to our baser instincts have historically been couched in
expressions of nationalism. T. Boone Pickens, visiting the offices of National Review, flew into a rage when I
suggested that his plan to mandate the use of natural gas in trucking was in
fact a plan to put a whole lot of money into the pockets of T. Boone Pickens,
thundering: “You must be in favor of foreign
oil!” Donald Trump’s early focus on the issue of illegal immigration was clever
in that it offers the combination of a real issue — illegal immigration is a
genuine problem, as is the persistence of poorly assimilated immigrant ghettos
around the country — while also appealing to the strain of xenophobia that has
always been associated with populist politics in the United States, currently
most energetic on the right side of the political spectrum. (But it is by no
means exclusively a right-wing phenomenon: Senator Bernie Sanders, the grumpy
Muppet socialist from Vermont, talked a great deal like Trump on immigration
during the Democratic primary, denouncing the “open borders” view as a
billionaires’ plot to undermine the American working man.) But from the 1980s
until approximately the day before yesterday, the Republican party was an
instrument of the conservative movement. It was the inverse of the Democratic
party, in which various intellectual tendencies and political constituencies
serve the party and are dominated by it. The Republican party was more strongly
an ideological organization, the Democratic party more strongly a collection of
interest groups. (Of course both parties are both things, but the GOP has long
been the more ideologically rigorous of the two.) The Republican party had
invective, of course, but it also had ideas, and, especially in the 1980s, a
lively and enriching transatlantic relationship with conservatives in the
United Kingdom. Intellectuals such as Milton Friedman and Jeane Kirkpatrick
were enormously influential figures, especially for young conservatives, and
the most prominent spokesman for conservative views was William F. Buckley Jr.
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Rick Brookhiser is right to insist that the emergence of
Fox News as the Right’s loudest voice was a “gigantic mistake, frenzied and
stupefying.” It has left the Right angrier and less intelligent — and it has
made the Right more like the Left in its instinctive reliance on the
enemies-list model of politics. You’ve seen how this works by now, I’m sure.
The Parkland students get some predictably good press for this gun-control
rally, and Fox News jackasses like David Clarke see the shadowy hand of George
Soros. The special counsel hands down another passel of criminal indictments
against Trump’s campaign executives, and the real story is all about . . .
Hillary Clinton. The enemies list is long: “elites,” Washington insiders, Paul
Ryan, Mitch McConnell, Bill Kristol, the Deep State, Barack Obama, out there,
somewhere, scheming . . .
Conservative critics of Trump receive a constant
complaint: “You don’t know who your friends are or, even worse, who the enemy
is.” Warming to the “moral equivalent of war” — in this case, the Cold War —
they insist that we must smile and nod and happily swallow whatever unsalted
s**t sandwich is being served up today because to do anything else is to give
aid and comfort to the “cultural Marxists,” one of the most ridiculous bits of
voguish new terminology on the right. For them, it’s always the end of the
country, the republic hanging by a thread. It’s a fundamentally unserious view
of the world that serves mainly to provide its adherents with a form of
emotional catharsis that is not at its root about politics at all. They get a
frisson of virility when they hear the president — the president of the United
States of America — describe his political rivals as “treasonous.” The idea
that opposition to the Big Boss is opposition to the nation itself — that to
criticize the Big Boss is treason —
is a very ancient superstition, and a very stupid one.
But these are stupid times, especially for Republicans,
who in their pursuit of fleeting political advantage must pretend to be
something other than what they are and pretend that Trump is something other
than what he is. The easiest way to get through that is to do what the Left has
been doing since the 1950s — convince yourself that the alternative is Hitler.
(And, hey, if you read Dinesh D’Souza, you know that George Soros was a Nazi,
right? And Soros is behind . . . everything.) And that works, if you don’t
think too hard about it, which doesn’t seem to be an obviously pressing problem for Sean Hannity and his ilk. But as
Republicans work their way down their enemies list, they ought to stop, if only
for a moment, to ask what it is they are working their way towards. This year at the annual CPAC conference, the president and
the vice president shared billing with Marion Maréchal-Le Pen of the French
fascist political dynasty. Funny that some of her admirers on the American
right such as the gentlemen at Breitbart
are fond of denouncing their critics as “Vichy” conservatives. If you’re
looking for the road to Vichy, ask the Le Pens — they know the way, if that’s
the way you want to go.
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