By Kevin D. Williamson
Tuesday, August 27, 2019
I’ve learned and gained and benefited from — and, on
occasion, stolen — so much from my friend Jay Nordlinger over the years
(including the years before I knew him) that I am sure he won’t begrudge the
additional theft of his “Impromptus” mood for a few observations from Prince
Edward Island, where Jay and I and some other writers, editors, readers, and
friends of National Review are enjoying the Canadian cool, talking
politics, and celebrating the work and legacy of William F. Buckley Jr.
A few things . . .
I am grateful to Rich Lowry for his kind words today in his
column on the New York Times’s sudden disembrace of “cancelation
culture” and the notion that journalists — especially, journalists writing
for the New York Times — ought to be considered eternally discredited
for an ill-advised tweet or an ill-framed utterance.
In my own case, I wish only that the Times would
make up its mind about the Kevin D. Williamson question: On the one hand, the
Williamson issue is considered important enough for the Times to publish
a half-dozen or so articles on it, including a hilariously inept and lazy
repurposing of a by-the-numbers denunciation of Larry Kudlow by Paul Krugman,
but, on the other, the Times cannot be bothered to stir itself to
perform any actual journalism or, say, review my book on the subject. Not a
single Times writer contacted or even attempted to contact me for any of
the articles the newspaper has written about me. The Washington Post, to
its credit, at least eventually thought to inquire about the nature of the
opinions that got people so excited. The New York Post, America’s
newspaper of record, was by comparison more
interested in the book than in the tweet.
I am sometimes surprised by the intensity of occasional
public interest in me, a relatively obscure writer of reports about poverty and
addiction, not-obviously timely essays about the Faust legend, and some
literally bookish concerns. I can see a pretty obvious case for failing to take
any notice of that. But I cannot see a case for wall-to-wall coverage of a
six-word tweet years after the fact that simultaneously studiously ignores my
actual work. Either I am interesting enough to write about or I am not.
And if the Times is making these decisions based on some other criterion
— what is politically useful to the Democratic party and its cultural allies,
rather than what is newsworthy or of general interest — then Dean Baquet should
say so, and quit pretending that he is running a newspaper.
Otherwise, he should give some serious thought to trying
to do his job.
Of course, Baquet has an interest in mob politics, too.
His newspaper and its writers are a participant in them and a furtherer of
them, but also a significant target of them. The Times has shown that it
can be bullied by twelve Caitlyns on Twitter into rewriting a headline, and
Baquet himself has acknowledged that much of the pressure for the Times
to conduct itself in a more partisan fashion comes from within the organization
rather than outside it. The same was of course true in my experience at The
Atlantic, and it almost certainly is the case for more high-profile figures
such as Roseanne Barr. I meant to ask Bill Maher whether that was the case in
his firing from ABC. More on that below.
To the Times’s credit, it mostly has chosen to
stand up for itself and its independence. There have been headhunting
expeditions against Bret Stephens, Bari Weiss, and Sarah Jeong, among others,
and the Times mostly has held firm. (Despite the president’s ritualistic
invocation of “the failing New York Times,” the newspaper’s improved
business prospects seem to have reinforced its confidence.) And, of course, it
will be up to institutions to provide the necessary counterweight to Millennial
Hysteria on Twitter and elsewhere. And the institutions really are what this is
all about: As I argue at length in The Smallest Minority, there wouldn’t
really be any juice in getting Bret Stephens fired from a columnist’s job — the
juice is in showing that you can make the New York Times jump when you
say so. That’s power, and power that matters. The Times does not jump,
usually. The Atlantic jumps. ABC jumps. And, much more significantly,
Google, Apple, Facebook, and Twitter all jump. CNN jumps.
I hope the Grey Lady’s not for jumping.
L’Esprit de l’escalier
A French term that is of constant use to writers who
sometimes appear on television is l’esprit de l’escalier, meaning the
spirit or the wit “of the staircase,” the unhappy experience of thinking of
just the right thing to say — too late.
I was a guest on Bill Maher’s program on Friday, my
second appearance there. Maher and his team are very gracious hosts. (The
experience provides a tiny interesting window into the very different scales of
HBO money and cable-news money.) The episode on which I appeared became
instantly infamous because of Maher’s vicious denunciation of the late David
Koch, whose philanthropy and interests I wrote about here.
Maher and his writers are very good, but theirs is an adolescent form of comedy
that instinctively retreats into viciousness and cruelty when the writers
become unsure of themselves. That’s an old trick: People laugh at
outrageousness and theatrical viciousness (cf. Trump, President Donald J.) as a
way of relieving the consequent tension and discomfort. Hence the “I’m glad
he’s dead” stuff, which was tedious, as opposed to the line about Koch’s
desiring to be cremated and to have his ashes blown into the lungs of a child,
which was genuinely funny.
What is striking about Maher and his team is how little
they seem to know about their pet obsessions. Maybe it’s a Los Angeles thing,
but it is remarkable. Maher, for example, made an entire film about religion,
but in the course of a few minutes’ conversation with him (the last time I was
on the show, a few years ago), it became clear that he knew almost nothing
about the subject, e.g. the fact that there is an ancient and well-established
tradition of understanding the creation story in Genesis as metaphor rather
than as history and that the dispute over literalism is relatively new.
I had that in mind as Maher spoke enthusiastically about
the idea of having rich people “buy the Amazon” on the theory that their
ownership would give them an incentive to take care of it, which the government
of Brazil seems unable to do. This is, of course, an idea long associated with
the policy network supported by Charles and David Koch, particularly the
Property and Environment Research Center. The value of this line of advocacy
can be seen in, to take one example, the recovery of
the white-rhino population.
If Bill Maher really thinks that creating property rights
in the Amazonian rainforest would provide a good basis for conservation work,
then he should salute David Koch, among others. Welcome to the club, Bill.
It doesn’t end there, of course. I do not know if Bill
Maher cares very much about rhinos. I do know that he cares a great deal about
marijuana, but does not seem to understand that most of the policy work and
advocacy leading to the liberalization of marijuana laws in many states owes
its success to the support of the Koch network, and in part to the advocacy of National
Review and writers associated with it. When William F. Buckley Jr. was
arguing for drug legalization, it was Jesse Jackson, the
Democrats, and the progressives opposing him, in no small part because the
Left can always be counted upon to take a patronizing and paternalistic view
toward those it purports to represent. The Left is, of course, in the process
of trying to rewrite that history.
David Koch was a supporter of gay marriage, abortion
rights (unfortunately), marijuana legalization, and much else, in addition to
his straightforwardly philanthropic support of various worthy institutions, which
included a $100 million endowment for the New York City Ballet. The idea that
this was all part of a grand scheme to lower his taxes by 7 cents on the dollar
or to raise his net worth from $52 billion to $53 billion is preposterous. No
intelligent person in possession of the basic facts could possibly believe it.
Mobs, Greater and
Lesser
I was on the show to talk about The Smallest Minority:
Independent Thinking in an Age of Mob Politics, my energetic and
occasionally filthy jeremiad against the popular culture of our time and its
deformation of our political discourse. Bill Maher, too, considers himself an
opponent of mobs. And I think his heart is in the right place.
But he was nonplussed when I explained to him that the
Electoral College, which he says he hates, is one of the glories of our
Constitution, which is in most of its best features wonderfully antidemocratic.
The Bill of Rights, for example, which I sometimes describe as “America’s Great
Big List of Things You F***ing Idiots Don’t Get a Vote On,” puts certain rights
beyond democracy, beyond the vote. It does not matter if 70 percent or 90
percent or 99 percent or 100 percent of Americans believe that the New York
Times should be censored or that Muslims should be prohibited from
practicing their faith — the mob does not get to say so. Bill Maher and
likeminded critics complain that the Senate is where legislation goes to die,
apparently unaware that that is precisely what the Senate is there for,
and what its original design (as a body representing the states themselves
rather than the American people corporately, with senators chosen by state
legislators rather than by popular election) was intended to achieve.
The presidency, as originally conceived, also was
designed in part to provide a check against the democratic passions of the
House of Representatives. Unfortunately, the presidency has supplanted the
House in its role as witless and slavering tribune of the plebs. The Electoral
College helps to mitigate that a little bit by subjecting the presidency to 50
different mobs with different interests and different agendas rather than
having it be the creature of a single unitary mob. Forcing factions to compete
for power and influence in a way that frustrates the fickle and addled will of
We the People was baked into the American constitutional cake from the
beginning, for good reason. Bill Maher is probably smarter and better informed
than 80 percent of the electorate, and he often does not know what he is
talking about.
A Note to Writers
Those of us who can read along with Maher on the
teleprompter are bound to laugh a little when in the course of a diatribe about
someone else’s stupidity and illiteracy his writers write “guild [sic] the
lily.” Even in Hollywood, nobody forces a lily to join a union. In my role as a
newspaper editor, I used to see a lot of raw Associated Press copy, some of
which comes with the grammar and spelling of a deranged third-grader, and then
watch in wonder as these same illiterate journalists snickered at the ineloquence
of Dan Quayle or George W. Bush. We are all of us lucky to have good editors.
One Last Thing
I stopped Maher at one point during the show and scolded
him a little for having delivered what I rightly described as “a stupid, cheap
applause line.” The subject was abortion and my view that abortion should be
prohibited as a homicide. (If it is not a homicide, then it is nothing of any
importance; it is not tax evasion, or littering, or failing to use the right
font size in an OSHA poster.) “What about the men who get women pregnant” Maher
demanded. “Do you want to punish them, too? Huh?” I’ve heard 10,000 variations
on that line, and every one of them was stupid.
That line of argument in fact represents exactly what it
is we pro-lifers always are accused of by the pro-abortion camp: proposing to
punish people for having sex. As a political matter, meaning as a matter of
regulation, I do not care who has sex with whom, even a little bit. If we are
talking about consenting adults, I am perfectly content that the law remain
silent on the question of who and whom and how many and in what combination or
combinations — and even, contra my friend Madeleine Kearns, whether money
changes hands. Nor do I believe that the law should take any note of contraception.
I only insist that, if the sex should result in a pregnancy, we do not legally
permit the willful killing of individual living human organisms. I don’t care
about the sex — I care about the violence, about the killing.
It is strange that so many so-called liberals cannot
quite make out the difference between consensual sex and premeditated homicide,
and that they are so eager to punish people for engaging in consensual sex. Not
that they really believe it. They only believe that people will nod approvingly
or, in the case of a television audience, applaud like trained seals at the
concluding harrumph. No self-respecting person could take Maher’s
argument seriously — and that is true irrespective of anyone’s belief about
the question of abortion as such.
It is difficult to resist the urge to deliver vapid
applause lines, to please a crowd when one is in front of one. But we ought not
allow that temptation to cause us to say things that are, beyond question,
stupid. Living in abject need of the mob’s applause is no different from living
in abject fear of the mob’s criticism — it is to be a creature of the mob in
either case. The only freedom and independence are in learning to be equally
indifferent to both praise and obloquy.
(I’ll let you know when I’ve managed to achieve that.)
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