By Kevin D. Williamson
Tuesday, August 11, 2020
Right-leaning writers hawking books about virtue
and character used to go on and on about the moral dangers of the
welfare state, the spiritual deadening caused by dependency, the “culture of
victimhood,” passivity, lack of personal agency — and they grew strangely quiet
right around the time a bunch of white people in the suburbs and rural areas
started dying from opioids and rallying around the banner of Donald Trump,
whose populist-nationalist politics offered them both patronage and a barely
plausible justification for their embrace of dependency, which is what
all patron-client politics ultimately comes down to.
The about-face was remarkable, hence much remarked-upon.
When it was young, poor African Americans and Puerto Ricans dying of heroin
overdoses in New York City under Mayor John Lindsay (“demand
a recount!”), the preferred solution was tougher policing and longer prison
sentences, a prescription that held for a generation with the enthusiastic
support of Joe Biden, among others. In the early 21st century, when it was young
white men from modest-to-affluent backgrounds dying of prescription-painkiller
abuse in Governor Robert J. Bentley’s Alabama, the entrepreneurs of Virtue,
Inc. did their best imitation of the tweedy sociological liberals they once
mocked and began snuffling out “root causes” like so many shiny pink
truffle-hunters. (And I don’t mean Der
Truffeljäger von Zuffenhausen.) Our progressive friends insist that
this is racism prima facie, but, then, they also insist that it is evidence of
racism if Mitt Romney orders oatmeal for breakfast.
(He seems like an oatmeal guy, no?)
What it is, of course, is what John Lindsay’s opponent in
1965 (a fellow by the name of Bill Buckley) said he proposed to take on:
“interest-group liberalism,” large-scale bloc politics organized around
patronage and political protection.
Of course, in the case of the United States,
interest-group politics often is racial politics. The GOP’s growing
indifference to civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s and the Democrats’ embrace
of civil-rights legislation at approximately the same time were two reactions to
one political reality: that black voters had abandoned the Republicans for the
Democrats, that this was unlikely to change in the foreseeable future, and that
this necessarily would influence political calculations in all sorts of ways,
not all of them happy. The historian Doris Kearns Goodwin reports that Johnson
described the situation in the crudest political terms: “These Negroes, they’re
getting pretty uppity these days and that’s a problem for us, since they’ve got
something now they never had before: the political pull to back up their
uppityness.” Senator Goldwater, an NAACP member and a lifelong opponent of
segregation (his
activism in Phoenix is an underappreciated story), was making essentially
the same calculation at the same time with his advice to “hunt where the ducks
are,” more or less giving up on the votes of the 12 percent of Americans who
are black in pursuit of the votes of the 88 percent of Americans who are not.
Political coalitions are temporary manifestations of
fluid cultural conditions, and part of the friction in democratic politics come
from the fact that institutional inertia ensures that the political coalitions
often outlast the underlying cultural conditions. There isn’t any obvious
reason for the Teamsters to be in a coalition with the transgender ideologues
and Black Lives Matter, just as there isn’t any real reason for the proponents
of what in the rest of the world is known as liberalism (free markets,
limited government, the rule of law, etc.) to be in coalition with the NATPOP
elements on the right, which incline toward étatisme, autocracy, and
mercantilism.
But political coalitions are funny and unpredictable
things. Right now, many on the right are celebrating President Donald Trump’s
unconstitutional practice of patronage politics; i.e., his issuing executive
orders assuming prerogatives that the president does not properly have. (Rush
Limbaugh approves, National Review dissents.)
In substance, President Trump’s recent foray might as well have come from
Elizabeth Warren: student-loan
forbearance, extended
unemployment benefits, etc. Conservative radio host Mike Gallagher was
typical in mocking the idea that anybody should “give
a damn about the constitutionality of this” because — well, because!
“That cat’s been out of the bag for a long time,” he says by way of
nonexplanation. How is this different from the executive orders from Barack
Obama that conservatives denounced? “People are frightened right now!”
Gallagher insists. Well. People on food stamps may be frightened of losing
them, illegal aliens may be frightened of being deported, soldiers may be
frightened of war — but that is not how we expect leaders to go about making
decisions, is it? Surely President Obama also was responding to genuine fear
and anxiety with, say, DACA, but that doesn’t change the fact that his actions
were unconstitutional.
But whose fear and anxiety is being responded to?
That, of course, is the skeleton key to democratic politics.
What might it take to get the Right to discover the
ancient and hard-won wisdom about the limits of patron-client politics? The
Upper West Side in agony might be a good place to start. The indispensable New
York Post has published an excellent selection of reporting and commentary
about current conditions in Manhattan neighborhoods into which Mayor Bill de
Blasio has relocated a portion of the city’s homeless population, moving them
from shelters into hotels, many of which have seen their revenue collapse
because of the coronavirus epidemic and the lockdowns. One of the benefits of
moving the homeless into hotels is that it gives them more privacy, which
contributes to individual dignity; one of the problems with moving the homeless
into hotels is that it gives them more privacy, which is not the best thing for
a population that includes many mentally ill drug addicts who would benefit
from more rigorous supervision.
The results are more or less what you would imagine:
people shooting up heroin in public, urinating and defecating on the sidewalks,
and generally terrorizing the elbow patches right off of the Upper West Siders.
Curtis Sliwa, the scarlet stormcrow of New York City, is leading red-beret
patrols, no doubt to the amusement of David Dinkins.
Decades of progress can be washed away in a day or two,
as Steve Cuozzo reports:
“We’re back to where we were fifty
years ago,” longtime area resident Michael D’Onofrio told the Post —
referring to the area’s decrepit and dangerous conditions in the 1970s. Don
Evans, a restaurant operator and consultant who lives one block away, fumed,
“This f—ing mayor. He wants to piss people off.”
Evans, chairman of the Taste of the
Upper West Side food festivals, said, “A lot of people on the Upper West Side
are away now. They’re going to be shocked when they get back to the city.”
Donald Trump and Bill de Blasio have a great deal in
common. They are both New Yorkers (de Blasio having moved around a bit before
settling there), both have populist pretensions, and both are really quite
extraordinarily bad at their jobs. (The tragedy of Donald Trump vs. Hillary
Rodham Clinton in 2016 is that it was not a race for mayor of New York City, a
position in which either one of them might have done a pretty good job, or at
least a better job than Bill de Blasio has managed.) And both Trump and de
Blasio are, in this case, attempting to react to a set of urgent conditions
created by the ongoing emergency of the coronavirus epidemic. In a sense, the
example of the de Blasio–Trump parallel is even more dire if you imagine
the facts on the ground to be the result of the efforts of two men making a
good-faith effort at doing the right thing as each understands it. To believe
our national situation or New York City’s local situation to be the result of
malice would be, in comparison, comforting.
This might be understood as a crisis of democracy. By
that, I do not mean that democracy is gripped by a crisis but rather that
democracy is the crisis. Coalition-building is a natural and healthy
part of democratic politics — that is one of the important functions performed
by political parties. But a democracy of nothing more than the arithmetic of
bloc politics, without direction or organizing principle, ends up mired in
error and chaos. The lesson of populists from Huey Long to Hugo Chávez to Donald
Trump is that populism’s politics of “the People” as a valorized abstraction
always and everywhere fails the people who actually live and work in the world.
Leo Strauss:
Modern democracy, so far from being
universal aristocracy, would be mass rule were it not for the fact that the
mass cannot rule but is ruled by elites, i.e., groupings of men who for
whatever reason are on top or have a fair chance to arrive at the top; one of
the most important virtues required for the smooth working of democracy, as far
as the mass is concerned, is said to be electoral apathy, i.e., lack of public spirit;
not indeed the salt of the earth but the salt of modern democracy are those
citizens who read nothing except the sports page and the comic section.
Democracy is then not indeed mass
rule but mass culture. A mass culture is a culture which can be appropriated by
the meanest capacities without any intellectual and moral effort whatsoever and
at a very low monetary price.
Strauss wrote that in the course of an essay about the
purpose of liberal education. The following sentences read:
Democracy, even if it is only
regarded as the hard shell which protects the soft mass culture, requires in
the long run qualities of an entirely different kind: qualities of dedication, of
concentration, of breadth and of depth. Thus we understand most easily what
liberal education means here and now. Liberal education is the counter-poison
to mass culture, to the corroding effects of mass culture, to its inherent
tendency to produce nothing but “specialists without spirit or vision and
voluptuaries without heart.” Liberal education is the ladder by which we try to
ascend from mass democracy to democracy as originally meant.
The liberal education to which Strauss refers is in part
an education in civic virtues, an education for citizenship. It is
simultaneously an education for leadership and an education for followership.
How to get to 270 in the Electoral College or 51 in the Senate is by no means a
trivial question. But those are questions of means. The question of ends
may be answered in a limited and short-term way with a candidate’s campaign
proposals or a party’s platform. And that is not trivial, either. But there is
a still higher question to be answered, one that cannot be satisfactorily
settled at the ballot box or by the superficial and truistic language of democratic
coalition-building politics. Bill Buckley talked about the politics of “free
false teeth.” We might ask: Who gets them? Who pays for them? Who wins the
contract for providing them? We might even wonder how various false-teeth
proposals poll in the swing states.
But that would be only a modest ambition in the service
of a republic that is, at the moment, in need of a more difficult kind of
service.
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