By Jonah Goldberg
Saturday, June 11, 2016
I am sitting here on the Acela barreling towards
Washington, D.C.
“Barreling” is a generous term for the relatively
plodding pace we’re taking. But I’m in a generous mood. And, frankly, who
isn’t? Why, the people on this train are celebrating like joyous Bolsheviks
moments after seizing the Winter Palace or after Bernie Sanders won the
Michigan primary. Everyone is grinning like Bill Clinton after the Secret
Service gives the “all clear” for the strippers to come out from their hiding
places underneath the bed and behind the window curtains. “Pantsuit One has
left the building, sir.”
It’s all hugs, smiles, backslapping, and joy for as far
as the eye can see. As I look out the window, I can see people skipping and
dancing to the tune of “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” as played out of their own butts.
Obviously, I’m referring to the wonder and glee that
comes from living in an age when a woman can finally be the presidential
nominee of a major political party.
Why, I wouldn’t be surprised if no one at all was reading
this “news”letter. I mean, why should I
bother when every street corner and crack-vial-strewn alleyway is now as
majestic and glorious as that alpine slope where Julie Andrews sings about how
the hills are alive with the sound of music?
Pro-Forma Passion
Sorry, none of this is the case. But you could be
forgiven for thinking so if you took Tuesday’s election-night coverage
seriously. I have no doubt some people — Donna Brazile, for instance — were
entirely sincere in their glee that a woman broke the “glass ceiling,” etc.
Others like Paul Begala were no doubt happy that their friend, and gravy train,
was that much closer to heading into White House Station.
But all in all, the lip-service about how thrilling it is
that a woman has finally become a major party nominee felt far less sincere
than the applause for Kim Jong-un’s demonstration of the latest technology at
North Korean Peoples’ Hula Hoop Factory No. 7. Over and over again Tuesday
night, anchors and pundits said, “Let’s just take a moment and appreciate the
historic nature of it all,” with all of the emotional intensity of a college
president required to talk about how excited he is to be at the ribbon-cutting
for the new faculty parking lot.
And, it is historic and good and all that. As the father
of a daughter, I’m glad this utterly inevitable and predictable moment with the
thing and the girls and the broken-glass whatever has happened.
It’s just that when I read this tweet from political
scientist Katy Perry — “A lot of little girls are in bed right now dreaming for
the first time, without limits. You broke the mold @HillaryClinton” — I felt
compelled to call b.s. on the whole thing.
First of all, this makes no sense. The whole idea of dreaming revolves around the fact dreams
don’t have limits. This is pretty much why we call them dreams instead of “Third Quarter Budget Proposals.” Last week I
dreamed about a bat-winged basset hound that harassed the local villagers by
flying in through their windows and aggressively napping in inconvenient
places. In another dream, Carrot Top was not only funny, he was a very large
rabbit who kept trying to eat his own head. Why just last night, Morpheus — the
god of dreams, not the guy from The
Matrix — planted in my mind a vision of the GOP nominating a mature and
principled conservative for 2016. In other words, the craziest s*** can happen
in dreams.
So the idea that Hillary Clinton’s nomination lifts one
of the final ectoplasmic shackles on the dreams of young girls strikes me as .
. . implausible.
It’s also ironic. While I have no problem with my
daughter — or any young girl — setting their sights on the White House, I would
dearly hope they don’t follow Hillary Clinton’s path to it. As Iowahawk put it,
“Hopefully Hillary will inspire a new generation of girls to marry ambitious
perverts who will pay off their embarrassment with Senate seats.”
However, if my kid’s takeaway is that she, too, can grow
up to give utterly banal speeches for a quarter of a million dollars a pop,
I’ll be like, “Follow your dreams, sweetheart.”
I mean, where else but America, or possibly Canada, can
you get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to sound like a cross between a
random cliché generator and Charlie Brown’s teacher?
Race, Gender, and
Uncategorical Hillary
Anyway, back to whatever point I was trying to make. Oh,
right. On Tuesday night, I was laughing watching all of the talking heads say
the right words with their mouths but yawn with their eyes. It was like on Seinfeld when everyone has to say “Not
that there’s anything wrong with that” or when newscasters insist on saying
“allegedly” even when they have video of the guy pleasuring himself in the
frozen-food section of the Winn-Dixie. It’s just something they have to say.
If you compare this moment to 2008, it becomes entirely
obvious that even for most hardcore liberals, Hillary Clinton’s accomplishment
isn’t nearly as emotionally exciting as Barack Obama’s was. Part of that has to
do with the differences between race and gender in American culture and
history. But that is a conversation for another time.
Besides, it has more to do with Hillary Clinton herself.
As I’ve written before, she really just isn’t a “woman” anymore.
Oh sure, she’s a woman in the biological sense, which is
kind of ironic given that her becoming the presumptive nominee comes at the
precise moment we’re being told that biological sexual categories are just
another way for the evil patriarchs of the Pale Penis People to keep everyone
down. Maybe Donald Trump should declare he’ll be the first woman president,
too?
No, my point is that Barack Obama was largely a blank
slate in 2008, and he was seen in no small part categorically as The First
Black President. That’s not the case with Hillary Clinton. She’s a known
quantity, love her or hate her. She is like one of her husband’s cold sores;
she’s been in plain sight for decades.
The fun part of all this is that what is a victory for
feminism is a setback for Clinton. That’s because on the merits, she’s not even
a fraction as interesting or exciting as the category. Another woman might have
excited all of those young Bernie Sanders fans early on in the primaries. But
they were more excited by breaking the taboo on socialist presidents than
female ones.
Sometimes the shadows fall very far short of the ideal in
Plato’s cave. It’s like a little kid who daydreams of getting a dog.
Dog-as-category dog fetches and does other tricks. Categorical dog protects you
from bullies and goes on adventures with you.
Then your parents get you a real dog and it’s a
three-legged narcoleptic Chihuahua with Irritable Bowel Syndrome.
Since I don’t want to be interpreted as calling Clinton a
dog, I will make the exact same point about a condo in Port Arthur, Texas. In
your imagination, it’s all pool parties and barbecues with beautiful people. In
reality, it’s sunburns, ridiculous condo fees, and a shared too-thin wall with
a hard-of-hearing dude who watches way too much Canadian porn. (“Oh yeah, baby,
what are you going to do aboot it?”)
In other words, Hillary Clinton isn’t about to bump her
head on any Platonic ideals any time soon. She’s boring, paranoid, corrupt, and
deceitful. If she had never been a martyr to her husband’s pants, she’d never
be within striking distance of being president. Spare me the talk about how in
private she’s so charming and wonderful. She’s had over 30 years to pull the
curtain back and show how great the real Mrs. Oz is. Instead she laughs like a
broken animatronic pirate at the Pirates of the Caribbean ride every time she’s
asked about the — alleged — felonies
she’s committed.
But let no one say they aren’t excited that she’s a
woman.
What Is Dead May
Never Die
Since my train is already blazing past Delaware I need to
start wrapping this up.
Earlier this week, I responded to an argument laid out by
Steve Hayward and “Decius” — one of the anonymous bloggers at the Journal of
American Greatness. In turn Decius posted a long and thoughtful response
lacking the bile and smarm that marks some other posts over there. And while I
think it makes some fine and clarifying points in the particulars, it is
fundamentally and dangerously wrong on one central claim. He writes, in part:
Here’s what’s really going on. The
old American ideal of judging individuals and not groups,
content-of-character-not-color-of-skin, is dead, dead, dead. Dead as a matter
of politics, policy and culture. The left plays by new rules. The right still
plays by the old rules. The left laughs at us for it — but also demands that we
keep to that rulebook. They don’t even bother to cheat. They proclaim outright
that “these rules don’t apply to our side.” They can be openly biased, and
justly so, because of past injustice, present white privilege and so on. But
for the right, it’s always 1963. And not the actual 1963 (which was bad) but
the 1963 of the March on Washington and the “I Have a Dream” speech (one of the
greatest ever, by the way), as if it were actually the law of the land right
now. Which, of course, it isn’t.
So Paul Ryan and the rest of the
pious right denounce Trump for undermining that noble vision, as if the left
hasn’t been undermining it in its own interests for the last 50 years. The left
demands that we pledge fealty to a colorblind society — which we at JAG think
is superior to any practical or theoretical alternative — that they have no
intention of honoring. They shame us into that fealty because they know that we
believe our principles demand it. They even know that, at some level, American
principles demand it. But they care much less about American principles than
about winning. They use our commitment to American principles the same way that
Islamic radicals in the West use Westerners’ commitment to Western principles
to cow us into acquiescing to anti-Western measures.
There’s much to debate, discuss and, yes, agree with
here, but if one cuts through the caveats and to-be-sures, Decius is saying
that the Right just needs to abandon its principles and fight the Left on its
terms. I think this is wrong across a number of analytical fronts.
Outside of Game of
Thrones, when something is “dead,
dead, dead,” that suggests it’s not coming back. It’s a lost cause and
practical-minded people should just accept it and move on. Well, I’m not a big
fan of lost-cause arguments, which helps explain why I am conservative in the
first place. As of a year ago, it would have seemed like a lost cause for those
who yearned for a thrice-married, short-fingered vulgarian statist huckster
from New York City to take over the GOP and rally the support of anonymous
Straussian luminaries. Now look where we are!
It’s certainly true that among activists and academics on
the left, the hypocrisies and double standards Decius points out (some of which
I’ve written about at length myself) are as pronounced and pernicious as he
describes. But in real life, I don’t think it’s nearly as bad as he suggests.
Popular culture certainly hasn’t given over to the bleak worldview he
describes. And, without wanting to sound like Peggy Noonan or Tom Friedman, who
draw sweeping political conclusions from the people they meet out in the world,
the blacks, Asians, and Hispanics I interact with — including liberal ones —
don’t strike me as anything like the sort of unreconstructed tribalists suggested
by Decius’s defeatism. The categories we talk about in politics don’t always
line up all that well with the way we actually live our lives.
One can see this most clearly with regard to women. To
listen to Hillary Clinton, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and the rest of her pride
of liberal lionesses, you would think every single woman in this country is a
pro-choice liberal Democrat. That’s just not the case.
Obviously, just because I reject Decius’s assertion that
this principle is dead thrice-over doesn’t mean I think it’s currently as
healthy as I would like. I know the JAG
guys don’t like my pop-culture references, but even so I’d say Decius would be
on better footing if he claimed this principle were “mostly dead” in the Princess Bride sense.
For what it’s worth, I don’t even think it’s “mostly
dead.” But even if it were, as Miracle Max says, mostly dead means a little
alive. Indeed, the only sure way for that principle to die, die, die is if
conservatives and libertarians in a fit of well-earned spite and frustration
shout “screw it!” and embrace identity-politics tribalism, too. In the wake of
last week’s “news”letter I’ve heard this argument from a great number of people
and trolls. I don’t care about the trolls, but I do wonder where the smart and
decent people think tribalism-uber-alles will lead over the long run?
I agree sticking to this principle puts us at a
disadvantage in fights with the Left. But that’s true of most conservative
principles. Certainly if conservatives turned their back on the free market, we
would “win” more fights with the Left. But would those victories be worth
anything? If we reject constitutionalism, we will get more policy victories.
Ditto abortion and countless social issues. Are the Straussians at JAG game for all that? Shall we only
fight on issues where our principles are popular or banal?
Decius says that liberals “use our commitment to American
principles the same way that Islamic radicals in the West use Westerners’
commitment to Western principles to cow us into acquiescing to anti-Western
measures.”
Okay, so should we all just convert to Islam and be done
with it then? Or, maybe we should be Christian versions of Islamists? Where is
this analogy supposed to take us? Surely some Western principles are worth the
price of upkeep?
Yes, our principles make politics harder. Yes, maybe we
could be more flexible and realistic in some of our fights and — as I’ve been
saying for years — conservatives definitely need to take persuasion more
seriously. But to ask conservatives to bury the “dead, dead, dead” principle of
individualism asks too much under the best of circumstances. To ask it in the
context of helping Donald Trump? Pass.
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