By Kevin D. Williamson
Sunday, February 12, 2017
One of the less understood criticisms of progressivism is
that it is totalitarian, not in the sense that kale-eating Brooklynites want to
build prison camps for political nonconformists (except for the ones who want
to lock up global-warming skeptics) but in the sense that it assumes that there
is no life outside of politics, that there is no separate sphere of private
life, and that church, family, art, and much else properly resides within that
sphere.
Earlier this week, I expressed what seemed to me an unobjectionable
opinion: that politics has a place, that politics should be kept in its place,
and that happy and healthy people and societies have lives that are separate
from politics. The response was dispiriting but also illuminating.
Among those who directed tut-tuts in my direction was
Patti Bacchus, who writes about education for the Vancouver Observer. “That’s one of the most privileged things I’ve
ever heard,” she sniffed. Patti Bacchus is the daughter of Charles Balfour, a
Vancouver real-estate entrepreneur, and attended school at Crofton House, a
private girls’ school whose alumni include Pat (Mrs. William F.) Buckley. It is
one of the most expensive private schools in Canada. I do enjoy disquisitions
on “privilege” from such people. But of course her criticism is upside-down: It
is exactly we privileged people with education, comfortable lives, and spare
time who expend the most energy on politics. But there are other pressing
priorities, like paying the rent, for poor people. If Ms. Bacchus would like to
pay a visit to West Texas, I’ll introduce her to some.
Another objection came from a correspondent who demanded:
“What if politics greatly impacts every facet of your life?” That would be an
excellent question if it came from some poor serf living in one of the states
our American progressives so admire, such as Cuba or Venezuela, where almost
every aspect of life is under political discipline, where government controls
whether you eat — and, indeed, whether you breathe. But if you live in the United
States and politics greatly impacts every facet of your life, you have mental
problems, or you are a politician.
(But I repeat myself.)
Esar’s Comic
Dictionary (1943) contains two definitions of the word “fanatic,” often
wrongly attributed (by me, among others) to Winston Churchill: First, “A person
who redoubles his efforts after having forgotten his aims.” Second (my
favorite), “One who can’t change his opinion and won’t change the subject.”
If you want to see fanaticism at work, try looking for a
roommate in Washington or New York City.
From the New York
Times we learn of the emergence of the “no-Trump clause” in housing ads in
our liberal (which is to say, illiberal) metropolitan areas. The idea is
nothing new — I saw similar “No Republicans Need Apply” ads years ago when
looking for apartments in Washington and New York — but the intensity seems to
have been turned up a measure or two: In 2017, the hysteria knob goes up to
eleven. Katie Rogers of the Times
offers an amusingly deadpan report:
In one recent ad, a couple in the
area who identified themselves as “open-minded” and liberal advertised a $500
room in their home: “If you’re racist, sexist, homophobic or a Trump supporter
please don’t respond. We won’t get along.”
That’s a funny kind of open-mindedness — it is in fact
literal prejudice. It is also illiterate: Whatever Donald Trump’s defects, to
associate him with homophobia is a stretch to the point of dishonesty, inasmuch
as Trump in 2017 is well to the liberal side of Barack Obama in 2008 on gay
marriage. Trump’s personal style is abrasive and confrontational, but he also
is on the actual policy issues arguably the most moderate Republican president
of the modern era, one who often has boasted of taking a more progressive view
of such issues as abortion, gay rights, gun control, raising taxes on Wall
Street, and what we used to call “industrial policy.” Given his history in and
with the Democratic party, this is unsurprising.
But, as Robin Hanson put it, politics
isn’t about policy.
What it is about is tribe, which is what makes all that
conflation of racism and bigotry with political difference so amusing.
Political prejudice is not the moral equivalent of racial prejudice, but they
operate in very similar ways, as anybody who ever has spent much time around a
genuine racist or anti-Semite knows. Taxes too high? Blame the blacks. Not
making enough money? Blame the Mexicans. Foreign policy seem overwhelmingly
complex? Blame the Jews. Whataburger gave you a full-on corn-syrup Coke instead
of a Diet Coke? Blame the blacks, Mexicans, Jews, subcontinental immigrants . .
. somebody. Racism and anti-Semitism are metaphysical creeds, and those who
adhere to these creeds see the work of the agents of evil everywhere. For them,
there is no world outside race and racism.
In this, they are very similar to the Hillary
Clinton–voting Manhattan balletomanes who seethe that they must endure being
seated in the David Koch theater. David Koch’s brand of libertarianism is mild
and constructive, and it has about as much to do with ballet as Keith Olbermann
has to do with astrophysics. But for the fanatic, even to hear the name spoken
is unbearable.
Imagine being so mentally poisoned and so spiritually
sick that you feel the need to organize a protest
at New York–Presbyterian Hospital because the institution accepted $100
million — the largest gift in its history, being put to purely philanthropic
health-care purposes — from someone whose political views are at odds with your
own. Imagine what it must be like to feel that doing that is a moral
imperative. Imagine sitting down to listen to a Beethoven
string quartet and being filled with paralyzing anxiety that the cellist
might not share your views on the Arab–Israeli conflict.
(I’ll bet Beethoven had really regressive views about gay
marriage. And who knows what Bach or Bernini thought about tax policy?)
Imagine being willing to take a stranger into your home
only on the condition that he did not vote for the man who won the 2016
presidential election. One of those Trump-excluding roommates mentioned in the Times insisted that this discrimination
was in the interest of the Trump voters, too, who would be unhappy in a
household full of “raging liberals.”
Meditate, for a moment, upon the word “raging.”
The people who believe that there can be no art,
literature, culture, or life apart from politics are people who do not
understand art, literature, culture, or politics, and whose lives are sad and
sadly deficient.
A Buddhist writer once described two kinds of material
unhappiness: the absence of what one desires and the presence of what one
despises. But the Buddha was known to associate with worldly men and their
unclean enthusiasms in much the same way that Jesus slummed around with
prostitutes and tax collectors, instructing us by example to seek after lives
that are as large as our love and not as small as our hatred. The people who
close their doors against those who simply see the world in a different way,
who scream profanities at Betsy DeVos or chant “You should die!” at Jewish
musicians, are people who cannot rise far enough above their own pettiness to
understand that the thing they fear is the thing they are.
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