By Kevin D. Williamson
Thursday, May 09, 2019
How to explain Brian Sims? None of the three most likely
possibilities — that he is not very bright, that he is insane, that he is a
fanatic — speaks very well of the Pennsylvania state representative, who for
some reason decided to accost an elderly woman praying silently in front of an
abortion facility, to film the attack, and then to boast about it on Twitter.
It is tempting to lean toward stupidity as an explanation
for Sims’s shenanigans, if only because that is the most statistically likely
scenario when the subject in question is a member of the Pennsylvania state
legislature, as witless a collection of moldering goofs and ravening
mediocrities as you will find in any of our state capitals.
But let’s not give short shrift to the insanity option.
Sims — who holds elected office and previously worked for the Philadelphia Bar
Association — offered a cash bounty to his social-media followers for
identifying information with which to “dox” three teenage girls who were
praying outside the same clinic. Mentally normal adult men do not go around
photographing teenaged girls and then trolling for their names on social media
in order to facilitate harassing them. Generally speaking, adult men who go
around taking photographs of teenaged girls are considered creeps; Representative
Sims is a homosexual, which may spare him the charge of lechery in this matter,
but his behavior is still pretty weird.
The times being what they are, perhaps we should classify
political fanaticism of the social-media performance-art variety as a kind of
insanity. Political fanatics such as Sims live in the shadows between the idée fixe and outright monomania. The
inferior kind — and Sims is the inferior kind — fixate on terminology as a
substitute for ideas, and for them buzzwords are a necessary intellectual
crutch. Hence, Sims’s shouty accusations of “white privilege” in the face of a
young woman who, as she pointed out with a smile, is not white. Intersectionality — it is a bitch.
What should be remarkable (but is not remarkable) about
the Sims video is the superficiality and banality of his thinking. His
political arguments are utterly sophomoric, e.g. demanding that the elderly
lady interrupt her Rosary to tell him how many unwanted children she is
clothing and feeding. The taunt is childish: No one ever asks critics of
capital punishment how many murderers they’re willing to bring into their
homes. The Pennsylvania state legislature is not the Olympus of politics, but
even that repulsive body deserves better than this stuff. It would be tempting
to describe this as dorm-room discourse, but most kindergartens do not have
dormitories.
Some fanatics are dangerous. Almost all of them are
boring. They are tedious in themselves and the cause of tediousness in others.
Forgive me for repeating this story: I once had a student who discovered the
Palestinian cause in college, as a certain kind of WASP suburbanite does, and
she endeavored to turn every conversation to the evils of Israel, rarely
speaking a sentence that did include the word “Zionist,” which she pronounced
in a distinctly low-pH way. I shared with her Winston Churchill’s observation
that a fanatic is “a man who can’t change his mind and won’t change the
subject.” She did not miss a beat. “Exactly. It’s like when you’re debating
with a Zionist . . .”
Representative Sims is a low kind of man with a low kind
of mind, but Representative Sims is, in fact, representative. In our time, politics has become a very strong part
of some people’s identities, fundamental to their self-conception. Partly it
fills the hole left by the attenuation of religion, but it is also a kind of
identity politics for — Representative Sims surely will appreciate the irony —
college-educated white people. People without a politically piquant demographic
characteristic (and being gay ain’t what it used to be) sometimes use affinity
groups as a substitute, seeking in being a vegan or a socialist or a Hamas
apologist the solidarity, cohesion, and social cachet they imagine African
Americans or transgender decathletes enjoying by virtue of their membership in
those ranks. They take up political causes just as some young people take up
exotic religions, in the same way and for the same reason.
Representative Sims is an adult man and an elected
representative in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Watching his rage-monkey
videos, one wonders: “Does he not hear himself?”
Of course he hears himself. He doesn’t hear anything
else.
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