By Kevin D. Williamson
Tuesday, July 28, 2020
I suppose it is normal to be sophomoric when you are a
sophomore, but I was a junior in high school when Clayton Williams and Ann Richards
faced off in the Texas gubernatorial election. Richards was a hero of Democrats
from coast to coast thanks to her insult-comic practice of politics, and
Clayton Williams was Donald Trump before Donald Trump was; i.e., a boorish rich
man with no obvious preparation for the office he sought and a penchant for
saying stupid and ugly things. Richards won that one, but Texas has never yet
elected another Democratic governor.
It was a close race, and the yard-sign action was pretty
hot in Lubbock, Texas, especially in the parts of town where college professors
and other imported progressives were likely to live. I had a stridently
left-wing American-history teacher, a would-be union organizer who taught the
crime-spree version of American history, which, in her curriculum, consisted of
very little other than slavery, the Trail of Tears, and the Triangle Shirtwaist
fire. She was mad for Ann Richards, of course (Richards, like Lyndon Johnson,
had been a schoolteacher, giving social-studies classes at Fulmore Junior High
School in Austin, the name of which has been changed because Zachary Taylor
Fulmore served as a private in the Confederate army) and believed Clayton
Williams to be the devil incarnate. So we took a couple of Clayton Williams
signs and planted them in place of the Ann Richards signs on her front yard,
out of juvenile meanness. She did a little Three Stooges–worthy
slapstick when she witnessed the vandalism. It was gratifying. We returned her
signs, mostly because we wanted to take credit for the prank, which she didn’t
think was as funny as we did.
(Technically, we were pre-sophomores, because sophomore
properly refers to the university years rather than to high school.)
As I have mentioned before, I live in a pretty
assertively lefty neighborhood (big cities in Texas are a lot like big cities
in the rest of the country) surrounded by diehards who are not going to take
the “Beto for Senate” stickers off
their Audis. (Forgive me for quoting myself: “We admire our neighborhood for
its diversity: There are white people with Audis, black people with Audis,
Latino people with Audis, Asian people with Audis, gay people with Audis . .
.”) But they are mostly nice people, and we rarely talk about politics. Sure,
all that “Black Lives Matter”
paraphernalia does sometimes give one the sneaking suspicion that these nice
white progressives are trying very, very hard to elide the fact that they all
live north of the street that forms a socioeconomic Berlin Wall between our
neighborhood and the poor and largely non-white one to the south, that they’re
all over here with the nice restaurants with vegan options and the new coffee
shop and the National Review guy rather than a few blocks away with The People.
But there have been two little eruptions of political nonconformism
in the precincts. In one instance, a modest little Trump yard sign made an
appearance, and lasted a day or two. I do not know what happened to it, but it
is gone. In the second episode, a big “Trump
2020” flag went up in front of a neighbor’s house. (The tragedy of
gentrification is that it doesn’t happen all at once.) That announced a little
escalating arms race on the block: A Biden sign went up directly across the
street, and then — in case anybody missed it — there were two Biden
signs in the same yard. (You know who needs to be told twice? Joe Biden.) Other
little eruptions followed. Random bearded hipster pedestrians passing by
pointed out my neighbors’ Trump flag to denounce it. With my mouth I said,
“People like what they like,” and with my heart I said, “Keep walking, hippie,
and don’t slow down.”
And then the Trump flag was gone.
I assume somebody stole the flag or that the neighbors
were bullied into taking it down. (I haven’t had a chance to ask and haven’t
really gone looking for one. Good emotional fences make good neighbors.) I
suppose it is just barely possible that they could have had a late July change
of political heart after reading something in the back pages of The
Economist, but these particular neighbors don’t seem the constantly-rethinking-my-priors
type. Given a choice between the people with the Trump flag and the smug
hipster snoot stopping randomly on the street to gossip about how awful it is
that somebody has a Trump flag, I’ll take a hard pass on the eye-rolling dopes
spilling a fair-trade almond-milk latte on my Kentucky 31. I don’t give a
flying MacGuffin how my neighbors vote.
There’s an art to neighborliness. It is simultaneously
libertarian and communitarian. If we would be good citizens, we should first be
good neighbors.
Neighborliness requires us to abide by Russell Kirk’s
“principle of variety,” to cultivate our “affection for the proliferating
intricacy of long-established social institutions and modes of life, as
distinguished from the narrowing uniformity and deadening egalitarianism of
radical systems.” The radical systems that Kirk refers to are all at heart
totalitarian in the sense that they recognize no community apart from or
superior to the factional community. For the old-time Communist or the modern
practitioner of political correctness, the shadow line runs through everything,
and there is a choice between good and evil when it comes to every pronoun,
every book, every magazine and newspaper, every film, every social-media
account, every breakfast, every dinner, every relationship and friendship, etc.
The monstrosity of cancel culture is in its refusal to make room for private
life, private conscience, and private differences. The tendency to make
totalizing creeds out of political ideologies is by no means reserved to the
obvious old jackboot-and-manifesto ideologies of socialism, fascism, etc. Ayn
Rand’s pseudo-philosophy of Objectivism was, as has been noted elsewhere, in
practice an aesthetic and a complete lifestyle demanding allegiance not only in
politics and economics but in everything from taste in music to
interior-decorating styles.
The totalizing instinct is to be found everywhere,
including in a now-famous passage from Ibram X. Kendi’s new book, Everybody
Who Disagrees with Me Is a Racist. (Oh, that’s not the real title, but it
may as well be.) Professor Kendi writes: “There is no such thing as a nonracist
or race-neutral policy. Every policy in every institution in every community in
every nation is producing or sustaining either racial inequity or equity
between racial groups.” Which is to say: This ideology demands affirmation and
obedience for everybody everywhere in all circumstances — pure totalitarianism.
Progressives used to scoff at that kind of “if you’re not with me, you’re against
me!” talk, when it was deployed by George W. Bush in the campaign against
jihadists. Of course Professor Kendi is writing the purest nonsense inasmuch as
it is very easy to think of policies adopted by institutions that neither
sustain racial inequality nor ameliorate it. (The limit of ten items or fewer —
fewer, not less, damn your eyes! — in the express lane does not
have any meaningful racial consequences. Especially at Trader Joe’s.) And even
race-conscious policies get pretty complicated: California’s desire to use
racial discrimination in college admissions would in theory make things easier
for members of one racial minority (African Americans) while making things
harder for members of another racial minority (Asian Americans). The doctrine of
“intersectionality” is intended to help sort that kind of thing out by imposing
a rule under which such decisions are basically left to a committee composed of
Professor Ibram X. Kendi, Professor Ibram X. Kendi, and Professor Ibram X.
Kendi. Dissenters will be cast into the outer darkness.
“Intersectionality” is a kind of mutant neighborliness in
that it recognizes that people belong simultaneously to many different
communities but attempts to impose hierarchical political discipline on the
natural organic diversity of human life. Genuine neighborliness, on the other
hand, accommodates genuine diversity, and it honors the different communities
to which we all belong by treating them as real and meaningful human
connections rather than as lines on a utopian org chart. In the abstract, this
is what makes genuine human community possible. Practically, what it means is
that I don’t want to see the restaurant down the street fail financially
because I suspect its owners have a different view of abortion than I do. It
also means that I prefer a community in which norms of privacy, toleration, and
property rights are scrupulously observed to one in which casual vandalism is
accepted as long as it is directed at sufficiently unpopular people. We cannot
put people outside of the considerations of neighborliness without doing
violence to the community as a whole. Neighborliness is necessarily inclusive,
though it also is exclusive in the sense that it thrives best where boundaries
and limitations are observed.
“And who is my neighbor?” a certain lawyer asked. As it turns out, there is a pretty good answer to that question, if you are willing to hear it. It begins with an ill-advised journey to Jericho. . . .
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