By Kevin D.
Williamson
Tuesday, April
13, 2021
Not that everybody is enchanted with
everything they read in this space. Far from it.
Last week, I wrote a couple of pieces that
irritated readers Right and Left. And so, proceeding in a politically
dextrosinistral fashion . . .
A number of right-leaning readers wrote
in, occasionally spitting with rage, to protest my suggestion
that the time is ripe for a bipartisan deal on gun policy. The refrain was, for the most part: “No
compromise!” Some of the less verbal among the critics sent cartoons of
Lucy van Pelt pulling the football away from Charlie Brown. The usual
right-wing social-media accounts desperate to draft off of National Review’s traffic did the sort of thing they usually do, in
the usual sad-clown fashion. And to think: It was only a few years ago these
folks were talking up The Art of the Deal.
Here’s some negotiating advice: When the
other side offers you something you want, take it.
Of particular interest to me was former
Brady Campaign director Dan Gross’s column in the New York Times,
in which he forthrightly conceded that if our goal is reducing the level of
criminal violence in these United States in a meaningful fashion, then focusing
on mass-shooting events (which claim fewer lives every year than do firearms
accidents) and pressing for policies such as a ban on so-called assault weapons
is not the way to go. Gross suggested several possible courses of action,
including doing more to investigate and prosecute gun-trafficking operations.
So, if you are keeping score: Gross supports an assault-weapons ban in
principle, writing, “I believe there is no place in civilized society for guns
that are made for the express purpose of killing people,” which is a case
against the Second Amendment per se — the right enshrined therein isn’t about
pheasant hunting. I, along with most other gun-rights advocates, would oppose
such a ban. But the action item here isn’t what we disagree about — it’s what
we agree about. If there are more like Gross, willing to put the “assault
weapons” issue on the back burner (I don’t expect them to set it aside
entirely) and instead work with conservatives on trafficking and straw buyers —
something many Second Amendment advocates have been seeking for years — then why
on God’s green earth should we pass up the chance to take “Yes” for an answer?
Conservatives — and, specifically, elected
Republicans — still have not learned the lesson they should have taken from
getting so thoroughly rope-a-doped by Barack Obama on health care back in 2009.
During the health-care debate, Democrats offered up some policies that ranged
from the mediocre to the positively bad, and Republicans responded by
insisting, almost with one voice, “We
have the best health-care system in the world! Harrumph!” Even if
Republicans had been right about that — and they weren’t — that would have been
political malpractice of the worst kind. Millions and millions of Americans
wanted (and still want) to see big changes to our health-care system, not
because of ideology but because of risk aversion — medical bills are
unpredictable, insurance benefits can be difficult to understand and manage,
plans linked to employers are inherently insecure, etc. Americans were worried
about losing their insurance, getting a surprise medical bill for tens of
thousands of dollars, or having a condition excluded from coverage by their
insurers on some self-serving pretext. Lecturing these people that they should
just be grateful for what they have was a political loser, to be sure, but it
was also — and this still matters! — bad policy, there being considerable room
for improvement in the American system.
Gun control is an issue in which Kulturkampf considerations
often trump empirical considerations and reasoned exchange, which is why Gross
is not having much luck moving progressives in his direction. But facts are
facts: The United States does have a great deal of criminal violence, more than
does any comparable country, and while the fundamental problem is that
Americans are simply violent people — which is why we also have more knife
homicide and big-heavy-rock homicides than other countries — a criminal with a
firearm is more dangerous than a criminal with a baseball bat or a knife. Mass
shootings do not account for many deaths (relatively speaking), but they are a
genuine cultural phenomenon. As with health care, millions of Americans are
dissatisfied with the violent-crime situation in our country. Conservatives
should be dissatisfied, too. The Democrats are ready to offer an array of bad
policies, and the Republicans are ready to offer Americans, for the most
part, squat.
(We never did see that great Donald Trump
health-care plan, did we?)
But gun trafficking is a real thing, and
straw-buying is a real thing, and there is no Second Amendment reason we should
be protecting the felons involved in those crimes. Every time a Democrat says
Republicans aren’t willing to do anything about guns, the Republicans should be
pushing back: Okay, how about we lay down a mandatory minimum of ten
years in federal prison for straw-buyers and traffickers and then make sure
U.S. attorneys will actually get off their collective asses and prosecute those
cases? How about we use the levers of federal power to encourage local
prosecutors to prioritize those cases, too? How about we stop giving probation
in weapons cases — when we don’t fail to prosecute them at all — and start
putting these offenders in jail for real? You want to crack down on illegal-gun
trafficking? Then let’s get cracking.
Joe Biden is out there talking about
“ghost guns,” which are used in about as many murders as LEGO bricks or corn
starch. Republicans ought to be responding with real policies designed to put
real pressure on real criminals. They ought to be pushing everywhere, from the
federal level to city hall, for improvements in mental-health care, too, which
could help not only with violent crime but also with the persistent vagrancy in
our cities.
But rather than flooding the zone with
better policies, Republicans demand instead displays of mood
affiliation. For Republican-oriented partisans and
media entrepreneurs, the world is always ending, because their business model
insists that the world always be ending, and their enemy is not proponents of
bad policies — their enemy is anybody who thinks, acts, or talks as though the
world is not ending.
Which it isn’t.
The cultivation of hysteria for fun and
profit is a fine way to program a talk-radio station but a terrible way to run
a country.
Moving On . . .
Some of you may have heard that I wrote a
piece headlined, “Why Not Fewer
Voters?” This inspired some prepackaged hysteria
from our friends on the left. It is impossible to overestimate the stupidity
and intellectual dishonesty of, to take one example, the response offered by
Ben Mathis-Lilley at Slate, under the appropriately hysterical
headline, “National Review Comes
Out Against Democracy, Explicitly.” The problem, Mathis-Lilley argues, is that
conservatives at NR and elsewhere are “cracking under the strain of the
Republican Party’s current unpopularity,” particularly in regard to Donald
Trump’s failure to win reelection.
Do you know with whom the Republican Party
currently is unpopular and has been for a good long while? Your obedient
correspondent.
Mathis-Lilley cites me, Dan McLaughlin,
and Andrew C. McCarthy in making his case for traumatized Republicans and Trump
enthusiasts. But it is difficult to make his analysis line up with his choice
of subjects: Insofar as this is about me and my political preferences, I don’t
think it’s very likely that I’m going to be driven mad by the inability of a
party to which I do not belong to reelect a candidate I opposed. McLaughlin,
too, declined to support
Trump in 2020, citing, among other things, the
president’s “racially inflammatory rhetoric toward Mexican immigrants, Muslim
refugees, and black protestors, while getting badly tongue-tied when discussing
white nationalists,” yet Mathis-Lilley would have you believe that he is in
some way an ally of “psychotic white-power militias.” My more indulgent friend
Andy McCarthy, for his part, argued that Trump was unfit for the office, unprincipled, hobbled by
“consuming narcissism, nonstop dissembling, infantile outbursts, inability to
admit error, withering attacks on well-meaning officials he entices into
working for him,” but, all in all, still a better choice than Joe Biden.
Given all that, I’m not entirely sure
Mathis-Lilley is on precisely the right track here.
But the facts don’t matter. There was a
prefab narrative, ready for deployment, insisting that Republicans are
anti-democracy (for reasons of racism, obviously) and that’s what the story was
going to say — even when the writer in question, me in this case, is not a
Republican. Heather Cox Richardson, among others, mischaracterized me as a
Republican, because it fits the flow of the argument even if it doesn’t fit the
facts. She corrected herself after I pointed out the error and criticized her
sloppy journalism, protesting in her own defense, “I am not a journalist.” And
I hope the professor will forgive me for insisting on the point, but: If you
are publishing a newsletter about current politics, then you are in the
journalism business, and, irrespective of what you call yourself,
the question is whether you are going to be a competent and responsible
journalist or the other kind.
As expected, no one on the left has made
anything approaching a serious response to my arguments, in some cases because
they haven’t bothered to read them at all (this is obvious in some
circumstances) or because they aren’t packing the gear to do so. And I’m still
comfortable denying the vote to felons and teenagers.
Instead of a real discussion, what we get
on the left is the mirror image of we get on too much of the right:
performative hysteria. Right-wing performative hysteria and left-wing
performative hysteria are, in fact, part of a single unitary phenomenon, which
is not really politics as such but something closer to a blend of group therapy
and role-playing game. It’s dumb and it’s boring, and it is much more of a
problem for democracy than is the disenfranchisement of embezzlers or the
absence from the electorate of people who can’t figure out how to organize
their way to a photo ID by next November.
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