By Kevin D.
Williamson
Tuesday, October
19, 2021
Gather ’round, progressive friends, sit
down here with the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, and let us speak the truth to
one another, for at least a moment: Take a look, if you will, into President
Biden’s eyes — those flat, terrified, watery, senescent eyes that could very
well have been plucked from the skull of Robert Byrd or Strom Thurmond, those
dull cow eyes that have been misapprehending the comings and goings of life on
this earth since the Andrews Sisters were topping the charts with “Pennsylvania
Polka,” those filmy orbs going blank as they fix absently upon the backend of
everything from the first-class compartment on Amtrak — and tell me: Are you
looking into the eyes of a man who gives even one half of a
rat’s furry patootie about your pronouns?
No. Whatever he pretends, no.
There are two Democratic parties, and Joe
Biden belongs to the older one: the Pillage Party. Thank God for small favors.
The Pillage Party goes all the way back to
Andrew Jackson, and its platform has always been precisely the same: transfer
as much money as possible to constituents from non-constituents. Old Hickory
and Lyndon Johnson would tell you that was all about helping out the poor folks
down on the farm and in the forgotten corners of America, but you and I know
that is pure bullsh**. Democrats are perfectly happy to run with something you
might think of as a more naturally Republican position if it puts money in the
pockets of their partisans: Removing the cap on state and local tax deductions
is a Democratic issue, not a Republican one, even though it means tax cuts for
the rich, and especially for rich people with expensive houses in expensive
neighborhoods. Silicon Valley and Wall Street may vote for Democrats for
largely cultural reasons, but Elizabeth Warren’s nice progressive neighbors up
in Cambridge are feeling the pinch of paying for all that progressivism out of
their own progressive pockets. College-loan forgiveness is not exactly No. 1 on
the agenda of desperately poor Americans in Democrat-run cities such as St.
Louis or Cleveland, where the put-upon proletariat is worried about keeping the
heat on this winter, not paying off the tab at Oberlin. Social Security, that epitome
of the New Deal, transfers
wealth from African Americans and Latinos to whites and, especially, from unmarried African Americans and Latinos to
married whites — because Ward and June always get theirs.
Franklin Roosevelt very cannily ensured
that his New Deal was heavy on middle-class and upper-middle-class benefits,
funded through payroll taxes that would remove the stigma of the “relief
attitude,” as he told Luther Gulick of the American Society for Public
Administration. “With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap
my Social Security program,” Roosevelt said. “Those taxes aren’t a matter of
economics, they’re straight politics.”
Understanding the character of the Pillage
Party makes some aspects of our contemporary politics more comprehensible.
On the matter of the social-spending bill,
the Biden administration and its congressional allies have followed a very old
negotiating strategy: Demand the redonkulous and accept the merely ridiculous
as a compromise, trimming a trillion or so off the top. But they will fight for
those dollars and that spending, just as Barack Obama was willing to throw away
much of the rest of his presidency in order to sign new health-care benefits
into law. We should expect like-minded Democrats to be relatively energetic in
the pursuit of middle-class benefits such as child-care subsidies and “free”
college educations.
At the same time, the Biden administration
has chosen to punt on certain progressive priorities, such as the court-packing
scheme that has fueled so many left-wing daydreams. Left-wingers in Congress
introduced a bill to expand the Supreme Court from nine to 13 members in order
to provide the administration an opportunity to pack the court with politically
reliable progressives, but the Biden administration handed the question over to
one of those goofy presidential commissions, which will produce recommendations
that will be hotly debated and fought over — two conservatives recently
resigned from the commission in protest — but which will produce, in all
likelihood, squat in terms of actual change. An administration
that wanted to overturn the constitutional order in the pursuit of abortion or
gun-control goals would not have handed this off to a blue-ribbon committee. We
should not misread what that means: It isn’t that the Biden administration
gives a fig about the constitutional order; it’s just that it doesn’t care
nearly as much about the so-called social issues or gun control as it does about
moving money from Smith (R) to Jones (D), and chose not to invest very much
political capital in the proposal.
The main political function of the
commission is giving conservatives another squirrel to chase, and one suspects
that the Biden administration would much prefer to have a culture-war battle
over the Supreme Court than to have conservatives instead bothering the
president about his involvement in any of his son’s shady shenanigans or
discovering what personal benefit he may have derived from them. If you are Joe
Biden, you don’t want to see Hunter on the news — not if you could instead have
Ted Cruz on there trying to explain originalism to Americans.
Joe Biden belongs to the Pillage Party.
And he does not have to negotiate with Republicans nearly as carefully as he
must deal with the other Democratic Party: the Freakshow Party. The Freakshow
Party has been on the progressive scene for a long time, and if the Pillage
Party is The Grapes of Wrath, the Freakshow Party is Last
Exit to Brooklyn. It’s the “Shout
Your Abortion and Show Me Your Pronouns!” party. The three legs of that
wobbly stool are the Jew-Hating Weirdo Left (Sharpton, Farrakhan, Omar, Occupy
types, etc.), the Loopy White People Left (NPR, vegan bakeries, college towns —
everywhere you see a Subaru covered in bumper stickers), and 2SLGTBQIA+ (which
I really hope is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s email password). Its natural
occupation is that of hall monitor.
Consider this from one of Slate’s
increasingly pornographic (and, apparently, fictitious) advice columns:
We do not
allow our children to have their own computers to prevent the risk of them
being radicalized by alt-right websites, so our kids share a laptop that we
monitor and control access to. We found an excel spreadsheet in Jack’s folder
that listed the names of all of his classmates, as well as dates and
descriptions of their problematic behavior. Some of the descriptions I saw
include “has a mom who is a cop,” “no pronouns in insta bio,” “laughed at a fat
joke,” “lists problematic show as one of their favorites,” “mimicked a foreign
accent,” and “used cis-normative language.”
Maybe that’s the work of some right-wing
satirist sneaking one in on Slate. But, in any case, the spectacle
of some progressive punk kid making a list of pronoun transgressions while
getting ready to go all We Need to Talk about Kevin on his
classmates — that’s a pretty good window into the soul of the Freakshow Party.
You will never see so much intolerance in the service of “tolerance,” so much
hatred in the service of “love,” so much ruthlessly enforced conformism in the
service of “diversity.”
They are vicious and petty, but they do
not actually matter all that much. What they are is useful. Have
you ever used a fan or a loud air conditioner to help you sleep in a noisy
environment? The constant, regular, low drone isn’t enough to keep you awake,
but it is enough to drown out the noises that might keep you up: a dripping faucet,
a hotel elevator located a little too close to your room, raccoons on the roof
of the cabin, whatever. That’s what the Kulturkampf stuff
really is: noise, just enough to keep us from being awakened by the things
going bump in the night. This is not to say that culture doesn’t matter — it
does. In fact, it certainly matters more than any other single factor. But the
outrage-of-the-day stuff on Twitter and talk radio doesn’t really touch or move
the culture all that much. It’s just churn, white political noise.
Partisan-outrage media on the left and partisan-outrage media on the right
traffic in the same commodity: disgust. Disgust is the easiest way
to produce emotional engagement, slightly edging out fear. But the so-called
culture warriors who spend their days advertising new reasons for their
audiences to hate people they already hate are — at best — self-deluding. They aren’t
fighting any kind of culture war — in that war, they are not the soldiers but
profiteers.
In the context of Texas, I have often said
that I worry about Houston more than I worry about Austin. That’s another way
of saying that I worry more about the Pillage Party than the Freakshow Party.
Freakshow politics is, by its nature, less serious. Its interests are less
enduring, its attention span is shorter, and its adolescent motives wear out
pretty quickly. That is why you see so many Freakshow partisans graduate to the
Pillage Party once they have secured real power. Bill Clinton spent about 10
minutes in the 1960s counterculture before he figured out what real power looks
like. Barack Obama could not have been more pleased to move on from the
Reverend Jeremiah Wright to Warren Buffett. Hillary Rodham did not grow up to
join the Marxist vanguard — she joined the board of Walmart. The demands of
wokeness change from day to day: One day, it’s engaging in Maoist
self-criticism sessions and denouncing ourselves for our “privilege,” the next
day, it’s pretending to believe that Bruce Jenner is a woman named Caitlyn.
That sort of thing has been keeping conservatives hopping from one foot to the
other since about 1968, but the Left was never really able to build a stable
political movement on top of that: 1968 gave us Richard Nixon, the radicalism
of the 1970s gave us Ronald Reagan, the 1990s gave us Newt Gingrich and the
real beginnings of what would later become Tea Party Republicanism, and the
turn of the century was dominated by George W. Bush and the foreign-policy
agenda he never wanted to be the centerpiece of his presidency.
It wasn’t until Barack Obama that the
American Left started to figure out how to make it work: While Donald Trump and
other jibbering jackasses of that kidney were going nuts about Obama’s birth
certificate and the Freakshow Party was pitching a circus tent in lower
Manhattan, Obama was busy pillaging: creating expensive new health-care
benefits that served to entrench his own personal power even as it decimated
(more than decimated, in fact) his party in the states, working through “green
energy” programs and the like to help ensure that Wall Street and Silicon
Valley saw their financial interests aligned with the Democrats as much as their
cultural interests are, etc. As a candidate, Obama fumed to his New York City
moneymen buddies that he was fed up with the teachers’ unions and their cynical
rent-seeking, which was a message very much tailored for an audience whose own
children would never see the inside of a public school; once he had their money
and their votes, he forgot all about that, because the teachers’ unions are, in
fact, the textbook case of Pillage Party politics: You get a few million people
relying on you for oversized salaries and generous benefits, and they volunteer
as your foot soldiers.
Obama was, of course, Freakshow-adjacent,
and he surely is a freak at heart, but he didn’t actually practice very much in
the way of Freakshow politics: sharp words for the Cambridge, Mass., police,
that sort of thing, most of it pretty low-cost for him, politically. But his
opponents wanted to chase the Freakshow, and he was clever to let them, and to
occasionally goad them. Meanwhile, it was pillage, pillage, pillage.
Biden may have learned a little something
from that. He’s got trillions going out the door, and his colleagues’ “moderate”
position is giving a trillion or two back in negotiations. The Right,
meanwhile, is chasing its tail: Masks!
Mandates! Iodine! Ivermectin!
You might think that Republicans could
make that strategy work, too. For years, the Left offered much the same
analysis of the GOP that I offer of Democrats: that the social conservatives
were basically running interference for the tax-cutters and business-deregulators.
And there may have been something to that, once. But while we still have two
Democratic parties, there’s only the one Republican Party still standing: the
Putz Party.
The GOP — Gaggle of Putzes.
Which Brings Us To . . .
There has been some interesting
back-and-forth — and some positively tedious back-and-forth! —
about the proposal from various anti-Trump/anti-Trumpism conservatives to set
up a new political party so that Reaganite ideas might have a political home. I
don’t think very much of the idea of a new party, because I do not think that
there are enough anti-Trump conservatives to make much difference as an
electoral matter, even as spoilers, though some of my more psephologically
inclined colleagues believe otherwise.
But, if you’ll allow me, I think I can
clarify the terms of the debate: On one side, we have people who think that the
most important thing for the long-term good of the country is to keep Democrats
from holding power for the next ten or 20 years, and, on the other side, we
have people who believe that the most important thing for the long-term good of
the country is to keep Trumpists from holding power for the next ten or 20
years. I think there are good-faith arguments for both positions, and I have
even seen one or two of those increasingly rare specimens.
What conservatives are likely to end up
with, in any case, is a worst-of-both-worlds outcome: Trumpists do not have the
necessary attention span to hold power nationally on anything but a sporadic
basis, and they lack the kind of positive policy agenda that would help them to
organize themselves into a genuine political movement instead of the
personality cult that they are today. At the same time, the economic incentives
of right-wing media more or less ensure that Trumpism will remain enough of a
force within the Republican Party for long enough to cripple
it for a generation. Donald Trump was for many years a generous donor to
Democratic campaigns, from Hillary Rodham Clinton to Chuck Schumer, but his
deformation of the GOP will be his lasting gift to the Democrats.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see the
Republicans have a very good midterm election. But there is a difference
between having power and deserving power — and an even vaster gap between
having power and knowing what to do with it. Still, there may be some electoral
victory, but I do not think that that will change the fact that the GOP is now
simply too damaged and disreputable to provide a useful channel for the
conservative electoral project. There are a few good men left in the Republican
Party, but they mostly are there out of mere sloth. And, if there’s an argument for a new party, that’s really it:
Conservative ideas and policies need some electoral instrument, and the
Republican Party is no longer that.
In a sense, conservatives are still
struggling with the question of 2016: Who deserves to lose more?
You may as well ask whether it’s better to
have testicular cancer on the left side or on the right side. Cancer is cancer.
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