Tuesday, July 26, 2022

Exnihilating an American Idiocracy

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, July 26, 2022

 

We live in a dumb world. Americans have a moral responsibility not to make it dumber than necessary — and Americans have been shirking that responsibility for a few years now.

 

On Twitter, that great overflowing sewer of American life, our friend Bill Kristol suggested — jokingly, I assume — that Democrats rally behind the singer John Legend if Joe Biden should (for some totally unforeseeable and unknowable and not-at-all-age-related reason!) not complete his term or decline to run again in 2024. His argument: The Ukrainians plucked Volodymyr Zelensky from the world of celebrity, and that has worked out pretty well for them — why not John Legend?

 

To which some nitwit replied with the complaint: “Kevin D. Williamson told me to grow the f*** up when I said Bill Kristol is a socialist.”

 

Well.

 

If you think Bill Kristol is a socialist — not somebody who disagrees with you about this or that, not somebody you think has bad political ideas, not somebody you think overreacted to the Trump phenomenon, but a socialist — then, yes, you should, indeed, grow the f*** up. Words mean things, and whatever socialism means, it doesn’t mean, “I think it would be a hoot if Democrats nominated John Legend for president.” I disagree with Bill Kristol about any number of things (and agree with him about many more), but insisting that such disagreements somehow magically transmute Kristol into a socialist is idiotic kid stuff, deserving of contempt.

 

For years, our progressive friends have insisted that everybody who disagrees with them about anything is a racist, or something like a racist, or a Nazi. It’s dumb and it’s predictable, which is why you could probably write the next ten years’ worth of Jamelle Bouie New York Times columns in a three-day weekend — same boring crap, over and over. For some reason, some conservatives have decided that this habit is something to be emulated. And so now everything they don’t like is socialist, communist, Marxist, etc. It is low buffoonery for low people, but that’s what the popular political conversation is in our time.

 

Someone who has more patience and a better sense of humor than I have could probably make a fortune writing a Devil’s Dictionary for our time, lampooning the way we use political labels. (My offering: “Country-Club Republican: n., Someone who thinks that Puerto Rico ought to immediately be given statehood . . . in some other country.”) It is tempting to write that our labels have become meaningless, but that is not quite right. They all mean something; in fact, they all mean the same thing: “I hate you.” As George Orwell observed about the word fascism:

 

It will be seen that, as used, the word “Fascism” is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley’s broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else. . . .

 

But Fascism is also a political and economic system. Why, then, cannot we have a clear and generally accepted definition of it? Alas! we shall not get one—not yet, anyway. To say why would take too long, but basically it is because it is impossible to define Fascism satisfactorily without making admissions which neither the Fascists themselves, nor the Conservatives, nor Socialists of any colour, are willing to make. All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword.

 

“Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality” — Orwell was a great maker of lists:

 

One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words “Socialism” and “Communism” draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, “Nature Cure” quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.

 

Sometimes, a word or a phrase is just a shiny object picked up by some otherwise-unoccupied mind. I remember being at one of those weird sad masturbatory alt-right rallies a few years ago, and one of the counter-protesters had, for some reason, fixated on the phrase “full metal jacket.” Maybe he was a fan of the film:

 

A guy shooting video on his iPhone interviews one of the militiamen, and he’s going on and on about the militiaman’s rifle and its ammunition: “Full metal jacket!” he repeats, over and over, obviously ignorant of the fact that the rifle in question can be loaded only with jacketed ammunition, since this isn’t 1899. A young black woman on a cheerful pink bicycle rides past and pauses to take in the show. The dramatic contrast is of interest to the guy shooting the video, and he points it out to the militiaman. “You’re here with your rifle, with your full-metal-jacket ammunition, and here’s this little girl on her bicycle.” She leans in to speak to him. “Here’s this 30-year-old woman on her bicycle.”

 

Neocon had a moment there in the George W. Bush years when it was on every Democrat’s lips, presumably because they found it sinister-sounding. Neocon took on a special meaning for the Left that has been picked up by some on the right: “This Republican is a Jew, or at least Jewish-adjacent, and I hate him.” The actual history of neoconservatism is pretty interesting, and people who are genuinely interested in political ideas would benefit from knowing about it. But for most people, it is just an epithet. The original neocons were mainly interested in domestic issues — welfare reform, urban policy, things like that — but, because of the way the term was used in the Bush years, it has come to be associated with a hawkish foreign-policy stance. There are still some people trying to make neoliberal happen — neoliberal meaning, “approximately in line with the editorial stance of the Economist.” Neoliberal got epitheted, too, in its time and place: Guardian-reading types practically spat the word at Tony Blair. But the neoliberal moment seems to have passed us by before the term really caught on, at least in the United States.

 

(In the golden age, we divided people politically by which newspapers they read, though that was always a bigger thing in the United Kingdom — Guardian people vs. Telegraph people — and elsewhere in Europe, where newspapers mostly have not pretended to “objectivity” the way U.S. newspapers do. In our time, I get the feeling that the people who actually read newspapers are all pretty much on the same side, or close enough to it. When I see somebody reading an actual newspaper now, I almost want to take a picture.)

 

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia imbecile, recently told one of those goofy right-wing “news networks” that Republicans should embrace the label “Christian nationalist.” She was as direct as can be about that: “I say it proudly, we should be Christian nationalists.” “Christian nationalism” is, of course, a particular politico-religious movement with a particular agenda and a particular sensibility — it is the alloy of Putinism and Evangelical sentimentality, and it is, as you might expect, often religiously illiterate. I don’t know if Representative Greene is, in fact, familiar with Christian nationalism. She seems to have just talked herself into the formulation: “We need to be the party of nationalism and I’m a Christian.” Ergo, etc.

 

We are, indeed, governed by cretins.

 

On the other hand, there are some genuinely interesting questions of political taxonomy. We often hear that civil-rights legislation was opposed by “conservative Democrats,” or “conservative southern Democrats,” which isn’t exactly right, at least in many cases. Some of those rotten old racist Democrats were conservative as we use the word in U.S. politics, but a great many of them were progressives, champions of the New Deal who were very interested in heavier business regulation and income distribution, etc. Democrat-leaning academics and their media amplifiers have done a nice job over the years defining conservative as racist, at least in that context, while insisting that racist progressive is some kind of oxymoron. I’ve been giving a careful reading to Racial Realignment: The Transformation of American Liberalism, 1932–1965 by Professor Eric Schickler of Berkeley, which is full of interesting observations and analysis pertaining to that question. One of Professor Schickler’s interesting findings is that hostility or indifference toward desegregation and civil-rights reform was strongly correlated with economic conservatism outside the South, among northeastern Republicans, back when those used to be a thing.

 

My friend and colleague Jonah Goldberg argues that we are in a time when a lot of those –isms and –ists mean less than they used to, that the real political division in the United States (and in the world) is between those who believe in basic things such as the rule of law and democracy and free speech and those who do not. Referencing Albert Jay Nock (who was referencing Scripture), he calls the former the “remnant.”

 

What I wonder is whether in ten or 20 years, we will even be able to talk comprehensibly about politics and public affairs at all, or whether, Idiocracy-style, “Bill Kristol is a socialist” will be all there is to say.

 

Brawndo has electrolytes. It’s what plants crave.

 

Obligatory Acknowledgment

 

Every time I mention Idiocracy, I point out that when that film first came out, I criticized it as being too harsh, too unkind, too pessimistic, etc. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. Mike Judge is a prophet. If anything, he wasn’t despairing enough.

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