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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