By Kevin D. Williamson
Wednesday, August 03, 2022
I live in one of those neighborhoods where every
third house has a political sign of some kind in the yard: Lots of “Beto for Texas” signs advertising the
sacrificial victim feckless Democrats are going to offer up to the maw of the
Texas GOP machine this time around, scads and oodles of those prim, imbecilic “In This House” signs, that kind of
thing. One of my neighbors kept up a big banner reading “Stop Killing Black People” for more than
a year, but has now taken it down, so I guess that killing black people doesn’t
matter three blocks over anymore, or maybe they got bored and wanted a change
of scenery. They have added some nice planters.
I hate them all, of course — all the signs, I mean, not
the neighbors.
Partly I hate them because they are such effective
advertisements for the ignorance of the general electorate. One neighbor has a very
large sign in her yard that demands we “say ‘no’ to demagogues” and blames our
political troubles on “donors and special-interest lobbyists” — i.e., the sign
criticizes demagoguery and then engages in the classic, textbook technique of
American demagoguery, insisting that covert moneyed interests rather than
genuine good-faith disagreements about values and priorities are behind our
differences. You see that with demagogues targeting the National Rifle
Association all the time: claims that So-and-So voted in favor of the Second
Amendment because he got money from the NRA. The NRA is, in fact, a trivial
player in the world of political money (946th in donations, 268th in lobbying outlays, 275th in outside
spending), and the power it has it has because it represents a position
that millions of Americans strongly endorse — not the tiny-but-loudmouthed
share of Americans on Twitter, but Americans who vote. I am sure my neighbor’s
heart is in the right place, but she is the kind of mark who makes demagoguery
so effective and profitable.
There were some stereotypical Trump voters down the
street until recently — textbook dysfunctional white people of the
screaming-confrontations-between-bored-police-and-aging-hookers type — but they
are gone, having been priced out of the neighborhood. (The tragedy of
gentrification is that it doesn’t happen all at once.) Their Trump banner went
with them. The rising tide of gormless lifestyle progressivism has inundated
the cities of Texas just as it has the cities of the other states: The Audi
People (who used to be the Subaru People before going upscale) and their
simpering conformism have come to stay.
The less real diversity there is in the neighborhood, the
more the local progressives feel compelled to advertise their bona
fides to one another. They are simultaneously lobbying for some street
closures that would just happen to have the effect of discouraging the poor
brown people on the other side of the socioeconomic Berlin Wall a few blocks
south of us from walking the same pristine urban streets as their purported
benefactors. The people with the “No
Human Is Illegal” signs live in a gated community, even if the gates are
invisible and the borders are enforced by mortgage bankers rather than by
actual patrolmen.
If you have ever spent any time around anybody who has
made a credible run for the U.S. presidency, you will have noticed that there
is something wrong with them — even the good ones, even the ones we like. You
have to be a little bit cracked to want that job and to put up with the
irritation and degradation that seeking high office in the United States
entails. Presidential candidates are a rare breed, but there is a similar
sickness at work in the lives of the yard-sign people. There is something
missing.
As even the most casual observer will understand, in the
lives of many Americans who are not particularly happy or well-adjusted,
politics has taken the place of religion — and I do not mean God, who can see
to His own interests, but religion in the sense of a community with shared
values and a shared story about where we have come from, where we are going,
and why things are the way they are at this point in the journey. Politics
isn’t a very good substitute for religion — setting aside such big questions as
truth, there is the fact that politics is an increasingly insular and atomized
pursuit that plays out on social media and in narrow, homogeneous social
circles composed of people who watch the same television shows and read the
same news sources. Religion, in the American practice, at least, remains as a
matter of form outwardly directed: We go to church, out into the world, where
we are obliged to have real-world, unmediated social encounters with people who
may be different from us in some important ways. The church congregations have
sorted themselves out to a great extent by now, too: I would be surprised if
there were more than ten registered Democrats in the church I attend, and I
don’t know of one. But even with that sorting, there is a great deal of real
diversity — of experience, of education, of economic condition, of interests,
of profession, of origins, etc. — that exists in a church. Churches also
understand themselves as communities, and unlike the people you “meet” on
social media, the members of your church are people you expect to have
continuing, regular, face-to-face interactions with for a long time — and that
changes how you interact with them.
But even the churches are in on the yard-sign game at
this point: There is a very large church down the road from me, belonging to
one of the famous old mainline Protestant denominations, that is festooned in
gay-pride rainbows, that goes a little bit overboard with Pride Month
decorations, and that makes various splendid proclamations about who is welcome
there. Not a word about that Jesus character, of course — the signs are not
about transcendent or eternal considerations but parochial social and tribal
ones in the profane here and now. “All
Are Welcome Here” the sign says, but I’d bet you 30 pieces of the finest
silver that they’d crucify Ralph Reed in the churchyard if he showed up on
Sunday and gave a sincere account of his religious and political views.
Because the truth about those signs advertising diversity
and toleration and open-mindedness is that all of them really say the same
thing:
“No Trespassing.”
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