By Kevin D. Williamson
Monday, April 29,
2024
The so-called hard right in the House is learning an old
lesson: Life is hard, but it’s harder if you’re stupid.
There’s a tendency in political rhetoric to talk as
though everybody who disagrees with you is stupid. That isn’t true. I don’t
agree with, say, Howard Dean—about almost anything—but I can tell you that
Howard Dean is not stupid. James Carville and I don’t agree about much
(although I think we are approaching one another in nonplussedness regarding
our own respective “sides”), and nobody who knows much thinks he is stupid. But
there are some genuinely stupid people in our politics—people who think a manila
folder is a Filipino contortionist—and you can, in general, get a pretty good
idea of how smart somebody is by how they speak and write in their native
language. (Years ago, I saw a talk by a brilliant Chinese scientist who spoke
English with some difficulty and reminded the audience: “I only sound like a
4-year-old in your language.”) And my impression is that the
rogues’ gallery of the populist wing of the GOP is dominated by some
room-temperature IQs: Moscow Madge, Matt Gaetz, Paul Gosar—let’s just say you
don’t want to ask any of these goobers who is to be found in Grant’s Tomb. Rep.
Marjorie Taylor Greene is the sort of clod who could accidentally lock herself
out of a moped.
And Donald Trump is exactly what you
should expect to get when you take a kid with an IQ of 88 and give him hundreds of
millions of dollars worth of New York City real estate. I’ve known
some dumb trust-funders in my life, and not one of them ever figured out he was
dumb until the money ran out. But everybody else figured it out way before
that.
Perhaps we should feel about the achingly stupid the way
Sen. Roman Hruska felt
about mediocrities: “They are entitled to a little representation, aren’t
they?” I suppose they are entitled to some representation—the asinine,
the dull, the dunces, the moronical—but they are
abusing the privilege.
Republican Sen. Alan Simpson of Wyoming famously
described the partisan reality of Washington: “We have two political parties in
this country: the Stupid Party and the Evil Party. I belong to the Stupid
Party.” He was not a suffer-fools-gladly kind of guy—asked on a political
questionnaire for his “church preference,” he answered:
“red brick.”
One of the nice things about being a conservative is that
so many things look so much better in retrospect: Sen. Simpson wasn’t wrong to
call the Republicans of his era the Stupid Party, but putting the Republican
leaders he served with up against the current GOP crop is to compare Hyperion
to a satyr. One Republican Senate leader Sen. Simpson served under was Howard
Baker of Tennessee, a moderate conservative best known to history as the man
who asked about Richard Nixon: “What did the president know, and when did he
know it?” Many conservatives detested the deal-making, consensus-building Sen.
Baker, and there are substantive criticisms of his legislative record that are
far more important than that famous quotation of his. Sen. Baker was, for
example, one of the fathers of the Clean Air Act, a well-intentioned piece of
legislation that addressed a needful issue but did so in such a vague and
easily abused way that it is practically a model for badly written legislation
that functions as an enabling act for entrepreneurial regulators. But Sen.
Baker also helped to see much of the Reagan administration’s legislative agenda
through Congress and later served as Ronald Reagan’s chief of staff and George
H. W. Bush’s ambassador to Japan. Sen. Baker was a Navy veteran, a lawyer (of
course), and the first Republican elected to the Senate from Tennessee since
Reconstruction; beyond that, he was a board member of the International
Foundation for Electoral Systems as well as an amateur photographer with enough
skill to see his work published in National Geographic. Not exactly
Cleisthenes, or even Dwight Eisenhower, but a useful and productive career for
an intelligent and energetic man.
Moscow Madge is a recently divorced Facebook troll who
had been a part-time CrossFit coach.
Her most recent political project was throwing a tantrum
over military aid to three important U.S. allies—Ukraine, Israel, and that
little island near China we’re supposed to pretend to regard with “strategic
ambiguity”—and threatening to do in House Speaker Mike Johnson. Johnson called
her bluff and we all got to enjoy watching Greene doing in public something she
is not accustomed to doing at all: learning. What she learned was that she
doesn’t have the kind of power she thought she did.
These people never do. The rest of us need to learn that
lesson.
Greene and her ilk are, essentially, terrorists. I mean
that here as an analogy, although to the extent that they were involved in the
events of January 6, 2021, you could say they are a species of regular old
terrorists, too. Terrorism works from a simple enough principle: If 99 people
can be counted on to follow the rules while one guy is willing to break them,
then that one guy actually controls the situation. That’s why the histrionic
violence of mass shootings is so terrifying: The killers don’t need organization,
or exotic weapons, or coherent ideas, or anything like that. They don’t
even need guns. They just have to be willing to do the thing and bear the
consequences.
Jihadist suicide bombers and manifesto killers are
willing to do the thing and bear the consequences because they are, for the
most part, intensely unhappy young men who would prefer to be dead, anyway, and
terrorism gives them a way to get dead that feels meaningful. Political
nihilists such as Greene are willing to bear the consequences for their
shenanigans because those consequences are, from their point of view, pretty
low-cost: Greene already is a reviled and detested figure, one who has no
reputation to damage, and she doesn’t care at all if she undermines the
political position of the Republican Party or damages its policy agenda,
because she and others like her—let’s not forget this—hate the
Republican Party.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her kind might be
useful rhetorical foils, but the Squad and the Peckerwoods—Greene’s gang needs
a catchy gang name, and now they have one—are playing the same game, and they
need each other to keep the game going. The people Reps. Greene, Gosar, et
al. hate are Republicans: Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney, the
legislative ghost of Paul Ryan, the Reaganites, conservatives, etc. Like the
Tea Party movement before it, the Trumpist movement is, first and foremost, an
alternative to the mainstream Republicans.
Or, rather, that’s what it was: Having won
the field, the Trumpists now are the Republican Party. Mike
Johnson—and you can count me right the hell out of his Dispatch “Strange
New Respect” caucus—is one of them. He may not be as dumb as Marjorie Taylor
Greene or as likely to give you a handjob in public as Rep.
Lauren Boebert, but he’s 100 percent organic, non-GMO Peckerwood.
Nevertheless, according to the rules of the Peckerwood game, he’s structurally
the enemy: Peckerwoods, once they achieve positions such as speaker of the
House, cease to be Peckerwoods, and become the Establishment. Remember, this
isn’t politics—this is therapeutic storytelling, and the Peckerwoods have only
the one story: “We, the Real Americans, have been betrayed, once again, by the
Establishment.” That’s their whole thing.
If you can think more than 48 hours into the future, you
can see the problem with this style of pseudopolitics: They have to win
elections while losing every policy fight and every major vote. Those of you
who are old enough to remember normal politics know that it looked a little bit
different from that.
Once upon a time, you could go through congressional
roll-call votes and see a bunch of bills that would pass with almost unanimous
Republican support—for years, it would typically be every Republican except
Rep. Ron Paul voting for something, with Rep. Paul jumping up and down and
demanding, “Show me where in the Constitution is says we have an Air Force!”
The Democrats had their own version of that, usually some zany lefty voting
against a military appropriations bill or protesting that his proposal to have
a federal building named after Patrice Lumumba had been once again rejected. If
you were a skillful negotiator, you could get 95 percent of your party on board
and bring in maybe 30 percent to 50 percent of the guys on the other side and
give yourself a resounding legislative victory. And if you could get 99 percent
of your guys on board and pull your bill across the finish line with a handful
of votes from the other side, you weren’t a traitor—you were good
at politics.
The notion that a speaker should bring a bill forward
only with the unanimous support of his party and—more important—that it is some
kind of a political sin to rely on cooperation from the other party to get big
things done is absolutely idiotic, of course, but it is necessary to the
Peckerwood/terrorist model of legislative life. Back in the day, Ron Paul was
always doing his Ron Paul thing, always ready to get in the way, and Republican
leaders seldom, if ever, let him actually stop them from getting something done
that was important to them. The only substantive reason figures like Greene
seem more important right now is temporary: Republicans have enjoyed only a
very small majority recently. But the main reason that figures such as Greene
have been able to exert so much control is psychological, the fact that
Republicans—and the electorate at large—have let them push them around. As Mike
Johnson has just shown, there’s no magical juju at work in the Peckerwood
Caucus. Terrorism stops working when people stop being afraid of it—or, at
least, when they stop being controlled by their fear.
And the thing is, Johnson et al. don’t have to be afraid
of these clowns. Because they aren’t suicide bombers. They’re just going to
bitch about the Establishment on Facebook. Let them bitch.
Words About Words
There are some writers who just have certain words or
phrases sitting there in the chamber, ready to go. (“Angels and ministers of
grace defend us,” etc. Yeah, I know.)
Kenneth Womack writes about the Beatles. That’s his
thing. And he has “senseless murder” on a hotkey, apparently:
·
October
2023: “One Beatle will be the victim of a senseless murder, the
other suffering an untimely death.”
·
2023:
“Commenting 30 years after her husband’s senseless murder …”
·
August
2018: “… a nine-volume narrative that begins with the musician’s formative
years in the 1940s and 1950s and ends with his senseless murder in December
1980.”
·
April
2020: “It took Lennon’s senseless murder in December 1980 to
finally quell the voices calling for their reformation.”
·
October
2016: “… the film doesn’t sensationalize Lennon’s senseless murder …”
·
2018:
“… Lennon’s senseless murder at the hands of twenty-five-year-old Mark David
Chapman …”
I suppose I have, from time to time, read the newspaper
and thought to myself, “Now, there’s a good sensible murder.” Maybe we should
start making a list of all the sensible murders that have happened—or
maybe should! It’s like that go-back-in-time-would-you-kill-baby-Hitler thought
experiment.
Economics for English Majors
Real GDP growth is under
2 percent, while inflation is at 3.4 percent, having almost doubled from
the last quarter. And the New York Times wants
you to know that this is … pretty good news! For reals:
The U.S. economy remained
resilient early this year, with a strong job market fueling robust consumer
spending. The trouble is that inflation was resilient, too.
Gross domestic product, adjusted
for inflation, increased at a 1.6 percent annual rate in the first three months
of the year, the Commerce Department said
on Thursday. That was down sharply from the 3.4 percent growth rate at the
end of 2023 and fell well short of forecasters’ expectations.
Economists were largely
unconcerned by the slowdown, which stemmed mostly from big shifts in business
inventories and international trade, components that often swing wildly from
one quarter to the next. Measures of underlying demand were significantly stronger,
offering no hint of the recession that forecasters spent much of last year
warning was on the way.
“It would suggest some moderation
in growth but still a solid economy,” said Michael Gapen, chief U.S. economist
at Bank of America. He said the report contained “few signs of weakness
overall.”
But the solid growth figures were
accompanied by an unexpectedly rapid acceleration in inflation. Consumer prices
rose at a 3.4 percent annual rate in the first quarter, up from 1.8 percent in
the final quarter of last year. Excluding the volatile food and energy
categories, prices rose at a 3.7 percent annual rate.
There’s an interesting inversion there at the end.
Usually, you read journalistic apologists reporting about inflation being high
but noting that it would be lower if you excluded the volatile
food-and-fuel category; this time around, inflation is high and would be higher
excluding hamburgers and diesel.
On the one hand, we have inflation and economic malaise;
on the other hand, we have campus protests and a Democratic convention
scheduled for Chicago: Does Joe Biden want to be Jimmy Carter or Hubert
Humphrey? Your choice, Mr. President.
Tricky Dick won 32 states with only 43 percent of the
vote in 1968, thanks in part to a former Democrat running as an
independent/crackpot. Plus ça change, suckers!
In Conclusion
Today is the feast of St. Catherine of Siena. If you’re
going to do a pilgrimage and want to end up someplace nice, try Siena. But
don’t let the lovely surroundings lull you into too much comfort: Catherine was
no lightweight. She made important contributions to Christian theology and
Italian literature both, as something of a politician to boot, and is
recognized as a “Doctor of the Church.” In one of her
better-known letters, she scolds Pope Gregory XI that it would be better
for him to resign from the papacy than to fail to do his job with holiness and
justice:
… with desire to see you a manly
man, free from any fear or fleshly love toward yourself … my soul desires with
immeasurable love that God by His infinite mercy may take from you all passion
and lukewarmness of heart, and re-form you another man, by forming in you anew
a burning and ardent desire; for in no other way could you fulfil the will of
God and the desire of His servants. Alas … pardon my presumption in what I have
said to you and am saying; I am constrained by the Sweet Primal Truth to say
it. His will, father, is this, and thus demands of you. It demands that you
execute justice on the abundance of many iniquities committed by those who are
fed and pastured in the garden of Holy Church; declaring that brutes should not
be fed with the food of men. Since He has given you authority and you have
assumed it, you should use your virtue and power: and if you are not willing to
use it, it would be better for you to resign what you have assumed; more honor
to God and health to your soul would it be.
That’s tough love, when both the adjective and the noun
are necessary.
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