The One Who Will Not Give His Consent

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, October 14, 2024

 

I have been pretty unsparing, I think, in my criticism of Donald Trump, his enablers, and his partisans since the beginning of this ugly, stupid, embarrassing mess. It’s cost me a fair bit of money, I suppose, and there are a few old friends I don’t hear from anymore. So be it. But I will admit to being a little bit disappointed by the low quality of the criticism I get. One of the dumbest complaints I hear 1,838 times a day goes roughly like this: “You say Trump is a would-be tyrant, a moron, a monster of moral depravity—which means that you’re saying that the people who support him, half the country, are idiots and moral miscreants and fools.” 

 

Yes, that’s right. That’s exactly what I am saying. 

 

It doesn’t necessarily follow that I’m saying that, of course—you could make a pretty good case that Trump supporters are just stuck in a corner and that they aren’t all morally culpable and entirely willing participants in a pageant of stupidity and cruelty. But that’s not my case. My case is that these people should be ashamed of themselves, that a self-respecting society wouldn’t allow such a specimen as Lindsey Graham to vote, much less to serve in the Senate. I understand that hurts some feelings out there in the dank, wooly wilds of the “real America.”

 

So what?

 

There are two ways of looking at the fact that gigantic stampeding herds of people buy into stupid and false ideas, believe patently untrue things, do dumb things, or, in the case at hand, support this particular lunatic and would-be caudillo, frequently because they are good Christians who think that what we need in government is this particular griftastical habitual liar and retired game-show host who spent his pre-presidency years appearing from time to time in pornographic films, a “very stable” guy who has a son named after the imaginary friend he invented to lie to the New York Post about his sex life. “By their fruits shall you know them,” etc.

 

You can say: “Well, ‘We the People’ have to be right, because that’s what democracy is all about, so there must be a little something to this guy, because the holy demos, or at least about half of it, has offered him its transformational blessing.” 

 

Or, two: You can face up to what we all already know, which is that “We the People” are, in their formal democratic aspect, cretins, and that the only really good reason for letting them vote on anything important is that the alternative is war. Democracy can produce good results and it can produce bad results, and the fact that a particular conclusion or position was come to democratically tells us nothing about its wisdom, efficacy, or morality.

 

Democracy is best understood as a procedure for avoiding violence, and it is invaluable in that role—there really is no replacement for it. But the notion that the people we see every day sitting in traffic jams and watching porn on the subway and trying to return 11-year-old truck tires at Walmart suddenly acquire a mystical power of sanctification when they enter a voting booth is pure superstition—and I mean shiny-pebble-worshiping, bone-in-the-nose, “This sounds like some stuff I read about in The Golden Bough”–level superstition.  

 

The greatest argument against populism—the only argument you’ll ever really need against populism—is: the People. The better you know the People, the less you trust them. As Tony Kushner has Thaddeus Stevens put it in Lincoln: “I don’t give a goddamn about the people and what they want! This is the face of someone who has fought long and hard for the good of the people without caring much for any of ’em.” 

 

(Stevens adds: “And I look a lot worse without the wig,” which is not in my case strictly applicable, though I am open to the possibility that I’d look better with one.)

 

There is a great paradox at the heart of American life: Americans are, in many capacities, amazing people. Nine-tenths of all the cool stuff in the modern world—from rock ’n’ roll to personal computers to cinema—was incubated in a garage or a spare room somewhere in California. Americans write great novels (not that John Podhortez, hater of Moby-Dick, appreciates the fact!) and make great art and start great businesses. Visit an American community in crisis, and you’ll see remarkable neighborliness, cooperation, and good citizenship. Philosophy, religion, medicine, military affairs, science, music—Americans excel in an astonishing number of fields. The American scientist, the American artist, the American businessman—impressive figures, all.

 

The American voter? A howling moonbat. I’d lend Ozzy Osbourne my truck on a Saturday night before I trusted one of those lunatics with any measure of real power beyond what is absolutely necessary.

 

I have a theory about this, the rough outline of which is this: Americans are more sensitive to certain incentives than are many of the world’s other peoples, and our general competitiveness causes us to respond to social and reputational incentives in areas such as art and science, where economic incentives may not be particularly strong. But even as our newfound idiotic tribalism causes us to regard people “on the other side” as our enemies, our thoroughly sorted social lives ensure that most of us do not spend very much time actually interacting with people who hold different political views. Slather on top of that the ethos of the cult of democracy, which holds that all points of view, no matter how insipid or ignorant, are entitled to a measure of respect as part of our unwritten constitution. The upshot is that there is, for most Americans, no real price to pay for having stupid or wicked political affiliations. As an engineer friend of mine likes to say: “Stupid should hurt.” In the matter of American politics, stupid doesn’t hurt as much as it should—the fact that we are rich, domestically secure, and blessed with an extraordinarily useful constitutional architecture left to us as a legacy by better men protects us from the worst results of this era’s dumb and malicious politics.

 

For now. 

 

If you look at a figure such as Donald Trump or Kamala Harris—respectively, a vicious and vile would-be tyrant and time-serving party hack whose mediocrity is matched only by her banality—then you might conclude that this country has a leadership problem. But it doesn’t. This country has a citizenship problem. Thanks again to the cult of the demos and to our insane overestimation of the transcendent (as opposed to instrumental) value of democratic procedure, we have reduced practically the whole of republican citizenship to the mere act of voting. That’s why so many of my colleagues are always being asked who they are voting for and pressured to pick one of the major candidates—there’s no practical value in doing so in the case of, say, Jonah Goldberg, who resides in the District of Columbia, which is going to go for Harris by about 103 percent irrespective of any vote Jonah Goldberg might cast. It’s just a demand to salute the flag and to pay homage to whatever imperial gods Antiochus IV has installed in the temple. In our crude time, “good citizen” means “voted the way I wanted him to,” and “bad citizen” means “didn’t vote the way I wanted him to.” 

 

That isn’t good enough. 

 

When Barack Obama lectured American entrepreneurs with the words “You didn’t build that!” he was making a case for a kind of economic collectivism, typical progressive pabulum. “Somebody invested in roads and bridges.” Well, yes, somebody did. Sometimes, somebody in government at some level does his job in exchange for his taxpayer-funded salary and pension—well, raise my rent! But when it comes to the republic itself, those words are true: You didn’t build that. Neither did I. It is something to live up to. And Americans are failing to live up to it.

 

Plutarch relates this story about Cato the Younger and one of his important political disputes, his fight against Metellus Nepos and Publius Clodius Pulcher, known as Clodius the Demagogue. 

 

Though many invited him to become a tribune of the people, he did not think it right to expend the force of a great and powerful magistracy, any more than that of a strong medicine, on matters that did not require it. And at the same time, being at leisure from his public duties, he took books and philosophers with him and set out for Lucania, where he owned lands affording no mean sojourn. Then, meeting on the road many beasts of burden with baggage and attendants, and learning that Metellus Nepos was on his way back to Rome prepared to sue for the tribuneship, he stopped without a word, and, after waiting a little while, ordered his company to turn back. His friends were amazed at this, whereupon he said: “Do ye not know that even of himself Metellus is to be feared by reason of his infatuation? And now that he comes by the advice of Pompey he will fall upon the state like a thunderbolt and throw everything into confusion. It is no time, then, for a leisurely sojourn in the country, but we must overpower the man, or die honourably in a struggle for our liberties.” Nevertheless, on the advice of his friends, he went first to his estates and tarried there a short time, and then returned to the city. It was evening when he arrived, and as soon as day dawned he went down into the forum to sue for a tribuneship, that he might array himself against Metellus. For the strength of that office is negative rather than positive; and if all the tribunes save one should vote for a measure, the power lies with the one who will not give his consent or permission.

 

The power lies with the one who will not give his consent.

 

Words About Words

 

As my aforementioned friend and colleague Jonah Goldberg has chronicled at book length, one of the big problems with speaking in clichés is that you also think in clichés. I’m still not sure which one drives the other: Whether the mental shortfall produces the shopworn language or if it is the verbal straightjacket that constrains the thinking. I suppose it can go both ways as needed. 

 

So, here’s Barack Obama, supposedly a great orator, on the Republican presidential nominee in 2024: “Donald Trump sees power as nothing more than a means to an end.”

 

I get it. I do. He wants to say that Trump is a self-serving intergalactic douche-rocket who doesn’t have any real concern for the national interest. And he wouldn’t be wrong to say so if that’s what he said. But: “A means to an end” is pretty much the definition of “power,” no? Power is a value-neutral capacity for getting something done. Saying Trump thinks of power as a means to an end is like saying Trump thinks of an airplane as nothing more than a convenient way to fly from one place to another. Well, yeah. Because that’s what it is. The problem isn’t that Trump thinks of power as a means to an end—it is that Trump’s ends are rotten and that his means are rotten.

 

English, Mr. Former Leader: Do you speak it? 

 

Here’s some advice I used to give to my writing students: Read your sentences out loud and think about the literal meaning of the words you have written rather than what it is you intend to say. And then keep revising until the literal meaning of the words in the sentence is what you intend to say. Ain’t no mystery to competent communication.

 

More Wordiness …

 

About Clodius the Demagogue, there is a linguistic legend, probably fanciful. Clodius was a patrician from the Claudia clan, and some have speculated that he changed the spelling of his name to Clodius to seem like more of a bubba. That would fit with the character of Clodius, who had himself adopted by a plebeian family in order to qualify for the office of tribune of the plebs, a powerful position. But the “Clodius” spelling seems to have been old and common, and was used by Cicero (and by Clodius’s sisters) long before his taking up the cause of the plebs. And, as professor Jeffrey Tatum notes, the plebs at the time preferred advocates with more aristocratic ties rather than the more democratic sort, believing that such associations would be beneficial to their cause.

 

Claudius to Clodius—it’s a good story. It just probably isn’t true. 

 

Economics for English Majors

 

There are some things that it’s just damn near impossible to get people to understand. One is that there is no Social Security “trust fund,” that the so-called trust fund is really very little more than a figure of speech. Another is that “I’m pro-choice because I believe a woman has a right to do what she chooses with her own body” is an example of begging the question. A third is what “begging the question means.” And a fourth is that businesses and industries do not exist to “create jobs,” and that jobs per se are not necessarily valuable. We could, for example, conscript every person on Earth into a corps of ditch-diggers and ditch-fillers, pay everybody $1,000,000 a year to dig ditches and fill them, and the result would be mass starvation and the end of human civilization rather than prosperity—because human action is the most valuable thing, and we’d be wasting it on non-productive ends. Everybody would have a paycheck, but there would be nothing to spend it on. “Job creation” is a mirage—what’s important is value creation. A century ago, it took scores of people to bring in a large cotton harvest, whereas today a single farmer operating a high-tech harvester can bring in tons of the stuff by himself while listening to podcasts in his air-conditioned cab. Hundreds of thousands of cotton-picking jobs were lost over the years to automation—and everybody is better off for it.

 

If you don’t believe me, go pick some cotton by hand for a few weeks, and then get back to me. 

 

If you really envy the life of a 1950s factory worker, know this: That 1950s standard of living is available to you—cheap. Enjoy that 750-square-foot house with no air-conditioning and a grocery bill that is 22 percent of your household income. 

 

Furthermore …

 

From the Wall Street Journal: “The New Coveted Résumé Line: Flipping Burgers.”

 

A stint in fast food is a badge of honor for business leaders who want to be viewed as humble and relatable—and proof that they worked to get where they are.

 

Vice President Kamala Harris has talked up her long-ago job at McDonald’s while campaigning for president, a way to show she gets the struggles of people on the bottom rung of the economic ladder. Her opponent, former President Donald Trump, has claimed without evidence that Harris never worked at McDonald’s.

 

The company declined to comment on the dispute. A candidate’s summer job is an unlikely point of contention in a race for the nation’s highest office, but it proves a point: Among powerful people, fast-food credibility is worth fighting for.

 

Well. If you’d like to hear a grizzled old Burger King veteran (me) discuss the business with a well-seasoned former McDonald’s guy (Charles C. W. Cooke), give a listen to our upcoming episode of “How the World Works.” 

 

While you’re over at the Journal, read Carson Griffith’s very amusing “The Anti-Status Watch: Why Men in Finance Love Cheap, Cheesy Watches.”

 

Elsewhere …

 

Behold: The Five Tribes of Anti-Trumpism. 

 

Like the Snoots to whom they are adjacent, the prodigal Neocons have, to a significant degree, already switched teams, returning to their ancestral home: the Democratic Party. One of the fault lines that runs through the anti-Trump right has to do with how attached one was to the GOP to begin with. Some of my friends in the neocon universe were deeply engaged as Republicans per se: advising candidates and officeholders, serving as speechwriters and party operatives, etc. There is something of the jilted lover in their current politics: Sure, they’re going steady with the Democrats now, but their strongest feelings are reserved for their ex.

 

(And there’s even a fair bit of bitter, late-night, wine-glass-in-hand social-media stalking on the anti-Trump right.)

 

Their embrace of the Democrats has the hot flush of a new romance, but these are intelligent and patriotic men and women. If they form a durable new right wing of the Democratic Party (strange as those words are to type!), then the Democrats will be better for it. After November, the smart Democrats, if there were any, would be doing what they could to keep the Neocons in the party this time around.

 

More in the Wall Street Journal. 

 

Incidentally, in reference to the first item: After that piece came out, I got an email from a columnist at the New York Times: “So, who will you vote for?” Missing the point, people!