Good Riddance
By MARTY PERETZ - Wall Street Journal
Mr. Peretz is editor in chief of The New Republic.
The American people have plumb busted the hearts of the country's liberal elites, and the sentiments evoked among these elites are not dolorous but actually quite nasty. So much so that they reminded me of a poem by the communist playwright Bertolt Brecht, sardonic and rare in its anti-communist sensibility. On June 17, 1953, workers in the Russian Zone of East Berlin had risen up against the regime, and one of its top apparatchiks distributed a leaflet,
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts.
About which Brecht observed,
. . . Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And choose itself another?
It is surely what America's cultural top drawer would like to do themselves.
* * *
Reading of the contempt this haughty and self-anointed elect has for the misbehaving populace as a whole (and feeling it in my hometown Cambridge, Mass., and in New York, where it is also altogether common), I am struck by the intellectual paradox with which these people live. As liberals, they are champions of popular sovereignty. It is they who pioneered, in our time, the getting of "good outcomes" through plebiscitarian democracy: nuclear free zones, sanctuary for illegal immigrants, mostly misleading and largely symbolic. But referenda and direct initiatives have not turned out to be reliably predictive. Quite to the contrary, as this past Election Day made clear. (And maybe this will end the liberal infatuation with single-issue politics as a surefire mobilizer of the tolerant and the just.)
So the majoritarians have over the years built the contradictory case for law established through the courts, and the courts in various jurisdictions have obliged them. Such contradiction in the weighing of principle against anticipated consequence is not limited to liberals. Conservatives who want to constrain the rule of courts, and especially the federal courts, certainly celebrated the Supreme Court's far-reaching and partisan ruling in Bush v. Gore. The politics of results comes first in the public arena, not the quality or character of the deliberation.
Still, the extreme and bitter judgments against the citizenry after this election are especially tendentious. For what the electorate did on Nov. 2 was essentially (or maybe just merely) turn down John Kerry, a candidate who until very late in the Democratic primaries was almost no one's choice as the nominee, the party's last option because it could rally around no one else. What a pathetic vessel in which to have placed liberalism's hopes! A senator for two decades who had stood for nothing, really nothing.
Oh yes, he helped to re-establish America's relationship with Vietnam. A good thing, but not exactly an issue that affects people's lives or expresses their hopes. In fact, Mr. Kerry's repetitive recitation of this achievement (really shared with John McCain) foretold the narcissism of autobiography in his presidential campaign: A man who came into public life on the infamy of the Vietnam War aspired to crown it by deploying for political purposes his service "in defense of country," the very proposition that he had, after all, denied and sullied for decades. But no one -- save Mr. Kerry himself and his immediate circle -- wanted to revisit Vietnam. It was the country's great nightmare, divisive, tormenting, politically paralyzing. This was the first of his great mistakes, the defining one.
Then quickly followed a whole procession of other tactical -- and symptomatic -- mirages. Even toward the end of the campaign, Mr. Kerry never had a day when the polls predicted his election. But there quickly sprung up an explanation for why support for Mr. Kerry was being under-reported. It was oh, so obvious: Many Kerry supporters, and especially younger ones, used cell phones which, since they're not listed, aren't called by pollsters. I can't remember how many sages uttered this wisdom over dinner.
Here are others. That with an endless series of rock concerts you would mobilize the youth vote, which of course would largely go for Mr. Kerry. It turned out not to be so, neither the increase in the raw vote nor its disposition towards Mr. Kerry. That with increased unemployment in states like Ohio, and double the election expenditures this year over 2000 by organized labor, unionized workers would turn out big-time for Mr. Kerry. Actually, his union vote was less than Al Gore's. As was his proportional women's vote and Hispanic vote and black vote and Jewish vote. (The Jewish vote for George Bush rose nationally from 18% to at least 25%. But, in Florida's critical Broward and Palm Beach Counties and Ohio's defining Cuyahoga County, the president's Jewish total was much higher. And exit polls of Jewish voters are notoriously unreliable: Some Jews are still embarrassed to admit voting GOP. "S'iz a shande far di goyim," as my cousin would say. It's a disgrace before the gentiles.)
There was hardly a slice of the population among which Mr. Kerry performed anywhere near expectations. In the end, as David Brooks pointed out on the New York Times op-ed page, Mr. Bush outpolled himself over the four years in 45 out of the 50 states. Neither the Kerry enthusiasm (and the Bush hatred) of Eminem (himself given to vile homophobic and racist ranting) nor of Paris Hilton, of Sean Combs (with his "Vote or Die" campaign) or Whoopi Goldberg amounted to anything except publicity for themselves. And then there was the cinemathug Michael Moore, fabulist and fibster.
But the campaign's reliance on such degrading and frivolous figures actually speaks to what many now believe was John Kerry's Achilles' heel: No one knew for what he really stood. He was for the Iraq war and against it. He was against gay marriage but for it, at least in contrast to George Bush, whose position actually was identical to Mr. Kerry's. He killed a goose on a hunting expedition in Ohio. But did he really? From the solemn to the trivial, a similar confusion. But the people did know that he was embarrassed by a certain muscular patriotism, by the historic place of Nature's God in the wider American community, by the simple and unadorned lives that most families live, from which his own new and unimaginably lavish lifestyle sets him apart.
Still, it wasn't Teresa Heinz's version of Tourette's syndrome (has she ever had an unexpressed thought?) that made him seem so remote from ordinary folk with ordinary existences. It was Mr. Kerry's own enchantment with the trashy celebrities who provided the energy of his campaign. Many Democrats seem to understand this in some vague way, and once again some of them are exhorting their party to retrieve the old-fashioned values of God and flag and family from the Republicans. Even Bill Clinton has gotten into this act. "If you let people believe that your party doesn't believe in faith or family . . . that's our fault." What do you mean by "our," Kemo Sabe?
But the problem is that many Democrats have a downright hostile attitude to the flag, to patriotism itself, which is thought by some in the party to be a retrograde sentiment. And they have, at best, a queasy disposition towards religion. To tell the truth, it gives many of them the creeps. You can't really do much with that, can you?
* * *
Had you noticed, by the way, that money in politics ceased to be an issue for the Democrats? There's no mystery why this is so. They and those 527s that circled around the Kerry effort collected much more money than they could spend usefully, which is why there were so many inane ads aimed unnecessarily at New York voters in the New York Times. The problem of money in politics, it turns out, was actually just Republican money. But all the Democratic money that was raised -- nearly $100 million from George Soros, University of Phoenix founder John Sperling, and the imperious chairman of the Progressive Corporation Peter Lewis alone -- accomplished, let's face it, nothing.
If, however, Mr. Kerry had won, there was a chance, insiders say, that Mr. Soros would have been made secretary of state or of the Treasury. Imagine Mr. Soros at his first meetings with the ministers of finance of allied countries whose currencies he'd once trashed. Perhaps he would lecture them on the virtues of multilateralism. |
