Slipping Gently Into Fascism
November 23, 2000
What remains, on this Thanksgiving, for which we can be truly thankful?
Faith, of course, and personal joys -- in my case, family, friends, good health, my garden, the timeless songs of Rodgers and Hart, old movies, glorious food.
EMAIL: DEB WEISS
But I was born in a republic, and I now live in a country that seems to be slipping gently into fascism, and I find this year that I cannot be altogether thankful.
Huey "The Kingfish" Long, the legendary governor of Louisiana -- a man who knew a thing or two about corruption and chicanery -- once warned, prophetically, that in America, fascism would come from the left while everyone was looking right.
And now, perhaps, it has really happened. An army of well-dressed, Ivy-educated, politically-correct progressives, yapping ceaselessly about Newt Gingrich and armed militias, has carried us to the brink and possibly over the edge.
Their offensive culminated, yesterday evening, in an audacious act of judicial activism, as a left-leaning Florida Court attempted to fix the election for Mr. Gore.
Anti-Republican journalists, elated by the unusual harshness of the Court's 49-page decision (quite a complex document for them to have whipped together in just 24 hours, I must say), failed to notice its distinguishing characteristic: the neatness with which it maps onto Gore campaign spin, right down to a frontal attack on Florida's Republican Secretary of State, the much-beslimed Katherine Harris.
What this decision lacks in law (as jurisprudence, it's fuzzier than Al Gore's math), it more than makes up for in political utility.
But then, of course, it is a political document, not a legal one. Its purpose is to provide cover for Mr. Gore, along with some soothing catch-phrases for journalists desperate to believe they're on the side of the angels.
Long before Election Tuesday, Mr. Gore had put his money on a politics of fear and division. Since the election, the candidate and his urbane hit-men have redoubled their efforts, invoking a classic Clintonian formula -- noise, delay, more noise, more delay, spin, smear, exhaustion.
It's a politics of chaos, now, a politics of hate: and, thanks to the intervention of the Florida Supreme Court, it is, very possibly, a politics of disintegration.
Meanwhile, Mr. Gore's reinvented America seethes with propaganda, lawyers, and smear-artists -- not to mention pet constituencies trotted out on cue, to weep and wail for the ravenous cameras.
The "disenfranchised" voters of Florida must take their place in history alongside those blonde German girls whose mournful testimony of Virtue Wronged -- artfully staged in flickering black-and-white -- persuaded other audiences, in another time and place, that the will of the people sometimes requires radical resolutions.
I won't join those who shrug and sigh and say pretty things about rallying together, no matter what. I owe no allegiance to Mr. Gore, and (perhaps this is the greatest tragedy of all, when you consider America as it used to be) I feel no kinship with his constituents.
Then there's this. Like most of us, I've lived through more than one Republican presidency, legitimately won as elections used to be won in this country -- at the polls, on Election Day.
I've seen these presidencies savaged by Democrats, weakened by poisonous rumors, cruel caricatures and ceaseless litigation -- and brought down altogether, in the single case that rose to the requisite 'level,' in the eyes of Mr. Bob Woodward and his friends.
Given the Democrats' tendency to disembowel duly-elected Republican presidents, I don't feel even a flicker of unease about refusing to honor an unelected one. Mr. Gore can carry on without me, no matter how many platitudes are hurled my way by David Broder and the kids at MSNBC.
After all, the Constitution does not require me to sign an oath of loyalty to the O.J. Simpson legal defense team.
Don't pin too much hope on the notion that there's an easy remedy, if not now, then tomorrow: if not this election, then an election or two down the road.
Should Al Gore succeed in pulling off this putsch, it will hardly matter if he's driven out of office a few years hence. He will have had time to alter the balance of the Supreme Court, packing it with arrogant ideologues like his Florida fixers.
As for the off-year election in 2002, with no presidency to pursue, the left will concentrate its considerable resources on Senate and gubernatorial races -- and it will win a lot of them.
True, Democrat strategists have learned that sheer demographics make it harder than they once imagined to shift the balance of power in the House. It would be quite a coup even for John Sweeney and Jesse Jackson to import a critical mass of resentful first-time voters, living or dead, into every Republican congressional district in the land.
However, given lawyers enough, and time, and a sufficient pool of civic pawns, statewide races should be relatively bite-sized.
Already, some Republicans are blasting Mr. Bush for not having fought Mr. Gore's war with Mr. Gore's weapons.
What they fail to understand, of course, is that if he had, the end would have been much the same. When you fight fire with fire, what you're left with is a pair of arsonists and a pile of ashes.
So there you have it. And all I can really say, this Thanksgiving, is: No, thank you, Mr. Gore.
No, thank you very much. |
