Andrew Sullivan is in top form this morning too.
America The Puritan
One thing the right and left agree on: they know what's best for us.
It is one of the oldest observations about America, but also one of the truest. The land of the free is also the land of the terminally bossy. Puritanism helped found the colonies; and it has never disappeared. Like a nasty skin-rash that won't go away, it creeps over American culture and politics in outbursts that never seem to decrease in frequency. This, after all, is a country that pioneered sexual liberation, but impeached a president for lying about sex. It's a country that consumes more illegal drugs than any other, but imprisons half a million for it. It's a country with liberal gun laws and the death penalty. It's a country with Constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech that was the first to initiate "hate crime" laws to punish crimes that might be motivated by bigoted ideas.
This whip-lashing puritanism knows no party or ideology. It's everywhere you look. Last Thursday, George W. Bush announced his new drug czar, a man whose response to the catastrophic failure of the war on drugs is to ratchet it up even further. John Walters is to the drug war what World War I generals were to the Somme. He is known for believing that medical marijuana should be denied dying AIDS and cancer patients and that the only effective response to drug-use is criminal sanctions. He backs a Bush plan to bar any government aid for higher education if a person has used drugs in the past - even in rehabilitation programs. He has argued that any private drug use of even soft drugs like cannabis automatically leads to a degenerate life of addiction and crime. He was introduced by a former alcoholic President who refuses to say whether he has used illegal drugs in his past. That president beat an opponent, Al Gore, formerly vice-president and all-round goody goody, who readily admits he was a heavy cannabis smoker in college. Bush now apparently believes that young Gore should have been imprisoned for his habit, to prevent him from being a menace to society. It's hard to know whether to laugh or cry at the twisted logic of it all.
But in some ways, puritanism is strongest these days on the left. That's what "political correctness" really is: a new form of American puritanism. The crime these days is not sexual - it's ideological. Anyone suspected of holding any views which might involve even the mildest generalizations about race, gender or sexual orientation get the modern equivalent of the Scarlet Letter. They are publicly humiliated, pummelled, ostracized and punished. Indeed, there is no social stigma in America these days worse than bigotry. Senator Bob Kerrey, facing serious accusations of killing women and children in Vietnam, was instantly supported by the liberal university he now heads up, the New School. As political activist Ron Unz has pointed out, if Kerrey had been caught making a faintly racist remark, he would likely have been dismissed on the spot.
Or take the recent inflammation pioneered by former leftist turned rightist David Horowitz. A recovering socialist, Horowitz recently decided to test the waters of tolerance on American campuses by writing an advertisement that opposed the notion that American blacks should be financially compensated for slavery. The ad was provocative, but by no means could it be viewed as racist. He sent it to several leading college papers. Almost all refused to run it. It was deemed "racist" even if a single minority member might feel offended by it. When Horowitz turned up on campuses, he needed armed guards. At Brown University, part of one edition of the college paper that ran the ad was confiscated and destroyed by students; faculty urged that the email addresses of people who had posted pro-Horowitz notes on the paper's bulletin board be tracked in order to punish the authors. The sheer force and power of this intolerance of divergent views came as a surprise to those of us who thought that p.c. terror had waned on America's campuses. But the thought police, content not just to police "racist" acts but also "racist" thoughts, are thriving in places which were built to house free thinking. In some ways, some Ivy League colleges have reverted in part to their original religious and sectarian roots. Except the religion is no longer Protestantism but anti-racism.
Such ideology has even permeated school rooms. For today's American schoolchildren and adolescents, life is just as strict as it was in the 1950s - it's just that the details have changed. Despite the fact that crime statistics show that the younger generation is one of the least violent in decades, hand-wringing liberals and zero-tolerance conservatives have united to police possibly violent kids. In Palm Beach County Florida, according to the Wall Street Journal, which has been keeping tabs on high school puritanism, they have banned back-packs. Who knows what could be hidden in them? California's Berkeley High School banned an army show-and-tell recruitment drive because, in the words of one school board member, "I felt it wasn't appropriate to have weapons simulators on the high school campus given all the violence at schools recently." An Arizona headmaster recently pulped an entire batch of class year-books because of inappropriate content. What was inappropriate? "Those familiar with the censoring," reported the Arizona Republic, "say Principal Doug Wilson ordered out all initials--including a set that stood for "Friends Forever"--because gangs often use initials as their monikers. He also ordered out references to God and religion, including a quote that said, "God made me perfect," and any that could be deemed sexually suggestive, such as "I love you Mark.""
In many American schools, you can no longer talk about God, have a pen-knife, make a pass at a girl, use a water-pistol or, heaven forefend, say a prayer. Sexual harassment suits have been brought against little boys grabbing little girls; some anti-sexist schools have tried to stop typical boyish rough-housing and even some aggressive contact sports in order to counter cultural stereotypes. Last week, a private school in New York's equivalent of Islington banned any celebration of Mother's Day or Father's Day. It would, apparently, be insensitive to kids who only have one parent or two mummies or two daddies.
The notion that people can actually think for themselves, that offense and even hurt are natural parts of human life, that difference of opinion is not a threat to anything but a sign of cultural health - these notions are now verboten under the neo-puritan order. No drugs, no sex, no jokes, no fights: this is a culture slowly being sedated into simpering nothingness. Remember the war against tobacco companies? In California, the leading edge of liberal authoritarianism, you can't smoke in a bar or a restaurant. In one neighborhood in D.C., they were trying to pass a law against smoking even on the street. In San Francisco, they're contemplating a ban on shops that even sell tobacco products. In my neighborhood - a few blocks of D.C. that are home to what passes for a hip counter-culture in the capital city - you can't even buy pipes or pipe screens any more, because the police fear they could be used for marijuana.
The prohibitionist impulse isn't restricted to illegal drugs either. Half the allergy medicines you can buy over the counter in Britain are fiercely regulated by the Food and Drug administration in America so that snifflers and sneezers have to go grovelling to their doctors to get a diagnosis that is not exactly esoteric. Any loosening of the FDA's iron grip is fiercely resisted. The right doesn't want the public doped up on pain-killers and prescription narcotics; the left doesn't want the hated drug companies making any more profits. The FDA has even recently banned some advertisements for HIV drugs. Why? They portray people with HIV as too healthy and active and thereby send the wrong message about safe sex. What about encouraging people with HIV to have hope and healthy role models? Forget about it. With all the restrictions on advertizing in America, we're beginning to have state micro-management of commercial speech.
And in all this, there are always enemies. Indeed, it's the enemies that matter. In the colonies, there were heretics and witches. In the twenties and thirties, there were drunks and bootleggers and mafia criminals who were largely created by Prohibition. In the 1950s, there were Communists and homosexuals and Communist homosexuals. Now there are drug-lords and drug and tobacco companies, "racists" and "sexists" and "homophobes." The cycle goes on and on. And it barely matters what the empirical data are. The encouraging recent statistics on teen violence don't mean that there aren't loopy zero-tolerance policies in high-schools. The fact that the "war on drugs" has only led to increasing demand and supply in America will never deter the generals from planning a new front. The possibility that little boys will always be little boys doesn't daunt the new feminists from their own cultural revolution to prove it otherwise. The fact that there's no solid evidence that second-hand smoke really harms anyone doesn't mean that smokers aren't regarded as only slightly less horrifying than child-molesters. What matters is the satisfaction of those who can pontificate about the immorality of others, and the drive of so many to tell their fellow citizens how to live their own lives. It was ever thus. The land of the free has always had panics about what freedom really means - and a sadder lack of confidence in the ability of ordinary people to handle it.
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