Mark Steyn - After America

Howard Fineman, the Chief Political Correspondent of Newsweek , took it a step further. The truck wasn’t just any old prop but a very particular kind: “In some places, there are codes, there are images,” he told MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann. “You know, there are pickup trucks, you could say there was a racial aspect to it one way or another.” 39

Ah, yes. Scott Brown has over 200,000 miles on his odometer. 40Man, he’s racked up a lot of coded racism on that rig. But that’s easy to do in notorious cross-burning KKK swamps like suburban Massachusetts.

Whenever aspiring authors ask me for advice, I usually tell ’em this: Don’t just write there, do something. Learn how to shingle a roof, or cultivate orchids, or raise sled dogs. Because if you don’t do anything, you wind up like Obama and Fineman—men for whom words are props and codes and metaphors but no longer expressive of anything real. America is becoming a bilingual society, divided between those who think a pickup is a rugged vehicle useful for transporting heavy-duty items from A to B, and those who think a pickup is coded racism. Unfortunately, the latter group forms most of the Democrat-media one-party state running the country. In perhaps the most explicit testament to the ever widening gulf between the metaphorical class and the simple-minded literalists they reign over, the liberal reaction to a murderous attack in Tucson by a deranged nut of no political affiliation was to blame it on the right’s “extreme rhetoric”—all this talk of “targeting” marginal seats and having your opponent in the “crosshairs.” Liberals can be expected to understand sophisticated concepts such as figures of speech, which is why they can safely name their Clinton campaign documentary The War Room and why Democratic Congressman Paul Kanjorski can recommend, re: the Republican Governor of Florida, “put him against the wall and shoot him.” 41Liberals exist in a world of metaphor, so it would be unlikely for them ever to rouse themselves to act on their rhetorical flourishes. But simple, embittered red-state types are too stupid to be entrusted with such potentially lethal weapons as literary devices.

Obama himself is not about “doing.” Why would you expect him to be able to “do” anything? What has he ever “done” other than publish books about himself? That was the story of his life: Wow! Look at this guy!

Wouldn’t it be great to have him… as Harvard Law Review editor, as community organizer, as state representative, as state senator, as United States senator. He was wafted ever upwards, staying just long enough in each “job” to get another notch on the escutcheon, but never long enough to leave any trace—until a freak combination of circumstances (war weariness, financial meltdown, divisive incumbent, inept opponent, the chance to cast a history-making vote) put Obama in line for the ultimate waft. If only Hogarth had been on hand to record a very contemporary Fake’s Progress . No rail-splitting, like Lincoln. No farm work, like Coolidge. No swimming-pool lifeguard duty, like Reagan. Upward he wafted without breaking a sweat, except perhaps when briefly blocked on his whiney Valley Girl autobiography—as who wouldn’t be blocked? It’s tough to write an autobiography when you haven’t done anything.

The new “meritocratic” elite, wrote Michael Young just before his death, “can be insufferably smug, much more so than the people who knew they had achieved advancement not on their own merit but because they were, as somebody’s son or daughter, the beneficiaries of nepotism.” 42As Young had foreseen in his original essay, a cult of (pseudo-)meritocracy absolves the ruling class from guilt. They assume not, as princes of old did, that they were destined to rule, but that they deserve to. Which is wonderfully liberating.

They “actually believe they have morality on their side,” said Young of Britain’s Blairites. The bigger government gets, the more transformative, the more intrusive, the louder it proclaims its moral purity/virtue. Thus, as Peter Berkowitz puts it, the ostensibly impartial concept of “fairness” is now no more or less than “the name progressives have given their chief policy goals.” 43

This is politics as a form of narcissism: Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all? In the name of “fairness,” they grant privileges to preferred identity groups over others—that is, they treat certain people unfairly. Yet, if you oppose “fairness,” you must be on the unfair side.

And who wants to find themselves hanging with that crowd? So, in government, in the dinosaur media, in the faculty lounge, in the community-organizing community, in the boardrooms of connected corporations, America’s rulers are conformicrats. They have the same opinions, the same tastes, the same vocabulary. They think the same, and they expect you to do likewise. As Michael Tomasky, former editor of the lefty mag The American Prospect , explained it: “At bottom, today’s Democrats from [Senator Max] Baucus to [Congresswoman Maxine] Waters are united in only two beliefs, and they demand that American citizens believe in only two things: diversity and rights.” 44

By “rights,” they mean not “negative rights” as understood by the U.S. Constitution—the right to be left alone by the government in respect of your speech, your guns, etc—but “rights” to stuff, granted by the government, distributed by the government, licensed by the government, rationed by the government, but paid for by you. In the Orwellian language of Big Government, “rights” are no longer individual liberties that restrain the state but state power that restrains you. And by “diversity,” they mean the state ideology of stultifying homogeneity. Hence, the peculiar spectacle of American “artists” from George Clooney to Stephen Sondheim to Green Day congratulating themselves on their truth-telling courage by producing films, plays, CDs, TV shows, and novels with which everyone they know is in full agreement. In such a world, to disagree with the liberal agenda is not so much an act of political dissent but, worse, a ghastly social faux pas. To take Mr. Tomasky’s own profession, the average American newsroom ostentatiously recruits for diversity of race, sex, sexual orientation, and every other diversity except the only one that matters—diversity of ideas. To achieve its own propaganda goals, the Soviet politburo had to smash printing presses and jam radio signals. America’s nomenklatura achieved the same level of dreary conformity just by leaving it to ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, the New York Times , and the Washington Post . Which is why, as the first industry to prostrate itself before the deeply unAmerican idea of enforced uniformity, America’s moribund monodailies are on life support and openly auditioning for a government bailout.

The advantage of life in the self-flattering conformicrat cocoon is that you never have to address anybody’s arguments. All those tea parties and town halls with ordinary citizens protesting governmentalized health care?

Oh, don’t be so naïve. As the New York Times assured its readers, “The Rage Is Not About Health Care.” 45“It’s merely a handy excuse,” Frank Rich explained. “The real source of the over-the-top rage of 2010 is the same kind of national existential reordering that roiled America in 1964….”

Ah, in the Democratic Party it’s always 1964 and Selma, Alabama.

Except that now it’s not the Democrats who are the redneck racists, it’s you—yes, you. As Frank Rich explains:

If Obama’s first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory. The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House—topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman—would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play…. When you hear demonstrators chant the slogan “Take our country back!,” these are the people they want to take the country back from.