CENSORSHIP, AMERICAN-STYLE

By Wim de Vriend

When I walk into the place, a large party of senior lunch customers is just leaving. One, a tiny lady with snow-white hair, grabs my arm and hails me as a long-lost hero. “Hello, how are you? I’ve been meaning to tell you I was all behind you, when you squirted those gals,” she gushes.

“Thank you so much,” I reply, and then I add: “But it sure was expensive.”

“But you had every right …” she starts. Sure, I had the moral right, but the political-legal establishment didn’t see it that way. What’s most astonishing, the incident with “those gals” happened over fifteen years ago, and she’s waited all this time to bring it up. So have several other people recently. There can be no doubt; as we come up to the sixteenth anniversary, I’m still known far and wide as the restaurant guy who hosed down the feminists. The latter a.k.a. locally as The Lesbians from Hell.

With some doubt that I can, I will try to make a very long story short. Halfway through the morning of Saturday July 3, 1993, I got a call at home, from the restaurant.

“Hey, they’re hee-ere,” Lynn droned in her deadpan way.

“Who is here?”

“The women’s crisis center crowd. They got signs, and they’re picketing, and they’re keeping people out of the restaurant.”

“Good grief. Ah -- are you doing any business?”

“Are you kidding? We’re standing around watching.”

“Ah -- I’ll be right over.”

Sure enough, when I got there I saw about two dozen picketers, mostly women, ambling around the place with the insouciance of hardened harridans who are sticking it to The Man. They waved picket signs. They stopped cars coming around the corner. They interfered with pedestrians headed for the restaurant by shouting things about rape, and by handing out flyers. The flyers went largely unread, but the sum total of their interference made every patron change his mind about coming in. The worst part, though, was their signs:


RAPE IS A HATE CRIME.
RAPE IS ANTI-HUMAN.
RAPE IS A GENDER BIAS CRIME.
DATE RAPE IS NOT A SPORT.
DATE RAPE IS A SERIOUS CRIME.
RAPE VIOLATES MY CIVIL RIGHTS.
BLAME RAPISTS NOT VICTIMS.
MALE ATTENTION YES, RAPE NO.
1 WOMAN IS RAPED EVERY 6 MINUTES IN U.S.
WIM DE VRIEND IS NO FRIEND.
WIM DE VRIEND, APOLOGIZE NOW.


In addition, a couple of the signs announced that this was an action by the Coos Coalition for Human Rights, the local homosexual lobby.


The restaurant is located on a downtown stretch of U.S. 101, the Pacific Coast highway. On an average day in 1993 some 15,000 vehicles passed that spot, a lot more on a summer day. This was a summer day. Hundreds, no, thousands of drivers might catch a glimpse of this scene. What would they think? Maybe what you thought when you read the slogans: that this restaurant or its owner had some sinister connection to the crime of rape. And sure enough, within days after the incident three acquaintances who had driven by told me their first thought was that I must have raped somebody. A damned infamy, when all I had done was write a letter to the paper, criticizing a radical anti-date-rape activist by the name of Dangerine, who seemed to be in charge of the picket. Dangerine had wormed herself into the position of chief of the local battered women’s home, which quickly had become known as the lesbian recruiting center. The most accurate way to describe her is to abuse Hobbes’s portrayal of primitive humanity: “nasty, brutish and short.” And what she had cooked up was not just business interference, but serious slander. I could not understand how she and her cohorts could be so blind. How was the public supposed to know that this was about a letter to the editor? Anybody with a smidgen of common sense would realize that most of those driving by had not even read it.

In a planned high-stress incident, the instigators have all the advantages of surprise. This bunch (as I discovered later) had planned their picket at meetings of the Human Rights crowd and at the Coos Bay Presbyterian Church. This church, like its national office, PC-USA, had become a haven for promoters of far-out political causes. I would also discover that nearly all of the picketers made their living off the taxpayers, which explained their disregard for my livelihood, and the support they got from the local power structure. Not counting the Human Rights boss, they included Dangerine, her lesbian “counselors” from the Women’s Crisis Center, a few county social workers, a public employees’ union activist, a probation officer, the wife of a retired public school administrator locally infamous for drunkenness on the job, and the wife of a judge. The conspirators had talked to the Coos Bay police about their plan, and the police had told them to go ahead but had not seen fit to tell me, or I might have done something more sensible than I did.

For I didn’t know most of these things I just told you; to me, these people were simple troublemakers interfering with my livelihood and ruining my reputation. When we called the police for help, we were told they were too busy. So I set out to get rid of the pests myself. In downtown Portland, along Burnside Avenue, merchants have had a lot of trouble with bums blocking access to their businesses and scaring off customers, and quite a few have installed sprinkler systems on the outside walls of their buildings. At irregular intervals they turn them on to dampen the spirit of the scruffy sidewalk assemblies. Having grown up in a water-rich country where disputes were often resolved by dunking obstreperous people in the nearest pond or canal (It happened to me), I thought water was a most sensible cure. So I quickly joined a couple of garden hoses together, climbed on my roof, and started hosing the picketers down. For a few minutes this made a few run away, especially the feminized men; but then they re-grouped en masse and started marching womanfully through the spray. According to a potential eyewitness who evaded showing up at trial, Dangerine urged her collaborators to get as wet as they could. In our highly politicized society, agents provocateurs often win the victim’s prize.

Once I realized that hosing the harridans was as effective as pouring gasoline on a fire, I sat down on my roof, at a loss what to do next. Then I saw that my gutter had collected so much dirt, grass was growing in it. I pulled out some clumps, intending to throw them into the back yard. Just then I caught sight of Dangerine down below, and she caught sight of me.
“You f-ckin’ …. !!!!” she screamed, shaking her calloused fist.



It was in my hand; I had to let go. But my aim has never been great.

“SPLAT!” said the clump of mud, glancing off her shoulder and missing a golden chance to improve her face.

Hmm. Now I felt I had done more than enough; a tactical retreat seemed advisable. Dragging the hoses back across the roof, I climbed down to get a situation report, and found the restaurant staff all shook up. While I was up there a frantic girl had burst into the place, screaming and carrying on about how terrible we all were until they pushed her out the door. As we found out later, that was Dangerine’s daughter.

But we didn’t know this, nor did we know much else; on our side, confusion reigned. I believe it was at that point that the picketers called the police, demanding that they arrest me. This time, two cops promptly arrived. After spending considerable time outside, interviewing the picketers, Coos Bay’s finest came in not to get my side of things but to charge me with multiple counts of “harassment” on account of the water-spraying, plus assault because Dangerine claimed her shoulder hurt due to the mud clod. She also said she was “pretty much covered with dirt”. The picture nearby shows the remains of the mud, near her feet. Draw your own conclusions. Regardless, the police said that an assault charge required me to be arrested and booked, so to the considerable glee of the picketers I was handcuffed and hauled off to the county courthouse to be booked.

Once there, the county jail deputies were as nice as they could be, and they were sorry that their holding cell contained nothing for me to read until a relative came to collect me. But before they started the fingerprinting and photographing, one deputy asked the city policemen what I had done. They told him.

“Whoa–” he stammered, “shouldn’t we give him a medal for that, instead?” Obviously the county jail was on the long list of places where Dangerine, that indomitable advocate of female innocence, had made a total pest of herself.

For a week or so it was not clear what would shake out of all this commotion. Business was slow for the time of year, and getting slower; clearly we’d been hurt where they meant to hurt us. But a lot of people expressed moral support, some making a point of patronizing my place, including several whom the picket first led to believe I must have raped somebody. Lord knows how many more never learned the truth. During those weeks, too, I gained a new respect for ordinary people because they, not the politicians, not the lawyers, and least of all the feminists, understood what this was all about. It was not about rape, and it was not about the “rights to free speech” of the picketers, although they loudly and constantly trumpeted those rights. One lady from North Dakota wrote: “Dear sir. I read in the paper about your spraying those women with a water hose. I feel you had a right to your opinion … I also think you had a right to protect your business from those who were obstructing your place.” Exactly. We might not have government-sanctioned censorship in the United States, but the picketers had appointed themselves censors. And, they got away with it. My consolation prize was an instant of national fame, as the restaurant owner who hosed down a bunch of picketing feminists. When I shopped out of town, merchants would recognize me and give me things. Some people sent money. That was welcome, for this was going to cost me.

Meanwhile my opponents spread lies, engaged in name-calling, and conducted a whisper-campaign to convince the public that I approved of rape. Deriding everything in my letter as untrue, they called me a fascist, which happens to be a tactic pioneered by Stalin. And as she had done throughout her do-gooder career, Dangerine took the opportunity to promote herself as the victim. She accused me of being a misogynist and an anti-Semite, and proposed that her staff at the picket be nominated for sainthood. That would have made the most peculiar set of saints in the history of Catholicism,

I also happened to run into Dangerine’s ex-husband, who apologized profusely: “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorry for what she did you!”

“Well, it wasn’t exactly your fault.”

“I know! But I’m the one who brought her here! She’s a monster!”

And then he told me a story from his turbulent marriage. Not being an intellectual but more of a hands-on character, he offered neither an explanation nor an analysis, but it was so weird, he could not have made it up. Dangerine had been the spouse-abuser in their marriage. On one occasion she was beating him up in their bedroom. While pounding him on the side of the head – and she could put some weight into it – their daughter, then only 9 years old, was hiding under a blanket. And while pounding him Dangerine was screaming: “Ouch! You’re hurting me!” Afterward he needed medical attention for a shattered eardrum, and I could tell that he had suffered some hearing loss.

Shortly after this, one of his employees told me he was present when Dangerine gave her man another thrashing while the pair was rolling down the hillside outside their home. After that the husband had to go on tranquilizers, and he was not a weenie. Shortly after the picket I also learned that the daughter who had thrown the hissy-fit inside the restaurant had publicly beat up her boyfriend who lived next door, at the same time trashing his car and screaming that he was a stupid Mexican. Although it deserves to be made, my point is not that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Instead, it is that equality of the sexes or caring for abused people or any other feel-good cause is not what this kind of feminism is about. Those are pretexts. This feminism is about creating a new tyranny, but in order to do so it needs to impose its own belief system. And agnostics must be trashed.

I wrote a letter to the District attorney, demanding that he prosecute the picketers for intimidation, coercion, and violating my right to free speech. No response. Instead, increasingly ominous pieces of information dribbled in. One was the picket’s domination by government employees, including those with a connection to the local “justice” establishment, particularly the judge’s wife. When I contacted local attorneys about taking my case, nobody was interested. Neither was the local paper, which for some time already had been Dangerine’s mouthpiece, paid and unpaid. The paid items included advertisements that demonized men and heterosexuality. One ad hinted ominously:

“Dating someone is better than dating no one. OR IS IT? Abusive behavior occurs in 50% of all dating relationships.” Another ad was no less startling: “WARNING! Dating may be hazardous to your health!” And a picture of a man and woman having a pleasant conversation carried the startling message: “Did This Woman Deserve To Be Raped?”

Besides getting paid for spreading this kind of terror, the newspaper had been filling many free column-inches with Dangerine’s harangues against the American male as a spouse-beating brute, a serial date-rapist, and a pathological dirty old man who would subject his own little children to sexual abuse so horrible that they had forgotten all about it. Those buried horrors could then be “recovered” by therapists such as Dangerine.

An even-handed check of social-science research reveals that blaming men for all those problems is like Mark Twain’s reaction to his premature obituary: greatly exaggerated. People do bad things, yes, but both sexes do. With regard to domestic violence, studies have shown it is just as likely to be initiated by females as by males, with the females more likely to use weapons. But you’d never know it, as demonstrated by the customary refusal of women’s shelters to receive abused men. Studies also show that many women – up to half – lie about having been raped; we’ve seen some infamous cases in recent years. And while Dangerine’s third obsession, “recovered” memories of incest, has no scientific basis, it’s been shown that such memories can be implanted in the minds of neurotic women by overzealous social workers and prosecutors. But practical politics, as the famous historian Henry Brooks Adams observed, consists of ignoring facts. What is worse, politics seems to attract a lot of power-hungry people. Bullies who practice deceit and spread paranoia.

So now, you may wonder, what of this letter of mine that had provoked the Lesbians from Hell? Shortly before the picket, a majority-female jury had returned an acquittal in a local man’s “date-rape” trial. This had induced the Coos Bay paper to run another puff-piece on Dangerine, in which both she and the district attorney carried on like sore losers. Dangerine proclaimed that every man accused of rape must be presumed guilty and found guilty, and the woman, being incapable of lying, shouldn’t even have to appear in court. This had induced me to write my letter. In view of the results, I may fit a famous description by George Eliot: “[he] suspected himself of loving too well the losing causes of the world.”

“It is in the nature of our court system that not everyone accused of a crime is convicted, and that people accused of crimes may confront their accusers in court. It looks like [Dangerine] wants to do away with such inconveniences. … While foreign to our tradition, [Dangerine’s] legal concepts can be effective. During the French revolution, they made lots of innocent heads roll.

It is true that many date-rape cases are dismissed or end in acquittal. If this proves a conspiracy against women, I would like to know why the women on our juries participate in it.

We should all be grateful that juries substitute a considered opinion for the snap judgment of one extremist. … Certain noisy feminists excepted, women still enjoy flirtation and male attention. Our society has done away with the stigma attached to unmarried intercourse. So when relations occur after a couple of dates, or even one, who decides that it was rape? The man may have been better at wining and dining than at doing “it”. The woman may be disappointed. A few days later, she decides she has really been raped. How can a jury determine what happened … ?


For rape to occur, the woman must object before the fact, not after. And the most effective prevention consists of taking the bull by the horns. Remember: this is date-rape, no guns or knives. When the unwanted act is about to occur, the rapist will expose the necessary equipment. All that an unwilling woman has to do then is grab half of it and not let go. With some force, she then applies the movements used in wringing all the water from a wet towel. Any woman who doesn’t know the sensitivity of these male parts is too dumb to go out on dates. And every would-be rapist subjected to the procedure will change his mind faster than you can say ‘feminazi’”.

Did my letter contain logic? Yes it did. Did it contain truth? Nothing but. But what about my advice to women who didn’t want to be date-raped? I’ve heard some people say this could not possibly work. But they are uninformed. As a tactic it has proved itself, and it’s recommended by self-defense experts, too. It has even been promoted on Oprah. I’ll be glad to provide sources. But my tormentors on July 3 would have none of it.

In accusing me of anti-Semitism, Dangerine’s logic ran like this: I had called her a “feminazi”; she was of Jewish descent; so that made me an anti-Semite. Of these three statements, only her Jewish origin was true, sort of. I doubt that she practiced the Jewish faith, and in reality I was the Jew in this scenario. Sixty years on, the 1933 Nazi-German picket of Jewish merchants had been re-enacted, this time by American feminist storm troopers.

At first I had trouble believing that I would be prosecuted, when I had been the one victimized. But that’s what happened. The assault charge was not pursued, because Dangerine had no real injury. But since I had been arrested they had to charge me with something, so I faced multiple counts of “harassment” for the water-spraying and for throwing the mud-clod. The district attorney’s office offered to prosecute these charges as “violations” instead of misdemeanors, which would save me from a possible jail sentence, but mere violations did not qualify for a jury trial, just a trial before a judge. In hindsight, I believe the jail sentence threat was theoretical. But I took the bait and opted for the violations, and when I had second thoughts the court was adamant that I could not change that decision. A jury trial would have been far, far better for me.

What I should explain, though, is why I tied myself in knots over a court proceeding that could at worst cost me as much as a few technical traffic violations. This may sound strange, but I was fighting disillusionment. As an immigrant I had developed great admiration for the way the American government had been structured by the founders. I was especially awed by the federal First Amendment, aware that while most governments guarantee freedom of speech on paper, nobody has it except the Americans, since their government has accepted "… the principle of free thought, not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate." (Justice Holmes in U.S. vs. Schwimmer, 1929.) Every place else in this world, a mere expression of opinion may be prosecuted if some authority feels it may hurt somebody’s feelings, and unlike in America, truth is no defense. The élites in those countries advance good reasons for their speech bans, but they make sense only if you ignore the fact that opinions that offend nobody don’t need constitutional protection in the first place.

In truth, my admiration for the First Amendment made me overconfident, not to say naïve. No matter what the Constitution or the Supreme Court say on the subject, people will find ways to censor speech they don’t like. I was a latter-day Don Quixote, on a quest for a moral victory. But moral victories are more common in movies.

An eager-beaver junior prosecutor who must have made straight A’s in Arrogance-101 took charge of my multiple “violations”. That year’s session of the Oregon Legislature approved a bill forbidding prosecutors in the state from handling violations. But that came too late for my case, which demonstrated the pernicious effects of the American sports mania on legal morals – if such there be. In the legal business as in sports, it’s all about winning.

To get to his goal post, the junior d. a. used several tactics. One, he took the position that the picketers had not interfered with my business, which was laughable. Two, even if they had interfered (which he never admitted), or if they had defamed me, that had nothing to do with the charges against me, and should be pursued as a civil matter later on. This can be described as the “Salami-tactic”, see below. And third, he was nauseatingly obsequious to the picketers’ whining about being hosed, suggesting (among other things) that my garden hose had the power of a jet engine. In the process he got them to produce the kind of ranting typically produced by hormonal imbalances. The understandable part of these rants was that being sprayed with water was like being molested and raped.

The “salami-tactic” was identified many years ago by German students of politics. It consists of dividing an issue into segments small enough so no reasonable person can object to the disposition of each individual part. The party who divides the issue (or slices the salami) fully intends to eat all of it, but he doesn't let on. In the end, he gets everything he wants while everyone else wonders how such a thing could have happened.

The legal establishment is very fond of the salami-tactic, due to its belief that justice will result from splitting up every case into its smallest constituent pieces. After doing so, they concentrate on one little part while ignoring the rest. Once enough tiny sub-parts ‑‑ or salami slices, if you will – have been dealt with in this manner, the accumulation of multiple small decisions will acquire such momentous logic that the big one almost makes itself. And that, of course, was the real goal of the salami-eater.


In my case, the d. a. insisted that the judge could not consider the context of the incident and what the picketers were doing to me; he could only rule on what I had done in the heat of the moment – a moment the picketers had staged. In a regular trial we could have got the jury to consider the whole salami, not just the hosing of the harridans but the harm they inflicted on my livelihood and my reputation. A jury could have done so despite the instructions of a judge. In Oregon as in many states, juries have the power to judge whether applying the law in the case at hand will be just or not. If not, they can acquit. It’s called jury nullification. And there is nothing the judge can do about it, even though he pretends otherwise.

Also working to my advantage in a jury trial would have been the labor-union background of many jury members. My accusers were unanimous in claiming that they never meant to cause my business any harm. But most people in a blue-collar town know that the primary purpose of a business picket is to do exactly that: cause harm.

But I did not have a jury; my goose was cooked, for the judge went right along with the toadying d. a. and his pet victims. That is, when the pontifications of the “victims” were not putting him to sleep.


State: “Did you find when you were sprayed with water, is this offensive to you?”

Dangerine: “As an incest survivor, it was horrifying.” [Laughter]

State: “Did you ever state to Mr. de Vriend – “

Dangerine: “And I don’t find it funny that I am an incest survivor.” (p. 60, transcript)


State: “What was the reaction of the crowd once he started spraying them with water as far as from an emotional standpoint?”

Dangerine: “I hope this doesn’t again get laughs. But there were women there who are victims of sexual assault and they chose to come there and for somebody to again be assaulted, it is very upsetting. I realize I say things in this court room as why we were there, but it is offensive and it’s scary, it’s horrifying for somebody to then again be assaulted. This was an assault. For those of us who have been assaulted in our lives, reading this letter or having somebody spray us. Or having somebody hit us, is not a very pleasant experience, and I realize that there are many people in this court room who do not understand what I am saying, and that’s why we continue to do what we do.”

State: “And did all of these events occur in Coos County?”

Dangerine: “Yes.”

State: “Nothing further.”
. . .
Defense: “You said that it was horrifying to be hit with a dirt clod.”

Dangerine: “Yes, it was.”

Defense: “How do you equate a dirt clod with sexual assault?”

Dangerine: “I will equate it with what was written in the letter, be it assault and the words that were used against me and that somebody deliberately looked at me with the intent of not throwing it in any direction, excuse me, but in the intent of hurting me personally. And it brings back memories that are very uncomfortable for me.” (p. 62)


Loverless: “… And he looked me right in the eye, and he said, “You’re one of them.” And he sprayed me right in the face, and all down my body, up and down nice and slow, you know, like nice and slow. And by golly, I felt raped! (p. 79)


State: Did he spray you?

Cripling: Yes.

State: How wet did you get?

Cripling: Soaked.

State: Did you find this offensive?

Cripling: Yeah, it’s really scary because – you know – we knew how he felt about rape, and so I consider rape a violent crime, So, I considered him a violent man and I didn’t know what else he might do. (pp 98/99)

The judge gave no weight to the outrageous defamation generated by the picketers:

Defense: What did you see?

Booth: Well, I saw 15-20 people holding signs that I thought were very offensive towards Wim, libelous. … I thought they were almost blocking traffic – close to it. And the signs that I saw – all I could think was, “Jesus, what has Wim done?” You know – “Has he raped somebody?” Jesus – and his wife – you know – what could have happened? (p. 102)

West: … I had to slow a little bit, and the light was just turning and we saw this bunch of picketers walking in a circle around the sidewalk with their signs, and the only sign that stuck out in my mind, of course, as you are trying to drive and look over there, was one that somebody was carrying that I think had the words “Date Rape Is Not A Sport” or “Date Rape Is No Sport”, I don’t remember the exact words. They continued milling around and we went on through the light and my wife turned to me and asked, “Do you suppose that Wim got involved with one of his waitresses?” (p. 127)

The trial took the better part of a day – an unusually warm day for an area without air conditioning. Before long the unventilated, crowded court room became oppressive, and the break brought no relief when the audience got treated to a hallway show of giggling, smooching lesbians. At the end of the day the judge found me guilty on all charges, and fined me about $1,300.

Because of the presence of a Coos County judge’s wife among the picketers, the trial had originally been assigned to a judge from a different county, who seemed to be strict but fair. But to our surprise, at the last minute he’d been replaced by a retired Coos County judge who apparently needed a little moonlighting. As soon as he had pronounced his sentence and we walked out in a daze, I was approached by two different acquaintances who asked if I had noticed he had slept through part of the proceedings. I was astonished. I had hardly looked at the man, being so intent on what everyone else was saying.

But, outraged by the verdict, I armed myself with affidavits from both observers to lodge a complaint for misconduct with the state bar disciplinary association. That self-protective fraternity conducted some sort of procedure, but except for informing me that they had done so they never told me their decision. Them’s the rules of the old boys’ club.

Dark, restless nights followed dark days, although they were again brightened by some great people. The morning after the verdict my old friend Lorance Eickworth walked into the restaurant and handed me a check for $400. Lorance had been a life-long gadfly on Coos Bay’s body politic, and he knew a price has to be paid.

Meanwhile my opponents, flush with victory, conducted a campaign of harassment. Off and on we got weird phone calls at the restaurant from what sounded like a lesbian orgy, and when I finally received an obscene letter with the Women’s Crisis Center’s address, I took it to the police. The policeman reported that everyone at the Crisis Center denied having sent it, but they promised it wouldn’t happen again.

I suppose it was an act of defiance when I acquired a World War II “Save Freedom of Speech” poster to hang in the restaurant. The truth is, though, that Norman Rockwell’s scene has a maudlin element of unreality. I’ve never attended a public meeting where everybody lavished adoring looks on a common man speaking up; where are the bored, the skeptical, the scoffers and the dozers? Not to mention the teenage girls blowing bubble gum. More to the point, the poster calls on people to buy war bonds to protect freedom of speech. But does the primary danger to our civil liberties come from raving foreign dictators, or from ranting domestic do-gooders?

After several months I worked up enough steam to initiate the second phase of my tale, a civil suit for defamation and business damages, but that one was torpedoed by a judge’s ruling that the picket signs could not possibly have constituted defamation. How can you explain such a thing except by corruption or incompetence?

One night I woke up around 3 AM again, unable to sleep, went to my living room and took out my bible. It fell open to Matthew 5:11:

“Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.” (NIV)

That one hit me hard; but I still possessed enough skepticism – or modesty, hopefully – to object silently that I had not exactly done it for Him. I had been feeding my pride.

“But I know how you feel.”

Day of the Democratic Dead: November 2, 2010

This election is a referendum not on Obama personally, but on Obama as liberal progressive

By Henry Olsen, vice president of the American Enterprise Institute

For Delaware Democrat Chris Coons, it’s fitting that Election Day comes two days after Halloween, running as he is against that sometime dabbler in witchcraft, Christine O’Donnell. For hundreds of his partisan brothers and sisters, however, another holiday reference is more appropriate: Mexico’s Day of the Dead. Today, our neighbors to the south will begin celebrating the memories of their deceased family and friends. Tomorrow, our neighbors to the left will mourn the demise of hundreds of candidates whose careers will be consigned to the political graveyard, few of which will rise to take bodily form again.

How did it come to this? Just two years ago, all things seemed possible for Democrats. In possession of congressional majorities larger than any since 1980, led by a seemingly historic figure who had just won a larger share of the popular vote than any non-incumbent Democrat since FDR in 1932, Democrats forecast an American political sky that would remain endlessly blue. Today, Democrats are headed for a reversal of fortune of proportions not seen since the landslide elections of 1946 and 1948.

How strong will this reversal be? I predict that Republicans will gain between 55 and 72 seats in the House; my best estimate is 64. That will give the GOP 243 seats, its highest total since the election of 1946 and the second highest since the Great Depression. No living Democrat has served in a House of Representatives with as few Democrats as will inhabit that body come January.

Furthermore, I predict that the GOP will gain nine Senate seats, giving it 50 members. That means the Republicans will nearly capture the slate in the seats up for grabs, losing only West Virginia in a nailbiter among the close seats in the polls. I would not at all be surprised if one Democrat — perhaps Jim Webb of Virginia — subsequently switches parties or changes which party he caucuses with to give the GOP operational control of the Senate. (Those interested in my specific seat-by-seat predictions should keep their eye on the Corner.)

Many will blame the economy for this situation, arguing that no party in the midst of the worst economic crisis in at least 30, and perhaps 80, years could have satisfied the electorate. There is truth to this, as the party in power always suffers at the polls during a significant recession.

But this explanation goes only so far. The anger, disappointment, and disgust that the voters will shower on the Obama administration and the Democratic congressional leadership is unusually deep. The electorate is reacting at a much more visceral level.

In my private election-prediction memo two years ago, I wrote the following words: “Democrats are split between progressives, who seek a radical and swift move to the economic left, and centrists, who want to re-regulate and ‘spread the wealth around’ but nowhere near the degree of the progressives.#…#Who will win these intra-party fights? We don’t know, and which faction wins and to what extent will largely determine both the health of our nation and the possibility of a quick Republican resurgence.”

We now know that the progressives, despite their dissatisfaction with many elements of President Obama’s agenda, largely won those fights. The result is that large segments of the American electorate feel that the administration and Democrats in Congress don’t understand and don’t care to understand their aspirations and fears. This sentiment is most keenly and strongly felt among conservative Republicans, but it is shared — for different reasons — by many nonconservatives. This sentiment is particularly strong among the white working class and among Catholics.

The development of this sentiment was not inevitable. President Obama took power with the strong support of most Americans, who hoped and believed he could make America whole again. Instead, in his deeds and in his words, in what he has done and in what he has failed to do, he has alienated the vast American middle.

Why did he do and say what he did? Why did those words and deeds alienate the American middle and working classes? Is there something inherent in progressive politics that is out of sync with American attitudes and aspirations?


To understand the answers to these questions, we must understand that this election is only the latest battle in what I have called the Fifty Years’ War between progressives and conservatives for possession of America’s political soul. One can understand the president’s words and deeds only if we understand both what the war is about and how Democrats themselves differ about how to fight the war. So it is to that issue that I now turn.

THE FIFTY YEARS’ WAR

At the political level, the Fifty Years’ War is about what defines American freedom. Is the promise of America that everyone enjoys the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness best kept when government is minimally involved, either through regulation or taxation, in individual decision making? Or is it best kept when government removes material and immaterial obstacles to some individuals’ ability to make the decisions they would prefer to make, even if removing those obstacles places obstacles in the paths of other Americans?

Conservatives have a tendency to agree with the first proposition, while progressives have a tendency to agree with the second. But for progressives there is a second, pragmatic question to answer: Should necessity — in the form of voter opinion and economic factors — significantly constrain the pursuit of justice? Progressives differ among themselves on this question, and it is this difference that forms the heart of the battle between the “moderates” and “liberals” within the Democratic party.

Liberal progressives say necessity should have a minimal role in constraining the pursuit of progressive justice. If voters don’t agree with a progressive view of rights, recourse to the courts to overrule them is proper. Voters’ desire, and especially well-off voters’ desire, to keep taxes low and the economy growing ought not to be a significant factor in bringing medical care to poor people or saving the planet from greenhouse gasses.

Moderate progressives take the contrary view. Justice can be secure only if it is secure in the hearts and minds of the people, they believe. They place more faith in, and pay more deference to, voters’ desires, not because they don’t believe in progressive aspirations, but because they believe those goals can best be achieved through incremental measures that receive broad popular support.

We can see this clash most clearly in the reactions of both camps to the Clinton presidency and to Hillary Clinton’s once and future candidacy. To liberal progressives, the Clinton presidency is anathema. It was too timid when it had power in 1993–94, and too conciliatory when it shared power with a Republican Congress thereafter. This belief fueled the challenges to Al Gore in 2000 by Bill Bradley in the primaries and Ralph Nader in the general election. It fueled Howard Dean’s 2004 bid, and was the impetus behind much of the support for Barack Obama’s challenge to frontrunner Hillary Clinton in 2008.

To moderate progressives, the Clinton presidency is the model of progressive action in the modern world. Clinton’s go-slow approach, coupled with his continued pursuit of progressive spending and social policies where possible, meant that progressive policies became imbedded in the middle-class mindset, making them impervious to conservative counterattack.

These differences did not arise with Bill Clinton, though. The seeds for this Democratic division extend much further back in our political history, to the start of the current political era in the 1960s. Each side in this progressive civil war draws different lessons from what happened in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, lessons that carried through into their different paths in the 1990s and remain to the present day.

THE LEGACY OF THE SIXTIES

Today’s liberal progressives are directly descended from the “New Left” of the 1960s. By this I do not mean student radicals, SDS members, Yippies, and others of the radical fringe of this movement. Instead, I define the “New Left” as those Americans — largely bearers of college and postgraduate degrees — who sought not merely to ameliorate some of the hardest edges of American life, as FDR did with the New Deal, but rather to transform American life now. They sought to eliminate, not ameliorate, poverty now. They saw Americans’ pursuit of ever-increasing wealth as an impediment to these goals; why should already well-off families have more when some people had little? And they saw American defense spending as a crucial obstacle to these goals; if no one was attacking us directly, why shouldn’t we spend on butter rather than bombs?


The New Left was characterized as much by its impatience as by its lofty ambitions. Its advocates saw the non-attainment of their goals as a moral crime. As such, those who stood in the way of those goals were not merely adversaries, they were enemies: selfish, unlettered, in need of enlightenment. This sentiment is the source of the arrogant condescension that many Americans and most conservatives have felt all too frequently is a defining feature of today’s Left.

The New Left and today’s liberal progressives, then, interpret America’s political history very differently from the way conservatives and moderate progressives do. They see the victory of Richard Nixon in 1968 and 1972 as catastrophic. As much as conservatives see Nixon as a liberal because of his imposition of wage and price controls and his failure to even seriously try to dismantle much of the Great Society, liberal progressives see his victory as a watershed, because he stood as an impediment to the rapid attainment of their goals. If Nixon’s victory was catastrophic, Reagan’s victory was epochal. Reagan and his heirs promised not just to stand in the way of achieving liberal progressives’ deepest dreams; they stood pledged to question the very assumptions of the progressive project and roll them back if they could.

To reverse these trends, liberal progressives knew they had to control the Democratic party, and to do that they had to nominate and elect one of their own to the presidency. Thus was born the now endemic battles between the progressives and the old guard (unions and party bosses in the ’80s, the DLC in the ’90s and ’00s) in Democratic nomination contests. The liberal progressive candidate would win educated voters — the “wine set,” as Ron Brownstein has labeled them — while the moderate progressive candidate would win the middle and working classes — Brownstein’s “beer set.” Since beer drinkers have always outnumbered wine drinkers in Democratic primaries, the candidates who excited the most progressive elements always lost — until Barack Obama broke the mold in 2008 by attracting African-American “beer drinkers” into the progressive camp.

Liberal progressives view these consistent defeats as examples of justice denied. Their consistent rejection by the voters is seen not as a rejection of their impatience or lofty ambitions, but as something more sinister. The voters were bamboozled by the Teflon Great Communicator, by Willie Horton ads, by triangulating good old boys, by corporate interests, and by blockheaded Texans backed by unscrupulous Mayberry Machiavellians. Something is the matter with Kansans if they don’t back progressives; it must be devious politicians who divert middle- and working-class voters with the bread and circuses of phony social issues and unnecessary foreign wars. The solution: Organize new constituencies, particularly among the young and among ethnic minorities, through the internet (Daily Kos, MoveOn.org), local groups (ACORN), and D.C.-based interest groups (EMILY’s List, Center for American Progress), and continue to press for progressive justice in bold colors, not pale pastels.

DEMOCRATIC THERMIDOR

As the continued failure of progressive candidates in Democratic presidential primaries shows, a majority of Democrats are not of this lineage. These moderate progressives place a very different interpretation on what went wrong in the ’60s and ’70s, and have adopted a very different view of how to engage in and shape American politics.

Moderate progressives view the rejections of the Democrats from 1968 to 1984 as a sober lesson delivered by a sober populace. They view Americans today as wanting the same things economically that their parents and grandparents wanted from the New Deal: an active safety net that helps them move up in American life. In this view, Americans support Democrats when they use government to support and enhance middle-class values and aspirations. Moderate progressives believe Democrats got away from that heritage when they started to be perceived as worrying more about people who did not work than about those who did, as worrying more about criminals than the victims of crime, as worrying more about American aggression than about the freedom of the West.

For moderate progressives, then, the very impatience and lofty ambitions that animate liberal progressives were seen to be the causes of Republican and conservative victory. Moderate progressives like Bill Clinton believed that voters would choose conservative Republicans if they were not offered a Democratic alternative that sought to modernize Roosevelt’s legacy for modern times. By pledging to “end welfare as we know it” and support the people who “work hard and play by the rules,” Clinton sought to place that alternative before Americans. He did, and he won.

The very victory that moderate progressives view as legitimizing their approach, though, is seen as destructive by liberal progressives. This difference is encapsulated in how each side views welfare reform, the passage of which is widely viewed as securing Clinton’s reelection. Moderate progressives are proud of that legislation, wishing that it had provided more economic support to single mothers but generally supportive of the fact that it helped move millions of people into work. Liberal progressives, though, believe that it did little or nothing to end poverty, and as such was a sell-out of the progressive commitment to the poor. The fact that the public demanded that the welfare-reform bill or something like it be passed weighs large in the calculus of the moderate progressives, but not at all in that of that liberal progressives.

THE PROGRESSIVE CIVIL WAR

Fast forward to the past two years, and we can see that this tension within the Democratic party is a factor in every major decision the administration and the congressional leadership has made. From the start, President Obama, with the enthusiastic backing of liberal progressives, declared that his would be a transformative presidency. This meant that his agenda would largely be that of the liberal progressives: health-care reform with a major emphasis on near-universal coverage, cap-and-trade, a large economic stimulus focused more on government projects than on tax relief, a consumer-protection agency to regulate financial instruments. Truly, this crisis would not be allowed to go to waste: Forty years of wandering in the political wilderness would finally be over.

Political urgency was coupled with this intellectual impetus. Democrats were acutely aware that they had supermajorities they had not possessed since 1980. With the increase of the partisan use of the filibuster, a phenomenon not widely seen until the Clinton years, they felt they would not have this degree of power again in the near future. Many argued that the window for bold action was narrow, and it could not be let to close without fulfilling liberal-progressive dreams.

Any one of these measures would have defined a Congress. To push all of them simultaneously, plus a major financial-regulation bill to address what was argued to be the causes of the financial crisis, proved to be too much. Nevertheless, time after time, when political warning signals went up, the administration and the congressional leadership pushed forward.

The administration has been criticized by many for not engaging in Clintonian triangulation, in not bending to the political winds to pass something incremental and obtainable. Speaker Pelosi’s decision to push her caucus to a floor vote on cap-and-trade legislation that was unlikely to pass the Senate might cost dozens of Democrats their seats. The decision to push the health-care bill after Scott Brown won the Massachusetts special election to the Senate has helped to define the entire 2010 campaign. Had they not done these things, many moderate progressives argue, Democrats could have staved off the massive defeat they are now certain to suffer.

But this argument essentially says that Hillary Clinton should have won the presidency. The whole point of liberal progressivism is to rid the Democratic party of what it views as temporizing and lack of principle. Barack Obama won his nomination with that faction’s support; Nancy Pelosi was elevated to the speakership with their favor. To ignore the liberal progressives’ ideals in difficult times would break faith with them, guaranteeing their eternal enmity and earning the president a probable primary challenge.

Indeed, these fears were justified. The twin totems of liberal progressivism — lofty ambitions and impatience — have been on full display when liberal progressives discuss the administration’s decisions. Paul Krugman decries a too-small stimulus, a bill whose near-trillion-dollar price tag shocked middle-class Americans. Jon Stewart tells the president that he has been too timid. While most polls show that Americans view President Obama as too liberal, liberal progressives view him as not liberal enough.

None of this would have mattered if the liberal progressives had been right about the reasons they have lost in the past. If Americans genuinely wanted quick implementation of liberal-progressive economic measures, then there would have been no electoral retribution to fear. Indeed, this was the argument many liberal progressives made when the decision was made to go forward with the health-care bill.

Moderate progressives argued that Brown’s election was a wake-up call. Pointing to many polls showing that Americans did not want the health-care bill to pass and that independents were growing more concerned about the deficit and moving against the Democrats, men such as Mark Penn and Doug Schoen argued that electoral disaster loomed unless the administration changed course. They pointed to the landslide of 1994 as an example of what could happen if the Speaker and the president persisted. In essence, moderate progressive argued that the Democrats lost in 1994 by trying to be three steps ahead of public opinion instead of one.

Those in favor of pushing forward argued that the reason the Democrats lost in 1994 was not that they were too far ahead of public opinion, but that by failing to pass Clinton’s health-care bill they had not heeded public opinion enough. Democrats were punished in 1994 for not governing, not for being out of step with public opinion. Thus in March 2010, liberal progressives were saying, Pass the bill and the people will reward you for tackling a tough problem. By November, these men argued, Republicans will no longer be able to distract the voters with wild claims about “death panels,” and the president could make the case himself. The political calculus, they said, favored bold action — not triangulation.

Note how all the issues in the progressive civil war played out in this discussion. Should we aim for incremental amelioration or bold transformation? Should public opinion cause progressives to slow down or not? Is the public genuinely for liberal progressivism or not?

The progressive civil war has played out in the ensuing post-Obamacare policy and political debates as well. Moderate progressives argued for a sole preoccupation with the economy, jobs, and controlling the deficit. Polls showed that this is what independents, who still had a personal regard for President Obama, wanted addressed. Liberal progressives instead insisted on measures that would energize the despondent base. Immigration reform would attract Latinos, addressing student-loan defaults would energize the young, cap-and-trade would energize environmentalists, and so on.

These debates also replayed old progressive debates on how to engage in American politics. Moderate progressives, who believed that liberal progressivism was to blame for prior defeats, emphasized the role independents would play in the election and counseled ameliorative incremental measures. Liberal progressives, who believed that lack of boldness and improper campaign tactics were responsible for prior defeats, focused on policies that would energize liberal progressives — who supposedly normally do not vote — to show up at the polls.

We can see that the administration again largely accepted the liberal-progressive view of the world. Legislative attention was focused on financial regulation, a bill that was superficially popular but which clearly was not a priority for any segment of the electorate. Little serious attention was paid to the deficit, and the administration’s reaction to the Gulf oil spill was to shut down offshore drilling, an act that thrilled environmentalists but surely was noticed by working-class Americans already worried about their jobs. It was as if the administration felt that directing popular anger against Wall Street and big business — a staple of the Democratic party since Andrew Jackson and 1832, as progressives John Judis and Ruy Teixeira noted in their book The Emerging Democratic Majority — was sufficient to bring working-class Americans back on board.

The result is clear, according to moderate progressives. Once again, the Democratic party has been seduced by the siren song of immediate and comprehensive public action without regard to cost or public opinion. The cure for this disease is clear: a return to the only course of political action that has worked for Democrats since 1966, Clintonian incrementalism.

Liberal progressives would contest this interpretation. They place the blame for the Democratic defeat on the economy, noting that unemployment is at historically high levels, levels that have particularly affected the working class. They further note that they were unable to deliver on immigration reform, cap-and-trade, don’t-ask-don’t-tell, and other measures that would excite the base. They would argue that the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United opened the floodgate to unprecedented influence by corporations and billionaires who could now spend unlimited amounts of money on campaigns guided by clever and unscrupulous Republican operatives.

In short, they are repeating all of their prior explanations for 40 years of political defeat. People are voting their pocketbooks, our voters won’t vote unless they have something to vote for, and outside interests are once more conspiring to distract the voters with phony issues and slick ads. This, then, is the decisive point: Are liberal progressives right about recent American electoral history? Or do American voters fundamentally not want what liberal progressives have to offer?

WHAT DO AMERICANS REALLY WANT?

Let’s start this discussion with a simple fact. Since 1960, Democrats have simultaneously controlled the White House and Congress with large supermajorities four times: 1965–66, 1977–80, 1993–94, and 2009–10. In each of the three previous instances, Democrats suffered landslide reversals in Congress within four years of obtaining their supermajorities. They will do so again this year. The only time they did not also then lose the presidency was in 1996, when the triangulator Bill Clinton was reelected. Is this a coincidence?

One cannot easily blame the economy for those earlier defeats. The economy was humming in the 1960s, and it was steadily recovering during the early 1990s. Nor can one easily blame political consultants and clever Republican tricks. As anyone who follows advertising and politics knows, a campaign succeeds only if it communicates messages its audience wants to hear. The only thread that runs through all four of the landslide reversals is the presence of liberal progressivism as the defining feature of the campaign.

One can begin to arrive at the political problem of liberal progressivism when one notes that each of those reversals saw the white working class abandon Democrats in record numbers. Nixon’s Silent Majority, Reagan Democrats, angry white males — these catchphrases from those past elections are merely euphemisms for the white working class. In each election, it was their defection that cost the Democrats their majorities and gave victory to the GOP, and polls and casual observation suggest that the white working class is in revolt against President Obama. You can read my NRO article “GOP Heaven, West Virginia?” for the full argument, but suffice it to say that President Obama’s approval rating among white working-class voters is in the neighborhood of 30 percent. By comparison, this is only a few points higher than Nixon’s approval rating on the eve of his resignation.

There must be something unique to the concerns of the white working class, then, that liberal progressivism rubs the wrong way. What might that be?

One could try to discover the answer by recourse to recent polls. If one examined the Ap-GfK poll from September 6–13, for example, one would find that working-class voters believe that government intervention in the economy is more harmful than beneficial by nearly a two-to-one margin. One would also find they are more distressed about the economy and more likely to say they have suffered financially or that a relative has lost a job. Over half say President Obama does not understand ordinary Americans’ problems. It should come as no surprise, then, to learn the same poll shows Republicans leading Democrats by 22 points on the generic congressional ballot, whereas Democrats led Republicans by 12 points two years ago.

But such recourse cannot account for the recurring white-working-class swings toward the GOP in prior years. Issues change, yet the same pattern has recurred for over 40 years. Something deeper must be at work, something that operates at the level of values rather than that of ideas. To discern what those values are, we must make inferences from these past elections rather than rely on contemporaneous data; we must turn off our computers and rely on the Force.

When I started to do this, I focused on American voters. But I soon realized that working-class voters exhibit similar traits in other countries as well. Ask an American working-class voter why he supports Democrats, and he or she is likely to say it’s because Democrats support “the little guy.” Reading about English voters in Claire Berlinski’s biography of Margaret Thatcher, There Is No Alternative, I found the exact same phrase used by English miners to describe their support for Labour. When I found the same phrase being used by Australian working-class voters to describe their attraction to the Australian Labour Party, I decided I needed to learn more.

So I reached out to Patrick Muttart, former chief of staff to Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper. Muttart is perhaps the world’s leading expert on working-class voters in English-speaking countries, having studied their behavior and attitudes not only in Canada but also in Britain, Australia, and America. He has found that in each country, working-class voters may form the base for successful center-left governments but are crucially responsible for the rise of center-right leaders like Harper, Australia’s John Howard, and Margaret Thatcher.

He was kind enough to speak with me at length. He emphasized that working-class voters do not fit neatly on the traditional left-right continuum. They are fiscally conservative, wanting low rates of taxation and wanting government to live within its means, but economically populist, suspicious of trade, outsourcing, and high finance. They are culturally orthodox but morally moderate, in the sense that they don’t feel their lives will change much because of how social issues play out. They are patriotic and supportive of the military, but suspicious of foreign adventures.

Most importantly, they are modest in their aspirations for themselves. They do not aspire to be “type A business owners”; they want to go to work, do what’s asked of them, not have too much stress in their lives, and spend time with their families. They want structure and stability in their lives so that things are taken care of and they don’t have to worry.

Drawing on Muttart’s insights and my own thinking, I believe there are seven salient values or tendencies that are common to working-class voters across the decades. Call them the Seven Habits of the Working Class. They are:

Hope for the future

Fear of the present

Pride in their lives

Anger at being disrespected

Belief in public order

Patriotism

Fear of rapid change

Let me address each of them in turn.

Hope for the future: One of the striking facts about America is how readily we believe that we can prosper through hard work and our own efforts. Polls show that Americans overwhelmingly believe this to be true. These polls also show there is a high correlation between the belief that one is in control of one’s life and the belief that one can prosper through one’s own efforts.

Working-class Americans share classic American beliefs very strongly. They value economic growth because they believe they personally benefit from it. Unlike Continental Europeans, working-class voters do not envy the rich. They believe that Bill Gates has earned his billions, and while they do not believe they can become billionaires, they believe their children can.

Fear of the present: Working-class voters may believe that they and their children can move upward, but they are as or more motivated by their fear of moving downward. They recognize that their relative lack of education means they are at more risk of being laid off in downturns. Their relative lack of earning power means they find it harder to save for retirement, afford medical care, or pay for their children’s education. Their relative lack of specialized skills means they are more vulnerable to competition from unskilled immigrants and more likely to remain unemployed if they lose their job. This gnawing fear that everything they have built is at risk of falling apart is a central feature of their political identity.

Pride in their lives: Working-class voters are generally not a despondent group. Life is harder for them in many ways, but they take pride in who they are. They are not “bitter people, clinging to religion or guns”; they celebrate their lives and crave respect from the educated and wealthy classes. They flock to politicians who show genuine respect for their lives, and turn on those who display contempt or disdain.

Anger at being disrespected: This is the flip side of their pride. Working-class voters are very cognizant of their status in American life. They rarely occupy executive positions in their jobs and are consumers rather than producers of ideas. They feel keenly this relative lack of control over important features of their lives, and resent being ordered about as if they were merely pawns in someone else’s grand plan. They particularly dislike having their lives belittled as unsophisticated or inferior to the lives of educated or wealthy folk.

This anger can be expressed against big business, big government, or big anything. If working-class voters feel they are being treated as mere tools, they will react with anger whether the source of the treatment is an employer, a politician, or an academic.

Belief in public order: Working-class voters rely more on the public order to provide a structure in their lives than do upper-class voters. They can’t afford private security services or retreat to homes with large yards far from unruly elements. They live closer together and in closer contact with crime. Accordingly, they place a high premium on effective police and fire services and greatly respect policemen and firemen.

Patriotism: Working-class voters are highly patriotic. They love their country openly in ways that often seem odd and embarrassing to the educated class. They are likelier to express open support of and deference to the military (while simultaneously recognizing that “big military” is wasteful); their children volunteer for the military in much greater numbers than those of any other class. This is partly economic — learning a trade in the military is a better opportunity for them than for people who think they can graduate from college — but it is also genuinely patriotic.

This sentiment is particularly strong among recent immigrants. One way to show your devotion to your new country is to revere its symbols and institutions, and for the working class the military is perhaps the most accessible institution of all. Hispanics in particular enlist in the military, and it is no surprise that Republican presidential candidates who are strongly supportive of the military, like Reagan and George W. Bush, have fared best among Hispanic voters in the last 45 years.

Fear of rapid change: Working-class voters recognize that they are less equipped to handle sudden changes; consequently, they value stability highly. They fear sudden recessions and distrust sudden changes in government programs. Ronald Reagan, the conservative who has best understood the working class, put his finger on it in a prescient 1964 National Review article on why Goldwater lost: “Human nature resists change and goes over backward to avoid radical change.” Upper-class educated people may embrace risk and change, but working-class voters do not.

Now consider these values in the light of the primary features of liberal progressivism. Liberal progressives inherently crave rapid, transformational change; working-class voters abhor it. This was as true in the 1960s (the Great Society) and the early Clinton years as it is today. The impatience that characterizes liberal progressivism often leads to the impression that its apostles feel contempt and disdain for those who disagree; working-class voters sense this and react against it. Liberal progressivism requires high tax rates, not only on the rich but also on the middle and working classes (overseas, this is accomplished via the VAT); working-class voters know this will choke off economic growth and increase the financial stress in their lives. Liberal progressivism typically displays less concern with public order and the institutions that provide public order; working-class voters opposed this in the 1960s and 1980s when it appeared that crime was rampant, and they remain sensitive to it to this day.

Many of the Obama administration’s actions directly attack these core beliefs. Working-class Americans crave economic security, but they see an administration that talks more about health care and climate change than about jobs. The current recession exacerbates their natural fear of downward mobility, but they see an administration seemingly incapable of providing the very thing they want most from a center-left government. In the Henry Louis Gates and Ground Zero mosque controversies, liberal progressives saw an articulate leader defending individual rights; working-class voters saw someone who questioned the police, perhaps the bedrock institution that provides public order, and showed an insufficient degree of patriotism.

Some of President Obama’s personal habits also rub working-class voters the wrong way. The president’s urbane articulateness and emphasis on rational argumentation attracts many highly educated voters, but is offputting to the working class. His preternatural calm and seeming lack of emotion also work against him. These traits have been lampooned by Doonesbury and commented on in the recent New York Times Magazine profile, but historically, working-class voters have been drawn to politicians who connect with them on an emotional level, from FDR to Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton. They need their politicians to demonstrate warmth and humor; they respond to speakers who use example, story, and narrative as much as specific analysis to make their points. President Obama’s aloof and academic manner is the exact opposite of what working-class voters want in their leaders.

It is no coincidence, then, that working-class voters regularly turn from Democrats when liberal progressivism is on full display. In this election, with liberal progressivism on display as boldly as it has ever been, the reaction will be stronger than it has ever been. There is absolutely nothing wrong with Kansas; working- and middle-class voters just want something different from what liberal progressives offer.

THE CONSERVATIVE CHALLENGE

Will the American middle and working classes’ turn to the GOP end the partisan and philosophical conflict of the last two years, or are there tensions between the conservative movement and those groups of Americans that remain to be worked out before a new, more stable political era is created? This is a topic well beyond the scope of this memo, but I will conclude by offering a sober, yet positive, assessment.

Conservatives often assume that elections like 2010 show America has a consistent conservative majority. I think it is more accurate to say that they show that America has a consistent anti-progressive majority. The task conservatives have today is to transform the anti-progressive majority into a pro-conservative one. This will be harder than it seems.

The American conservative movement was founded in explicit opposition to the progressive project. It was also founded on the premise that a return to the governing principles of the Founders’ Constitution was feasible and desirable. The first principle is anti-progressive; the second is pro-conservative. The dynamics of working- and middle-class attitudes I have outlined above raise the specter that these principles in their pure forms can be politically incompatible.

The same abhorrence of rapid change that fuels working-class fear of liberal progressivism works against rapid conservative political action. In that 1964 article, Reagan argued that conservatives lost not because of their ideas, but because liberals portrayed them “as advancing a kind of radical departure from the status quo.” Today’s Tea Party enthusiasts have displayed a desire for rapid transformation of public policy nearly as strong as that of the liberal progressives. Moving too far, too fast down this road will alienate the very voters who just came over to the GOP.

There are other, deeper tensions at work. Working-class voters crave order and stability. They value the degree of these things that the welfare state and public institutions have provided. They also respect entrepreneurs but have no desire to be forced to emulate them. They respect private economic activity, but fear that business will cast them aside in the pursuit of profits. A conservatism that conveys the message that we seek to abolish the welfare state or that people have value only if they enthusiastically participate as risk takers in a dynamic, turbulent economy will not appeal to them.

Conservatives often speak in language and propose policies that the working class perceives as threatening. Conservatives celebrate freedom, opportunity, achievement, being our own boss, entrepreneurship. Working-class voters want these things, but in moderation. They know that not everyone can graduate from college or own a business. They want a political and economic system that rewards and supports their modest vision for their own lives, rhetorically and practically. Conservatives must figure out how to reconcile their core principles with working-class desires if they are to form a lasting, stable political coalition.

We’ve done it before. Ronald Reagan in 1964 said “We represent the forgotten American — that simple soul who goes to work, bucks for a raise, takes out insurance, pays for his kids’ schooling, contributes to his church and charity, and knows there just ‘ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.’” He knew that to attract the working- and middle-class voter, “that simple soul,” conservatives need to express what they already believe, that the simple soul has value as a creature made in God’s image.

Reagan did this in both word and deed. His State of the Union addresses often featured a reference to a person in the audience. This person was invariably an ordinary man who had had a moment of extraordinary heroism, not a captain of industry or a great entrepreneur. When Reagan went to Normandy, he did not laud the genius of Eisenhower or the courage of Patton; he praised “the boys of Pointe du Hoc.” His celebration of average men and women who did their duty, and oftentimes more, reassured and inspired them.

His deeds also struck a balance between advancing freedom and respecting stability. Rasher conservatives often criticized him for failing to do more to reduce the size of government, but he understood, having been a supporter of FDR himself, how much the safety net meant economically and spiritually to the working and middle classes. He knew that his task was to plant the tree of liberty in the garden of Roosevelt. As he said in 1964, “time now for the soft sell to prove our radicalism was an optical illusion.”

His success is manifest. For nearly 30 years, politicians have labored to define themselves in the light of his legacy. Even President Obama was said he wants to be transformative like Reagan. Thanks to him, conservative sentiments are today stronger among the American people than at any time since the Great Depression.

Today’s conservatives have a rendezvous with destiny. The peculiar political challenge of our time — repairing our nation’s finances and avoiding national bankruptcy — requires us to reform our welfare state. This forces us to confront the tensions outlined above, and to do so in a way that reassures rather than frightens the vast American middle that has turned to us now in response to the last two years. If we seize this opportunity and act with principle and prudence, we truly can say we have met our challenge. In so doing, we truly will have “preserved for our children this, the last best hope for man on earth.”

Source

THE SNOBBISHNESS OF THE LEARNED

by W. T. STACE (1936)

There is a story told of a very well known living writer who produced a popular book on a branch of modern science - one of the best books of its kind now in print. He is said to have submitted his manuscript for criticism to a fellow expert, who, having read it, tossed it back contemptuously, saying, " You understand thoroughly the subject on which you are writing, and I have no adverse criticisms to offer. But why do you waste your time writing stuff of this sort? "

The story is quite possibly apocryphal. But that such a story can be passed round, and gain credence, illustrates very forcibly the fact that there is among learned men a widespread tendency to look down upon popular writing as something not worthy of their serious consideration, as something to be despised and discouraged. On the face of it, this would seem to be an extraordinary attitude. That the discoveries made by men of science and the world conceptions of philosophers should be made as widely known as possible would be, one might expect, their especial desire. And how else can this be done, if not by translating their thought from the technical jargon in which it is apt to be expressed into plain English which the world can understand? How else can it be done, in fact, if not by the labors of the popular writer?

It would seem obvious that the widespread dissemination of knowledge already attained is of at least equal importance with the discovery of new knowledge. For what, in the end, is the value of knowledge? His acquisition of knowledge is, to the expert, often an end in itself. He may be uninterested in its subsequent influence on the world. And it is quite right, and even necessary, that there should be men who take this point of view. The advance of knowledge mostly depends upon such men.

But the matter, after all, cannot end there. To many others, discovery is of value because of the practical benefits which it confers upon mankind, as when pure science is applied to the extermination of disease or the invention of useful implements. But I would suggest that the supreme value of knowledge lies, not in the thrill which its discovery gives to the small band of experts, nor even in its practical usefulness, but in the enlargement and ennoblement of the human mind in general of which it is the cause. Of the human mind in general. That means the minds, not of a few experts, but of the multitudes of civilized humanity.

This has certainly been the case with the greatest discoveries of science. They have revolutionized human conceptions of the universe, given men at large a vaster sweep of mind; and it is this which has constituted their chief importance. The greatness of the Copernican hypothesis lay neither in its purely theoretical value for the scientist nor in the better application of astronomy to navigation or other practical affairs to which it may have contributed, but in the fact that it gave to mankind some conception of the immensity of the universe in which we live, and that it destroyed forever the petty views, the insolence, the self-conceit inevitably connected with the belief that the whole creation exists for, and revolves around, man. This is why the Copernican theory constituted a revolution in human thought. This is why it is so vastly more important than, shall we say, the discovery of a new variety of ant, or of a new theorem in mathematics.

Exactly similar remarks might be made about the theory of evolution. That too obtains its importance neither from its theoretical nor from its immediately practical bearings, but from its influence upon man's general conceptions of the world. Thus what makes the difference between an important and a trivial scientsc or philosophical discovery is precisely the influence which it exerts upon mankind in general, not upon the minds of a few learned men. And that is why, in philosophy, however interesting such a subject as symbolic logic may be to a few experts, it sinks into triviality beside the world conceptions of a Plato or a Kant. It is in itself a mere intellectual plaything, nothing of real importance, though it may become of importance if it can be applied to the solution of the great problems of philosophy. And it will be noted that it is precisely this trivial kind of subject which cannot be popularized.

In truth it matters little what the doctors of science or the doctors of philosophy think, believe, or say among themselves in their cloisters. What humanity thinks and believes -that is what matters. And the true function of the cloistered few is precisely to be the intellectual leaders of humanity and to guide the thought of mankind to higher levels. This function can only be carried out if someone, either they themselves or others, will translate their thought from technical language into the language of the market place. The best and the ablest discoverers and thinkers often possess both the ability and the desire to do this themselves. (It is worth noting that Einstein is the author of a popular book on relativity.) Or if their talents are not of the kind required for successful popular writing, it can be done by men who make a special business of spreading broadcast the best knowledge of their age. This type of popularizer is the liaison officer between the world's thinkers and mankind at large.

Thus it appears that the function of the popular writer is profoundly important and responsible. It is related that the soul of a dead man was conducted by Saint Peter on a tour of inspection of the Heavenly City. After seeing all the marvelous glories of the Lord, and the millions of white-clad worshiping souls, he was shown by his guide a little curtained-off enclosure in which half a dozen people were praying, cut off from all the rest of the multitude. These, he was told, were the Plymouth Brethren, who believed themselves to be the only people in Heaven. Those experts who look down upon the popularization, and who would, if they could, make all knowledge the exclusive property of a little coterie of intellectuals, show a spirit identical with that of the poor souls in the story.

But, it will be said, much, if not most, of what learned men think and discover cannot be made intelligible to the masses. This is, on the whole, untrue. The big conceptions, the important results of science and philosophy, can be communicated to the layman. What cannot be communicated is, as a rule, the detailed processes of discovery and argumentation which have led to those results. Every educated person now understands the main conceptions involved in the Copernican and Darwinian hypotheses, although the proofs and details may be a sealed book to the majority. In a tube of antityphoid serum there are so many millions of dead bacteria. The methods by which the number is counted or calculated may remain a mystery to the layman. But the fact that there are these many can be understood by a child.

The same principle holds true even in those sciences which seem to most of us too hopelessly mathematical. The results reached can usually be disentangled from their mathematical formulation and set forth by themselves. This is not true, of course, of pure mathematics itself, but only of those physical sciences which use mathematics as a mere instrument to reach their conclusions. And this is, after all, what one would expect. For mathematics is not itself knowledge at all. It is an instrument for obtaining knowledge. The actuary makes use of higher mathematics which no one except the expert can follow. But the resulting knowledge which he obtains is intelligible to everyone. The astronomer uses mathematics to calculate an eclipse, but none is required to understand his final prediction. And it is not fundamentally different with relativity. To think otherwise is like supposing that one cannot appreciate the scenery of Niagara Falls without understanding the mechanism of the railway locomotive which conveys one there.

Mathematics, said a famous writer, is a science of which the meanest intellect is capable. The statement by no means reflects, as one might be inclined to think, the mere partisan prejudice of a one-sided and narrow intelligence. There is a real truth in it. It is obviously false if it is understood to mean that a stupid man can be a good mathematician. For plainly it is only a very clever man indeed who can be first-class in this, as in any other, subject. But his intellect may nevertheless be, and indeed is, mean if he is incapable of doing anything with it except juggling with symbols - however cleverly he may do this. For mathematics, as I said before, is not knowledge, but only an instrument for obtaining knowledge. A Newton or an Einstein uses mathematics to help him to reach out to great and grand conceptions of the Universe.

This employment of mathematics as an instrument of general culture is the work of noble, and not of mean, intellects. But in so far as it cares for nothing save its own internal affairs, is without effect upon general culture, is a mere manipulation of symbols for their own sakes, it certainly can be cultivated, and successfully cultivated, by mean minds -that is, by minds which know nothing of, and care nothing for, what is really great in human culture. It is because mathematics is a means, and not an end, that a purely mathematical education is a bad education - or, rather, no education at all.

For the true purpose of education is to teach men what things in life are genuinely valuable. That is, it is concerned with ends. Therefore education ought not to concentrate upon means. They are a secondary matter. The true order is to learn first what to aim at, and then only what are the instrumentalities by which we may attain our ends. Mathematics, accordingly, should be part of a subsequent technical training. Thus the now old-fashioned preference for a classical - which really meant a humanistic - over a mathematical education, although it may have degenerated into a prejudice or even a pigheaded obscurantism, was originally rooted in a true insight.

The impression that philosophical and scientific ideas cannot be explained in plain language to plain people is also in large measure due to the fact that philosophers and men of science have not, as a rule, the wit to do it. It is due, in plain terms, to the stupidity of the learned men, not to the stupidity of humanity. They lack the mental flexibility and adroitness which are required if they are to come out of their hiding places in the laboratory and the library and make themselves intelligible in the big world of men. They can speak only one language, the language of cast-iron technical formulas. Change the language, take away from them their technical terms and symbols, and they no longer know where they are. They are like those inferior boxers who can only box according to the rules and are nonplused by anyone who disregards them and fights as the light of nature teaches him.

They lack too that human sympathy with simple people which is also essential if the teachings of science and philosophy are to be made available to the many. They cannot move with ease in the world of men. And these too are the reasons why erudite men, great figures in their own secluded world, are so often observed to behave like buffaloes in society. The contemptuous attitude toward popular writing so often affected by learned men is, then, nothing but an unwarranted prejudice. And it may not be uninteresting to inquire into its psychological motivation. May I be allowed to recommend to the reader that, whenever in this human world he finds a totally unreasonable opinion adopted by large bodies of people, he make a practice of looking, not for reasons, but for motives. He will thus save himself much time which might otherwise be wasted in searching for rationality where none exists.

Why, then, do so many workers in intellectual fields look askance at any attempt to make the results of their labors intelligible to the world at large? It is true that some apparently plausible reasons may be urged. Popular writers tend to develop certain characteristic faults. Cheap cleverness not infrequently mars their writings. And they are apt to slur over difficult and profound conceptions, and to substitute superficialities -because they have not the gift of being both simple and profound at the same time. Thus a writer on Aristotle, who wished to make easy for his readers that philosopher's teleological conception of the cause of motion, wrote that in Aristotle's view "'tis love, 'tis love that makes the world go round." *

But a moment's thought should be sufficient to convince one that these facts afford no basis whatever for a general contempt of popular writing. Popular writers may often be cheap and shallow. But to entertain a prejudice against popular writing because some popular writers are bad is like condemning all books because of the existence of certain inferior authors. The real ground for the disfavor in which popular writing is held among experts is to be found elsewhere. It is rooted in class prejudice. The learned think themselves superior to the common herd. They are a priestly caste imbued with the snobbishness that is characteristic of caste systems. Their learning is the mark of their superiority. It must be kept within the limits of their own class. And the means by which this is accomplished consists in a learned language of long words and technical terms. Anyone who translates knowledge from the technical into the popular language is disregarding the rules of caste, and is thus taboo.

Technical terms, long words, learned-sounding phrases, are the means by which second-rate intellectuals "inflate their egos" and feed their sense of superiority to the multitude. If an idea can be expressed in two ways, one of which involves a barbarous technical jargon, while the other needs nothing but a few simple words of one syllable which everyone can understand, this kind of person definitely prefers the barbarous technical jargon. He wishes to be thought, and above all to think himself, a person who understands profound and difficult things which common folk cannot comprehend. He wishes to feel himself cleverer than other people. The long words and clumsy phrases with which he encumbers the simplest thought are the badges of his class superiority. And as this kind of person is always in a majority in any large assembly of intellectuals, a definite prejudice against popular writing is engendered.

The poorer a man's intellectual equipment, the more does he revel in technicalities. A man with a wealth of valuable ideas is anxious to communicate those ideas, and will naturally tend to choose for that purpose the simplest language he can find. But a man whose intellectuality is a sham, and who has in truth nothing to communicate, endeavors to conceal his emptiness by an outward show of learning. The more unintelligible his language, the more profound will he appear to himself and (he hopes) to others. He fails to see that the love of long words and technical terms is in fact nothing but a symptom of his mental infirmity. It is a kind of intellectual disease. And perhaps those who suffer from this disease would like to have a technical term for their own malady. I will therefore make them a present of a new long word. I will christen their disease macronomatamania.

It is true that a few really great men, such as Immanuel Kant, have seemed to revel unnecessarily in technicalities. But let not all the macronomatamaniacs of the world attempt to shelter themselves under Kant's umbrella. Kant was great in spite of his obscure language, not because of it. And one does not become great by aping the weaknesses of a great man. It is true, too, that technical terms are a necessity. In many branches of knowledge one cannot do without them. This is especially true in science. And it is true (but in a much lesser degree) in philosophy.

About their use in science I will say nothing at all. Even regarding their use in philosophy I will not attempt in this place to say what their legitimate functions are, nor legislate as to where they should be used and where avoided. For that would be itself a technical inquiry, not suitable to this paper. I will, however, set down what I regard as an elementary first principle of a good style in philosophical writing. It is this: Never use a technical term when a simple nontechnical word or phrase will equally well express your meaning. And I would add as a gloss: Cultivate in yourself a dislike and suspicion of all learned-sounding words and technical terms, a habit of regarding them not as fine things, but at best as necessary evils.

This will come easily to anyone naturally endowed with a hatred of humbug, and also to anyone with an artistic sense of the beauty and value of words; and the result of it will be that, whenever a technical term springs to the writer's mind, he will instinctively cast about to see whether he cannot replace it by plain English. Sometimes it will happen that he cannot do so without prejudice to his meaning. But often it will happen that he can.

I think that these principles should be applied, not only to popular writing in the usual sense, but to all philosophical writing of whatever sort, even that which is written by experts for experts. For the use of a good style and of plain decent English will always facilitate the communication of meaning, to whomsoever it is addressed. And if anyone asks for an example of a good philosophical style, of the kind I have in mind, I would point to the writings of Mr. Bertrand Russell as showing the best philosophical style of the present day. Mr. Russell, of course, uses technical terms, plenty of them; but never, I think, where they could reasonably have been avoided.

A technical term as such is, anywhere and everywhere, a barbarism, an eyesore, an offense to the soul, a thing to be shuddered at and avoided. Macronomatamaniacs, therefore, are not only to be suspected of emptiness, but also to be accused of lack of taste. When a man uses a hideous jumble of technical terms where he could use plain English words, he writes himself down as a person without the sense of the beauty and dignity of language.

After all, the issue is a simple one. Do you wish to communicate thought? Or are you impelled by some other motive - to appear clever, to boost yourself up as a highbrow, to impress the simple-minded with your superiority, or what not? If you write an article or a book, your sole motive ought to be to communicate what you conceive to be truth to as many people as possible. If a writer is governed by this motive, it is inevitable that he will express himself in the simplest language which he can possibly find. And if, in addition to this sincerity, he has also some sense of the beauty of language, he will choose short, sharp, simple, expressive words in preference to long, uncouth, and clumsy ones. He will not, for example, write " ratiocination " when all he means is " reasoning," nor " dianoetic " when the word " intellectual" would do just as well.

Unfortunately, however, to communicate ideas is by no means the most usual motive for writing books. And if a man writes because he thinks himself a superior person, and wishes to impose this same delusion upon other people, he tends to make his style as obscure and difficult as possible. He hopes that his obscurity will be mistaken for profundity. He will write, if he can, in a learned language instead of a simple one. He will prefer big words to little ones, and a barbarous technical jargon to plain English.

And the American custom of forcing university professors to "produce" (that is, to write books), and of practically making their promotion in their profession depend upon their doing so, is responsible for no little evil in this matter. Not only does it result in the publication of floods of inferior books, which the world would be much better without; not only does it compel men who have no taste for writing, and no gift for it, to waste their time writing bad books when, if left alone, they might have made admirable and even great teachers; but it also demoralizes style, and develops macronomatamaniacs. For the man who has nothing to say worthy of publication is encouraged, almost compelled, to conceal his lack under a smoke screen of technicalities and obscure verbiage. He has to convince his university superiors of his intellectuality; and since he cannot do this by the inner worth of his thought, he must do it by putting out a spurious and pretentious conglomeration of learned-sounding words. How easily this succeeds, how easily the world (including the learned world) is gulled by long words, the following incident may serve to illustrate.

Years ago, in a certain university, there flourished a "Philosophical Society," in which the tendency to read papers couched in obscure and unintelligible language became rampant. A brilliant Irishman, wishing to prick the bubble, read before the society a paper called " The Spirit of the Age." In this paper there was not a single paragraph, not a single sentence even, which possessed, or was intended by the author to possess, the faintest glimmer of meaning. It was full of long words, of loud-mouthed phrases, of swelling periods. It sounded magnificent; it meant nothing. The society listened to it in rapt attention. Not one of the members perceived that the society was being fooled; and a long and learned discussion followed, in which not one of the members admitted that he had not understood the paper.

A man may write whole books of what is either totally meaningless or palpably false, and may secure by doing so a wide reputation, provided only that he uses long enough words. For example, the thought that there is no such thing as thought is self-contradictory nonsense. But if a man wraps up this same nonsense in a learned-sounding hocus-pocus about reflex arcs and conditioned reflexes, if he talks enough about neurons and the neural processes, and if he interlards his whole discourse with the technical terms of physiology, he may become the founder of a school of psychology, and stands a good chance of earning an enormous salary.

BUT to come back to popular writing and its place in the world of learning. I would contend for two positions. First, the works of the pure popularizer - the man who has nothing of his own to say, but who popularizes other people's thoughts -is of the utmost importance. So far from being despised, he ought to be regarded as performing an absolutely vital function in the intellectual progress of mankind. And it is perfectly possible for him to be popular without being either shallow or cheap.

Secondly, I would urge that, in a sense, all writing, even of the most original, learned, and abstruse kinds, should aim at being popular as far as possible. That such writing can always be made entirely suitable for the general reader is not for a moment contended. But the writer can at least aim at using technical terms as sparingly as possible, at avoiding unnecessary jargon, at expressing himself as simply and clearly as he can - even as beautifully as the nature of his subject permits. He can surely avoid giving the reader the feeling that he positively likes ugly words, that he revels in unintelligibilities, that he dotes on gibberish. Most readers will be grateful to him if they feel that he is at least trying to make some meaning clear to them, and not merely to stun, intimidate, and befuddle them with his cleverness. His writing will be popular in the only sense -and in the best sense -in which this can be demanded of him.

Nearly all the great philosophers of the English tradition have been in this sense popular writers, though I am afraid that the same cannot be said of the Germans. The style of Locke is lucid, if pedestrian; of both Berkeley and Hume beautiful in the extreme; of Mill clear and simple, though undistinguished and marred by some affectations; of Spencer perfectly lucid in spite of the "hurdy-gurdy monotony of him." William James, the greatest of American philosophers, had an absolute genius for graphic, telling, and brilliant English phrases. And of living writers, as I have already said, Mr. Russell's style is the best, and is a standing example of the fact that philosophy, and original philosophy too, can be written in plain English with an absolute minimum of technical terms.

* Obviously, it is not possible to explain Aristotle's teleological conception of the cause of motion in a short footnote. It may help, however, to know that Aristotle believed that since every motion presupposes a motive principle, one must assume the existence of a first motive force which is itself unmoved. This first motive force he calls The First Cause, or primum mobile, which he equates with absolute reality, or God. Since God is the ultimate source of all motion, and since God is also the object of desire, "'tis love that makes the world go round." The serious student will find a more satisfactory explanation in a good encyclopedia or in a history of philosophy.