April 3, 2006
Re: Modern Conservatism Posted by John Steele Gordon at 05:20 PM EST I’d just like to make a few points. 1) Mr. Zeitz trots forth a bunch of liberal historians who find racism permeating modern conservative thought and political action. What a surprise. 2) He then trots out Jerry Falwell, a media darling (the mainstream media is to liberalism what Max von Mayerling was to Norma Desmond—the principal enabler of her dearest fantasies), to represent the religious right. Please. For every Jerry Falwell there’s an Al Sharpton, every bit as odious (although, in Mr. Sharpton’s case, a great deal more amusing). The left has plenty of people no decent person should be proud of: Jesse Jackson, Julian Bond, Kweisi Mfume, racists one and all; Ramsay Clark, Noam Chomsky, viscerally, pathologically anti-American. The list is endless. When a country has big-tent political parties, as most English-speaking countries do, then there will be plenty of jerks in both parties. Using them to represent the other side is the oldest rhetorical trick in the book. 3) Politics is a sleazy business that notoriously makes strange bedfellows. Why? Because Paris is worth a mass. Power trumps sincere belief every time. If Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler could climb into bed together, as they did between August 1939 and June 1941, then John McCain can certainly make nice with Jerry Falwell. 4) When I talk about conservatives, I am referring to ordinary people, the sort you encounter getting into the subway, not the kind you encounter getting out of a limo in front of a townhouse in Louisburg Square. Whether Mr. Zeitz likes it or not (and he obviously doesn’t), these people have over the last 40 years been putting conservatives into more and more offices until now they dominate American government the way liberals did under Franklin Roosevelt.
There are only two possibilities to explain this if Mr. Zeitz is correct here. Either a considerable majority of the American electorate are racists in their hearts or they’re too stupid to know they are being hoodwinked by the race-baiters who dominate the right.
I’m a democrat. That’s why I would rather be ruled, in William F. Buckley’s famous remark, by the first 2,000 people in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard. The former are a lot smarter about running a country than the latter.
There was a time when Democrats believed that too. Those days are long gone, which is why Democratic political power is long gone as well.
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