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THE ELECTION RETURNS are in, and the high priest of American liberalism has spoken.
"If you like God in government, get ready for the Rapture," warned Bill Moyers
in his post-election PBS commentary. And not only will George Bush, right-wing radical,
now attempt to impose a theocracy, he is preparing, among other depredations, "to
force pregnant women to give up control over their own lives . . . to transfer wealth from
working people to the rich . . . [and] to eviscerate the environment."
Odd. In a country where the great assault, such as it is, on "choice" consists
of parental notification of teenage abortions, in a country where most people don't
particularly enjoy having their wealth "transferred," where they support
reasonable environmental regulation and believe in some separation between church and
state, how could this conjunction of "piety, profits, and military power, all joined
at the hip by ideology and money"--Moyers's summary of Republicanism--command such
public support?
Moyers doesn't explain, it being perhaps imprudent to openly express contempt for a public
whose tax money supports his show. Bob Herbert works for the New York Times and thus does
not have the same dilemma. But as a prototypical paleoliberal, he offers the traditional
explanation for the umpteenth defeat of liberalism at the polls: the beguiling smile. The
GOP, you see, "wears a sunny mask, which conceals a reality that is far more
ideological, far more extreme, than most Americans realize." The voters are therefore
not the total idiots Moyers makes them
out to be. They are simply seduced, done in by the genial smile.
Ah, the genial smile. There have been three successful Republican presidents in the modern
era (i.e., since the New Deal), all of whose successes confounded the liberal elites. It
began with their inability to fathom how Americans could prefer Eisenhower to Stevenson.
The smile. Ike was a fool who (in Captain Renault's immortal phrase) blundered his way
into Berlin, smiled his way into the presidency--and then whiled it away playing golf.
The next puzzle was Ronald Reagan, the "amiable dunce" (Clark Clifford's
famously obtuse characterization) who somehow brought down the Soviet empire. It was a
Hollywood conceit that "Being There," the Peter Sellers film about a retarded
recluse who is taken for a mystical genius and becomes president, was a metaphor for
Reagan. His genial smile concealed not just stupidity but evil intentions. No, not his
evil intentions--he being too dimwitted even to merit moral opprobrium--but the evil
intentions of those manipulating him behind the scenes.
Twenty years later, the liberal nightmare returns in the form of George W. Bush, another
exemplar of the trinity of Republican success: geniality, empty-headedness, and evil. With
him, there is a similar difficulty reconciling the apparent antitheticals:
empty-headedness and evil. Once again this is explained by the Manchurian Candidate
theory, Bush, the simpleton, being the puppet of a vast, dark, right-wing cabal.
This is a running theme, indeed an obsession, of Times columnist Paul Krugman, who wrote
during the French election that the neofascist presidential candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen
was a mirror image of American Republicanism. Except that things are worse in America
because Le Pen lost and Bush won. "Le Pen is a political outsider. . . . So his
hard-right ideas won't be put into practice anytime soon. . . . In this country people
with views that are, in their way, as extreme as Mr. Le Pen's are in a position to put
those views into practice."
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In America,
the fascists have achieved power, riding the smile of their front man "boy
king," too dense perhaps even to know the interests he serves. This theme reached its
comic apogee in Barbra Streisand's now famous, gloriously misspelled antiwar memo to Dick
Gephardt, in which she explained that the reason Bush was dragging the nation to war with
Iraq was to serve the "oil industry, the chemical companies, the logging
industry." On to Baghdad--for the timber!
This is truly bizarre. George Bush, extremist? This is a president who passed an education
bill essentially written by Ted Kennedy. His tax reform involves the most modest of rate
cuts for the upper brackets and is what any Keynesian would have done in the face of a
recession. It is, for example, more moderate than the (John) Kennedy tax cuts. The other
alleged parts of his agenda--the environmental rape, the imposition of theocracy, the
abolition of civil liberties (Moyers: "secrecy on a scale you cannot
imagine")--are nothing but the delusion of liberals made quite mad by defeat.
The last time the Republicans enjoyed unexpected political victory, the Gingrich
revolution of 1994, the liberal consensus was dumbfounded. How to explain history going so
wrong? Hence, a legend was born, the legend of the "angry white male." In fact,
that term had no empirical basis whatsoever. I did a search and found only three polls
that even asked about anger. In all three, 70-80 percent of white male respondents denied
being angry. In contrast, the Democrats' victory two years earlier was sweetly dubbed
"Year of the Woman."
Why? Because it is an article of liberal faith that conservatism is not just wrong but
stone coldhearted to the core. When Robert Nozick died earlier this year, Christopher
Lehmann-Haupt wrote in his New York Times obituary, "The implications of 'Anarchy,
State, and Utopia' are strongly libertarian and proved comforting to the right, which was
grateful for what it embraced as philosophical justification."
Liberalism needs no philosophical justification because it only wants to do good.
Conservatives are grateful to find a thinker who can spin logic well enough to cover their
tracks, providing "philosophical justification" for their rape and pillage.
And when this sleight of hand, this transmutation of evil into good, is accomplished not
by a philosophical genius like Nozick but by yet another amiable dunce in the presidency,
liberals become unhinged. The 2000 election they could attribute to simple theft; the 2002
election they could only attribute to a kind of cosmic false consciousness. Yet the voters
seem to have known precisely what they were doing. It was not George Bush's genial smile
that got the most liberal state in the union, Massachusetts, not only to elect a
conservative Mormon businessman as governor but to overwhelmingly approve the abolition of
bilingual education, that totem of liberal social engineering. It was a triumph of
experience over hope, the very definition of conservatism.
Such ideas cannot possibly be admitted. Hence the rage at Bush, the contempt for the
electorate, and the spinning of deeply disturbed and highly entertaining conspiracy
theories. Judging by their wild and crazy reaction to their defeat on November 5, one can
only conclude that this election has left liberal elites further out of touch with reality
than at any time in recent memory. As a former psychiatrist, I can confidently predict
that logic and empirical evidence will have no therapeutic effect. It's time for the
Thorazine.
Charles Krauthammer is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.
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