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200 pages
ISBN: 159403253X
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Introduction: Notes from the Belly of the Beast
The phone messages and emails from fellow conservatives started coming early on election night 2008 and continued well into the next day. Some were anguished, some merely fatalistic. But even most of these featured at least a dollop of gallows humor.
“Just thought I’d check in before I went out back and slashed my wrists,” went the message on my answering machine from my friend Ron, who’d recently moved from New York to North Carolina seeking also a change of political climate. “What a bloodbath, huh? Our country and the world are about to be cast into ruin. Talk to you soon.”
My friend David couldn’t help venting about the disgracefully in-the-tank-for-Obama media. “They dealt with every story potentially damaging to Obama like it was Rasputin. They didn’t just bury it—they shot, poisoned and drowned it!”
Then there was my friend Cary, who, as the dimensions of the disaster became apparent late on election night, announced he might have to skip work.
“For how long?” I asked.
“I’m thinking a year.”
Who could blame him? Obama may be an empty suit, fronting for a cabal of left-wing maniacs, but at least he has charm, civility, and makes open-minded noises. In Manhattan offices like my friend’s, his fans don’t even bother pretending to those virtues.
Elisabeth Hasselbeck, the token conservative on “The View,” was among those who made the mistake of going to work the morning after. “I fought hard on the other side, but today is a victory for this country,” she graciously allowed on the air. “I haven’t felt this good throughout this entire election process.”
“So what you are saying is I was right all along?” shot back her colleague Joy Behar.
My friend John Leo forwarded the missive from one Blue State blogger summing up what Behar surely wishes she could have said out loud:
“AAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAAHAAAAAA!! He’s dead, it’s dead, the Republican beast is fucking deaaaaaaaaad!! Eight years of that rampaging Republican fucking elephant beast finally brought to its knees! Yes, you’re dead, you fucker, you fuck, you fuck, you’re DEAD! DEAD! DEAD!”
Of course, there are those who’ll argue that the authors of such remarks are the hothead fringe of the vast, untidy American left—modern liberalism’s equivalent of the leather-lunged townsfolk in old Westerns shouting, “What’re we waitin’ for, let’s string ’im up!” Most liberals, they’ll say, are far more level-headed than that.
And they’re absolutely right. Ordinary liberals are the ones in the mob who, on hearing the hotheads’ bloodthirsty cries, mumble for a second or two and then go along with the plan.
This book is about those who are not part of the mob at all, the conservatives living and working among such folk—and, more than occasionally, the ones getting lynched. They are the good guys in this story. Think of them as Gary Cooper in High Noon, strong, independent, ready to risk their lives (okay, sometimes their careers, and always a nasty comment) on principle.
Indeed, their very day-to-day experience reveals how utterly deformed is the current version of liberalism. It presents stark evidence of the extent to which a philosophy predicated on freedom of thought and openness to varied perspectives has become a wellspring of intolerance and rancor.
Here, for instance, is just a tiny, tiny sample, courtesy of the Huffington Post, of how liberal New York Times readers reacted to the news, in the closing days of 2007, that in a touching bid to recapture a bit of its vanished credibility as a somewhat evenhanded journal, the paper would be running a weekly column by the conservative eminence William Kristol on its op-ed page.
• Worthless suck-up Kristol should be cleaning toilets in public restrooms for his GOP “friends.”
• I will never, ever buy another issue of the newspaper, I will never again be a subscriber to your newspaper, and I will do my level best to avoid any purchases from any New York Times advertiser.
• William “the Bloody” Kristol is a beady-eyed warmonger…
• If The New York Times is going to hire a liar and a racist like Bill Kristol, then they might as well hire Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Michael Savage, Bill O’Reilly, and Ari Fleischer.
• Kristol is an arrogant, warmongering prick. I can’t stand the sight of him.
• Just what The New York Times needs, another stenographer for the right-wing slime machine.
• Listening to Kristol, that warmongering crater-face, is worse than listening to Bush, Cheney, and Richard Perle all rolled up in one…I hate that decision and I will do everything I can to discredit this decision until they finally flush him down the toilet like the turd he is.
To be sure, the conservatives I’ll deal with herein are difficult to pigeonhole. They—okay, we—are a diverse lot. Personally, though an out and proud libertarian-conservative, I actually remain a registered Democrat; partly because of inertia, mainly because the GOP is so pathetically off-base or weak-kneed on many of the issues I care about, from government spending to affirmative action. Besides, as a New Yorker, I want my say on primary day. (That’s when my wife and I work our own private Operation Chaos—voting for Al Sharpton whenever his name appears on the ballot and otherwise doing our modest bit to mess with the party’s head).
While by definition most every conservative getting by in the alien environment of Blue State America is blessed with independent judgment and a fair amount of backbone, a working sense of humor doesn’t hurt, either. How else to deal with the stuff that at any time can put a crimp in an otherwise fine day—the angry old lady with the anti-war sign affixed to her walker, the PETA zealots from the nearby campus, or the random leftist idiot at a dinner party, waxing self-righteous and quoting George Soros?
One friend of mine recalls being interrupted by an infuriated fellow shopper on Broadway in the Eighties. She’d overheard him speaking approvingly about the War on Terror to a friend. “I can’t believe I’m hearing this—and on the Upper West Side!” Then, he recalls, laughing at the memory, “she fled in terror, as if looking for a commissar to report us to.”
The fact is, in key ways, those of us living and working among such people often know them better than they know themselves. Unable as we are to avoid the media they take as gospel—NPR, the networks, The New York Times or its local equivalent—we’re on intimate terms with their most passionately held beliefs and convictions. We know who they admire and who they despise; we know in advance how they’ll react to every controversy, every utterance by a public figure; we anticipate, politically and public policy-wise, their sighs, their frowns, their ups, their downs.
Existing as we do in both worlds—leading, as it were, double lives—those of us on the right get to experience the remarkable liberal mindset on a daily basis, up close and personal. Among the many things of which we are frequently reminded is how astonishingly little they know about us. What they think they know, they’ve picked up by innuendo or, very nearly the same thing, the commentary in their preferred media. It can be boiled down to this: Conservatives are greedy, hard-hearted, evil bastards, and are, by definition, wrong about absolutely everything. More than a few liberals would, if they could, make us wear warning bells like medieval lepers, and force us to shout, on every approach, “Unclean! Unclean!” (Maybe they will, if Obama gets to appoint a Supreme Court justice or two!)
But what might be most startling about the liberals is their capacity for self-delusion. Not long ago, Dennis Prager produced a splendid column called “When I Was a Boy, America Was a Better Place.” Basically, it was a catalogue of the disasters liberalism has visited upon American culture in recent decades.
• Restrictions on free (and honest) speech in the name of sensitivity.
• The remaking of American history into therapy for minorities and women.
• A general decline in civility.
• The absence of fathers from countless homes.
• The stigmatization of men as potential predators.
• The corruption of childhood through an aggressively sexualized culture.
What’s funny, if that’s the word, is that even those comparatively reasonable liberals who decry these and other cultural changes cited by Prager seem to have no idea that any of them stem from liberalism. As one such guy I know put it, apparently oblivious to the contradiction, liberalism “stands for progress; conservatism stands for turning back the clock to the bad old days.”
In fact, what we conservatives stand for is a commitment to enduring verities and immutable standards, which is quite a different thing. Meanwhile, for liberals, the very meaning of that magic word “progress” is subject to constant and even violent revision.
As a reformed lib myself, I vividly recall how, during the debate on the Equal Rights Amendment in the early Seventies, my friends and I used to sneer at the ERA opponents’ claims that its passage would lead one day to co-ed bathrooms on college campuses and women in combat. We labeled these arguments absurd right-wing canards designed to scare the hell out of credulous Middle Americans. A couple of decades later, countless millions of liberals themselves were dismissing the notion of gay marriage as an outright absurdity. Today, in liberal land, to so much as question the desirability of any of these things is to cast suspicion upon oneself as a closet reactionary.
I swear, to try and find any logic in it is to make one’s head spin.
Of course, that’s precisely the point. When you’re talking liberalism, you may be talking many things—self-righteousness, good intentions as an end in themselves, obliviousness to consequences—but logic is not one of them. Liberals feel what they feel, when they feel it, and what they feel at any given moment is what they know.
This is why anyone who believes that a liberal can be straightened out if only reality is explained to him, simply and clearly, is doomed to fail. I made that mistake myself some years back, at book length. That volume was entitled How I Accidentally Joined the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy (and Found Inner Peace), and I truly expected that (a) most of its readers would be liberals curious to know why one of their own would desert the tribe and (b) it might engender some interesting conversation across ideological lines.
The reader is free to imagine me smashing my forehead and exclaiming “D’oh!”
Truly, I’ve never been so wrong about anything in my life. I literally cannot say with complete certainty that a single liberal even read it. And I include family and friends, none of whom seems to have gotten past the most cursory skim. One old friend, in a moment of unembarrassed candor, told me he read the title and “was sickened.” Another, a guy on my over-forty softball team, claimed to have read it, sneeringly referring to it as How I Lost All My Ethics and Became a Fascist, but when closely questioned didn’t seem to know anything that was in it.
It is a mistake I won’t make again. This book is not only about, but also expressly for, those who already know exactly what I’m talking about—those for whom a red flag goes up every time they see the words “diversity,” “multicultural,” or “non-judgmental.”
As it happens, there are lots and lots and lots of us out there, a good many more, in fact, than we sometimes realize, in our apparent isolation. Even the 2008 election results, gruesome as they are, make that abundantly clear. Let’s put it this way: In Cambridge, Massachusetts, where a lunatic like Noam Chomsky is considered mainstream, the McCain-Palin ticket got 4,664 votes; in San Francisco, which lays out the welcome mat for the drug-addled homeless like other cities do for free-spending conventioneers, an intrepid Republican named Dana Walsh racked up 16,149 versus Nancy Pelosi (and never mind that Cindy Sheehan outpolled Walsh nearly 2-1); in Chicago, Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr.’s intrepid Republican opponent drew 29,050 voters, not a single one residing in a cemetery; and, yes, even in Manhattan’s Upper West Side, ground zero for elitist know-it-alls, media narcissists, airheads in the arts and America-hating academics, the Republican challenger to formerly rotund liberal icon Jerry Nadler polled 35,822.
As a matter of fact, this book’s working title was Red Manhattan, the reference of course being to Red State-types marooned on that magnificent, accursed island. But I soon saw that the title provoked confusion. Some took it to refer to Communists of old, of which there were plenty in Manhattan, and others objected on geographical grounds, since I was dealing not just with beleaguered conservatives in New York, but anywhere self-satisfied liberal ignorance holds sway.
Among the alternatives I considered were In Darkest Blue America, Among the Savages in Darkest Blue America, and Behind Enemy Lines, and each was obviously wanting. But, as we know, in their perverse way, liberals never fail to come through. I was still struggling with the title problem when, one evening, my wife and I attended a dinner party. It was primary season, early on in Obama mania, and when, inevitably, the discussion turned to the glories of The Messiah, I felt compelled to sound a mild cautionary note about his lack of experience. At this, the guy beside me, who’d known me all of fifteen minutes, drew back his chair, cast me a savage look, and roared, inaccurately, “I can’t believe I’m sitting next to a Republican!”
This is the sort of thing known, in the liberal academy, (or would be, were I of the appropriate gender and pigmentation), as a “hate speech,” and who’s to say that it won’t soon become a federal crime? But we conservatives know how to take it—and far worse—in stride.
Indeed, during the presidential campaign, infuriated liberals cast even the mildest criticism of Obama as racist, and in the bluest of Blue State locales, to flout the local belief system involved genuine courage. It’s anyone’s guess how many thousands of conservative cars got keyed this election season—ours, for one, $1700 dollars worth. In Seattle, a leftist weekly, The Stranger, actually pointed vandals in the right direction, by printing the addresses and photos of local houses with McCain yard signs.
Then again, no auto-related expression of liberal rage compares with the experience of a certain Gareth Groves—and that wasn’t even around election time. One morning a couple of years back, Groves, 38, emerged from his home in the tony Northwest section of Washington, D.C., to find that someone had taken a baseball bat to the windows and body of his month-old $38,000 Hummer, and a machete to the interior, and then, almost redundantly, etched on the side the words “FOR THE ENVIRON.”
According to the Washington Post, his neighbors reacted to this as liberals will. While some professed misgivings about the violence involved, others pretty much thought he’d gotten what he deserved. Reporting the story in a tone best described as bemused, the Post reporter pointed out that, after all, Mr. Groves’s was an extremely “socially conscious” and “environmentally friendly neighborhood,” one rich in Priuses and other hybrids, and since acquiring his gas-guzzling behemoth he’d often been subjected to angry stares and hostile comments. Indeed, one neighbor, freely identifying herself by name, was moved to declare acidly that “he’s very proud of himself that he has such a macho vehicle. It belongs in a war zone. Send it to Iraq.”
Some might think of Gareth Groves as a poor schnook living in the wrong place at the wrong time, or as a naïve fool for believing he could so heedlessly rile up the local enviro-vigilantes without paying the price. Lots of us know better. We see him as the exemplar of personal courage that he is, a free-market, free-thinking individualist amidst the herd of independent minds: Gary Cooper in High Noon, contentedly ensconced in a seven-foot, 122.8 wheelbased steel and chrome horse.
