Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right (37 page)

Most devastating for the left as a cohesive political movement was the collapse of their beloved Soviet Union. For decades, the Great Issue uniting various forces on the left, from proclaimed communists to soft anti-anti-communists, was the socialist “ideal.” Great Society programs have run their course—and have been a disaster. With impeached former President Clinton having proclaimed the era of big government over—even his wife, Hillary, has averred that “there are not government solutions” to most of society’s problems—few people pin their dreams of a brighter tomorrow on yet one more government program.

Apart from global warming—coming in a thousand years to a planet near you!—the left’s only remaining cause is abortion. For many Democrats,
Roe v. Wade
is the essence of politics. At the 2000 Democratic National Convention, presidential candidate Al Gore won the loudest, most sustained applause for his promise to protect abortion. This was in a speech that was a virtual whirligig of promises for “working families”—a euphemism for families in which no one works. Gore offered targeted tax cuts, universal health-care coverage for children, smaller class sizes, new gun and tobacco laws, and prescription-drug benefits for seniors. His speech included surefire audience pleasers, such as his pledge to pass a hate crimes law and to oppose school vouchers. He mentioned national defense and got only a lukewarm reaction. He mentioned America’s role in freeing the world “from fascism and communism”—polite applause. He said he would fight for the victims of crime—sporadic clapping. But the mere mention of
Roe v. Wade
and total pandemonium broke loose.

Abortion rights would be an odd single issue for any political party. But it is nearly unbearable for a party that prides itself on moral self-righteousness. Instead of their typical smug certitude, abortion makes many Democrats queasy. This is something new: It is unusual for liberals not to conceive of themselves as Christ on the Cross and their political opponents as Nazi stormtroopers. The messy details of abortion are a bad fit with the left’s preference for haughty indignation. The absurd, backward rhetoric that associates abortion rights with “women’s lives” exposes the dissonance.

There is no question but that
something
gets killed in an abortion, whether one considers that thing worthy of life, like a human, or unworthy of life, like crabgrass. But the pro-killing side of the debate flips the facts upside down to claim that they are protecting women’s “lives”—as opposed to women’s convenience. At best, some women’s “lives” would be saved by abortion if one presupposes women will make good on their threat to: (1) refuse to use birth control and (2) when they get pregnant, engage in unsafe and illegal abortion procedures. Which is kind of a stretch if you think about it.

Since abortion is not the left’s proudest moment, liberals prefer to keep reminiscing about the last time they were giddily self-righteous. Like a senile old man who keeps telling you the same story over and over again, liberals babble on and on about the “heady” days of civil rights marches. Between 1995 and 2001, the
New York Times
alone ran more than one hundred articles on “Selma” alone. I believe we may have revisited this triumph of theirs sufficiently by now. For anyone under fifty, the “heady” days of civil rights marches are something out of a history book. The march on Selma was thirty-five years ago.

To put this in perspective, almost thirty-five years before
that
was the beginning of the Great Depression, also a newsworthy event. In 1965, were newspapers jammed with biweekly “Great Depression Updates”? Indeed, the country is as different a place today compared to 1965, as it was in 1965 compared to 1930. What civil rights do people lack now? What bus is anyone not allowed to ride on?

Where there is a vacuum of ideas, paranoia slips in. Much of the left’s hate speech bears greater similarity to a psychological disorder than to standard political discourse. The hatred is blinding, producing logical contradictions that would be impossible to sustain were it not for the central element faith plays in the left’s new religion. The basic tenet of their faith is this: Maybe they were wrong on facts and policies, but they are good and conservatives are evil. You almost want to give it to them. It’s all they have left.

But the personal invective is getting a teensy bit wearying. It always takes an enormous exertion just to ascertain what liberals are so damn upset about. Once you finally figure out what has propelled the tolerant crowd into frenzies of demonic rage, it invariably turns out to be a perfectly ordinary view held by many good-hearted Americans.

A classic of the genre was a
New York Times
editorial on Newt Gingrich—about whom liberals were also wrong. When Republicans won the House of Representatives for the first time in fifty years, the
Times
ran a welcoming editorial to mark the occasion titled “Newt Gingrich, Authoritarian”
²
Among other utterly pointless criticisms, the
Times
accused Gingrich for being “in the throes of post-election gloating.” Despite the length of the
Times’s
diatribe, what made Gingrich an “authoritarian” remained murky. The only point that came through clearly was that the
New York Times
really disliked Gingrich. I mean—really. “Mr. Gingrich wants to be obeyed,” the
Times
psychoanalyzed, “both within a Republican majority that exists mainly to rubber stamp his legislative menu and within a country where behavior would be regulated by a society that is emphatic about right and wrong.” The
Times
was clearly indignant about the idea of a society that is “emphatic about right and wrong.” But apart from Gingrich opposing the
Times’s
evident preference for a society that is ambivalent about right and wrong, it wasn’t manifest why the editors were frightened of this man.

In only one of eight vituperative paragraphs did the
Times
allude to any of the positions demonstrating Gingrich’s latent fascism. Even these rare substantive points were nearly buried in the hysterical bile:

The authoritarian undergirdings of Mr. Gingrich’s politics show not only in the conventional ways, such as his outlining of a nation of plentiful executions where juries and judges cannot exercise their independent judgment about probation and sentencing. It is even more tellingly revealed by the areas of individual social behavior Mr. Gingrich wants to bring under control. Schoolchildren will be required by law to seek their education in classrooms where prayer is imposed by the will of the majority. As soon as he gets the votes, medical decisions on abortion will be taken from the hands of women and physicians and the treatment itself proscribed by the state.

Four policy positions can be gleaned from that paragraph: Gingrich apparently differs with the editorial position of the
Times
on the death penalty, sentencing guidelines, prayer in schools, and abortion. This is a peculiar collection of policies on which to base a charge of “moral authoritarianism.” Vast majorities of Americans agree with Newt Gingrich on at least three of the issues—school prayer, the death penalty, and sentencing guidelines.

It’s a little difficult to gauge the public’s feelings about the fourth— abortion—on account of abortion’s preposterous status as a “constitutional right.” But evidently liberals don’t think a majority of Americans supports abortion—otherwise they would welcome the overturning of
Roe v. Wade,
which would do nothing more than put abortion to a vote. As their theatrics on
Roe
demonstrate, the last thing they want is a vote. Once Americans were allowed to vote on abortion. Then
Roe
came along and overturned the democratically enacted laws of forty-eight states.

But however the vote would go if abortion were ever returned to the democratic process, it is sheer lunacy to attack any House member for his views on abortion, anyway. No mere congressman can have the slightest, tertiary effect on the legal status of abortion. Only the Supreme Court can do that, and House members don’t even vote on Supreme Court nominees.

That leaves sentencing guidelines, the death penalty, and school prayer.

Federal sentencing guidelines were once championed by liberal Democrats. (Their idea was that uniform sentences would prevent racist judges from imposing longer sentences on minorities.) Senator Ted Kennedy joined Strom Thurmond as one of the original co-sponsors of the bill that created the guidelines.
³
Michael Dukakis supported federal sentencing guidelines in his 1988 campaign.
⁴
The Guidelines Commission was headed by former Kennedy staffer Stephen Breyer, who was later appointed to the Supreme Court by Clinton. So Gingrich was an authoritarian who wanted to be obeyed because he supported a policy also supported by Teddy Kennedy, Michael Dukakis, and Stephen Breyer.

Unlike sentencing guidelines, liberals have always opposed the death penalty and school prayer. But vast majorities of Americans have consistently supported both.

So it’s not really that surprising that the editors of the
New York Times
might not want to highlight their precise points of disagreement with Gingrich. A forthright statement of their outrage would make clear that the official editorial position of the
Times
is that the American people are “authoritarians.” The
New York Times
has every right to call Americans authoritarian race baiters. That’s indubitably what the editors believe. But that’s not what they say. That is why the
Times
must attack politicians who share the views of large majorities of Americans by obscuring the point beneath vicious personal tirades.

Most amusingly, the
Times
denounced Gingrich for—of all things—his “implicit” belief that “intellectual dissent is unpatriotic and infuriating.” At least the
Times
doesn’t bother with being “implicit.” Gingrich’s dissent from the positions of the
New York Times
editorial page constitutes, as the
Times
calmly put it, “a threat to civil liberties, racial justice and religious freedom.”

Bereft of winning issues, persuasive arguments, or real ideas, liberals are bitter. The one impulse that consistently unites them is hate. It is an arresting fact that an impeached, disgraced, disbarred Democratic president successfully rallied liberals to his cause merely by calling his opponents “right-wing Republicans.”

The hate-mongering and name-calling on the left might be a droll irrelevancy, except that it has a debilitating effect on real issues. It is often absurdly said that scandals such as Gary Hart’s affair with Donna Rice “will discourage young idealists from going into politics. This is mainly said by Gary Hart. Of course, another possible response to adultery scandals involving politicians is not good people avoiding politics, but politicians avoiding adultery.

By contrast, it is surely true that if holding political opinions can itself be scandalous, fewer people are going to want to have any of those opinion things. Lies and personal attacks are deeply corrosive of public debate and democratic compromises. Of necessity, therefore, almost all serious political debate takes place exclusively among conservatives—out of earshot of the children so as not to upset them. Not coincidentally, for about twenty years now, all new ideas have bubbled up from the right wing. (It’s amazing how productive debate can be when one is not constantly being called a racist.) Almost by definition all new ideas are “right-wing”—whether dubbed “conservative” or “libertarian.” Where are the great liberal thinkers?

Some of the new public policy ideas to bubble up from the right wing are School Vouchers, Welfare Reform, the Flat Tax, Quality of Life Crimes, Privatizing Social Security, Videotaping Criminal Confessions, the Strategic Defense Initiative, Pollution Tax Credits, Enterprise Zones, and Winning the Cold War. These ideas were once ridiculed by liberals. (“Shut up,” they explained.)
⁵
But, despite liberals’ infernal squawking, these ideas are changing the world.

To take one example, when President Clinton “triangulated” on welfare reform, the left denounced him for capitulating to Newt Gingrich and the Republican Congress. This was true. Despite Clinton’s campaign pledge to “end welfare as we know it,” somehow it took a Republican Congress coming in two years later to enact welfare reform. Clinton’s complex-sounding “triangulation” was nothing more than capitulation on the installment plan. By 2001, one of the Democratic officials who had resigned from the Clinton administration to protest the Republicans’ welfare reform made this startling and welcome admission: “In many ways welfare reform is working better than I thought it would.... The sky isn’t falling anymore. Whatever we have been doing over the last five years, we ought to keep going.”
⁶

Another example of Republican progress in the face of liberal carping is Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Throughout his wildly successful mayoralty, Giuliani was regularly protested as “Adolf Giuliani” and portrayed with a Hitler mustache.
⁷
By the end of his term—even before September 11—he had cleaned up the city so spectacularly that his prospective successors were tripping over one another in their rush to promise to continue his policies. And after September 11, Giuliani’s heroic status was so daunting he could have gotten a table at Elaine’s. It was not surprising that Giuliani performed magnificently when New York came under a savage terrorist attack. What was surprising—stunning, in fact—is how liberals began saying novenas to Giuliani’s immortal soul.

In a break from their otherwise fiendish cleverness, the hijackers’ one grievous miscalculation had been to attack Manhattan, the stronghold of domestic liberalism. The only thing the terrorists could have done to instill greater fear in Manhattanites would have been to release a list of rent-controlled apartments. The city was in a panic: After September 11, the average New Yorker faced a risk of death or bodily harm not seen since David Dinkins was mayor.