Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right (6 page)

While the rich are insulated by their wealth from the societal disintegration they promote, the rest of us are protected from these Dionysian revolutionaries and their pet intellectual disenchantment only by our abiding belief in God. That’s why religious people drive liberals nuts. Bourgeois morality allows people to have happy lives without fantastic wealth.

In the sixties, affluent, pampered liberals capitulated to the groovy countercultural mores of their college-age children, embracing free love and rampant drug use. It was all harmless fun. They knew the kids would eventually come home and go to law school. Poor blacks moving up to northern cities to start their lives were not so secure.

Neurotically promoting the idea of women in the military, liberals lightly instruct soldiers to learn to repress their sexuality. That’s a brilliant liberal idea for better living: Train men to stop looking at women sexually. The left’s ideal world is G.I. Jane showering while she chats with her Navy SEAL commander who registers no response at the sight of a naked woman. Liberals seek to destroy sexual differentiation in order to destroy morality.
The Vagina Monologues
is the apotheosis of the left’s desire to treat women’s sexuality like some bovine utilitarian device, stripped of any mystery or eroticism.

Another way liberals think women should be like men is in the relentless pursuit of casual sex. Of all the fictional devices used by Hollywood, the rampant promiscuity of beautiful women is the most ludicrous. But apart from the History Channel and C-SPAN, pretty much all they’re doing on the lowbrow channels is fornicating. Casts of entire shows ought to have the clap by now. The real-life consequences of Hollywood behavior rarely figure into the plot lines. There’s a lot of meaningless sex—but not so many abortions, venereal diseases, and bitter divorces. There are, however, many happy stories of beautiful, wealthy women having children out of wedlock. Despite overwhelming evidence of the incredible destructiveness of illegitimacy on every possible axis—crime, poverty, social pathology, welfare dependency, education—liberals will not relent in their glamorization of single motherhood. From
Murphy Brown
to NBC’s
Friends,
having children out of wedlock is absurdly portrayed as the considered choice of many sophisticated women. In real life, about the only accomplished attractive women who raise illegitimate children are Hollywood actresses. They can afford it. On the basis of liberal squawking about welfare-to-work requirements, apparently the only women who liberals think should be stay-at-home mothers are single women on the dole.

Another way liberals flaunt their omnipotence is by toying “with murderous predators. If liberals expressed half as much self-righteous indignation about crime as they do about the random case of police brutality, one might be inclined to take them seriously. Criminals they like. It’s the police they hate. In his book
The White Negro,
Norman Mailer wrote: “One is Hip or one is Square. One is a rebel or one conforms, one is a frontiersman in the Wild West of American night life, or else a Square cell, trapped in the totalitarian tissues of American society, doomed willy-nilly to conform if one is to succeed.” They have reinvented the master race and it is their own hip selves.

Mailer and his fancy friends hailed the murderer Jack Henry Abbott as an “intellectual, a radical, a potential leader, a man obsessed with a vision of more elevated human relations in a better world that revolution could forge.” Mailer helped Abbott get out of prison and championed his literary—and social—aspirations. Abbott was interviewed on
Good Morning America,
published in the
New York Review of Books,
and feted at chichi Manhattan cocktail parties. Two weeks after the beautiful people toasted the murderer at a Greenwich Village dinner party held in his honor, Abbott killed again. When waiter (and aspiring playwright) Richard Adan stepped out on the street to show Abbott where to go to the bathroom, Abbott stabbed him and left him to bleed to death. Mailer termed the incident “tragic.”

Jerzy Kosinski, one of the fabulous people who had been at the dinner party, later said: “Had Abbott proposed the Nazi solution, we would not have embraced him. There is a tendency to believe violence on the left is somehow justifiable. Had Jack Abbott substituted for the phrase Marxist-Leninist, Hitlerian-Mussolinian, I do not think Mailer would have written the introduction to his book, I do not think we would have gone to toast his success.”
¹

Noticeably, more fancy high-priced lawyers jumped at the chance to represent American traitor John Walker—free of charge—than would have touched Paula Jones’s case with a ten-foot pole.

Predators are great fun for liberals. Criminals and poor people allow them to swell with a sense of their own incredible self-worth. That’s the whole point of being a liberal: to feel superior to people with less money. They enjoy pitying unfortunate wretches and trifling with killers. Only the grasping acquisitive middle class, with their petty rules and morals, are a nascent threat to liberal pomposity.

Consider that the leading Democrat argument against Bush’s 2001 tax cut was to demand to know how exactly it would help anyone. Scratching their heads and babbling about long-term economic goals and short-term economic goals, liberals exasperatedly asked how a tax cut was supposed to improve people’s lives. To state the manifestly obvious: People would have more money. That’s an improvement right there. Liberals are so blocked on the idea that people’s money should be their own, they can’t see the big fat reward: more money! It’s some metaphysical thing with liberals. More money will give people more money. Isn’t that the goal? What am I missing?

The
New York Times
has transformed into a caricature of the old reactionary WASP establishment, swatting down the social-climbing middle class with their polo mallets. They are annoyed at the thought of new money emerging from the perpetual dynamism of capitalist economy. Really vicious liberals are constantly bragging that they
love
paying taxes. They want their taxes to be raised even higher! The ostensible point of these boasts is to induce admiration for their deep patriotism or unbounded generosity toward the poor. But the real point is to announce that they do not share the working class’s petty concern with taxes.

Thus, for example, during the battle over George Bush’s proposed tax cut, billionaire music mogul David Geffen loudly bragged, “Speaking for myself, I don’t need a tax cut.” He loved paying taxes, he said, because it’s “a privilege to be an American citizen.”
²
This is pure braggadocio, intended to convey the information that Geffen has more money than God. “I want to pay more taxes” is a way of saying that, no matter how much the government takes, they will still have enough money to keep drinking Dom Perignon and making out in the hot tub.

Liberals obsess over the environment for the same reason they love crowing about how much they love to pay taxes: It is a way of separating themselves from the coupon-clippers. The environment is only the left’s most transparent expression of their contempt for the middle class.

Instead of “helping the poor” by cutting checks to the IRS from their unfathomable fortunes, it would be nice if liberals would just stop blocking ordinary people from using the public beaches. In early 2002, David Geffen, Barbra Streisand, Steven Spielberg, and about one hundred other Malibu Marie Antoinettes erected chain-link fences to keep hoi polloi off the public beaches adjacent to their beachfront estates. The California Coastal Commission was forced to intervene to demand that the Hollywood left stop blocking access to the beach. Steve Hoye, former head of the Malibu Democratic Club, expressed shock at the arrogance of what he called “some of the best, most liberal people in Malibu.”
³

Liberals use the environment as a battering ram against the acquisitive middle class bumping up against the prerogatives of the fabulously wealthy. While California was experiencing rolling brownouts a few years ago, liberals steadfastly objected to building more power plants on the grounds that it would ruin the aesthetic of their hot tub lifestyles. Liberals want to prevent drilling in mudflats in Alaska, a place they would never visit, because they already have their Jacuzzis and can afford the electricity bills. Meanwhile working people need energy and could use the jobs. One cultural suggestion the Not-on-My-Beach movement might take from their beloved France is nuclear power. That would solve the alleged “greenhouse effect” immediately. But despite its acceptance by our lily-livered French friends, the left doesn’t like nuclear power, either.

Nothing would make liberal environmentalists so happy as an entire country that looked like the Hamptons: beautiful rich people living in solar-powered homes staffed with a phalanx of obedient servants who can’t afford SUVs. Liberals believe their fabulous wealth is a product of their unique brilliance, and the rest of us should live like aboriginals to preserve the view.

Republicans are simultaneously portrayed as the swine in third class and “the rich” (which, on the basis of Democrat tax proposals, evidently means “any guy with an alarm clock”). But for the incessant mind-numbing repetition of liberal propaganda, people would recognize this as a blinding contradiction. In fact—and contrary to another liberal myth—conservatives are aggressively anti-elitist. Reagan was so beloved by working-class Americans that a new demographic had to be created in his name—”Reagan Democrats.” Still, leftists couldn’t overcome their counterfactual stereotypes and continued to denounce Reagan as the champion of “the rich.” Liberal cartoonist Jules Feiffer said Reagan was “making the world safe for white, male, heterosexual millionaires.”
⁴

Republicans may resent the fact that unions give so much money to Democrats, but they don’t hate the worker. Who would be more likely to have a beer with a trucker: Tom DeLay or Barbara Boxer? Democrats actually hate working-class people.

The preposterous conceit that Democrats are the Party of the People and Republicans the Party of the Powerful has been repeated so often that by now it is incapable of disproof. In fact, all conceivable evidence supports the theory that liberalism is a whimsical luxury of the very rich—and the very poor, both of whom have little stake in society.

While the Democratic Party hauls in enormous donations from Hollywood celebrities and multimillionaire trial lawyers,
⁵
the average donation to the Republicans is about fifty dollars. For years, the Republican National Committee has proudly posted the size of its average donation and tauntingly asked the Democrats to release theirs. The Democrats have doggedly refused to do so. During the 2000 campaign, a Democratic spokesman justified this refusal, saying that an abstract number representing the average donation constituted “proprietary” information.
⁶

The most fabulously wealthy senators are invariably Democrats. After the 2000 election, there were four senators worth $200 million or more—and all four were Democrats: Senator John Kerry (D-Mass., $620 million), Senator Jon Corzine (D-N.J., $400 million), Senator Herb Kohl (D-Wis., $300 million), and Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-W. Va., $200 million).
⁷
If “moderate Republican” Lincoln Chafee (R-R.I.) ever figures out that he is in the wrong party, nine out of the top eleven would be Democrats.
⁸
(Republican multimillionaires are also more likely to have earned their money than to have married it.
⁹
)

The jet set is especially self-congratulatory about its notable empathy in comparison to the middle class, whom they call “the rich.” Liberals’ insistence that the rest of the world pay homage to their depth and compassion is even more irritating than their incorrigible elitism.

College dropout and working-class-phony Michael Moore produced a documentary,
Roger and Me,
that was wildly popular with rich liberals who enjoy jeering at workers from the land of pork rinds. As a caustic review in the
New Yorker
summarized the point of
Roger and Me:
“Members of the audience can laugh at ordinary working people and still feel that they are taking a politically correct position.” The UAW denounced Moore for the film.
¹⁰
The left reveres Moore as an authentic blue-collar type.

Only people who are grounded in a sense of their own value and who do not think the good life consists of being able to sneer at other people as inferior can resist the lure of liberal snobbery. If liberals couldn’t exercise their adolescent sneers through their control of the mass media, there would be no liberals at all.

It is important for liberals to demean the people they oppose to reinforce their sense of class superiority. Anyone can associate himself with the elite by adopting the left’s snooty superiority and laughing at Republicans for being dumb hicks. Adopting the prejudices of the powerful interests is a way of saying you are with the “in” crowd. You are with the cool Hollywood types who hang out with Gwyneth Paltrow, Sean Penn, and David Geffen— not the working-class hillbillies who go to NASCAR races.

Liberal propaganda gives the individual “a set of prejudices and beliefs, as well as objective justifications.” Anyone can be validated by saying what the cool, good-looking, rich people say. A “new idea will therefore be troublesome to his entire being. He will defend himself against it because it threatens to destroy his certainties.”
¹¹
It doesn’t matter if you, personally, are a smelly white-trash idiot who doesn’t have a college degree. It is simply a means of asserting one’s relative refinement. It is axiomatic that every intelligent cultured person is a liberal. That is why there will always be a powerful lure to the left’s false and destructive ideas. To be cool, all you have to do is call Republicans ‘’stupid” or some similarly brilliant riposte; express greater empathy for a tree in the Brazilian Amazon than a human fetus; state your deep affection for government-sanctioned theft; and support drug legalization, sexual promiscuity, and child-molesting murderers on death row.