Don’t Vote

by P. J. O'Rourke

  But are we men and women of principle? And I don’t mean in the matter of tricky and private concerns like gay marriage. Civil marriage is an issue of contract law. Constitutional amendment against gay marriage? I don’t get it. How about a constitutional amendment against first marriages? Now we’re talking. No, I speak, once again, of the fundamental principles of conservatism.

  Where was the meum and the tuum in our shakedown of Washington lobbyists? It took a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives forty years—from 1954 to 1994—to get that corrupt and arrogant. And we managed it in just twelve. (Who says Republicans don’t have much on the ball?)

  Our attitude toward immigration has been repulsive. Are we not pro-life? Are not immigrants alive? Unfortunately, no, a lot of them aren’t after attempting to cross our borders. Conservative policies on immigration are as stupid as conservative attitudes toward immigrants are gross. Fence the border and give a huge boost to the Mexican ladder industry. Put the National Guard on the Rio Grande and know that U.S. troops are standing between you and yard care. George W. Bush, at his most beneficent, said that if illegal immigrants wanted citizenship they would have to do three things: pay taxes, learn English, and work in a meaningful job. Bush didn’t meet two out of three of those qualifications.

  To go from slime to the sublime, there are the lofty issues about which we conservatives never bothered to form enough principles to break. What is the conservative foreign policy?

  We may think of this as a post–9/11 problem but it’s been with us all along. What was Reagan thinking, landing marines in Lebanon to prop up the government of a country that didn’t have one? In 1984 I visited the site where 241 marines and sailors had been murdered by a suicide bomber the year before. It was a beachfront bivouac overlooked on three sides by hills full of hostile Shi’ite militiamen. You’d urge your daughter to date Rosie O’Donnell before you’d put troops ashore in a place like that.

  Since the early 1980s I’ve been present at the conception (to use the polite word) of many of our foreign policy initiatives. Iran-Contra was about as smart as using the U.S. Post Office to deliver democracy to Iran. And I notice Danny Ortega is back in power.

  I had a look into the eyes of the future rulers of Afghanistan at a 1989 sura in Peshawar while the Soviets were withdrawing from Kabul. I would have rather had a beer with Leonid Brezhnev, dead as he was. At least there would have been beer.

  Fall of the Berlin Wall? Being there was fun. Nations that flaked off the Soviet Union in the Caucasus and Central Asia? Being there was not so fun.

  The aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War still makes me sick. Fine to save the fat, greedy Kuwaitis and the arrogant, grasping House of Saud, but to hell with the Shi’ites and Kurds of Iraq until they get some oil.

  Then, half a generation later, when we returned with our armies, we expected to be greeted as liberators. And damn it, we were. I was in Baghdad in April 2003. People were glad to see us until they noticed that we’d forgotten to bring along anyone to feed or doctor the survivors of shock and awe or to get their water or electricity going again. After that they got cranky and began stuffing dynamite in their pants pockets before consulting with the occupying forces.

  Is there a moral dimension to conservative foreign policy? Or is the point just to help the world’s rich people make and keep their money? (And a fine job of that we’ve done lately.)

  If we do have morals, where were they while Bosnians were being slaughtered? Where were we when Clinton was dithering over the massacres in Kosovo and decided, at last, to send Kosovo’s Serbs a message: Mess with the United States and we’ll wait six months then bomb the country next to you. About Rwanda I can’t bear to think let alone wisecrack.

  Then, to carry conservatism on its final trip to the recycling bin, came this financial crisis. For almost three decades we conservatives had been trying to teach average Americans to act like “stakeholders” in their economy. They learned. They cried and whined for government bailouts just like the billionaire stakeholders in Citigroup. Aid was forthcoming. Then average Americans learned the wisdom of Ronald Reagan’s statement: “The ten most dangerous words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the federal government and I’m here to help.’” Ask a Katrina survivor.

  The left had no idea what was happening in the financial crisis. And I honor their confusion. Joe Jerk down the road from me, with the cars up on blocks in his front yard, fell behind in his mortgage payments and the economy of Iceland collapsed. I’m missing a few pieces of this puzzle myself.

  Under political pressure that never seemed to be noticed by conservatives, a lot of lousy mortgages, which couldn’t be repaid, were handed out to Joe Jerk and his drinking buddies and all the ex-wives and single mothers with whom Joe and his pals have littered the nation.

  Wall Street looked at the worthless paper and thought, “How can we make a buck off this?” The answer was to wrap it in a bow. Take a wide variety of lousy mortgages—some from the East, some from the West, some from the cities, some from the suburbs, some from shacks, some from mansions—bundle them together, and put pressure on the bond rating agencies to do fancy risk management math. The result was a “collateralized debt obligation” with a triple-A rating. Good as cash. Until it wasn’t.

  Wall Street pulled the “room full of horseshit” trick. Brokerages said, “We’re going to sell you a room full of horseshit. And with that much horseshit, you just know there’s a pony in there somewhere.”

  Anyway, it’s no use blaming Wall Street. Blaming Wall Street for being greedy is like blaming prostitutes for getting paid. The people on Wall Street never claimed, as even prostitutes might, to be public servants. Investment bankers took no oath of office. They’re in it for the money. We pay them to be in it for the money. We don’t want our retirement accounts to get a 3 percent return. (Although that looks pretty good at the moment.)

  We, the conservatives, who understand the free market, had the responsibility to, as it were, foreclose upon this mess. The market is a measurement, but that measuring does not benefit a nation or its citizens unless the assessments of height, width, volume, and weight are conducted with transparency and under the rule of law. We’ve had the rule of law largely in our hands since 1980. Where was the transparency?

  This is one more fundamental principle of conservatism. It is a political principle, it is an economic principle, it is a principle of manufacturing, finance, and trade. It is a principle that should be kept in mind when you explain to your wife and the people of South Carolina that you disappeared for a week in order to hike the Appalachian Trail. Beyond a certain point complexity is fraud.

  Think of airline fares. Think of cable service. Think of Microsoft Windows 7. Think of health care reform. Now think of conservatives in government office. It should have been so simple.

  3

  A Digression on Shouting at Each Other

  American politics has become increasingly polarized and nasty, so I’m told, and conservatives and liberals are shouting at each other too much. I don’t think we’re shouting at each other enough. I’ve felt this way for a while, through a great deal of shouting, during an era of partisan clamor so loud sometimes you’d think that, with American politics, it’s all over but the shouting. I’m satisfied with the quantity of our screeches. Even the quality of our shrieks isn’t too bad. But I’m concerned about the direction in which we yell.

  I remember the moment I was struck with this concern. It was in the fall of 2003 midst the run-up to the unmemorable presidential election of the following year. The proximate cause was the even more unmemorable General Wesley Clark, who briefly offered himself as the answer in the debate concerning who would be the Democratic Party’s candidate for president.

  I was driving across the Midwest, listening to Rush Limbaugh shout on the car radio. I usually agree with Rush Limbaugh, therefore I don’t tune in to his show. I tune in to NPR: “World to end. Poor and minorities hardest hit.” In my own car, w
ith my own radio on, I prefer that it’s me who does the shouting.

  Of course, if I had continued to listen to Rush Limbaugh over the next few weeks, while his OxyContin addiction was being revealed, I could have shouted at him about drugs. I don’t think drugs are bad. I used to be a hippie. I think drugs are fun. Now I’m a conservative. I think fun is bad. I would agree with Rush Limbaugh all the more if, after he had returned from rehab, he’d shouted—as most Americans should—”I’m sorry I had fun! I promise not to have more!” (Or he could have shared.)

  Anyway, I couldn’t get NPR on my car radio, so I was listening to Rush Limbaugh shout about Wesley Clark. Was Wesley Clark a Hillary Clinton stalking horse?! Was Wesley Clark a DNC-sponsored Howard Dean spoiler?! “He’s somebody’s sock puppet!” Limbaugh shouted.

  My laugh was followed by an uneasy thought. Who was Rush Limbaugh shouting at? Was he shouting at Wesley Clark? I doubted that Clark listened to AM talk radio the way I listened to NPR, to get his blood pressure up. Besides, Howard Dean was already doing that for Clark. Was Rush Limbaugh shouting at uncommitted voters, hoping to scare them into the George W. Bush camp? Shouting “Hillary Clinton!” “Howard Dean!” “John Kerry!” over and over might have done it. But what uncommitted voter cared a spit about Wesley Clark? The person hearing the shout had to know enough about Democratic politics to know who Wesley Clark was and enough about Wesley Clark to know that he was a small pumpkin and a false alarm. Was Rush Limbaugh shouting at Hillary Clinton supporters to hearten them? At Dean supporters to energize them? At Kerry supporters to alert them? These people didn’t tend to be ditto heads. No, I realized, Rush Limbaugh was shouting at me.

  Me. I am a little to the right of... Why is the Attila benchmark always used? Fifth-century Hunnish depredations upon the Roman empire were the work of an overpowerful centralization of authority with little respect for property rights, pursuing a policy of economic redistribution in an atmosphere of permissive social mores.

  I am a little to the right of Rush Limbaugh. I’m so conservative that I could talk Ellen DeGeneres out of supporting gay marriage. Gays wed, they buy a house, they have children, they encounter the public school system. Then gays all vote Republican.

  I suppose I should be shouting at my fellow right-wingers about that, and draconian drug laws, and many other things. Shouting is a form of argument. And the purpose of argument is to convince others. Many people deny that shouting is a form of argument. They say, “Nobody ever convinced anybody about anything by shouting at them.” These people don’t have children.

  Shouting can be a very effective form of argument, as will be attested to by any person (say, a president of the United States) who’s heard a sermon preached by the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. But, when shouting, you must have people within earshot who—will they, nil they—are receptive to the shout-out.

  After I’d realized, in 2003, who Rush Limbaugh was shouting at, I performed an experiment. I listened to some more talk radio, watched some conservative television programming, and read some of the conservative books that were popular at the time. I listened to Michael Savage and Mark Levin. I watched Bill O’Reilly’s No Spin Zone and the Sean Hannity part of Hannity & Colmes. They did a lot of shouting. But they didn’t seem to be shouting at the potentially repentant sinner who had guiltily slipped in at the back of the congregation after emptying his bottle of malt liquor. Nor did they seem to be shouting at the abashed political wire puller in the middle pews, his conscience bothered by the electoral blood on his hands. No, Limbaugh, Savage, Levin, O’Reilly, Hannity et al. were shouting at the pious women in the big hats standing blamelessly in the choir. That is, they were shouting at—with a change of gender and headgear—me.

  I judged the conservative books by their covers (certainly a better method than reading their reviews, if any, in the New York Times). Ann Coulter, on the cover of Treason, had the look of a soon to be ex-wife who’d just gotten done shouting. And Bill O’Reilly was wearing a loud shirt on the cover of Who’s Looking Out for You? Also, his title was a rhetorical question I remembered hearing shouted by various frustrated scout masters, camp counselors, and sports coaches. Then I gave the books a good reading, the same kind of good reading I gave to my textbook The Democracy of Our Self-Governing Republic in eleventh-grade civics class to keep the teacher, Mr. Mannsburden, from shouting at me.

  Ann Coulter’s book was subtitled “Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism.” Her theses were that the love of the ideal results in the hatred of the real and that belief in changing society, totally, means belief in totalitarianism. At least I think those were her theses. (Understand that I found myself operating in eleventh-grade essay test mode: “Manifest Destiny. Manifested? Destined? Discuss.”)

  In the first paragraph of her book Coulter wrote, “Liberals have a preternatural gift for striking a position on the side of treason. You could be talking about Scrabble and they would instantly leap to the anti-American position. Everyone says liberals love America, too. No they don’t. Whenever the nation is under attack, from within or without, liberals side with the enemy.”

  Mind you, I’d shouted this sort of thing myself. But it was two in the morning and I was shouting it at a couple of other drunk right-wingers in the bar. Here was Ann Coulter putting it down in black and white on the printed page in the cold light of day. I’m not saying she was wrong, but was this the kind of shouting likely to call anyone in from left field?

  The volume was not turned up quite so high in Who’s Looking Out for You? But there was something of the halftime harangue at the team in just the adoption of that second-person voice. It began with the title and extended from the introduction (“When you finish this book... you will know what’s going on.”) to the last page (“You deserve to have good people on your side.”). Again, I’d heard myself shouting this, hoarsely, with my eyes misting up, at 2 a.m. in the bar.

  Who’s Looking Out for You? could be condensed thus: “Nobody, what’s who! The fat cats aren’t looking out for you! The bigwigs aren’t looking out for you! Nobody’s looking out for you except me, and I can’t be everywhere! You’ve got to look out for yourself! How do you do that? You look out for your friends and your family, that’s how! And they look out for you! And that’s the truth, Bud!”

  We’ve all backed away from this shouting guy while vigorously nodding our heads in agreement. Often the shouting guy we were backing away from was our dad.

  And O’Reilly, in his book, did come across as dad-like, somewhat pathetically wanting to be listened to and liked and thought of as a decent fellow. He cast his net widely in search of a nodding, agreeing, backing away audience. He attempted to ingratiate himself with people driving pokey economy cars: “Not imposing gas mileage standards hurts every single American except those making and driving SUVs.” He gave a nod to folks with a foggy nostalgia for the liberalism of yore: “The gold standard for public service was the tenure of Robert Kennedy as attorney general.” He got up on the hobbyhorse of nativism to voice worries about illegal aliens coming across the border and taking jobs from us. (I was worried about illegal aliens not coming across the border and giving jobs to us, such as painting the house.) And O’Reilly tried to reach out to youth by prefacing each chapter with lyrics from pop groups that, as far as I knew, were hip in 2003, like Spandau Ballet. But the person O’Reilly was shouting at was still me: “If president Hillary becomes a reality, the United States will be a polarized, thief-ridden nanny state with a mean-spirited headliner living on Pennsylvania Avenue.”

  Fortunately that didn’t happen. George W. Bush was no headliner.

  My retired FBI agent father-in-law is fond of the shouters. He’s a little to the right of, well, me. After I’d listened to the radio, watched the TV shows, and read the books, I asked him, “What do you get out of these loudmouths? You already agree with everything they say.”

  “They bring up some good points,” said my father-in-law.

  “That you’r
e going to use on who?” I said. “Do your retired FBI agent golf buddies feel shocked by the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and want to give Saddam Hussein a mulligan and let him take his tee shot over?”

  Whereupon my father-in-law looked at me with an FBI agent look and I shut up.

  In the 1960s, a generation before my Limbaugh ah-ha moment, there wasn’t much conservative media. (“Media” was a liberal worry word that had just come into vogue, denoting what ordinary people watched, listened to, and read, as opposed to what liberals thought they should.) Mostly it was just William F. Buckley hosting Firing Line.

  Buckley didn’t shout a lot, except at Gore Vidal and who can blame him. But Buckley’s icy sarcasm spoke louder than bellowing. William F. Buckley was like Miss Ditwiley, my eleventh-grade English teacher, as opposed to Mr. Mannsburden, my civics teacher. Mr. Mannsburden did a lot of shouting, sometimes to effect and sometimes not. One quiet word from Miss Ditwiley froze you in your seat.

  Therefore I count lonely Bill Buckley as a stentorious (as he would have said) voice. And with little but this vox clamantis in deserto to guide it, public opinion went from the 1964 defeat of Barry Goldwater with 38.5 percent of the popular vote to the 1980 victory of Ronald Reagan with 50.7 percent of the popular vote.

  After Reagan was elected conservative media grew enormously in popularity and range. The result, as far as I could figure it, was nil. In 1988 the less conservative George H. W. Bush was elected with 53.4 percent of the popular vote. By the time we got to 2000, George W. Bush—arguably more conservative than Reagan himself—had to resort to Florida lawyers and a Supreme Court ruling to gain the presidency. One could have, I thought, accused conservative commentators of shouting “Fire!” in a burned-down theater.