Editorial
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
Editorial Toward Democratic Tribalism I suspect that there prowls through every society substantial congeries of public-spirited persons whose animating urge is to lower everyone to their own...
...Further, as every sociologist knows, a given individual has many roles and it will be enormously difficult to assign him a single identity or quota...
...It is also one of the reasons America remains the world's most desired residence in spite of the increasingly apparent fact that our streets crawl with madmen...
...Individual aspiration is a daydream...
...For awhile their fever is upon the Republic, and the Bill of Rights is expurgated...
...What is more, all of those old liberal principles will not even be around to trouble our consciences...
...Modern America has de-emphasized beauty contests and encouraged a fashion in dress that accents ugliness...
...Today they spread the rumor that freemen possessing critical minds automatically suffer from demoniacal infestation...
...Ultimately the largest group will triumph over all other groups...
...They do not expect all of us to be satisfied by their imbecilic confection...
...What it all amounts to is that they intend to take the good principle of equality, stretch it beyond recognition or meaning, and wrap it around the good principle of freedom until they have strangled the latter good principle with the former...
...There are just too many minorities in our immense nation to receive equal attention...
...Even now they are busying themselves in every cranny of the Republic...
...They are a bureaucratic frankenstein, responsive only to the mysterious laws which govern those idiotic conglomerates...
...They do not...
...Silently and with enormous gall the marplots have brought a kind of democratic tribalism to America...
...Surely such militant ill will was the primary afflatus for Cotton Mather and all his grumpy associates...
...So what makes the perpetually dissatisfied so confident that a new and idiotic system will be a brief prelude to bliss...
...Their ultimate nope and driving dream is that we shall all of us be equally, simultaneously, and enduringly, miserable...
...And just as our constitutional liberty is about to disappear forever and anon beneath a pile of prescriptive legislation, these principles whisper into the ears of every bluenose, "You are a two-faced scoundrel...
...What quotas portend for democracy is tellingly suggested by the fact that the federal government has already been hiring according to a quota policy since 1965...
...Now I cannot see how this can do anything but conduce to polarization, intolerance, and the disintegration of community...
...Every race track and sportspalast has a ladies' day and no reciprocity is offered...
...For instance, is a twenty-year-old white female to be designated a woman, a youth, or a white...
...Quotas also dissolve the ideal of excellence or personal achievement...
...There should be equality of opportunity, for as the Founders laid it out, the infant Republic was to be a society in which status was achieved through personal merit judged through fair competition, uninfluenced - so much as is possible - by birth, patronage, and other extraneous criteria...
...Now the government is forcing those sanctuaries of academic freedom, the universities, to hire according to quotas and it is beginning to force industry to follow the same coercive policy - all without any public debate whatsoever...
...Our entire legal system is groaning under mountains of litigation, yet we are about to pass into law the so-called Equal Rights Amendment, which promises to sink the court system irretrievably...
...And to the frayed remnants of the Klan it must appear as a divine windfall...
...But our society has been operating on a system of eminently logical principles for almost two hundred years, and it has yet to satisfy a timeless element in our society...
...Democracy will be obsolete...
...The result will be a society without freedom, without equality, and without liberalism...
...And what sort of progress will this be...
...The morale of a society monitored by quotas must be something like the morale of a Victorian sweat shop...
...It acknowledges the glum fact that the commonweal is never likely to be elevated to that state of ease known by the Rockefellers and the Kennedys, so it might as well be lowered to that consoling anguish known by reformers and do-gooders...
...Consider two powerful supporters of quotas: the militant woman and the militant black...
...Hence, blacks are limited to exactly 11 percent of any profession or craft or social grouping, and so it will go with every other minority...
...Further we are instituting quotas and thereby allowing ladies the privilege of becoming butchers, stevedores, bootblacks, and Supreme Court Justices...
...Until recent months people simply have not known, and their government has not told them, that the American democratic ideal is being clandestinely rescinded by a pack of bureaucrats abetted by the forces of equalized misery...
...The bluenoses begin flailing at everything that moves and the civilized few are triumphantly inspired to drive the scoundrels out of office and back into their cages...
...For one, the designation of a minority is purely arbitrary...
...The quota system is a spike in the heart of liberalism...
...That is to say that justice is not served until every social grouping reflects the same "minority" proportions as the aggregate society...
...Through the years this principle of individual merit has held up rather well...
...America is the home of the electric toothbrush and has the highest per capita consumption of aerosol spray deodorant in the world...
...When thinking about quotas it is crucial to remember that they are not administered by the elected representatives of the people...
...They are administered by creations like the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare...
...As Jefferson envisioned it, America would have a "natural aristocracy" composed of individuals respected for their assiduity, competence, and rectitude...
...America has not missed celebrating a Mother's Day since its inception in 1914...
...Of course, the advocates of quotas assure us that all of these questions will be worked out to everyone's satisfaction...
...The size of the pile itself is all that matters...
...The old Federalists were full of a communicable misery, and the captains of industry socked away fortunes while espousing a blowzy excuse for philosophy which regarded wretchedness as a positive good - though it must be said on their behalf that at least they, unlike today's advocates of misery, did not assume general anguish to be society's goal...
...So powerful is this tactic in whipping up suspicions against the civilized minority, that every now and again this element gets the upper hand...
...From it we derive the idea that men should be equal before the law and free to choose their own courses in the world so long as they do not molest their fellows...
...Editorial Toward Democratic Tribalism I suspect that there prowls through every society substantial congeries of public-spirited persons whose animating urge is to lower everyone to their own level of misery...
...Indeed they do not expect any of us to be content...
...Always intent on extirpating the Constitution's guarantees of freedom and equality before the law, they are forever inflaming the populace against the civilized minority...
...And the ladies have it especially sweet...
...Though this position is never advanced quite so shamelessly, it is advanced continually, and today its adherents wield awesome power throughout our nation...
...One can train a lifetime to become, say, a professor of chemistry, but if upon graduation one's quota is filled, well so much for that life's ambition...
...But now along comes a cunning band of cranks whose insight it is that because the American system has not ushered in eudaemonia, it might as well be sacked...
...There are even hospitable saloons where women can guzzle at a special low price, extended only to them...
...According to the ideal of the quota, persons cannot enter a craft, a profession, a school, or any other social grouping in numbers exceeding their ethnic, biological, or racial proportion in society as a whole...
...Further, the Great Republic has listened sympathetically to those with the women's fever, and it has acted...
...And how are we to compute her ethnic extraction...
...And as if this were not enough, America now offers still another enticement to its angry young women...
...The way this new American Dream will be realized is by cashing in individual merit for quotas, an advanced social policy that has been felicitously labeled "the new racialism...
...To begin with they live in the freest and wealthiest society on earth...
...Possibly this urge issues from a soured Utopianism, but whatever its origin, I find it a spot more logical and realistic than Utopianism undistilled...
...Recently the principle of individual merit animated such good liberal causes as the civil rights movement and trade unionism...
...Now these malign yearnings for one's neighbor have been with us since the very first sourpuss disembarked from the Mayflower...
...To Thomas Jefferson, America would contrast starkly with the oppressive societies of Europe which were characterized by an "artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth without either virtue or talents...
...Key amongst these enlightened principles is the principle of the primacy of the individual...
...Will Alabama only have to give blacks an 11 percent quota or a quota reflecting the proportion of blacks actually living in Alabama...
...In the 1920s all the wowsers were sustained and inspired by an idealistic vision of homogeneous misery...
...It is one of the reasons our society is more productive and prosperous than any other on earth...
...How could a nation offer more...
...Yet fortunately, we Americans have been well-served by a resilient array of salutary liberal notions which continually breathe vitality into our society...
...One answer bubbles to the surface...
...Prohibitionists, Ku Kluxers, and world savers were all dedicated to the proposition that the saucy fellow who lives contentedly and cheerfully is a hazard to his community...
...Quotas strip the individual of his importance and throw him like a poor fish into a pile...
...What this means is that social groupings will be set against one another...
...So it comes as no surprise that quotas bring with them subtle impossibilities...
...In days of yore they encouraged the suspicion that anyone thriving in liberty and minding his own business was ipso facto subversive, a Bolshevik, and possibly a devotee of foreign wine and poetry...
...Two of the above, or all three...
...Its cities now boast the highest rate of rape in the western world...
...Naturally their descendants live on...
...Not even homosexuals are tendered the same privileges...
...What is more, the humanitarians of the high court are now allowing the ladies the opportunity to put (continued on page 27)ontinued on page 27...
...Equality of opportunity will end (indeed in the universities, in government, and in those industries subject to government, it already has ended), and one's position in society will depend on group membership...
...What they are demanding is the most fundamental change in American history, and to implement this change they have confected a bizarre arrangement of abstractions which will govern our society in the future...
...Now some demented liberals and progressives view this as a stupendous breakthrough in racial relations, and busybodies are licking their lips at their new opportunities...
...This curious urge proceeds on the understanding that if all men cannot be equally happy, they had best be equally miserable...
...We shall take those afflicted with the women's fever first, for in our society ladies always come first...
...Quotas deny the eminence of the individual...
...And are quotas to be based on national proportions or local proportions...
...It has encouraged the pursuit of excellence, tolerance for diversity, and a general broadening of respect for all individuals...
...And today, with the whole nation aching for an as yet inexpressible ambrosia, the forces of organized malevolence are again swarming in earnest...
...It will be an ideal society, a society of homogeneous misery...
Vol. 6 • March 1973 • No. 6
