Editorial/New Vistas in Bigotry
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
Editorial New Vistas in Bigotry R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. One does not like to put words into the mouth of Theodore H. White. There is always an astonishing plentitude of them pothering about there,...
...Nor did any majority ever vote for the 55 mph speed limit, the Equal Rights Amendment, busing, abortion, quotas, or dozens of other practices now posing as the law of the land...
...The America that has emerged, with its rarely acknowledged system of privileges and exclusions, its primitive fears and debased fantasies, its arcane rancors and pert philosophisms, more closely resembles some Kluxian jerkwater of the past than the America that White and his hero JFK envisaged...
...We have grim judges peering into every act of human intercourse...
...And so, ladies and gentlemen, I give you the so-called liberal, an authoritarian bigot...
...To be sure there are no laws against their applications...
...A new jurisprudence was opening up, not intending to but nonetheless destined to establish new special privileges," says White...
...But I wander...
...Of all the great events in domestic history since the war, the Law of Unintended Consequences might later claim this Kennedy legislation as one of its finest demonstration pieces...
...Orwell foresaw it all years ago...
...Observe: Medicare and medicaid combine with health insurance schemes designed to shield taxpayers from the onerous taxes of the welfare state...
...A revolution without leaders or bloodshed or fixed goals took place, idiotizing liberalism and rendering obsolete almost every textbook explanation of the polity...
...I take it as a testimonial to the so-called liberal's belief in the meaninglessness of words and actions that he would set up affirmative action programs based on a law that declared with magisterial sweep: "No person in the United States shall on the ground of race, color, or national origin be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance...
...Imagine the lurid spectacle of a new constitutional gathering...
...And government would be summoned to intrude into areas previously left to community law or custom to decide...
...That is to say, he is in the same woeful condition as Ambassador Young, the only diplomatist in the world with an upper and lower appendix, the upper one being slightly behind his bovine eyes where it cohabits with other tissue that might well constitute a second gall bladder...
...There was a day when a candidate for the House of Representatives merely had to file his name...
...Somehow the thing blew up...
...And our commerce is fettered by an occult system of regulations somewhat reminiscent of the free enterprise system of the Fourteenth Century Papacy...
...Xrecisely how America came to be a land of increased privilege for some and diminished opportunity for all perplexes White...
...All Washington is alarmed...
...Inns, hotels, bars, sports stadiums, and so forth lost their full standing as private property and became subject to extensive federal regulation...
...No wonder the so-called liberals stress that such a convention might repeal the Bill of Rights...
...All that is needed is the approval of eight more states...
...I think I understand his distress...
...White has discovered that the America of the nonce is not so pleasing as the America of the recent past...
...And the epic confiscation of liberty was accomplished without this great democracy even putting the matter to a vote...
...In point of fact, one reviews the arrogant way the so-called liberals have confiscated our liberties in recent years and one realizes that not even the Constitution matters...
...Under their guidance, the Founders' philosophy of freedom has been so degraded and the Bill of Rights has been so twisted that it would be a rare Americano who believes that the curious instrument matters a wit...
...All this being true, it would be a hard heart that would not sympathize with Senator John C. Culver, the stupendously liberal solon from Iowa...
...They did not struggle against the ascriptive privilege of yore to clamp down on America a new privileged class and a new system of primitive prejudices...
...Today he has to arm himself with hordes of accountants and lawyers, school himself in an arabesque of idiotic laws, and hope to have in his lifetime cultivated just the legal mix of agreeable financial supporters...
...It is this pyramiding of blunders that is now leading us to the advanced condition of modern Italy...
...Senator Culver has discovered that, back in the boondocks, 26 state legislatures have voted to convene a constitutional convention to amend the Constitution so as to prohibit our democratic representatives in Washington from bankrupting us-a frightening prospect to be sure, yet Senator Culver predicts ever more horrifying occurrences...
...Selflessly working the full power of the state, Senator Culver and his fellows have freed the citizens of all the onerous burdens of self-government save elections and taxes, and now the citizens would convene a constitutional convention...
...Today there are ever larger numbers of positions for which Jews need not apply, nor need Catholics or WASPs or, for that matter, any qualified male of the species...
...Suffice to say that the progressively educated liberal performs cleverly when, for instance, he takes it upon himself to design a new chair...
...but no sooner has he done so than he is in a fever to design a new Homo sapiens to sit in it, and a new way of sitting...
...Any atrocity can be read into it...
...Today the agents of Joe Califano weigh us according to race, color, creed, and comparative hormone balance...
...Moreover, infringements of federal civil-rights laws no longer had to be proved by traditional rules of evidence, but could be proved by mere "statistical inference" drawn by some bureaucratic mullah...
...There is always an astonishing plentitude of them pothering about there, often in service of his generous heart or at command of his increasingly incisive and thoughtful mind...
...No democracy in the West has lost more of its freedoms in recent years than the land of the free, home of the brave...
...This is the American reality, and what makes it all the more appalling is that no majority was ever amassed to vote for it...
...Up through the early 1960s, the land abounded with opportunity, liberty, and idealism...
...It is increasingly apparent that, with the death of JFK, a shade was brought down on the exuberant land of the free...
...As a result, medical costs are greatly inflated, causing the so-called liberal to howl for an even more gigantic governmental intrusion into private-sector medicine...
...Hollywood starlets pronounced upon the public interest, and people listened...
...Have the citizens no gratitude...
...An indignant grumbler cannot even advertise his com(continued'on page 41) EDITORIAL (continued from page 4) plaints in a local newspaper without consulting a lawyer, preferably one with government connections...
...It is rather that there are no laws favoring them, and there are indeed laws favoring the employment of others...
...How the so-called liberal thumping for new vistas in bigotry and coercion manages to remain so earnest and humorless is a mystery...
...This historic breakthrough has been perpetrated by our so-called liberals, who conceal their bigotry by setting it forth as liberality and enlightenment...
...Yet having just turned the last page of his engaging memoir, In Search of History, I should like to amplify one of his discoveries -a discovery unremarked by his reviewers but of enormous relevance to us...
...This might well serve as a useful general theory for recent American history...
...With the reform of our election laws it is vastly more difficult to petition government effectively or even to run for public office...
...White sees the operation as having commenced with the Civil Rights Act confected by his friend JFK and later rammed through Congress by LBJ...
...He believes that the thing could be taken over by such monsters as the opponents of the ERA- think of it, spiking that jewel of enlightenment after all the progressives have done to shield it from the will of the people...
...Thanks to thousands of recent judicial decisions, regulatory laws, and administrative rulings, the average American's suzerainty over his life has increasingly been taken over by higher authorities...
...Whether moved by charlatanry, quackery, or imbecility, he has managed to bring the whole liberal dream to such a ghastly flummox that kind-hearted liberals of yesteryear like White are fleeing the church...
...A law intended to unify would divide Americans by categories...
...And the same thing was not only to become the usufruct of blacks, but soon Aleuts were in on the swindle, and women and prisoners and, of course, the much put-upon homosexuals...
...In 1963, White saw America as a land of opportunity and heroes He expected the heroes to multiply and the opportunity to be extended to the poor and the fuliginous...
...I think it is fair to say though that, no matter how brainy he might be, when he sets out to right the larger wrongs of mankind his brain is about as helpful to him as his appendix...
...Increasingly the national stage was populated with truculent drunks...
...This ukase arrogated from taxpayers large areas heretofore held as private even in the Middle Ages...
...Not surprisingly, White gloomily shuts off his memoir at the end of 1963 and shuffles off shaking his head...
...Here he botches, and he botches again in attempting to correct his prior botch, thus setting off a whole concatenation of disasters, each more ruinous than the last and each more demanding of his enlightened panaceas...
...Yet it is not just affirmative action programs that scotch opportunity and freedom...
...It is now harder for him to get a job, more difficult for him to offer one, and downright dangerous for him to create new ones...
...Doubtless it will take some tenacious historians to chronicle fully the exaltes recent confiscation of American freedoms...
...What has happened to America...
...Unlike the slippery southern sheriff of yesteryear, whose apology for racism was accompanied by a playful wink, our liberal exalte retails his sophistries very solemnly and even sanctimoniously...
Vol. 12 • March 1979 • No. 3
