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...
...Indeed they do not expect any of us to be content...
...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...
...That is to say that justice is not served until every social grouping reflects the same "minority" proportions as the aggregate society...
...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...
...Quotas deny the eminence of the individual...
...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...
...They do not...
...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...
...The size of the pile itself is all that matters...
...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...
...Quotas also dissolve the ideal of excellence or personal achievement...
...Today they spread the rumor that freemen possessing critical minds automatically suffer from demoniacal infestation...
...For instance, is a twenty-year-old white female to be designated a woman, a youth, or a white...
...Consider two powerful supporters of quotas: the militant woman and the militant black...
...What this means is that social groupings will be set against one another...
...It is one of the reasons our society is more productive and prosperous than any other on earth...
...Even now they are busying themselves in every cranny of the Republic...
...And are quotas to be based on national proportions or local proportions...
...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...
...So what makes the perpetually dissatisfied so confident that a new and idiotic system will be a brief prelude to bliss...
...Silently and with enormous gall the marplots have brought a kind of democratic tribalism to America...
...And what sort of progress will this be...
...And today, with the whole nation aching for an as yet inexpressible ambrosia, the forces of organized malevolence are again swarming in earnest...
...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...
...Their ultimate nope and driving dream is that we shall all of us be equally, simultaneously, and enduringly, miserable...
...Will Alabama only have to give blacks an 11 percent quota or a quota reflecting the proportion of blacks actually living in Alabama...
...The quota system is a spike in the heart of liberalism...
...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...
...To begin with they live in the freest and wealthiest society on earth...
...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...
...For awhile their fever is upon the Republic, and the Bill of Rights is expurgated...
...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...
...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...
...Through the years this principle of individual merit has held up rather well...
...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...
...Naturally their descendants live on...
...Quotas strip the individual of his importance and throw him like a poor fish into a pile...
...There are even hospitable saloons where women can guzzle at a special low price, extended only to them...
...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...
...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...
...When thinking about quotas it is crucial to remember that they are not administered by the elected representatives of the people...
...Of course, the advocates of quotas assure us that all of these questions will be worked out to everyone's satisfaction...
...Though this position is never advanced quite so shamelessly, it is advanced continually, and today its adherents wield awesome power throughout our nation...
...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...
...What is more, all of those old liberal principles will not even be around to trouble our consciences...
...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...
...Two of the above, or all three...
...And the ladies have it especially sweet...
...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...
...So powerful is this tactic in whipping up suspicions against the civilized minority, that every now and again this element gets the upper hand...
...Ultimately the largest group will triumph over all other groups...
...It will be an ideal society, a society of homogeneous misery...
...The result will be a society without freedom, without equality, and without liberalism...
...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...
...Further we are instituting quotas and thereby allowing ladies the privilege of becoming butchers, stevedores, bootblacks, and Supreme Court Justices...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...In the 1920s all the wowsers were sustained and inspired by an idealistic vision of homogeneous misery...
...Surely such militant ill will was the primary afflatus for Cotton Mather and all his grumpy associates...
...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...
...Every race track and sportspalast has a ladies' day and no reciprocity is offered...
...Now I cannot see how this can do anything but conduce to polarization, intolerance, and the disintegration of community...
...Democracy will be obsolete...
...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...
...There are just too many minorities in our immense nation to receive equal attention...
...And as if this were not enough, America now offers still another enticement to its angry young women...
...Further, the Great Republic has listened sympathetically to those with the women's fever, and it has acted...
...America is the home of the electric toothbrush and has the highest per capita consumption of aerosol spray deodorant in the world...
...One answer bubbles to the surface...
...It has encouraged the pursuit of excellence, tolerance for diversity, and a general broadening of respect for all individuals...
...So it comes as no surprise that quotas bring with them subtle impossibilities...
...They do not expect all of us to be satisfied by their imbecilic confection...
...Key amongst these enlightened principles is the principle of the primacy of the individual...
...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...
...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...
...The morale of a society monitored by quotas must be something like the morale of a Victorian sweat shop...
...America has not missed celebrating a Mother's Day since its inception in 1914...
...Recently the principle of individual merit animated such good liberal causes as the civil rights movement and trade unionism...
...We shall take those afflicted with the women's fever first, for in our society ladies always come first...
...This curious urge proceeds on the understanding that if all men cannot be equally happy, they had best be equally miserable...
...They are a bureaucratic frankenstein, responsive only to the mysterious laws which govern those idiotic conglomerates...
...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...
...And to the frayed remnants of the Klan it must appear as a divine windfall...
...Modern America has de-emphasized beauty contests and encouraged a fashion in dress that accents ugliness...
...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...
...Not even homosexuals are tendered the same privileges...
...They are administered by creations like the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare...
...And how are we to compute her ethnic extraction...
...For one, the designation of a minority is purely arbitrary...
...Its cities now boast the highest rate of rape in the western world...
...How could a nation offer more...
...Individual aspiration is a daydream...
...Yet fortunately, we Americans have been well-served by a resilient array of salutary liberal notions which continually breathe vitality into our society...
...Possibly this urge issues from a soured Utopianism, but whatever its origin, I find it a spot more logical and realistic than Utopianism undistilled...
...As Jefferson envisioned it, America would have a "natural aristocracy" composed of individuals respected for their assiduity, competence, and rectitude...
...Now these malign yearnings for one's neighbor have been with us since the very first sourpuss disembarked from the Mayflower...
...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...
Vol. 6 • March 1973 • No. 6
