The Last Page
Kohák, Erazim
RUNNING AS A social democrat for the Senate in the Czech Republic is not for the timid. In my district, four voters out of five stoutly affirm social democratic values and virulently reject...
...But what does the right want...
...Most prominent among them is our former president Vaclav Havel, who launched a "Do not speak to Communists" boycott, eagerly signed the notorious Letter of Eight, urging George W. Bush to attack Iraq, and most recently spearheaded an attack on the European Union for being soft on Castro...
...Who or what, though, is right...
...The communists want a short shrift for the capitalists...
...In my district, four voters out of five stoutly affirm social democratic values and virulently reject social democratic candidates...
...only the right is respectable, and they want to be right...
...After all, would you want to stand in line for bananas, as under the communists...
...It is made up of the 20 percent who became instant millionaires after 1992, when Klaus turned off the lights and encouraged would-be entrepreneurs to "privatize" whatever was not nailed down...
...Many more wish they were...
...The social democrats want the social state and prosperity, a neat trick...
...128 DISSENT / Spring 2005...
...The tolerant society is pluralist, accepting dissent as a valid form of participation...
...Viktor Kozem'r, today still alive, well, and living in the Bahamas, was one of them...
...Little love is lost between the Righteous Right and the Rapacious Right, but they share the blessing of not being left...
...The social state is called to serve rather than rule—to provide the presuppositions of cultured coexistence, from health care and schools to trains and pensions...
...Only our pensions, health care, educational system, national railways, public television, and our entire social state are endangered...
...In the popular eye, party delineations seem clear...
...It is an unbeatable argument...
...Years of Radio Free Europe had their effect...
...They might have a surprise...
...One faction, which the public correctly or incorrectly associates with the current president, Vaclav Klaus, and his party, is the Rapacious Right...
...Again, in the popular eye, the right stands for freedom and prosperity...
...At its core is the audacious project of the Enlightenment, the hope of ordering human affairs by the light of Reason, in freedom and justice...
...To a critical eye, the picture is more complex...
...That is what the European Union is about...
...After forty years of waking up to radios blaring Kupredu levci!—roughly, "Lead with the left...
...The People's Party wants to be on the winning side, whatever that may be, to protect church interests from godless communism...
...Right...
...Needless to say, I lost the election, though only in the second round...
...No doubt, our supply of bananas is assured...
...Actually, this revolutionary right is split within...
...Margaret Thatcher undertook not so much a revolt of the right against the left as a coup within the right, revoking its consent to the social state...
...My constituents voted for the traditional right but unwittingly elected the revolutionary right...
...Though few Europeans would so speak of it, the basic reality here is still the great democratic revolution (a.k.a...
...the Great French ditto, though that evokes the guillotine...
...Europe knows the Enlightenment project tangibly as the social state and the tolerant society...
...We shall all be rich and respectable— at least those who deserve it—and no one will tell us what to do...
...No matter, at least we are right...
...After all, social security was Bismarck's idea...
...The traditional European right talked loudly about Order and Tradition, but it made its peace with the social state...
...The other faction is the Righteous Right, singlemindedly devoted to eradicating evil communism from the face of the earth...
...Bush honored him with the Medal of Freedom for his efforts...
Vol. 52 • April 2005 • No. 2
