The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (28 page)

Is it any wonder that any human so ensconced in the spun silk of self-indulgence would lose the ability to grasp the rigid scaffolding of the real world? Unlike the self-made riches of the so-called robber barons, the wealth of these dauphins is derived not from the mined riches of terra firma but from the vaporous clouds of their own feelings.

The artistic rich can utter incandescent idiocies and be applauded for thinking outside the box. Sheryl Crow famously proposed on her Web site that all of us should be limited to one square of toilet paper per bathroom visit. “Although my ideas are in the earliest stages of development, they are, in my mind, worth investigating. One of my favorites is in the area of conserving trees which we heavily rely on for oxygen,” she wrote. “I propose a limitation be put on how many squares of toilet paper can be used in any one sitting,” she continued. “I think we are an industrious enough people that we can make it work with only one square per restroom visit, except, of course, on those pesky occasions where two to three could be required.”
¹⁵
See, it’s just that easy. Oliver Stone, an avowed admirer of Cuban socialism and the director of the anticapitalist screed
Wall Street,
owns palatial homes in various locales. When interviewed by
Architectural Digest
in 1993 at his magnificent Spanish colonial villa in Santa Barbara, Stone was asked if he felt any guilt about his opulent lifestyle while still claiming to be a despiser of all things capitalist and bourgeois. “That’s a Western Christian trip,” he responded.
¹⁶
Of course, his own response to any economic question is in effect “Let them eat cake!”

Michael Moore, self-proclaimed champion of the working man and best friend to organized labor, is a notoriously unpleasant boss who treats his staff like peasants. He describes his office as “a nonstop rock-’n’-roll party for the proletariat,” but went to great lengths to keep his employees from unionizing. When they did join the Writers’ Guild, staffers had to routinely implore their union reps to force Moore to pay what he owed. “If you had… a reunion of people for whom working for Michael was the least pleasant professional experience of their lives,” noted a former Moore producer, “it might be necessary to rent a large stadium.”
¹⁷

Much is made of the fact that wealthy environmentalists can afford the costs of their preferred public policies—they will lose neither their vacation homes nor the ability to fly to them in a world with draconian carbon taxes or green eminent domain. But not nearly enough is made of the fact that their real successes lay not in distorting the markets but in distorting the culture. When Catherine Zeta-Jones married Michael Douglas, her lawyers demanded and got a $5 million “straying fee” in the highly probable circumstance that he, as a “recovering sex addict,” might get the Jones for someone else’s Zeta.
¹⁸

Or take the all-too ironically named Madonna. It’s an understatement to say Madonna was a champion of cultural libertinism. She launched her career as a peripatetic evangelist of slattern chic. She taught twelve-year-old girls to embrace their sexuality, and to throw off all those bourgeois hang-ups about sex, marriage, heterosexuality, whatever. And when it came time to settle down and have a husband and kids, she could, quite simply, afford to. But what happened to the lower-middle-class girls from Jersey City who took her advice? When on tour, Madonna has an entourage of hundreds. When not on the road her retinue drops to less than a tenth of that, but there are still enough hands on deck. “I don’t have any problems with [diapers],” she has explained, “because I have never changed one.”
¹⁹

If this pathology only led to these modern aristocrats building temples to their own egos, indulging in Dionysian excess and employing cadres of sycophants, there would be little or no harm. But today’s secular royalty will not content itself with personal contentment. They feel compelled to export values only the very rich and very admired can afford. A plumber, and more importantly his children, cannot so easily carry the freight of serial broken marriages. Nor can society afford to have a generation of children think “if it feels good, do it” is a productive way to live. Madonna can afford to have as many children as she wants, indeed she can afford to buy “surplus” children from poor Africans. But the middle-class woman who lives for the moment may well have some extra diapers to change as a result.

Worse, some of the new aristocrats adopt a policy of
droit de seigneur
—the lord’s right—to live outside the rules of others. Roman Polanski, who drugged a thirteen-year-old girl in order to have sex with her and then fled the country after accepting a plea bargain, is as good an example of Acton’s warning that power corrupts not just the powerful, but the voluptuaries of power (see
Chapter 6
, Power Corrupts). Normally, the rule is that women don’t make up such allegations. But despite the fact that she testified to the grand jury that he committed forcible rape, none of Mr. Polanski’s peers seemed to care. Numerous actors, directors, and producers, not to mention heads of state, writers, and leading journalists, all defended Polanski upon his arrest on the grounds that this all happened long ago, the victim has “forgiven” him, and—most important—Polanski
has made some wonderful films. Whoopi Goldberg insisted that what Polanski did wasn’t “rape-rape” but rather the sort of rape that important people sometimes get away with. Such instances shed light on the self-image of the true ruling classes.

Alas, the greater damage caused by the new nobility is rarely this obvious, because it does not usually manifest itself in the form of rape in a hot tub. Rather it manifests itself in a class, governed by its own unfiltered appetites, insisting that everyone can eat cake, just like them.

16

VIOLENCE NEVER SOLVES ANYTHING

I
magine you are being raped. As you struggle to get free of your attacker, your hand finds the assailant’s gun on the floor. Your fingers pull it to your grip and you bring it up to point at your assailant. Then, suddenly, it dawns on you! “Violence never solves anything!” You immediately lay down the gun and endure the unendurable wishing there was some way out of your predicament.

“Violence never solves anything” is one of the greatest examples of something transparently untrue nonetheless serving as profound and high-minded. Violence has been a necessary solution to myriad problems. The problems of madmen on killing sprees are often solved with the judicious application of bullets. Indeed, if violence never solved anything, police would never have guns in the first place. Violence used, or at least threatened, by “peacekeepers” must solve
something
, otherwise so many people who so often say “violence never solves anything” wouldn’t love them so much. Many of the greatest evils conceived by men were put to an end with violence. The global slave trade, condoned without controversy for centuries in the Muslim and Christian worlds alike, was ultimately abolished because a few Christian souls in Britain ultimately convinced their fellow countrymen to crush the practice by force. In America, it
took a Civil War to end the institution of slavery. Perhaps war was avoidable, and it was certainly regrettable, but only a fool would say it wasn’t part of the solution to the problem of slavery in the United States.

It is an unpleasant thought to contemplate violence as a morally neutral phenomena. Something deep within us cries out in protest at the notion that violence is a mere tool devoid of moral content in and of itself. This is undoubtedly so because decent people of all political persuasions recoil at human suffering as a thing in itself. It also runs counter to the best of the Enlightenment tradition which assumes that men are open to reason, and reason can rightly inform conscience without recourse to violence. But unpleasant truths do not cease to be true because they are unpleasant.

“Those who ‘abjure’ violence,” George Orwell wrote in 1945, “can only do so because others are committing violence on their behalf.”
¹
This insight, hardly original to Orwell, is the fundamental, irrefutable fact of all civilizations at any time in history. Max Weber in his
Politics as a Vocation
, wrote that the state has a “monopoly on violence” (
Gewaltmonopol des Staates
). Weber meant it as much as an observation as a theory. The State, both modern and premodern, determines the legitimate use of violence. This is true of evil regimes and just ones. Indeed, one of the best ways to differentiate a just state from an unjust one is how violence is regulated.

In a decent society the police have a right to use as much violence as necessary, and no more, against the illegitimately violent. The military has an obligation to use violence, when necessary, to deter threats from without. Citizens may use violence in some cases—self-defense being the most obvious example—or employ private security only when doing so is in accordance with the law. But it is the state that determines the scope and definition of those laws.

Certain breeds of libertarian and anarchist are fond of observing that the state is ultimately about force, by which they mean violence. They’ll point out that if you refuse to pay your taxes or even mow your lawn long enough, eventually after much paperwork, men with guns will come to your home and make you do—or pay—what is required of you. The problem with this observation is not that it is wrong, but that those who espouse it think it is
an
indictment
. Law without the possibility of force is not law. Or, as Hobbes noted, “covenants, without the sword, are but words, and of no strength to secure a man at all.”
²

In other words, to say violence can’t solve anything is to say that the law cannot solve anything. Without the ultimate threat of force, law becomes simply a wish expressed with legalistic formality. I am for laws against child rape. To be for laws against child rape means also being in favor of police with guns stopping, apprehending, or securing for punishment men who rape children. To be for the former but against the latter is to be against child rape in principle but for it in practice.

While the libertarian is offended by the reality of law, the liberal is in denial about it. It is a common device of liberal rhetoric to replace “tell” with “ask.” It’s “only right that we ask everyone to pay their fair share,” President Obama says about his burning desire to raise taxes on the wealthy (somewhat unfulfilled as of this writing).
The New York Times
followed suit in a front page headline Obama Tax Plan Would Ask More of Millionaires.
³
But Obama’s plan is not to “ask” more of millionaires, it is to
tell
millionaires to pay more. After all, taxes are not voluntary. Now it’s true that we use the word “ask” in funny ways. Football coaches “ask” more of their players, which is a polite way of saying that they demand more. But the state is different. If you defy your football coach, you’re off the team or don’t get to start in the big game. If you defy the government, eventually men with guns will come to your home and force you to either pay up or go to jail. If you resist, it is likely they will hit you or shoot you.

Still, since I believe that some amount of taxation is necessary I believe that a necessary amount of law enforcement is necessary as well. Hence I believe that violence solves the problem of people not paying their taxes. I could run through all the steps again, but suffice it to say you can’t solve the problem of tax cheats and delinquents without guns or Billy clubs.

This sort of rudimentary state violence is one of the great drivers of peace in human history. As Steven Pinker documents in his
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined,
the first kings (the human manifestation of the State) disliked tribal raids, vendettas, and murders between their subjects for the same reason a rancher dislikes violence among
his livestock: there’s no profit in it. In the pre-state era before the rise of the first feudal kings, 15% of the populations died from violence. After kings imposed order—violently!—such deaths dropped to around 3 percent. This process accelerated into and through the Middle Ages as small kingdoms merged into the first nation-states and empires. Trade, the greatest driver of peaceful coexistence, increased as the rule of law prospered. Contracts make trade possible and contracts must ultimately be enforced at the point of a gun (or sword or really pointy spear).

Of course, most people who say violence never solved anything say it in a very specific context: When America might do something violent. For instance, when some evil regime slaughters domestic opponents, even whole peoples, in order to hold on to power, a certain breed of pacifist says there’s nothing we can do about it other than to “work diplomatically,” rally “world opinion,” or impose sanctions. After all, violence never solved anything. In the vast majority of cases these remedies do little to nothing to halt the violence. Often, the sanctions end up hurting innocent civilians while leaving the regime unscathed. And, sometimes, the sanctions even help the regime solidify power because the government is in control of the food supply. This describes countless situations from North Korea today to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. The hitch is that the violence being waged by the regime solves all sorts of problems—
for the regime
. And our refusal to use violence is the one thing that guarantees the continuation of the problematic regime. This is a particularly acute challenge when the problematic regime is in fact at war with us.

This was Orwell’s fundamental insight into pacifism. “In so far as it hampers the British war effort,” Orwell wrote in 1941, “British pacifism is on the side of the Nazis and German pacifism, if it exists, is on the side of Britain and the USSR. Since pacifists have more freedom of action in countries where traces of democracy survive, pacifism can act more effectively against democracy than for it. Objectively the pacifist is pro-Nazi.”
⁴
The following year he observed in
Partisan Review
that “Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, ‘he that is not with me is against me.’” (When George W. Bush
said something similar, not aimed at domestic opponents of war, but at foreign regimes who harbored terrorists, he was denounced as a fascist for agreeing with Orwell.)