After America

California, your health system is worse than it was a decade ago and will be worse still in a decade’s time. Fortunately, by then your now retired action-hero governor will have cured “all these terrible illnesses” and there will be no need for California’s last seven hospitals.

The illegal immigration question is an interesting test of government in action, at least when it comes to core responsibilities like defense of the nation. Enforcing the southern border? Too porous. Can’t be done, old boy.

Cloud-cuckoo stuff. Pie-in-the-sky.

But changing the climate of the entire planet to some unspecified Edenic state? That we can do. Politicians incapable of clearing snow from city streets three days after a storm are nevertheless taken seriously when they claim to be able to change the very heavens—if only they can tax and regulate us enough.

On the eve of the 2010 Massachusetts election to fill what the Democrats insisted on referring to as “Ted Kennedy’s seat,” the president came to town to help out his candidate, a party hack named Martha Coakley. He had nothing to say, but he said it anyway. All those cool kids on his speechwriting team bogged him down in the usual leaden sludge. He went to the trouble of flying in to phone it in. The defining moment of his doomed attempt to prop up Ms. Coakley was his peculiar obsession with the emblem of Scott Brown’s campaign—the Republican candidate’s five-year-old pickup: “Forget the ads. Everybody can run slick ads,” President Obama, standing alongside John Kerry, told an audience of out-of-state students at a private school. “Forget the truck. Everybody can buy a truck.”³⁶

How they laughed! But what was striking was the thinking behind Obama’s line: that anyone can buy a truck for a slick ad, that Brown’s pickup was a prop—like the herd of cows Al Gore rented for a pastoral backdrop when he launched his first presidential campaign. Or the “Iron Chef” TV episode featuring delicious healthy recipes made with produce direct from Michelle Obama’s “kitchen garden”: the cameras filmed the various chefs meeting the First Lady and wandering with her ’midst the beds picking out choice organic delicacies from the White House crop, and then for the actual cooking the show sent out for stunt-double vegetables from a grocery back in New York.³⁷ Viewed from Obama’s perspective, why wouldn’t you assume the truck’s just part of the set? “In his world,” wrote the Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes, “everything is political and everything is about appearances.”³⁸

Howard Fineman, the Chief Political Correspondent of Newsweek, took it a step further. The truck wasn’t just any old prop but a very particular kind: “In some places, there are codes, there are images,” he told MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann. “You know, there are pickup trucks, you could say there was a racial aspect to it one way or another.”³⁹

Ah, yes. Scott Brown has over 200,000 miles on his odometer.⁴⁰ Man, he’s racked up a lot of coded racism on that rig. But that’s easy to do in notorious cross-burning KKK swamps like suburban Massachusetts.

Whenever aspiring authors ask me for advice, I usually tell ’em this: Don’t just write there, do something. Learn how to shingle a roof, or cultivate orchids, or raise sled dogs. Because if you don’t do anything, you wind up like Obama and Fineman—men for whom words are props and codes and metaphors but no longer expressive of anything real. America is becoming a bilingual society, divided between those who think a pickup is a rugged vehicle useful for transporting heavy-duty items from A to B, and those who think a pickup is coded racism. Unfortunately, the latter group forms most of the Democrat-media one-party state running the country. In perhaps the most explicit testament to the ever widening gulf between the metaphorical class and the simple-minded literalists they reign over, the liberal reaction to a murderous attack in Tucson by a deranged nut of no political affiliation was to blame it on the right’s “extreme rhetoric”—all this talk of “targeting” marginal seats and having your opponent in the “crosshairs.” Liberals can be expected to understand sophisticated concepts such as figures of speech, which is why they can safely name their Clinton campaign documentary The War Room and why Democratic Congressman Paul Kanjorski can recommend, re: the Republican Governor of Florida, “put him against the wall and shoot him.”⁴¹ Liberals exist in a world of metaphor, so it would be unlikely for them ever to rouse themselves to act on their rhetorical flourishes. But simple, embittered red-state types are too stupid to be entrusted with such potentially lethal weapons as literary devices.

Obama himself is not about “doing.” Why would you expect him to be able to “do” anything? What has he ever “done” other than publish books about himself? That was the story of his life: Wow! Look at this guy!

Wouldn’t it be great to have him… as Harvard Law Review editor, as community organizer, as state representative, as state senator, as United States senator. He was wafted ever upwards, staying just long enough in each “job” to get another notch on the escutcheon, but never long enough to leave any trace—until a freak combination of circumstances (war weariness, financial meltdown, divisive incumbent, inept opponent, the chance to cast a history-making vote) put Obama in line for the ultimate waft. If only Hogarth had been on hand to record a very contemporary Fake’s Progress. No rail-splitting, like Lincoln. No farm work, like Coolidge. No swimming-pool lifeguard duty, like Reagan. Upward he wafted without breaking a sweat, except perhaps when briefly blocked on his whiney Valley Girl autobiography—as who wouldn’t be blocked? It’s tough to write an autobiography when you haven’t done anything.

The new “meritocratic” elite, wrote Michael Young just before his death, “can be insufferably smug, much more so than the people who knew they had achieved advancement not on their own merit but because they were, as somebody’s son or daughter, the beneficiaries of nepotism.”⁴² As Young had foreseen in his original essay, a cult of (pseudo-)meritocracy absolves the ruling class from guilt. They assume not, as princes of old did, that they were destined to rule, but that they deserve to. Which is wonderfully liberating.

They “actually believe they have morality on their side,” said Young of Britain’s Blairites. The bigger government gets, the more transformative, the more intrusive, the louder it proclaims its moral purity/virtue. Thus, as Peter Berkowitz puts it, the ostensibly impartial concept of “fairness” is now no more or less than “the name progressives have given their chief policy goals.”⁴³

This is politics as a form of narcissism: Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all? In the name of “fairness,” they grant privileges to preferred identity groups over others—that is, they treat certain people unfairly. Yet, if you oppose “fairness,” you must be on the unfair side.

And who wants to find themselves hanging with that crowd? So, in government, in the dinosaur media, in the faculty lounge, in the community-organizing community, in the boardrooms of connected corporations, America’s rulers are conformicrats. They have the same opinions, the same tastes, the same vocabulary. They think the same, and they expect you to do likewise. As Michael Tomasky, former editor of the lefty mag The American Prospect, explained it: “At bottom, today’s Democrats from [Senator Max] Baucus to [Congresswoman Maxine] Waters are united in only two beliefs, and they demand that American citizens believe in only two things: diversity and rights.”⁴⁴

By “rights,” they mean not “negative rights” as understood by the U.S. Constitution—the right to be left alone by the government in respect of your speech, your guns, etc—but “rights” to stuff, granted by the government, distributed by the government, licensed by the government, rationed by the government, but paid for by you. In the Orwellian language of Big Government, “rights” are no longer individual liberties that restrain the state but state power that restrains you. And by “diversity,” they mean the state ideology of stultifying homogeneity. Hence, the peculiar spectacle of American “artists” from George Clooney to Stephen Sondheim to Green Day congratulating themselves on their truth-telling courage by producing films, plays, CDs, TV shows, and novels with which everyone they know is in full agreement. In such a world, to disagree with the liberal agenda is not so much an act of political dissent but, worse, a ghastly social faux pas. To take Mr. Tomasky’s own profession, the average American newsroom ostentatiously recruits for diversity of race, sex, sexual orientation, and every other diversity except the only one that matters—diversity of ideas. To achieve its own propaganda goals, the Soviet politburo had to smash printing presses and jam radio signals. America’s nomenklatura achieved the same level of dreary conformity just by leaving it to ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. Which is why, as the first industry to prostrate itself before the deeply unAmerican idea of enforced uniformity, America’s moribund monodailies are on life support and openly auditioning for a government bailout.

The advantage of life in the self-flattering conformicrat cocoon is that you never have to address anybody’s