The Intolerance of Tolerance

Mark Steyn's website under "Greatest Hits" ^ | July 12, 2001 | Mark Steyn

[WarrenC]

OF the many and varied depressing aspects of the current Tory leadership campaign, the most dispiriting is the general tenor of the Portillo pitch. Mr Portillo thinks that the Conservative party needs to change not just the odd policy on Europe, the pound and other minor matters, but its entire personality.It needs to cease being Captain Hook, stamping about brandishing its hook and twirling its moustaches, and to transform itself into Tinkerbell, assuring mothers and infants that it believes in fairies. Conservatives, says Mr Portillo, need to chuck out ‘arrogance, complacency and bigotry.’

The generous interpretation of this is that it's merely the British version of Dubya's 'compassionate conservativism' hooey. But you'll notice that, unlike bigot-expulsion, compassionate conservatism is linguistically positive, not to say relentlessly upbeat.

Asked what it meant, Bush talked about helping poor minority children escape rundown, no-hope school districts; he offered programmes to encourage faith-based institutions that ease single moms off welfare. He didn't do what Portillo's doing: damn his own party's activists in order to kiss up to the leftie media bores he meets in swank restaurants. That, incidentally, was the strategy adopted by Senator John McCain, whose attacks on the religious Right were wildly applauded by the press. Still, Michael Heseltine agrees with Portillo. In the future, he maintains, Britons ‘are as likely to be black, gay and single as they are to be white, straight and married.’ I should have thought that this was statistically improbable. If there were significant tax advantages, I would consider being Mr Heseltine's gay partner, which could conceivably end both our marriages, but I don't really see how either of us can convincingly become black. Hezza's careless maths is, however, a useful illustration of the broader trend: tolerance of, and respect for, minorities has become an ersatz majority of its own, deeply intolerant and disrespectful of those who disdain its pieties.

I hate to say it, but Portillo's shtick sounds terribly vieux chapeau to me. After all, the notion that we on the Right are a bunch of intolerant bigots is more or less conventional wisdom throughout the Western world, no matter how touchy-feely we get. One of the grand panjandrums of American letters, Lewis H. Lapham, touched on this subject in a long, weary post-election thumbsucker in the February edition of Harper's. 'Quick to impugn the character and motives of their opponents, they seldom missed the chance for malicious slander', he writes of America's conservatives during the tetchy courtroom jousts between Bush and Gore. Actual evidence of this maliciousness was apparently difficult to find, but eventually Lapham managed to cite an example: 'the poisonous language’ of ‘a columnist by the name of Mark Steyn.’ By contrast, the genial and relaxed Democrats ‘didn't mistake their opponents for the friends of Darth Vader or senior consultants to the Antichrist.'

He's quite correct. In the post-election stand-off, no Republicans were compared to Darth Vader or the Antichrist. Instead, they were compared to Soviet commissars, money-launderers, Brownshirts, fascists, slave-owners and Nazis - and not the benign kind of furtive, guilty Nazis with the desk jobs, but the Nazier-than-thou, knuckle-dragging concentration-camp guards themselves. These perceptive observations were made not by obscure foreigners (a columnist by the name of Mark Steyn) but by the marquee names of the American Left: Alan Dershowitz, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Gore campaign honcho Donna Brazile, corpulent film-maker Michael Moore, and Clinton aide Paul Begala, who in a magnificent tour de force compared not just the Republican establishment, not just nutcake columnists, but the entire Republican electorates of Middle America to a racist, gay bashing, terrorist, white supremacist lynch mob. Oh, and let's not forget the ubiquitous Jesse Jackson, who equated the Florida recount with the struggle against slavery, the Holocaust, and other famous occasions on which ‘the blood of blacks and Jews’ had been spilt. ‘Mr Jackson has been careful not to be inflammatory,’ noted Lynette Holloway in the New York Times. Thank goodness for that.

Conceding a certain amount of pointed rhetoric on the part of Gore partisans, Mr Lapham argues that Democrats nevertheless ‘seemed to know the difference between what was said and what was meant.’ This is the Eminem defence - that, when we're compared to Nazis, Klan members and mass-murderers, there's a level of irony that we hick right-wing rubes are too dumb to pick up on.

Heigh-ho. We dead white males have learned to live with this sort of thing. But increasingly the identity groups of the Left reserve the heavy power for those they see as traitors to their own sides. Recently, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas (black and conservative) was invited to Hawaii to debate the President of the American Civil Liberties Union at the annual David Levin First Amendment Conference - that was until the board of the Hawaii ACLU got steamed up and rescinded the invitation on a 12-3 vote. It seems that a conference dedicated to the principle of free speech is no place for free speech. Board member Daphnee Barbee-Wooten said that inviting Thomas ‘sends a message that the Hawaii ACLU promotes and honours black Uncle Toms.’ Eric Ferrer called Thomas ‘an Antichrist’ and ‘a Hitler’, and said that ‘allowing him to speak would be like having a serial murderer debate the value of life.’ Worst of all, he continued, there's a chance, even a likelihood, that ‘a lot of people might like his views.’ Horror of horrors! If we start exposing the peasantry to a broad range of opinion, there's no telling what these simpletons will fall for.

Warming to her theme, Ms Barbee Wooten claimed that she had ‘the inside scoop’ on Thomas. ‘Anita Hill wasn't the only one,’ she said. On a previous visit to Hawaii, ‘he went to strip clubs.’ (The ACLU’s against strip clubs? Who knew?) And let's not forget that ‘he's married to a white person.’ This isn't from some retiring backbench crank like John Townend; this is the official on-the-record view of the principal American organisation for the defence of civil liberties.

Worried that the rhetoric - no matter how many layers of Laphamite irony it was swathed in - was getting a little overheated, former ACLU president Roger Fonseca opted for a more considered approach: ’Thomas is an asshole,’ he said. ‘If not Hitler, he is a Goebbels.’

Bill Clinton may be the first black president, but Colin Powell and Condi Rice will never be hailed as the first black secretary of state or the first black female national security adviser. For the Barbee Wootens of this world, you cease to be black when you refuse to prostrate yourself before identity-politics orthodoxy.

You also cease to be gay. Over a decade ago Andrew Sullivan left Britain and wound up in Washington as the first gay, Catholic, Thatcherite editor of the liberal New Republic. He wasn't much of an editor, and his departure coincided with his announcement that he was HIV-positive. I've met him just once and thought he was an arrogant tosser, which I gather isn't an unusual judgment. That said, I agree with pretty much all of what he writes, aside from the gay thing. But those of us right-wing loonies tagged as "hateful" and "ugly" can only marvel at the incessant barrage Sullivan is under daily. "Everyone knows what a hypocrite you are, you f---ing liar. This also applies to your pronouncements about your supposedly getting HIV from oral sex. You are a f---ing joke of the highest order. And I think it's time that some newspaper took you to task for your lies." This is the sort of thing that for most of us columnists comes in green ink and unsigned. In Sullivan's case, it was from the editor of Bay Windows, Boston's leading gay newspaper. Sullivan is one of the leading proponents of gay marriage, gays in the military, gay this, gay that, but because, on other matters, he's broadly speaking a pro-Bush conservative, the forces of tolerance are out to get him.

Recently, various gay publications laid bare every detail of his sex life, hyping the story enough to persuade the New York Post and a few other mainstream outlets to take it up. No position Sullivan has taken in bed is inconsistent with the positions he has taken in innumerable, interminable books and columns on gayness. His sex life has been brutally exposed by his fellow gays for no other reason than to punish him for straying from the party line: As Michelangelo Signorile, the gay journalist who broke the "story" put it to him in an e-mail, he should think twice before he "attacks gay people."

You don't see so many gays in leather uniforms these days, but just because they've quit dressing like a tween-wars fascist party doesn't mean that the gay stormtroopers' totalitarian inclinations aren't as strong as ever. They've embarked on a campaign against the anti-gay Boy Scouts to get a benign and useful organisation kicked out of the school gyms and town halls and church basements where they meet. Steven Spielberg, a man who makes courageous message pictures about issues that were resolved decades ago, has disowned the Scouts, a sure sign that for most on the Left this one's a no-brainer: if it's a choice between the gays and the Scouts, the Scouts are toast. After all, last year the gay establishment took on Dr Laura, America's top syndicated radio host, for her hateful views (i. e. , traditional Judaeo-Christian morality), and they won a convincing victory: her TV show got cancelled, and gay pressure on advertisers cost her $30 million in revenue.

But only when the intolerant forces of tolerance turn on their own does the strategy of the authoritarian left become clear: They don't want a debate--they just want to shut you down, whether you're the Scouts or an iconoclastic gay columnist, Dr. Laura or a black conservative judge. "Identity politics" is left-wing apartheid--a way of dividing the citizenry into competing interest groups, beholden to a strong central government as an arbiter of largesse. And, as the Scout campaign proves, it's not enough to be "inclusive": the New Tolerance demands you take sides--against Boy Scouts, practicing Christians and anybody else who gets in its way. The only hope that the tide will turn against identity politics is that eventually there will be more Thomases and Sullivans, blacks and gays who decline to fit the left's identikit profiles and see themselves as free-born individuals equal under the law--the only identity that matters.

[WarrenC]

From Mark Steyn's website - It was first published a couple years ago but is still timely and I hadn't seen it before. Maybe others missed it too.

[lainde]

bttt

[goldstategop]

The lifestyle Nazis are the worst offenders - holier than thou mugwumps who insist not only that people not object to the way they live their lives but that people endorse their chosen lifestyles. Any one suspected of silence or disapproval is automatically treated as an enemy fit to be silenced. You know this is the Left's idea of tolerance and coexistence - only on their terms.

[fporretto]

Thanks for posting it, Warren. It's a brilliant exegesis, Steyn at his best, and ample evidence that simply holding the facts up for all to see, with a touch of wit to assist the memory, can work wonders.

Freedom, Wealth, and Peace,
Francis W. Porretto
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