Don’t Vote Read online

  My assistant, Phoebe Bunker, spent many long hours digging up obscure and abstruse research material for this book. She also spent many more and much longer hours inputting and outputting and (for all I know) shot putting the manuscript because I don’t even know which end of a computer to stick the eight-track cassette into. Phoebe, you were very good-natured about it all.

  The dust cover photo was shot with style and flair by James Kegley, who is not to be blamed for his subject’s looks (or attire—that being the author’s idea on the theory that the only real benefit of being over sixty is a perfect freedom to injure one’s own dignity, to the extent that time hasn’t done the job already).

  The author would look even more frightful if it hadn’t been for the ministrations of stylist Janis Heffron and of photographer’s assistant Mike Stargill who kept moving the lights around in an attempt to keep the cover photo from looking like a portrait of Uncle Samosaurus.

  At the behest of my excellent friend Frank Saul, Washington’s Hay-Adams Hotel lent us a room for the photo shoot. Jenny Niessen made us comfortable there, for which we thank her. You should stay at the Hay-Adams even if you live in Washington already. It’s so close to the White House that you can see the president sneak a smoke, but not so close that he can lecture you on health care reform and financial regulation.

  Grove/Atlantic has remained a patient and understanding publisher. Chief executive Morgan Entrekin, with whom my friendship dates back to the 1970s, has published all but one of my books and he reissued that one. Thank you Morgan, and thank you Eric Price for keeping Grove/Atlantic functioning, Charles Rue Woods for keeping it looking good, Deb Seager and Scott Manning for keeping it publicized, Don Kennison for un-mangling my spelling and grammar, managing editor Michael Hornburg for managing, Sue Cole for making sure somebody remembered to send the book to the printer, and to Andrew Robinton and every other Grove/Atlantic literary light.

  And lastly I want to thank my wife, Tina, for fifteen years of happiness, which is none of the reader’s business. More to the point I want to thank her for the editorial targeting she did on Don’t Vote. Tina undertook a careful re-aiming of my 12 gauge, open bore, scatter-shot approach to my subject. She convinced me to use full choke in both barrels on politics. I’ve got a bead on the thing now, Honey. And I promise I won’t ask you to clean or cook it.

  Apologia Pro !%@& Sua

  I beg forgiveness from the reader for the vulgar language in this book. Politics is a vulgar fucking subject. I have resorted to barnyard words because of the amount of bullshit, horseshit, and chickenshit involved in politics. I’m sorry I can’t devise a more polite mode of expression. I can only blame myself. It is possible, I suppose, to take a decorous approach to politics. But I’m reminded of the American guest at a dinner in one of the great houses of Britain. The American was seated to the left of a very grand and fat old duchess and an Englishman was seated on her right. During the soup course the duchess farted. The Englishman, taking chivalrous responsibility, said, “I beg your pardon.” During the fish course the duchess farted again, louder than before. Once more, the Englishman said, “I beg your pardon.” Then, during the meat course, the duchess cut loose with a tremendous, resounding blast. The Englishman said, “I beg—”

  “No, no,” the American interrupted. “This one’s on me.”

  PART I

  The Sex, Death, and Boredom Theory of Politics

  The man of system... is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamored with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it.

  —Adam Smith

  “Scientific socialism” would hold especial attraction for intellectuals by promising to replace spontaneous and messy life with a rational order of which they would be the interpreters and mentors.

  —Richard Pipes

  Here’s a good rule of thumb:

  Too clever is dumb.

  —Ogden Nash

  1

  Kill Fuck Marry

  Having been a political commentator of one kind or another since 1970, it has occurred to me to ask: What the hell have I been talking about for forty years?

  It’s a surprisingly difficult question to answer. One subject has been power, the skull beneath the skin of politics. Sometimes we get flayed completely and there’s nothing left but a pile of skulls. Then there’s freedom. From my addlepated hippie youth to my right-wing grouch maturity, I’ve been a fan of freedom, particularly my own. Furthermore, because I’ve always lived in a nation that is self-ruled (if often by selfish selves) and that is under the rule of law (if often legally unruly), responsibility, too, has been a topic, although I dislike taking any.

  Power, freedom, and responsibility are the trinity of politics in a free and democratic country. But it’s hard to know how to go about understanding this triad. We are so passionate about our politics. And how do passionate affairs end? In a passion, usually. In a crime of passion, sometimes. Occasionally they turn into stable, permanent, connubial relationships, which is to say endless, peevish quarrels.

  How should the political institutions of America be approached? Do we overthrow them with violence? Do we screw around with them while they screw around with us? Or do we try to build something that’s lasting and boring, worthy and annoying, marvelously virtuous and at the same time dreadfully stifling?

  No wonder most of my fellow political commentators and I have preferred to rave about politics rather than consider them. It’s human nature—at least among free and democratic humans—to be angry, confused, and instinctual about politics. So how do we go about creating a set of political principles that don’t suck? We need a reasonable, reasonably precise, and reasonably well reasoned way to look at political institutions, political policies, and politicians. There is ample evidence of what happens when such principles are lacking: Somalia.

  Power, freedom, and responsibility are not principles in and of themselves; they’re perspectives. But we can use these three ways of looking at things to analyze politics. The game “Kill Fuck Marry” comes to us, as far as anyone can tell, from late-night giggle sessions at all-girls boarding schools. Take three political institutions that seem to occupy different vertices in the triangulation of power, freedom, and responsibility. Or, because it’s more fun, take three politicians. For instance, the Kennedy brothers: charismatic Jack, conscientious Bobby, and Teddy with a lampshade on his head. Obviously, we kill Ted, fuck Jack, and marry Bobby.

  If choosing among martyred (plus cancer-stricken) Kennedys seems tasteless, we can use the 1992 U.S. presidential candidates, who, for example’s sake, were exemplary. We kill Ross Perot. We could hardly avoid a fuck from Bill Clinton. And we marry kindly, old George H. W. Bush.

  The game’s outcome is not always certain (per our mysterious elopement with Bill instead of our church wedding with George). In the case of the 2000 presidential election people of goodwill were evenly divided about whether to fuck Al Gore or marry George W., although I believe we all agreed on killing Ralph Nader.

  I won’t venture any answers involving more recent elections for fear of attracting attention (hard as that sometimes seems) from the Secret Service. But the game works on the parts of government as well as it does on the politicians who run them. We kill the postal service, fuck the Department of Health and Human Services, and marry the armed forces. The same goes with government policies: fuck agricultural subsidies, marry Social Security, and health care reform kills us.

  Try “Kill Fuck Marry” at your next cocktail party if you want the people you invited never to speak to one another again.

  2

  Politics Makes Us Free

  And We’re Worth It

  When I first began to think about politics—when mastodons and Nixon roamed the earth—I was obsessed with freedom. I had a messy idea of freedom at the time, but I had the tidy idea that freedom was the central issue of politics.

  I loved politic
s. Many young people do—kids can spot a means of gain without merit. (This may be the reason professional politicians retain a certain youthful zest; Strom Thurmond was the boyo right down to his last senile moment.) I was wrong about the lovable nature of politics, and even at twenty-three I probably suspected I was wrong. But I was sure I was right about the preeminent place of freedom in a political system.

  Freedom is a personal ideal. Because politics is an arrangement among persons, we can plausibly assume that freedom is a political ideal. Our favorite political idealists think so. They’ve been unanimous on the subject since Jean-Jacques Rousseau convinced polite society that human bondage was in bad taste and John Locke showed the divine right of kings to be a royal pain.

  The signers of the Declaration of Independence declared us to be residents of “Free and Independent States.” John Adams demanded, “Let me have a country, and that a free country.” Tom Paine warned that “Freedom hath been hunted round the globe.” And he exhorted us to “receive the fugitive and prepare in time an asylum for mankind.” Calling America an asylum may have been a poor choice of words, or not. Thomas Jefferson, in his first inaugural address, preached “Freedom of religion; freedom of the press, and freedom of person.” Jefferson was quite free with the person of Sally Hemings. And a dinner toast from Revolutionary War general John Stark bestowed upon New Hampshire a license plate motto that must puzzle advocates of highway safety: “Live Free or Die.”

  With Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations as a useful gauge of what we think we think, we find that Emerson poetized, “For what avail the plow or sail, or land or life, if freedom fail?” Hegel weighed in, “The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.” As unlikely a character as the crackpot Nietzsche had something to say: “Liberal institutions straightway cease from being liberal the moment they are soundly established: once this is attained no more grievous and more thorough enemies of freedom exist than liberal institutions.” The UN Commission on Human Rights comes to mind.

  We can survey the arts, where mankind is most blatant in its truths, and find artists taking the broadest liberties. (They are especially free with the use of fate as a plot device.) We can peruse philosophy, where mankind is less truthful, and not hear freedom denied by anything except free thinking. Theology makes sporadic arguments against free will, with which the devout are freely willing to concur. Science is deterministic and its special needs stepsister social science is more so. But people are free to pick and choose among the determinations of science until they find something they like. I give you Al Gore and you can have him. Perhaps there are scientists who make a sound case for the inevitabilities of biology and such. But we don’t know what these geniuses are talking about and very likely neither do they. For example, the important biologist Richard Dawkins has written a book, The God Delusion, in which he uses predestinarian atheism to argue that Richard Dawkins is the closest thing to a superior being in the known universe.

  The theoretical (as opposed to practical) enemies of freedom are feeble opponents. And we are all but overrun by theoretical allies in freedom’s cause. We’ve got collaborators in the fight for freedom that we don’t even want. “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains” is the penultimate sentence of the Communist Manifesto. And a creepy echo of it can be heard in the refrain of Kris Kristofferson’s “Me and Bobby McGee.” Mao announced, “Letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend is the policy...” Half a million people died in those ellipses.

  If we were to give out the proverbial “a word to the wise,” the sagacity-testing utterance with which to provide the sages would be “freedom.” In the unabridged Oxford English Dictionary the noun has fifteen definitions and the adjective “free” has thirty-six. These definitions, along with their usage citations, occupy 189¼ column inches of small and smaller type.

  Peter Roget (1779–1869), of Roget’s Thesaurus, was a physician, a scientist, the secretary of the Royal Society for more than twenty years, and an exhaustingly systematic thinker. He designed his thesaurus (Greek for “treasury”) as a reverse dictionary. Instead of listing words and giving their meanings, he listed meanings and gave words for them. Under the heading “freedom” there are more than four hundred entries in twenty-one categories. And “freedom” is only one of the twenty-three headings in Roget’s “Section I, General Intersocial Volition” of “Division II, Intersocial Volition” of “Class Five, Volition.” It’s hard to know whether or not to be thankful that Peter Roget’s obsessive-compulsive disorder meds hadn’t been invented.

  Among the various types and kinds of general intersocial volition, about ten have something to do with political freedom.

  freedom in the abstract

  autonomy

  enfranchisement

  toleration

  frankness

  leisure

  laxity

  abandon

  opportunity

  privilege

  Several of these may seem beside the point. But “frank,” for instance, is from the Old French franc, meaning free. We can be frank with the president of the United States. We can honestly and openly say what we think to him. And what we think of him. But in all our name-calling the name we call our president that sticks is “Mr.” He’s not “Your Excellency” or “Your Highness,” nor do we kowtow, genuflect, or curtsy to him. Callisthenes, the great-nephew of Aristotle, plotted to kill Alexander the Great rather than prostrate himself in the Persian manner to the conqueror of the known world. It’s probably just as well that our current president forgoes even a handshake with Fox News.

  Then there are the freedoms of leisure, laxity, and wild abandon. Anyone who thinks these have nothing to do with democracy hasn’t met the demos. Also, it was not so long ago, during the great political demonstrations of the 1960s, that I was risking my neck—well, risking a conk on the head and a snootful of tear gas—in the battle to create a utopian society where I could lie around all day, utterly heedless and high as a kite.

  Freedom, of course, may be considered as an abstraction. I was young enough to be highly abstracted—not to say stoned—when I began to think about freedom. But I wasn’t old enough to think. Therefore I can tell you nothing about my abstract thinking on the subject. And so can’t a lot of other people, because there are languages in which the word “freedom” doesn’t exist. (Not surprising if you think about some of the places languages are spoken.) Richard Pipes, emeritus professor of Russian history at Harvard, who is fluent in a number of tongues himself, makes this point in his book Property and Freedom (a perspicacious analysis of what the title says).

  Professor Pipes cites the work of M. I. Finley, preeminent historian of classical antiquity (and, incidentally, a Marxist, something Richard Pipes is the opposite of). Finley wrote, “It is impossible to translate the word ‘freedom,’ eleutheris in Greek, libertas in Latin, or ‘free man,’ into any ancient Near Eastern language, including Hebrew, or into any Far Eastern language either, for that matter.” Indeed, when the Japanese first encountered Western notions they were hard put to translate “freedom” and ended up using the word jiyu, which means something like “getting jiggy with it.”

  Freedom and liberty themselves don’t have quite the same meaning. “Free” is derived from the Indo-European root pri, to love. The p becomes f in Germanic languages, thus fri in Old German and freo in Old English. The original sense of the adjective was “dear,” and it was used to describe those members of a household who had a kinship relation to the master of the house. Since at least the reign of King Alfred the Great, ruled 871–899, the primary definition of “free” has been “not in bondage.” You’re free because... Who loves ya, Baby?

  Liberty is probably the better word;1 its source is in the Indo-European leudh, “to mount up, grow.” Hence Latin for children, liberi, and German for populace, Leute. We the people make leudh into eleutheris and libertas.

  Yet, the fi
rst definition of “liberty” in English is, once again, “exemption or release from bondage.” Whatever we mean by our abstract statements about freedom and liberty, the most meaningful thing we’re stating is that mankind has a sickening history of slavery.

  Enfranchisement is the lively, fortunate, and honorable freedom, for the sake of which our political ancestors pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. Nothing concerning the goal of enfranchisement is ignoble except its attainment. Among those who choose the congressmen, senators, and presidents of the United States we now include people who are not considered mature and responsible enough to have a beer. (If it’s any comfort, we should remind ourselves of the purpose of voting. We don’t vote to elect great persons to office. They’re not that great. We vote to throw the bastards out.)

  Toleration is the best comfort of a free life for most people most of the time, especially if they experience as well as practice it. But tolerance is of minor interest to politics. Politics aspires to a big, positive role in things. And the role of politics in toleration is small except in the usually negative actions of keeping the peace. Yet it was two consummate American politicians who supplied us with a model for the universal formulation of tolerance: “Mind your own business and keep your hands to yourself.” These may be rightly called the Bill and Hillary Clinton Rules. Hillary, mind your own business. Bill, keep your hands to yourself.

  The ontological freedom known as autonomy isn’t part of practical politics, it’s all of practical politics—imposing my will and thwarting yours. If the actions of mankind and the events of history turn out to have been foreordained it will be a good joke on politics.

  This leaves us with the nub or butt end of politicking: privilege and opportunity. Ignore everything politicians say about opportunity. They’re lying. When politicians tout “opportunity” either they are trying to help voters disguise an extortion as a gift or they are the groom of government complimenting the bride of private property while in bed with the socialist maid of honor. And ignore all of politicians’ sniffing at and scorn for privilege. Privilege and opportunity are the names for rights—opportunity being rights you’d like to get and privilege being rights you’d like someone else to surrender. A politician doesn’t ask if he may have the privilege of a dance; he says he has a right to it.