New Ideas & Charlotte Corday

September 1997

By Robert Stacy McCain

We count among the annoyances of life in modern America -- like rap music, except perhaps more repetitive -- the regular call for "new ideas" in politics. It is as if public policy were a Paris fashion show, where couturier-wonks unveil the exciting "new ideas" that fashionable pundits and politicians will tout in the upcoming season.

Block grants? No, daah-ling, that was last year's style! Where have you been? This year, school vouchers are all the rage.

Doubtless this trend-mongering reflects both the American citizen's healthy apathy toward politics and the amoebic attention span of the media elites who are ever innovative in their efforts to recruit volunteers for the crusade to save Democracy As We Know It.

So it is that the television news viewer or op-ed page reader is treated to a parade of "issues" which seemingly demand attention. One week the "issue" is redneck militiamen, the next week it's decaying inner-city schools, the next some newly-discovered food toxin, and so forth. From police brutality to campaign finance reform to Farrakhan -- the frenetic hopscotching from issue to issue assures the information-consumer of a steady diet of crises and scandals, chosen by editors and producers ("gatekeepers," as they sometimes style themselves) from the infinite smorgasbord of potential Problems in need of Solutions.

Occasionally, the information oligarchy will coordinate its efforts for a brief span, usually in regard to some high-profile event, as when the Oklahoma City bombing unleashed a fairly steady stream of "investigative journalism" and editorial-page hysteria regarding the allegedly widespread menace of paranoiac gun nuts. Either the menace was overrated or the media spotlight sent the paranoiacs scurrying for cover, as with the exception of a few arrests of tiny bands of pipe-bomb conspirators and an armed standoff or two, the specter of reactionary brigands initiating Armageddon in Middle America never really materialized. And so, after a while, the anchormen and camera crews turned their attention to other dangers to Democracy As We Know It, such as fossilized war-hero presidential candidates.

(This just in: The mail today brought a guidebook to "Experts and Sources on Current Events and Politics" published by a New York PR firm. One of the "experts" is a guy whose specialty is "A Threat to Democracy -- Promise Keepers," as if middle-class men attending gospel rallies at football stadiums were a genuine danger to the Republic. See? I'm not making this stuff up.)

The good thing about all this, as anyone who lives outside the major urban power centers knows, is that a sizable majority of Americans are almost immune to issue-mongering. Joe and Jane Sixpack are watching pro football or sitcoms on TV, and don't give a rat's rectum about fiscal policy or the Fourth Amendment. The trial of O.J., the death of Di, or the Jon-Benet whodunnit -- now those are issues that Middle America can get excited about. A hike in property taxes or a used car dealership relocating next door might get them off their sofa and down to City Hall to register their complaints, but as for national politics and the sort of things that Beltway pundits worry about, the Sixpack family simply doesn't care.

For some, apathy is itself a danger to Democracy As We Know It. A former speech writer for Jimmy Carter named Hendrik Hertzberg has argued that the way the districts are drawn for the House of Representatives means that most voters live in a district dominated by one party or the other. "And in these districts it doesn't matter which side you're on," Hertzberg argues, "because if you're on the losing side your vote is wasted and if you're on the winning side your vote is superflous. So you may as well stay home. And of course, that's exactly what a lot of voters do -- stay home."

We see here the concept -- probably engendered by paying too much attention in high school civics class -- that the entire point of democracy is not whether the system delivers good government, but only whether the citizens have the opportunity for meaningful participation in the electoral process. Making a fetish of the democratic process is a favorite of those demagogues who place unlimited faith in the masses. The politically untutored condition of the masses (one does not absorb a lot of constitutional insight from watching MTV or the NBA) appeals to certain Nanny State wonks because of their notion that these people would endorse whatever "new ideas" the wonks might propose. Curiously, these are usually the same wonks who push the panic button the minute a genuine populist like Pat Buchanan makes any headway in appealing to the real political sympathies of the masses.

One need not know of Hertzberg's political ties to the Carter administration to get a clue that his animus against the current method of House districting is ideological in origin. His proposed solution to this supposedly apathy-inducing institution is "proportional representation." Having failed to produce the desired political outcome with racial gerrymandering -- a "new idea" which backfired horribly by creating GOP-leaning white enclaves across the South -- the Left now has cooked up yet another novel scheme for protecting Democracy As We Know It.

“The main goal ... is to do away with the single-member winner-take-all district," Jack Beatty writes in a review of Hertzberg's book on the subject. "In multi-member districts seats would be apportioned according to the percentage of the vote won by each candidate. This would increase voter turnout, political scientists say, which currently is held down by the winner-take-all system."

One need not look too hard at such an idea to understand for whom this idea is designed. Gee, you're a college-educated middle-class progressive, disappointed that your neighbors are an unenlightened mob of pro-life, low-tax conservatives? Feel that your Keynesian voice is going unheard because of this absurd popular cry for balanced budgets? Upset that arguments based on compassion for the downtrodden don't get you far with law-and-order folks whose preferred solutions to crime involve mandatory sentencing and the death penalty? Multi-member districts are just the ticket for you. This is affirmative action for suburban liberals.

If something about this "proportional representation" idea seems vaguely familiar, it should. For the Left, sentimentality about the virtuous masses has long informed their weltanschauung. This sentiment resulted in the New Left's call for "participatory democracy" in the Sixties, the idea being that by "empowering" the masses, one might somehow create widespread support for radical socialism. Instead, the result was that Republican candidates won five of six presidential elections from 1968 to 1988, even while bloated boondoggles left over from the Great Society became entrenched as budgetary sacred cows. Any suggestion to cut Head Start or Medicare is met with hysterical rhetoric to the effect that such reforms would leave children and senior citizens starving in the streets.

Power to the people, indeed! In the long run, the radicalism of the New Left resulted only in ensuring that the overwhelming majority of the federal budget is devoted to self-perpetuating programs which the people are powerless to change because of opposition from interest groups like the Children's Defense Fund and AARP. With a $5 trillion national debt and the massive Baby Boom generation approaching retirement, even prospects of a fiscal meltdown are insufficient to deter progressives from urging ever grander schemes for "empowerment." One wonders if they haven't considered assignats to fund their Jacobin lunacy.

What is missed by those who call for "new ideas" in politics is that politics is the one area in which new ideas are almost invariably bad ideas. Exceptions to this rule are so few as to be truly remarkable. Charlotte Corday's dagger into Marat's breast -- now there was a new idea worthy of emulation!

So it is with certain Beltway pundits who imagine themselves to be conservatives but who are, in fact, nothing but prissy Whig nationalists. Full of nostalgic longing for the good old days of the Reagan-Bush administrations, when all their GOP pals were cabinet officials or ambassadors to archipelagoes in the Indian Ocean, these Whigs have joined the hunt for "new ideas" that will bring back the Golden Age.

A greater folly cannot be imagined and can only be explained by the theory that long periods of confinment to Potomac environs induce a delusionary state in which erstwhile conservatives begin to imagine that the editorial board of the
New York Times has a clue as to the prevailing mood of the electorate.

In truth, all conservative political ideas are very old, mostly dating to principles of government established more than 200 years ago. The Constitution has not yet been repealed, the Tenth Amendment is still in effect, and if the establishment punditocracy would spend as much time reading the works of Russell Kirk and Richard Weaver as it does following the latest public-opinion polls, we might be spared this foolish quest for new ideas.

Making political success dependent upon policy innovation plays directly into the hands of the Left. Because they appeal to constituencies with little regard for the Constitution or fiscal reality, the Left is able to create cloud-cuckooland fantasies that will protect the citizenry from every conceivable social ill while distributing the economic blessings of democracy equally to all. These pie-in-the-sky platforms -- college scholarships for all and Uncle Sam waging war against such evils as institutional racism and corporate greed -- have an almost infinite appeal to mobs who don't bother to check the fine print and who view government as a sort of national Santa Claus.

So long as the battleground is "new ideas," the Left has a decided terrain advantage. Conservatives have been getting whipped on the new idea front since the days when the New Dealers stigmatized opponents who quibbled about the Constitution as being relics of the "horse-and-buggy" era.

For better or worse, adherents of political conservatism are wedded to ideas as old as Edmund Burke and Patrick Henry. But it is absurd to pretend that this is an electoral disadvantage. In fact, because truly conservative principles have long been in abeyance, sometimes the old ideas will strike the public as almost revolutionary. Even Hertzberg's idea of "proportional representation" is little more than John C. Calhoun's concurrent majority dressed up in progressive drag.

Upset that the American electorate rejected their fossilized war hero -- a danger to Democracy As We Know It, of course -- the prissy Whigs are in a funk at the thought of another four years without ambassadorships and cabinet posts. Therefore, they gaze at their collective navel and petulantly whine about the need for new ideas, while the astoundingly popular non-war-hero administration bullies Congress into approving new boondoggles.

Perhaps what is needed is for conservatives to take a hint from Hertzberg and recognize that opinion-poll numbers are largely irrelevant to the political process. Sure, 70 percent of those responding to a pollster's survey may say they approve of the current administration and its policies. Sure, the House Speaker may be less popular than syphilis. Guess what? It doesn't matter. Mass opinion has very little genuine impact on election results.

It takes virtually no effort for the randomly-chosen citizen to respond to a telephone survey by some polling outfit. Actually going out on election day and voting, on the other hand, does require effort. Election turnout is neither random nor scientific. The majority of Americans who actually vote -- as opposed to the respondents to public-opinion surveys -- are fairly reliable partisans of one or the other major parties. This is why so many precincts vote Republican or Democrat year after year. Only when the candidates or issues are such as to motivate an unusually heavy turnout on the part of the local opposition do these allegiances change, and then the change is only superficial. The majority of Democrats remain Democrats for life, the majority of Republicans remain Republicans for life, and the best way to appeal to uncommitted voters is to offer them a ride on a victorious bandwagon. As Hertzberg recognizes, however, in many districts the uncommitted voters are meaningless.

The recent "revolt" of House conservatives against their Tofflerite Maximum Leader is simply the response of men who know what their constituents want, who don't give a damn what the New York Times has to say about it, and who consider "dance with the one that brung ya" to be a sound political principle.

Likewise, the success of the current administration in capturing moderate non-partisans, which has so demoralized the Beltway conservative establishment, is chiefly the product of a candidate almost unique in his capacity to insincerely pander to conservative sentiment. Barring the repeal of the 22nd Amendment, this won't be a problem next time around, when a Democratic return to honest McGovernism can be expected.

The primary task for the Republican establishment -- Whig, Tofflerite and otherwise -- is to rally the faithful and hold the fort long enough for the cavalry to arrive. A mass bug-out by the GOP punditocracy is not in order. Presuming that the party's next nominee is something other than a fossil from the Nixonian epoch, chances are better than even that the 21st century will be ushered in with a new wave of cabinet jobs and ambassadorial appointments for all the wonks and flacks who endured eight years in the wilderness during the Clintonista regime.

All things considered, widespread public apathy toward Potomac political shenanigans is by no means bad for the Right. A far greater danger comes from allegedly conservative pundits who hunger for "new ideas" to counter such apathy, thus playing a game in which all the rules favor the Left.

Where's Charlotte Corday when you really need her?

r.s.mccain@worldnet.att.net

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