In regard to politics, I have always considered myself a member of a tiny minority. A minority of exactly one. For all of the political parties in the United States, the two dominant parties as well as the smaller ones, there are aspects of their respective platforms that simply preclude my membership. They all have some ideal or ideals that I cannot endorse and often find loathsome.
Further, I have found that political independents are not able to look to other independents for similar ideals or community. To borrow from Tolstoy, political party members are all alike; every political independent is independent in his own way. Every nonconformist is nonconformist in his own way.
So it is with this background that I come to Kevin Williamson's The Smallest Minority. By title alone, it seems, finally, someone has written a book for me. And perhaps for you, if you are a member of, as Williamson puts it, "the smallest minority - the only one who matters: the individual."
Williamson defines individual as, "one who can stand at least partly away from the demands of his tribe and class and try to see things as they are, and shout back over his shoulder what he sees." Yeah okay, sure. But I don't think that Williamson is an independent in my sense above. He says that he is not a Republican, but he seems to be a Christian conservative. He is certainly independent in the sense that he works in the overwhelmingly left-leaning media. But a more honest subtitle for this book might have been: Conservative Survival in the Age of the Left-Wing Digital Mob. Sure, I might still have picked it up, but no doubt he wanted to appeal to the broadest possible book-buying public.
So whether or not Williamson considers himself an independent, he certainly considers himself an independent thinker - It's right there in the subtitle. But then, doesn't everyone. There is this nugget: "People who dedicate their lives to finding idols before which they may abase themselves—the cult of inter-sectionality, identity politics, the Make America Great Again jihad, race and/or sex and other demographic features, nationalism, socialism, the Democratic party, the Republican party, organized homosexuality, the Bernie Sanders movement, animal rights, veganism, Crossfit, whatever —cannot abide the presence of those who decline to abase themselves before that idol or, short of that, any idol." As for religious types, Williamson adds, "True believers believe truly, and what they hold in common isn’t that which they believe but that they believe."
I have found this to absolutely true. Presbyterians may well understand and tolerate the Methodists, the Catholics, and even the Muslims, but they have an exceedingly hard time with the atheists. If you cannot be in our corner, at least be in some easily-discernible corner.
Williamson describes his subject as, "mob politics, on social media and in what passes for real life, which increasingly is patterned on social media—and its effects on our political discourse and our culture...We think in language. We signal in memes. Language is the instrument of discourse. Memes are the instrument of antidiscourse, i.e., communication designed and deployed to prevent the exchange of information and perspectives rather than to enable it, a weapon of mass intellectual destruction"...The function of discourse is to know other minds and to have them known to you; the function of antidiscourse is to lower the status of rivals and enemies."
Williamson begins with democracy itself: "Democracy, properly understood and properly deployed, is an exclusively procedural consideration...It has procedural value not because we believe in equality—the American concept of 'equality before the law' describes the functioning of American institutions, not the character of the American people—and not because we believe that everyone deserves to have his say, that all voices must be heard. There are plenty of people out there who have nothing useful or interesting to say...There is no special virtue in consulting morons and cretins simply because they exist. There is no special moral value in bundling together complex problems and policy ideas and asking 50 percent plus 1 of a sprawling and almost pristinely ignorant group...what they think about those bundles and which of them they prefer." Rather, "[democracy's] moral value consists almost exclusively in its utility as a substitute for violence."
The problem with pure democracy is that it can too easily degenerate into mob rule, or ochlocracy. "Ochlocracy sometimes comprises illegal and non-governmental actions (e.g., lynch mobs) or using threats or violence to intimidate private parties into compliance with the mob’s political demands, but it often consists in non-governmental actors' bullying or intimidating the official organs of government or public institutions into following some particular course of action...." And further, "the conversion of businesses and the university...
into disciplinary corporations, agencies deputized to enforce political and intellectual conformity on subjects ranging from the most high-profile business executives and intellectuals to the most obscure fast-food managers."
Quoting Mill, Williamson cautions: "A healthy society required cultural prophylactics “against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own.” That is, "the apotheosis of public opinion."
Williamson spends a chapter on the concept of streitbare Demokratie, that is militant democracy, as practiced in Germany. The idea that "liberal democracy needs...access to the arsenal of authoritarianism, such weapons as banning political parties or shutting down newspapers, using illiberal methods in specific and limited cases to defend itself from illiberalism in its fuller expressions." And used to defend against the technique of fascism.
The technique of fascism, "relied on exploiting nationalism or other appeals to solidarity, together with newly available forms of media and communication that could be harnessed to achieve a supersession of constitutional government... Fascism wasn’t founded on corporatist economics, anti-Semitism, or glorification of the military—though it could be put into the service of any of those things, as needed, and put them into its own service as easily...Fascism is obviously only a technique for gaining and holding power, for the sake of power alone."
But Williamson asks, are illiberal methods really needed to prevent a hypothetical evil? "The real evils of censorship and suppression are considerably worse than the hypothetical troubles that a more liberal attitude toward unpopular speech might risk." Williamson points out, brilliantly, that while fascism is indeed a technique, so too is streitbare Demokratie a technique. The same technique.
Yet people are constantly creating hypothetical evils, "often based on some notion of safety," what Williamson labels defining danger down, in order to suppress behavior and speech they disagree with. "For example, would-be censors argue for the suppression of certain kinds of political speech on the grounds that they might lead to illegal or undesirable behavior: insurrection, sedition, assaults, etc. In order to prevent these hypothetical evils, we are instructed that we must accept real and immediate evils, such as restrictions on speech, invasions of privacy, financial surveillance, limitations on travel to and from our country, and the like."
What this is really about: "We are talking about boorish and puerile attempts to use the principle of streitbare Demokratie as a pretext to censor political speech, or other kinds of speech, on the grounds that one simply does not want to hear it—or, more accurately, in order to savor the exquisite pleasure that mental and emotional weaklings take in exercising momentary power—declaring their superior status—over the people they hate."
Williamson: "But the new militant democracy lives on social media, where the marks of affiliations are hashtags and memes rather than uniforms and banners." Social Media provides a platform for a might-makes-right form of pure democracy. That is to say, a digital mob. And while Williamson never explicitly points it out, it is almost always a left-wing digital mob. There are right-wing mob types on the internet, certainly. But they are drown out by the left, and are mostly confined to walled ghettos like Ace of Spades and Breitbart. How many people lose their job or university placement or scholarship based on the howls of a right-wing digital mob? No doubt Williamson would argue that this point is implicit in his book. But I think this is a mistake. We need to be crystal clear, not only about the bad behavior, but also from where it comes.
Williamson on Disciplinary Corporations: "When—or, while—the apparatus of the state is beyond the mob’s reach, the mob must turn to other organizations, grasping other cudgels with which to beat the dissidents and critics into conformity. In many cases, these private-sector organizations are much more effective instruments of suppression than are government agencies. It takes a great deal of effort to have someone convicted and imprisoned for a thought crime; it takes a lot less to bully that person’s employer into firing him, but the moral outcome is the same."
As an example, Williamson writes about being fired by The Atlantic: "As much as the rampant unhinged egoist in me would like it to be otherwise, the fact is: This phenomenon isn't really about me or about people like me. We are props. Seeing me fired is no doubt a kind of perverse moral perk for the sad specimens who get a jolt out of that sort of thing, but the point of the exercise is to bend the corporation to the will of the mob, repurposing the corporation as an instrument of political and intellectual suppression...It is less important to the mob that we be punished for our political speech than that others see the example and never speak in the first place, thereby rendering certain ideas unspeakable in an ever-widening context, one that now encompasses almost all employment and all enrollment at colleges and universities."
"What is under way in the United States today is an effort to construct something like Hayek’s monopolistic employer, a project that does not require the nationalization of corporations but the nationalization of corporate Kultur, recruiting the aggregate power of American employers into the program of intellectual repression...[T]he very progressives who claim to be most skeptical of and opposed to corporate power wish to give corporations the remarkable power to decide which political views are acceptable in the public square and which may be excluded. Progressives would not trust corporations with that kind of power if they did not believe that they could control them and thus wield that power themselves by proxy."
Williamson spends a couple of chapters on the psychology of the new digital ochlocrats. "[S]omeone should break the bad news to Antifa and their imitators online and in the real world: There isn’t any Nazi menace lurking in the United States. And the play-acting on that score would be embarrassing for thirteen-year-olds—for thirty-two-year-olds, it’s delusional and neurotic. There is no secret cabal of Cultural Marxists out there; patriarchy is a figure of speech; white supremacy is not the American zeitgeist."
Quoting Eric Hoffer: “Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life. Thus people haunted by the purposelessness of their lives try to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy cause but also by nursing a fanatical grievance. A mass movement offers them unlimited opportunities for both." And these "must be occasions for the pursuit of glory...Glory is largely a theatrical concept. There is no striving for glory without a vivid awareness of an audience."
Williamson returns to the concept of antidiscourse in Chapter Eight, defining it as "communication intended to prevent the exchange of ideas and views rather than to enable it." He continues: "The internal psychological and political mandates of mob politics in our time, compounded with the economic mandates of the media business, make genuine political discourse almost impossible...."
Williamson turns to censorship in Chapter Nine: "Those who would embrace either the European regulatory model or the American mob-retaliation model, assuming they are acting in good faith—a pure hypothetical; we already have established that they are not and really cannot—would be obliged to...balance the virtues of free speech against other considerations which by definition must also be other than absolute: If they were absolute, then there would be no need for 'balance' at all, and they would simply trump free speech on absolute moral grounds."
"This is the moral conundrum of the would-be censors: If freedom of speech is to mean anything at all, then it must protect speech that is unpopular, hated, offensive, marginal, and associated with people of low social status—i.e., it must be precisely the sort of speech that is the only thing censors really ever want to censor other than military secrets. There is no such thing as principled censorship. Censorship is an exercise of political power, and, hence, a status game—even when it is undertaken with the best of intentions, as in Germany...."
He goes on to explain how status affects censorship. Consider his example of "the enormous social difference between an American who embraces Communism and one who embraces Nazism. One of these is a tolerated eccentricity, and one of them is the lowest thing you can be...The real difference between an American Communist and an American Nazi is that American Communists historically have been intellectuals and American Nazis have been rednecks...It is difficult to imagine an American's being expelled from college or fired from a service job because it was discovered that he belonged to a Marxist reading group...even if he was one of its more radical members. Imagine the related case of a young person with fascist or National Socialist interests, even if those leanings were devoid of anti-Semitism and other related kinds of bigotry. It is difficult to imagine that person’s not being expelled from college or fired from a service job unless he kept those views a secret. That does not have anything to do with the content of the views or their morality—it has to do with status."
Williamson goes on to skewer Oliver Wendell Holmes's Fire in a Crowded Theater argument limiting free speech: "In a perfect world, we wouldn’t have to lock up the war protesters, but if we allow them to exercise their free-speech rights, there will be riots, and we can’t have that, so in the name of public safety, we have to preemptively give the rioters what they want." Too right; Williamson continues: "Justice Holmes, being an intelligent man, would no doubt see the kinship between his own cynical sophistry and that of those in our own time who seek to suffocate dissent employing the same meager pretext." The problem as Williamson points out: "If you wish to suppress certain speech or certain points of view, then all that you have to do is construct a crowded theater around it."
Williamson moves on to a Christian argument in favor of disobedience, rebellion, and treason. Brutus may have been a traitor, but he did slay a tyrant. For that, Dante, obedient to authority as his times demanded, places him [Brutus] in the Ninth Circle with Satan himself. Williamson contrasts Dante's attitude toward rebellion with Milton's. "Dante’s Satan is a dead fish on eternal ice. Milton’s Lucifer is on fire. In Paradise Lost, Lucifer is not some pathetic figure reduced to an eternal spasm in the service of God’s unalterable program. Milton’s Lucifer is the hero of Paradise Lost, albeit a tragic hero, a lively figure—an individual. He insisted upon his own mind and his own judgment, even at the cost of Paradise lost. Lucifer, too, is a partisan of the smallest minority...there is something splendid in the spirit of disobedience. Dante’s Satan is a thing. Milton’s Lucifer is one of us, alive, a personality, an individual—a traitor."
Williamson argues that Western Civilization needs honorable, and Christian, rebellion to survive: "If there is to be a repository of genuine civilization, a fragment shored against our ruins as high-tech barbarism rises on all sides, it will be in the churches. Whatever else the Christian religion may be, it is the seedbed of Western civilization, and not only in vague and abstract ways. Among other things, it is in the Anglo-Protestant tradition that runs from William Tyndale through John Milton to the American Founders that freedom of speech as a legal and ethical principle took root."
"Milton’s poetic liberties with Lucifer’s career were wildly un-biblical, to be sure—but that does not mean that they are untrue. Or un-Christian, for that matter...Rebellion is human. To choose is to be human, even if one chooses disobedience and wickedness. Lucifer sees the clockwork universe of Shakespeare and Dante and wants no part of it. He will not be a cog in anybody’s machine—not even God’s."
"To choose is to be human. To be the first to choose is to be an outcast...The case for toleration is never more than an inch away from being suffocated by the desire to punish. And those who will not serve the desire to punish are to be cast out as heretics. The desire to punish comes in many forms—political, religious, social—but it is always and everywhere the same in its demand for obedience and service."
Lucifer: "Non serviam. I will not serve." Williamson: "I will reserve my obedience for that which deserves it....Jesus might well have said of the Romans: 'They may torture my body, break my bones, even kill me. Then they will have my dead body—but not my obedience.'"
Quoting William F. Buckley, Jr: "'I will not cede more power to the state,' he wrote with Luciferian verve in Up from Liberalism. 'I will not willingly cede more power to anyone, not to the state, not to General Motors, not to the CIO. I will hoard my power like a miser, resisting every effort to drain it away from me. I will then use my power, as I see fit.' And here Buckley departs from Milton’s Lucifer, from the adolescent love of rebellion for its own sake, and from the childish conflation of eccentricity with individuality. 'I mean to live my life an obedient man, but obedient to God, subservient to the wisdom of my ancestors; never to the authority of political truths arrived at yesterday at the voting booth.'"
Williamson ends: "If Milton’s Lucifer seems attractive to us, it is because, in our time, Public Opinion is God. Non serviam."
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But aside from that, Williamson's take on the media is golden: "Media organizations in particular are put in an awkward position by this new microclimate of sudden...outrage storms: They embrace controversy to the extent that it drives readership and revenue, but they abhor controversy to the extent that it disrupts the smooth daily flow of memo-writing and committee meetings...Like idiot children on Christmas morning, they turn up their noses at the gift of genuine intellectual controversy and content themselves by playing with the box it came in."
On Jeffrey Goldberg, Editor of The Atlantic: "If you aren’t in media or politics or a similar field, then you probably have no idea how absolutely terrified middle-aged white men such as Jeffrey Goldberg are of their young female subordinates whose tender if occasionally bananas sensibilities represent a kind of Sword of Damocles hanging over the scrota of their male superiors. A couple of hundred thousand tweets from people on the intellectual level of dead-average chimpanzees and a few passive-aggressive threats from a handful of dotty young Millennial women on staff had Goldberg’s tackle shriveling up like a couple of unharvested Bordeaux grapes in late November."
"On the other hand, I very much admire the New York Times for having enough institutional self-respect to stand by its hires, even when they are people who have views which I myself find distasteful.... The New York Times is, thankfully, making a great deal of money these days, which gives it sufficient confidence to say, "We’re the New York Times. We’ll hire whoever we goddamned well please." Goldberg took the same view...until he didn’t...The Atlantic episode was less about the question of my losing a job than about the question of Goldberg keeping one."
And a final warning from his Afterword: "Mob rule does not end with the mob. The mob rarely acts on its own and never for long. Mob rule is not a mere riot: It is what happens when the mob successfully recruits the state to act as its henchman...What the mob hates above all is the individual, insisting on his own mind, his own morals, and his own priorities. The mob hates him less for the content of his views than for the fact that he holds them without the mob's permission and declines to abandon them at the mob's demand. Democracy has always been the enemy of minority rights. It always will be. And the biggest democracies will always be a dangerous place for the smallest minority."
Finally let me make note of Williamson's colorful, in-your-face writing style. A style he describes as "abrasive and confrontational." Examples are best. Here from a footnote: "If you happen to be the sort of person who objects to purportedly patriarchal phrases of perfectly good English such as 'Founding Fathers,' you might want to go ahead and fuck right off around this point. You just ain’t going to enjoy this." Another: "If you cannot understand that, then you should probably stop reading here, because you are not packing the neural gear for either of us to benefit from further conversation." On Goldberg: He suffers "from delusions of testicular adequacy." On Atlantic publisher David Bradley: "When an old WASP banker with no ass feels compelled to put on a serious face and promise that he’s not about to fuck you, you’re already fucked." But Williamson also offers beautiful phrases to make his points: "I work in the argument business, laboring fruitfully in the vineyards of controversy." Yes he does.