Politicians who believe the least should determine the most in
Washington, D.C. That’s the chattering class’s mindless conceit,
apparent in its explosion of gaudy tributes to “moderates” this
week. No sooner had the Senate’s college of cardinals struck their
deal on judges than the David Broders were breathlessly expressing
their fervent hope that moderates would form the new dominant
“shaping force” in American politics. These are men and women of
“national stature,” “elders,” sage guardians of “national
consensus,” went the tributes.
The assumption right off the bat in most of these articles is
that moderate pols embody the wishes of the majority. Wrong. They
are a tiresomely conceited minority to which the elite media assign
an outrageously disproportionate influence. Together the McCains
and the media do not obstruct extremism, as they kid themselves,
but produce a new form of extremism — a tyranny of the moderates
under which the majority’s legitimate will is thwarted in the name
of this or that phony elitist objection.
Under the tyranny of the moderates, mealy-mouthed media darlings
get to determine which judges are “inside the mainstream” even as
they stand outside the mainstream themselves. How many elections
would the Democrats have to lose (and de facto Democrats in the
Republican Party, whose media-accorded authority comes from losing
Republican primaries and thwarting the mainstream of their party)
before their magisterial powers determining who and what qualifies
as “mainstream” are questioned?
“Mainstream” is the elite’s euphemism for what the majority
should think, not what they actually do think. Notice that the
anti-democratic streak grows more and more pronounced in the
American elite. Last year this anti-democratic streak was seen in
its gravitation toward non-American, utterly unaccountable
institutions like the United Nations and the World Court as useful
vehicles with which to overpower American majority views. The less
support the elite could find democratically, the more they turned
for support to undemocratic international institutions. This year
their anti-democratic streak is seen in the glorification of a
Senate with aristocratic pretensions, claims the ahistorical and
happily uncultured elite press usually casts in other contexts as
reactionary and disturbing.
Obstructing the people suddenly counts amongst the elite as chic
and progressive. On Wednesday the New York Times
editorialized with approval that while “the idea of letting the
majority rule is at the heart of much in American democracy, it has
little to do with the Senate…” The Times lauded this
week’s moderate conclave agreement and praised, in a dramatic
warming to musty aristocratic ideas, the “14 senators who signed
on, including Robert Byrd, 87, and John Warner, 78, whose weekend
seminar on Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist Paper No. 66 must have
been one for the record books.” Imagine the one-man, one-vote
Times getting as enthused about a seminar on the Founding
Fathers’ support for literacy tests before voting.
The subtext of the media bouquets to the moderates is a contempt
for democracy: a handful of wise senators, using old privileges,
are beating back a dangerous, primitive, bible-wielding majority,
suggest the stories.
Howard Fineman of Newsweek, writing excitedly of a
coming moderate upheaval in our politics, noted: “That notion —
that you could change long-standing rules by a mere majority vote
— was viewed by Senate traditionalists, old and young, as more
than unacceptable. It was outrageous to the likes of Republican
Sen. John Warner, an old-fashioned Virginia Cavalier who thinks of
the Senate as a Platonic redoubt of republicanism of the most
ancient sense. He was the key to this deal. Something else about
him: a hunt-country patrician of the old school, Warner never has
been a fan of (or a favorite of) Rev. Jerry Falwell and Dr. Pat
Robertson, Virginia’s pulpit-based powers. He’s not their man.”
Of course, lost in the media’s sudden romanticizing of the
Senate’s aristocratic procedures is any sense of their original
purpose: to make Senators more principled, not less, more
conservative (in the sense of maintaining high moral and
intellectual standards essential to the preservation of American
civilization), not more fashionably muddled and moderate. The
Senate moderates with aristocratic pride in their powers of
deliberation lack any high and sturdy principles that would justify
them. They are beneath, not above, the American people, advancing
an elitist ideology hostile to the founding principles of the
country. They’d filibuster the Founding Fathers (who were far more
conservative than any of today’s stalled nominees) if they came
before them.
“We have kept it. We have kept the republic,” said Robert Byrd,
indulging himself in yet another moment of comically overblown
rhetoric. Had he studied the Federalist Papers with a
little more comprehension, he’d know that moderates can tyrannize
too.
