Demonic: How the Liberal Mob is Endangering
America
By Anne Coulter
Crown Forum, 368 pages, $28.99
Ann Coulter has a gift for exasperating even the people
who agree with her, but she is also an underrated public
intellectual and one of the few pundits whose collected work
rewards close scrutiny. Among the book-length broadsides for which
she is known, none is more enlightening than this year’s
Demonic: How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America, which
was released in June by Crown Forum, a subsidiary of Random House,
Inc.
This time around, a recounting of the savageries wrought
by the French Revolution becomes the centerpiece of a sustained
attack on the mob mentality that Coulter asserts is always and
everywhere the lifeblood of progressive politics. Coulter has had
it with people who lump the French Revolution with the more
civilized American Revolution simply because both upheavals
happened within a generation of each other. “In the American
Revolution,” she points out, “fewer than 10,000 died in battle and
another 10,000 died of disease or exposure during the war. And our
king was fighting back!” In the French Revolution, she can’t help
but note, “France’s king capitulated immediately, but the
revolutionaries proceeded to liquidate more than half a million of
their fellow citizens anyway, in what the revolutionary leaders
themselves called the ‘Terror.’ “
Comes then the inspiration for writing a historical survey
that might also function as a primer for the next election: “How
did the nation of Voltaire, Descartes, Pascal, and Moliere
transform itself into a bloody saturnalia overnight? This is a
question liberals don’t want us to think about,” Coulter writes.
That, of course, is reason enough to think about it, with “think”
being the operative word, because it is mob leaders who traffic in
images rather than ideas.
Case in point: If the anonymous folk who contribute hit
pieces to the Los Angeles Times arts blog, “Culture
Monster,” had read Coulter’s latest book, they might not have been
as
quick to join a hyperventilating
colleague on the right coast in painting Michele Bachmann as a
legislator who pines for the so-called “Dark Ages.” Were mainstream
journalists conversant with history, hacks on both coasts might
also have recognized the scurrilous pedigree and libelous nature of
“Dark Ages” as an impressively-visual-but-empty-headed label for
the Early Middle Ages.
Our revolution was essentially conservative, Coulter
observes, whereas Robespierre and his Jacobins set a benchmark for
nihilism that would later inspire the Communists, the Nazis, the
Viet Cong, the Khmer Rouge, and, yes, the Democrats. (When Coulter
has her dander up, expressions like “oh no, she didn’t!” tend to be
leached of whatever surprise they imply for less controversial
people.)
Her muse du jour is Gustave Le Bon, whose 1896 book,
The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, apparently rivals
Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer for prophetic takes on
what would come down the pike.
Demonic has an off-putting title,
but it ought to be perused by conservatives, simply because it sets
the record straight on so much that passes for conventional wisdom
these days. Reading Coulter is like accompanying Annie Oakley to a
shooting gallery:
• Afraid — like Michael Crowley of Time magazine
and other press release rewrite specialists who’ve never heard the
Austrian critique of Keynesian economics — because the Tea Party
movement “treats longtime political verities as hokum”? (That’s
Crowley’s phrase) Ping! Coulter contrasts imaginary violence from
the right with actual violence from the left.
• Think of Bastille Day as little more than the
French version of the Fourth of July? Ping! Coulter revisits
18th-century history in a way that will raise hairs on the back of
your neck, while doing more to rehabilitate the reputation of the
unjustly-maligned Marie Antoinette than any other popular
author.
• Confused about which American political party nurtured
the Ku Klux Klan and which did not? Ping! Coulter settles that
question, too, and not just with her trademark zingers — although
they’re pretty good (“These days,’civil rights’ is nothing but a
cat’s-paw for the mob’s left-wing social policies, such as
abortion.… Back when civil rights meant rights for blacks,
Democrats were standing in the schoolhouse door.”)
No other writer working today has the temerity to claim
that the tragic shooting of four students at Kent State University
in Ohio nevertheless had the salutary effect of ending the student
riots of that era. Very few are bold enough to suggest, as Coulter
does, that Martin Luther King, Jr. was not the best of civil rights
leaders. Coulter questions the timing of King’s famous march on
Birmingham, which was staged over the objections of others in the
civil rights movement after the citizens of Alabama had
already voted its racist Commissioner of Public Safety out of
office.
In her reckoning, Thurgood Marshall must be ranked ahead
of MLK because he had a more positive impact on American society.
There are people who will hate this book for that contention alone,
but Coulter’s blonde ambition is made of sterner stuff. Just to
keep the ox-goring equitable, she also jabs Thomas Jefferson as
unquestionably the “flakiest” of the Founding Fathers, and a man
whose signature work was immeasurably helped by the
take-no-prisoners editing of the other luminaries who helped to
draft the Declaration of Independence.
The weaknesses of Demonic are real but not fatal,
and they seem to be a consequence of Coulter’s failure to avert her
gaze even when it would have been advisable. Coulter spares nothing
in her survey of the depravities associated with the French
Revolution. Closer to our own time, a chapter on why it was wrong
to vacate guilty verdicts thirteen years after five New York
teenagers were convicted of raping a woman in Central Park reads
like a stomach-churning paper on the politics of jailhouse
confession. While the episode can indeed be seen as an example of
the left’s disdain for the rule of law, reading about it made me
wonder whether Coulter would have done better to lean on something
less despicable.
In a lighter vein, I’m glad that Coulter’s forays into
theology were short and defensible if not sweet. (You want sweet
nonfiction, you read someone else — All Creatures Great and
Small is still in print.)
Yet “too analytical for her own good” is not the same as
“heartless,” which is why I question Coulter’s judgment but applaud
her motives, whether they include selling books, saving America,
making good on her contract, or some combination of all three. In
pioneering the genre of popular history-as-diatribe, defending the
Christian foundations of the American founding, and voicing the
kinds of opinions that the most genteel of progressives are sure to
dismiss with a “bless her heart,” Coulter has again put her fierce
intelligence to good use. This is not the kind of book you want to
be seen reading on a subway or in a lunch room, but it is
an act of public service, and in spite of its occasional hyperbole,
it’s sure to outlive others of its type.
