A Parliament of Idiots

Hey,

Hans Christian Heg was an immigrant from Norway. He was a fierce opponent of slavery and an early member of the anti-slavery Free Soil Party. He was a leader of the Wide Awakes, an anti-slavery militia dedicated to chasing down slave catchers (groups we’ve been told constantly were the progenitors of policing in America). When the Civil War started, Heg signed up to fight. He organized Wisconsin’s all-Scandinavian Fighting Fifteenth. “The officers of the regiment will be men who speak the Scandinavian languages. Thus an opportunity to enter the service is afforded those Scandinavians who do not yet speak English.”

Heg was revered by his troops for his willingness to lead the charge in many engagements rather than hang back like so many officers. He died at the battle of Chickamauga in Tennessee, along with half of the men he went into battle with. 

And last night, a bunch of idiots  in Wisconsin tore down his statue and decapitated it. 

(They also pretty savagely beat a gay progressive state legislator and toppled a statue symbolizing Wisconsin’s progressive tradition. But I’m going to ignore all that as well as the controversies about Abraham Lincoln, U.S. Grant, Jefferson, etc.)

I use the word idiot with care. As I discussed recently on the Remnant, the word “idiot” today means someone of below-normal intelligence, a moron. But that meaning didn’t catch on until about the 14th century. The word actually comes from Ancient Greece. John Courtney Murray wrote more than a half-century ago:

I suggest that the real enemy within the gates of the city is not the Communist, but the idiot. Here I am using the word “idiot” not in its customary, contemporary vernacular usage of one who is mentally deficient. No, I am going back to the primitive Greek usage; the “idiot” meant, first of all, the private person, and then came to mean the man who does not possess the public philosophy, the man who is not master of the knowledge and the skills that underlie the life of the civilized city. The idiot, to the Greek, was just one stage removed from the barbarian. He is the man who is ignorant of the meaning of the word “civility.”

Now, the only way in which my use of idiot isn’t quite right is that originally “idiot” suggested an atomized individual, private, apart (“Idiosyncratic” and “idiom” share the same root, “idios”). And the idiots who tore down the statue weren’t atomized ignorant individuals. They were an undifferentiated mass of ignorant individuals, which makes me think that the plural of idiot is “mob.”

After all, mobs reject civility. Mobs reject the “public philosophy.” Mobs are collections of individual idiots who see their idiocy reflected in, and ratified by, those around them. Mobs don’t care about the law, about the facts, about the concerns of others, never mind their property. They just have will and grievance, and that is enough for them. 

I bring all this up because there are a lot of people who want to have an argument with the iconoclasts. And I get the temptation. I would love to patiently explain—restraining my righteous desire to replace every comma with “You stupid f***!”—that tearing down the statue of a guy—an immigrant!—who gave his life to fight slavery doesn’t make you brave or heroic or even interesting. It marks you as a contemptible fool and a vandal. At least when little kids smash things or write on the wall with permanent markers, they make no effort to rationalize it with ideological and historical nonsense. It was just fun! And that’s what these idiots are doing, having fun. There’s no legitimate argument for it. No defense. No intellectual construct that can defend it. 

To quote the far more philosophically sophisticated Alfred from The Dark Knight, “Some men just want to watch the world burn.”

Distinctions, right and wrong.

But people try to defend it, to give it context, to make it more sophisticated and high-minded. They say “You don’t understand, they’re angry.” Who doesn’t understand that? It’s not a difficult concept to grasp. But if anger is self-justifying, then anything can be destroyed. To be clear, I am not saying their anger is necessarily unjustified—we’ll get to that in a second. I’m merely saying that anger isn’t a warrant to do anything you want. “Officer, I think there’s a misunderstanding here. I set fire to the store because I was very angry” is an explanation, not an excuse.  

If you’re angry about George Floyd’s death, your anger is justified. If you’re angry about police violence, your anger is justified. And if you’re angry about slavery, I suppose your anger is justified, too. I’m not trying to minimize slavery. It’s just that the slavers are all dead, slavery has been abolished, and it is universally condemned. 

But the question of whether your anger is justified is something of a red herring. The important question is: What are you doing with your anger?

Look, all wisdom, intelligence, and decency hinges on the ability to make meaningful distinctions. Idiots don’t make distinctions, they smash through them with rage. 

If I burn down a store because I’m angry at the owner for mistreating me, that is wrong, but it is understandable—even conceivably forgivable (depending on what form the mistreatment took). If I burn down a store because an ancestor of the store owner wronged an ancestor of mine, that’s also understandable, but it’s not forgivable under any circumstances. We do not inherit the sins of our ancestors (I bear no ill will to Egyptians today for enslaving my people). And if I burn down the store of an immigrant whose ancestors weren’t even in this country when my ancestors were wronged, I’m just someone looking for an excuse to burn stuff, and no one should even bother taking me seriously, save as a criminal threat to public safety. And, it should be said, it’s never right to take the law into your own hands. 

Feeding the mob.

But what enrages me is how progressive politicians and journalists are actively trying to blur every meaningful distinction to placate mobs—and even incite them. 

Nancy Pelosi recently said of the Senate Republicans who are trying to pass an entirely defensible and reasonable police reform package, they’re “trying to get away with murder, actually—the murder of George Floyd.” This is Huey Long stuff, boob-bait demagoguery made no less outrageous by her smirking self-righteousness, and it’s no less boobish just because the mobs she’s throwing red meat to are more “diverse” than the right-wing mobs the media is happy to disparage and demonize. She might as well wave a bloody toga and be done with it. 

Andrew Cuomo said yesterday, “Look, people are making a statement about equality, about community to be against racism, against slavery.” 

“I think those are good statements,” he added.

Thank God someone is finally making a statement against slavery! After all, until 2020, no textbooks, movies, or politicians ever had the courage to speak out against slavery. I mean, seriously, what has Hans Christian Heg done for us lately?

What an amazingly stupid time this is. 

Now, in fairness to Cuomo, he also conceded it was possible to “overdo it” but he didn’t think that was happening in New York. Fair enough. But the whole thrust of his comments was to position himself on the side of the mobs, by blurring the distinction between “making a statement” and lawlessness. Since when, in a law-abiding democracy, is the violent destruction of property a “healthy statement.” Sure, vandalism makes a statement, but come on.  

More importantly, who out there is proposing legislation to reinstitute slavery? Has someone written a compelling essay somewhere for the reestablishment of human bondage? 

Opposition to slavery may be the single most settled issue in American life. And since there is literally no movement to unsettle it, what possible justification is there for resorting to illegal force to make a “statement” when there’s literally all the time in the world to use democratic processes to get statues removed? 

My point is, this whole thing is predicated on a strawman so immense it could be seen from space if it were literal instead of figurative. Politicians are bending over backward to prove their status as brave dragon-slayers lancing a beast that was dead a century before they were born. No, they’re not going out and saying, “Tear it all down,” they’re just signaling to the mobs that they don’t mind very much if they do because the mobs’ heart is in the right place. The further to the “left” they move rhetorically, the longer the leash gets for the mob. 

Sen. Tim Kaine said on the Senate floor last week that “the United States didn’t inherit slavery from anybody. We created it.”  When called on this deliberate idiocy, his office clarified somewhat, saying that his full remarks added context he left out in the speech he released. “There was no law mandating slavery on our shores when African slaves came ashore in 1619,” he explained. “Did slavery already exist in the world? Of course. But not in the laws of colonial America at the time.”

This is sophistic balderdash. Before colonists came to America there was no Christianity in America either, that doesn’t mean Americans created Christianity, does it? Oh, and by the way, there was no United States of America in 1619. Kaine is implicitly endorsing the 1619 Project’s pernicious nonsense that the actual American founding a century and a half later was a trivial formality, the “true” America was founded when slaves came here. (As I’ve noted before, there’s a rich irony here, given that this concedes much to the arguments of nationalists who insist we were an ethnic nation long before we claimed to be a creedal one.)

But the clarification proves the point. Had Kaine not been called on it, he would have been happy to leave his original comments out there without any further distinction. 

From the 1619 Project, to the relentless insistence that policing is a modern incarnation of slave-patrolling, to the endless populist pandering of politicians like Cuomo and Kaine, progressives are trying to create a moral panic that goes far beyond the specific issue of police misconduct. We spend a lot of time decrying how Republicans feed the beast with boob-bait—Lord knows I do. But by condemning conservative protests as outrageous threats to public safety while celebrating woke ones as righteous moral expressions, by failing to distinguish meaningfully between peaceful protest and nihilistic vandalism, by not saying “You goddamn shmucks, Hans Christian Heg gave his life for the cause you claim is your own,” they are at least as guilty of cultivating political hatred and ushering in an idiotarian republic. 

Shame on all of them, all the more so because they know what they’re doing.  

Photograph by Emily Hamer/Wisconsin State Journal via Associated Press.