Stumbling Block

Kevin Williamson is one of my favorite writers at National Review and elsewhere that he may appear. It's almost impossible to misunderstand him, unless he throws around one or another of those kinds of vocabulary words that make you mark your place when you head to the dictionary. His points of view are up front and not hidden behind attempts to make palatable what he believes to be true but difficult. He's witty and can be hilarious when he trains his keyboard on a target that the reader also rather mislikes, but he goes out of his way to make certain that every accusation has backup and sourcing. His The Case Against Trump made it clear why people would have been better off voting for someone else and should have been stapled to every briefing paper every GOP presidential hopeful received leading up to the primary season, so they could realize what they were doing when they tried to position themselves to pick up the coiffed one's supporters when he dropped out. The End Is Near (And It's Going to Be Awesome) clearly explains how everyone's failure to rein in government spending will provoke an economic collapse that might lead us to better ways of doing things. The Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism explains even to the meanest of intellects why that system will never work with human beings. I enjoy his podcast with NR online editor Charles Cooke, even down to the psych-out abrupt endings.

All of which means I really wanted to like The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics. I like the idea of it: Encouraging people to take up the actual responsibilities of being citizens of our republic instead of outsourcing our thinking to systems ill-equipped to handle it, such as memes or Twitter. I think generalizing thoughts about groups of people is a good way to increase tensions between them and lead to dangerous kinds of bigotry and prejudice and that we do better as individuals a society and a country when we take people in smaller groups or even one-on-one. Those tenets are part of Williamson's basic argument in Minority.

He also points out that the United States Constitution was not designed to govern a direct democracy, but instead protect the people from the consequences of such a government when it was mishandled. After all, mob rule is just a more energetic form of democracy, in which the majority can install a tyranny as it sees fit and demand that others follow it, individual conscience be damned. These are all good thoughts and I agree with them. I don't even mind so much when Williamson works within his usual caustic tone that jabs as much as it argues, but his dyspepsia here is what eventually weakens Minority and make one hope for someone else to cover these matters in a more palatable tone.

In the chapter on democracy, for example, Williamson decries how a whole lot of the people who have the right to vote don't really know enough to use that right in a responsible way that will elect qualified people who can do the jobs we ask them to do. Such people are just a few generations away, he says, from chimpanzees flinging feces around at each other and yet their hands are on the levers of power. I would agree we have a lot of people who don't bring much information or wisdom into the voting booths with them. But they're not just a few generations away from chimps, Kevin. They're the same several million generations removed that the rest of us are, even though they want to act without much thinking. Being disappointed and disgusted with them is understandable and some hyperbole serves to make the case -- but at this level, laced with this much disdain? Condemn me if I'd rather laugh with the chimps than sneer with the savants, Kev, but you had the choice and the tools to approach the matter better -- and you didn't.

When taking aim at recent campus trends to do more than just bemoan or protest "undesirable" speakers but to gather in masked mobs as "antifa" and actually commit violence to prevent those events from happening, Williamson references columnist and author Ann Coulter in a footnote. I've little interest in Coulter's ideas or her manner of sharing them. If they're good they usually get expressed better by someone who's not as much of a jerk about it as she is. But in the note Williamson describes her as a "ghastly hunk of prom queen jerky." Nothing in what Williamson says in the chapter requires this kind of damning reference to Coulter's appearance; if it did he wouldn't have stuck it in a snide footnote. As an author and speaker, Coulter offers targets aplenty for those who would wish to point out that she is more of a burden which free speech requires us to carry than a pillar that supports it. Any of them would have made that point without a bitchy little ring-the-doorbell-and-run-away shot at her looks. Again, Kevin, you had the choice and the tools to do something better, but you didn't.

As a person who values the rights of the individual, the way our governmental system was set up to protect them and is worried about how modern moves like cancel culture, intersectionality and the immaturity that social media both fuels and is fed by can erode such rights, I'm glad to see discussions about those matters make it into print. As a reader who wants to explore them in a useful manner, I'll be keeping my eyes open for treatments that do so with less acid than Smallest Minority.