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E-mailWe need more Ann Coulters
Colin McNickle is the Trib's director of editorial pages. Ring him at 412-320-7836. E-mail him at: cmcnickle@tribweb.com.
Coulter, an attorney who once worked in the Justice Department, also is a regular columnist for Human Events, the weekly conservative newspaper. But she's perhaps best known these days for her best-selling book, "Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right," in which she takes aim at the illiberal intelligentsia and consistently pierces the bull's-eye. And that's her "crime" — her piercing and tart pen and tongue.
Liberals hate her. They can't take the truth. But some conservatives are, how shall I say this, displeased too. The editors of National Review Online, a pretty respectable outfit, didn't think Coulter played with them very well. Coulter and NRO parted ways. At least one newspaper killed her column for a tone deemed intemperate.
There's even an outfit out there called BrotherWatch that's been lobbying media outlets to can Ann. "Editor" Daniel Borchers calls Coulter a "linguistic terrorist." The group links those who come upon its Web site to two associated sites.
One, CoulterWatch, run by Citizens for Principled Conservatism (Borchers heads this group, too), says it stands for conservatism that stands for "honor and integrity, honesty and virtue." It accuses Coulter of "name-calling." It then proceeds to call Coulter a "professed promise-breaker, proven liar, suspected plagiarist, professed polemicist and self-evident extremist." Honor and integrity and honesty and virtue with a flame-thrower, I guess.
The second Web site, www.anorexic-annie.com (hey, now there's a temperate, conservative descriptive of the lithesome Coulter) tells visitors: "Let us dispense with this preposterous notion that Ann Coulter is arch-conservative or far-right. Adding arch or ultra to conservative implies more; Coulter is less. Coulter may be arch but she's not conservative; she may be far but she's not right." Sounds likes these clowns are shills for the Democratic Leadership Council, now doesn't it?
Known for sometimes having something of a tart writing tongue myself (on the set of a Gerry Bowyer talk show a few years back, then-Allegheny County Commissioner Mike Dawida labeled me as one of the meanest tongues in print), I have a special affinity for Coulter. She's not afraid to tell it like it is. And she's not about to back down from liberals who tell it as they see it — polemics and all — then cry "Foul!" when conservatives rejoin.
We don't need the Ann Coulters of the world to tone it down. And we certainly don't need fewer Ann Coulters. In fact, we need more Ann Coulters. And we need them to ratchet it up and throw more stones. For despite what you might be hearing from whiny liberals that conservatives control this nation's microphone of political discourse, there's a troubling new tome making the rounds that suggests liberalism — and a far more virulent strain at that — is about to make a comeback.
Writing in "The Emerging Democratic Majority" (Scribner 2002) John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira are predicting "the dawn of a new progressive era." They call their "new" progressivism "progressive centrism." The old "new" name for progressivism was "new Democrat," a Clinton-era invention. Pigs with the latest shade of lipstick, both. Progressivism is, of course, a fancy old name for socialism.
Judis and Teixeira document how the nation is trending Democrat. From the dustcover, this synopsis:
"Once the party of the Rust Belt, Democrats are now the party of Silicon Valley and of North Carolina's Research Triangle" and, I might add, the Rendellicans of suburban Philadelphia. "(T)he Democrats are now also the party of professionals, working women, blacks, Asian-Americans and Hispanics." Among other things, these new Democrat voters "take umbrage at Republican calls to privatize Social Security."
But this new Democrat majority, which Judis and Teixeira say will bow by the end of the decade, wants far more than simply the government to guarantee basic property rights and the rule of law that foster security, stability and free markets; it wants a new paternalism, a new nanny state — "security, stability and free markets" as government products.
This coming Democrat majority views Republicans and conservatives as "racists." Get a load of this load of detritus: School busing, the darling of liberal socialist engineers, didn't fail to integrate our urban schools because it was social re-engineering at its worst, it failed because of "white flight," Judis and Teixeira say.
And how about this gem: "Some public housing programs put the entire onus of integration on working-class white neighborhoods. But Republicans used the corruption of black officials and the inadequacy of these programs to stigmatize the Democrats and to avoid offering any constructive remedies of their own."
So, it's blame conservatives for the socialist excesses of liberals? Are these morons for real? This is the kind of mind-set that, by 2010, will constitute the American majority? Heathen Methodist that I am, even I have to say God help us all!
The world according to Judis and Teixeira has it that Republicans and conservatives "are fighting the future on behalf of the past." No, sirs, they are fighting for the future with an understanding of and reverence for the past. For they know that those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat its mistakes; they know that, say, a "living" Constitution — one that can be molded at will to placate the cause du jour without amendment, as liberals are wont to do — is no Constitution at all.
Continue Judis and Teixeira, "Democrats, chastened by defeat during the eighties, have repudiated their own extremes and moved to the political center, which itself has gravitated in a broadly progressive direction. … They are the new party of progressive centrism."
What's that I said about pigs and lipstick? Who are these clowns kidding? The records of the Daschles and Gephardts and Kennedys and, locally, the Murphys, prove otherwise. And, folks, please re-read the above quote. Given what I've told you about "progressive centrism," does it not show that Democrats, if anything, are becoming more liberal and more enamored with socialism? Sure it does.
Judis and Teixeira proffer that Americans want government to play an active role in their lives, "guaranteeing a reasonable level of economic security … rather than leaving them at the mercy of the market and business cycle."
Can you say "mercantilism" and the "welfare state"?
"They want to preserve and strengthen Social Security and Medicare, rather than privatize them."
Can you say "bankruptcy"?
"They want to modernize and upgrade public education, not abandon it."
Can you say "larger and worse teachers unions" and "worse results"?
"They do not want science held hostage to a(n) … ideological agenda."
Can you say "global warming"?
"And they want the social gains of the sixties consolidated, not rolled back."
Can you say "quotas" and "affirmative action"?
They want socialism? Again, God help us all.
Back to Daniel Borchers. His supposedly conservative group disputes Ann "Coulter's notion that extremism and hatred are the building blocks of a thriving nation." But, friends, this is not Ann Coulter's notion. Ann Coulter is not the extremist here; she must shout to get the attention of an increasingly indoctrinated society that, with each passing generation, has become more deaf to the dire dangers of socialism and its snake oil salesmen.
The extremists are Democrats and liberals. Those are the dirty words here. After all, what can be more extreme, dangerous and filthy than, in a republic, bear-hug advocacy for the nanny state and its wealth redistribution, command economics and ideologically driven government intervention after government intervention?
In his new book, "Heaven on Earth, The Rise and Fall of Socialism," Joshua Muravchik reminds that socialism was man's most ambitious attempt to supplant religion with a doctrine claiming to be rational and scientific. Of course, this ignoble endeavor, what Mr. Muravchik calls "the search for the Promised Land," failed.
"Nowhere did socialists succeed in creating societies of easy abundance or in midwifing the birth of a 'New Man,' as their theory promised," he writes. And nowhere will it. Yet, here in America, too many persist in their belief that this theory can be proven, that Nirvana is just one more government program away.
This is why Ann Coulter shouts. It's why I do, too. And it's why we need more, and louder, shouters. The deaf must begin to listen. For if they do not, the death of our republic is assured.
