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Tolerance Totalitarians by Steven Yates
Over the months I’ve occasionally taken a little heat for having once written a column endorsing Bush the Younger over Gore back in 2000. Whether we would be any better off under a Gore Regime than the Bush Regime we have is something we (thankfully!) shall never have to find out. Republicans, though – especially since the takeover of the GOP in the early 1990s by the neocons – have not only failed to stand up to those I will call tolerance totalitarians, they have joined them. The Trent Lott fiasco illustrated this perfectly. The cultural Marxists didn’t have to lift a finger. Lott was tarred and feathered by his own party not excepting Bush the Younger, and it never occurred to the political elites or media talking heads to connect Lott’s remarks with anything except race. But when it comes to advancing the cause of thought control in America, Republicans still don’t quite measure up to Democrats. Consider, for example, remarks made by former House Minority Leader and newly announced Democratic presidential hopeful Dick Gephardt during his recent visit to South Carolina. Gephardt denounced the Confederate flag and stated that it should not be accorded "any official display anywhere in the state…. The Confederate flag is a hurtful, divisive symbol and, in my view, has no place flying anywhere in any state in this country." He added in an interview with Columbia’s The State newspaper: "I want to be crystal clear to the people of South Carolina where I stand on this issue. The flag should not fly anywhere in this country…. [M]y own personal feeling is that the Confederate flag no longer has a place flying any time, anywhere in our great nation." As if on cue, state officials in Missouri, Gephardt’s home state, removed Confederate flags from two historic sites this past Tuesday. The flags were removed from the grounds of the Confederate Memorial Historic Site and the Fort Davidson Historic Site, although not from inside their visitor centers. According to an AP report, "the flag had flown for decades without controversy or criticism from public officials at the Confederate Memorial near Higginsville. The remains of 694 Confederate veterans and 108 wives are buried at the site." This illustrates how quickly state officials will jump when a tolerance totalitarian barks. These days they don’t even have to be told. Let’s analyze this thing a little more closely. Note the anywhere that cropped up at least three times in Gephardt’s remarks, and was implied throughout. What, precisely, does it mean? Gephardt didn’t tell us. He didn’t qualify by stating – for example – that while it is inappropriate to fly the Confederate flag on public grounds such as behind the Confederate Soldier Memorial at the South Carolina State House, flying it on private property is an individual’s right under the First Amendment to the US Constitution. No politician wanting to survive inside today’s Beltway culture, much less one with presidential aspirations, would say anything like that. Despite the war that has been waged against the Confederate flag for over ten years now, most people – even NAACP leaders – still see a private citizen as having a right to fly whatever flag he wants on his own property. However, as tolerance totalitarianism continues to grow, this could change. Consider: flying the Confederate flag over one’s business had become a touchy proposition by 2000, the year the flag came down off the South Carolina State House Dome. Barbecue baron Maurice Bessinger, long one of the Confederate flag’s staunchest supporters in Columbia, can give you an earful. He would remind you that many large corporations have become as politically correct as universities and governments. Bessinger had raised the Confederate flag over his restaurants that summer in protest against its removal from the Dome. In August of that year, The State published a slashing and very personal attack on Bessinger and his business, insinuating that he was a racist who believed in slavery. I have known Bessinger personally for a number of years. He’s no racist, just one of the few men left who believes an entrepreneur has a right to run his business as he sees fit if his customers are satisfied and he isn’t interfering with anyone else. However, no one bothered to try and find out the truth. Within a matter of weeks, nearly all the major grocery chains serving South Carolina had pulled his products from their shelves. By Christmas, Bessinger had lost 98 percent of his wholesale business, a business that took him over 40 years to build. Thus as tolerance totalitarianism has continued its alarming spread into corporate America (in this case, the grocery chains and businesses such as Wal-Mart), exercising your First Amendment rights can cost you dearly. Bessinger is over 70 years old. He will probably never repair the damage to his business that standing up for free speech and against political correctness has cost him. I admit that as a fan of free enterprise, I don’t criticize corporations unless I think there is a very good reason. The grocery chains have the same rights as Bessinger. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. A private corporation can carry whatever products its leaders want, set standards of its choosing, and expel those it deems don’t measure up. But let’s face it: (1) corporations have allowed themselves to be victimized by ruthless shakedown artists such as Jesse Jackson (beginning with the restaurant chain Denny’s and proceeding through Texaco and beyond); (2) they have hired myriad "diversity managers" and "sensitivity counselors" that have furthered the spread of tolerance totalitarianism; (3) many have accepted corporate welfare, often in the name of "job creation," resulting in entanglements with the federal government leading to a loss of control; and (4) most CEOs care little about cultural issues. Many have little understanding of the premises of freedom in America even if they are very good at providing a product or service to a customer base. Thus they have capitulated to every form of political correctness to come along, whether it involves warning their employees about sexual harassment or actually firing them for dissenting from the new corporate embrace of homosexuality (as Kodak recently did with a 23-year old employee). Corporate America, then, understands the bottom line but in large measure senses no danger regarding the spread of tolerance totalitarianism. Cases from Denny’s to Bessinger all set new and advancing precedents. For the tolerance totalitarians are like proverbial weeds: give them an inch and they’ll take a yard. As the years pass, they get bolder. Like the true Orwellians they are, in the name of tolerance they broke no dissent (hence my use of the Orwellian oxymoron tolerance totalitarian). In the name of diversity they demand ideological uniformity. In the name of being inclusive they exclude straight white Christian males who dissent from the MTV-derived whatever-floats-your-boat ethos. In the name of sensitivity they are capable of utter ruthlessness. If you are an employee, they will get you fired; if you are a financially independent business owner, they will attempt to destroy you. Tolerance totalitarians cannot be negotiated with, nor reasoned with. With Gephardt, they have a found a voice among the Democratic presidential hopefuls, although admittedly Gore said something similar in early 2000. The point is, Democrats seem more prone to taking the lead at dictating such things than Republicans who are usually johnny-come-latelys (a more polite phrase, I suppose, than useful idiots). Republicans – again especially since the neocons took over – are desperate to prove that "conservatives" aren’t racists. Knocking a Trent Lott from his pedestal is one way of doing this. But this means that the "liberals" are setting the agenda whether the "conservatives" know it or like it or not. It is always useful to remember that one of the chief aims of tolerance totalitarianism is to rewrite history, to force this entire country – and this means every institution in it – to embrace a politically correct, cultural Marxist paradigm of history and culture. In this version of history and culture, central to U.S. history has been the struggle of the victims (blacks, women, etc.) against their oppressors (white men). In this simplistic model, slavery was the only cause of the War Between the States. Never mind those pesky details about tariffs or centralization. One of the ways totalitarians gain and maintain power is to control the information that reaches people – be it through education or the media or, when those fail, threats, intimidation, or the banishing of a Maurice Bessinger from the "polite society" of the tolerant. This must include what symbols are allowed public display. Those who associate the Confederate flag with something called states rights – and associate that not with race but with limitations on a powerful, central government – have long been thorns in the side of those who want to build up that kind of government. We should make no mistake about it. Tolerance today means advancing totalitarianism. It means thought control. And so perhaps Gephardt’s "anywhere" may really mean anywhere. Someone should press Gephardt on this. Does he believe that the Confederate flag shouldn’t fly on state property but that private citizens ought to be able to fly whatever flags they please over their businesses and homes? Or does he want to further obliterate the public-private distinction by banning the banner from businesses as well? What about citizens’ flying it from flagpoles or displaying it from windows on their personal property? What about car license plates and bumperstickers? It is true that to the best of my knowledge no one has advocated passing a law specifically aimed at criminalizing the Confederate flag. Yet. A "hate crimes" bill, however, would surely open the door to clever leftist lawyers attempting to read "hate speech" into displaying the banner. Ideas for such bills continue to be kicked around, and their equivalents already exist in, say, Canada. If no one stands up to the tolerance totalitarians and defends free speech rights and property rights, can their dictating to private businesses and private homes be far off? Criminalizing the Confederate flag would not mean that the Maurice Bessingers of the world would merely find their businesses under attack; they would find themselves subject to arrest for thought crimes. (At least one case of an individual being arrested and jailed for private speech deemed politically unacceptable by an aggrieved minority has already happened, so a broad precedent already exists.) So far no one likely to be listened to has stood up and told Gephardt that which flags are flown in South Carolina and where they are flown is none of the federal government’s business. Even candidate Bush the Younger, back in 2000, left the fate of the flag on the State House Dome to South Carolinians. This would be a good start at standing up to the tolerance totalitarians. If nobody opens his mouth, and if these displays continue to come down under continued a continued sense of intimidation by tolerance totalitarians, leading to still more strongarming, eventually a day will come when openly criminalizing Confederate symbols and other modes of expression deemed politically unacceptable will become a live option in what was the land of the free and the home of the brave. January 18, 2003
Copyright © 2003 LewRockwell.com
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