In Defense of Angry Mobs

This week pundits were all in a tizzy about the angry mobs showing up at John McCain and Sarah Palin rallies. “Those who press this Ayers line of attack are whipping Republicans and conservatives into a fury that is going to be very hard to calm after November,” fretted former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum. “Is it really wise to send conservatives into opposition in a mood of disdain and fury for a man who may well be the next president of the United States, incidentally the first African-American president?” David Gergen warned, “There is this free floating sort of whipping around anger that could really lead to some violence.” Andrew Sullivan intoned ominously, “This is a moment of maximal physical danger for the young Democratic nominee. And McCain is playing with fire.” And there are signs that John McCain is now looking on the passion he has stirred up the way Frankenstein looked on his monster. But I’d like to know, What’s so bad about angry mobs? After all, angry mobs made our country -- and the Republican Party -- what it is today.

This country wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for an angry mob that decided it wanted a tax cut and threw English tea into Boston Harbor. Angry mobs once enforced local justice without interference from the meddlesome federal government in the Old West and in the south after Reconstruction, just as our Founding Fathers had envisioned in The Federalist Papers. And we would probably all be Muslims now if an angry mob hadn’t chosen Barabbas over Jesus 2,000 years ago.

The Republican Party certainly owes a lot to angry mobs. Angry mobs in Little Rock and Selma deeply concerned about the issue of state’s rights, angry mobs of parents in Boston who didn’t want their kids bussed across town and angry mobs of Chicago homeowners who didn’t want their property values to go down all helped give birth to the modern conservative movement. The Democrats had angry mobs of their own rioting in the cities and burning flags at antiwar protests and conservatives realized that the only way we would win is if we had better, angrier mobs. What was Nixon’s Silent Majority but a very quiet, very angry mob?

But some conservative “intellectuals” like David Brooks subscribe to the canard that the conservative movement was defined by pointy-headed eastern elites like William Buckley, whose “entire life,” Brooks recently wrote, “was a celebration of urbane values, sophistication and the rigorous and constant application of intellect. Driven by a need to engage elite opinion, conservatives tried to build an intellectual counterestablishment with think tanks and magazines, they disdained the ideas of the liberal professoriate, but they did not disdain the idea of a cultivated mind.” Now Brooks laments, “What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole.” Brooks even goes so far as to claim that conservatives once valued “constant reading, historical understanding and sophisticated thinking.” We did? Since when? Does he honestly believe that the conservative movement was based on people who read books? Reagan wasn’t elected by the Harvard faculty. It was an angry mob tired of welfare queens and pinko fellow travelers selling us out to the Soviet Union that put him in office. And when Al Gore tried to steal the election in Florida in 2000 it took an angry mob of bussed in Young Republicans to remind Americans that you don’t get to be President just because you have the most votes. That’s not how democracies work.

So when people like David Brooks and David Gergen act like scared little rabbits over a good old American red-blooded angry mob, I wonder, where have you been all these years? How do you think Nixon, Reagan and Bush got elected?

Some conservative “thinkers” now act shocked when angry conservative mobs don’t bow down to their precious ivory tower thoughts. When Kathleen Parker treasonously wrote that Sarah Palin should quit the ticket, they responded with justifiable outrage, sending her 12,000 emails calling her a traitor and an idiot and saying she should have been aborted. But suddenly Parker no longer wants to have a frank dialogue with her readers. “When we decide that a person is a traitor and should die for having an opinion different from one's own, we cross into territory that puts all freedoms at risk,” she writes self-righteously, acting as if the scales just fell from her eyes. Is this the same Kathleen Parker who excoriated Scott McLellan for being disloyal to President Bush just to sell his book? Is this the same Kathleen Parker who defended a man who pointed out that Barack Obama is not a “full-blooded American” by saying, “Some Americans do feel antipathy toward ‘people who aren't like them,’ but that antipathy isn't about racial or ethnic differences. It is not necessary to repair antipathy appropriately directed toward people who disregard the laws of the land and who dismiss the struggles that resulted in their creation. Full-blooded Americans get this.” I’m sorry, Kathleen Parker, but you are just not like us.

And whether Ms. Parker likes it or not, how else to characterize the endorsement of Barack Obama by William Buckley’s son Christopher Buckley as anything but a betrayal? Buckley was too much of a coward to make his endorsement in his father’s magazine. He made it on The Daily Beast because he said he didn’t want to receive “foam-at-the-mouth hate-emails” from National Review readers. Why is Buckley turning his back on those who have kept the magazine in business all these years? If National Review cut all of its foaming-at-the-mouth readers from its subscriber rolls who would be left to read the magazine? Now, suddenly, Buckley thinks foaming at the mouth is a bad thing?

Sure, angry mobs can get a little rambunctious and overenthusiastic at times. Some members of the angry mobs that have been attending McCain/Palin rallies (otherwise known as “the Republican base”) got a tad carried away when they reacted to hearing Obama’s name by screaming “Kill him” and “Off with his head.” But it’s easy to go overboard in the heat of the moment. Who wouldn’t be furious at the prospect of a terrorist who went to Pakistan on an Indonesian passport, where he probably had secret meetings with Osama Bin Laden, the Weather Underground and the Illuminati, getting elected President? Can you blame them?

At first it looked like John McCain and Sarah Palin were not only prepared to ride this angry mob to victory but were even willing to egg them on a little. But yesterday it seemed McCain suddenly got cold feet. On Friday he rebuffed a woman at one of his rallies who said that Obama was an “Arab,” telling her, “No, ma'am. He's a decent family man [and] citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues and that's what this campaign's all about. He's not [an Arab].” He told another man that he didn’t have to be “scared” if Obama is elected President. Now you tell us. Don’t you want to win this election?

I don’t know why McCain now seems to be turning his back on his base, which never trusted him anyway. Maybe it was the memory of the angry Vietnamese mob that pulled McCain out of his plane when it went down in Hanoi and nearly beat him to death that gave him second thoughts. But now is not the time for McCain to suddenly find his moral scruples. Pandering to the eastern elites won’t get McCain elected. If McCain wants to win, he’s going to have to put aside whatever principles he is still clinging to and embrace the angry mob the way Ronald Reagan and George Bush did before him. Because if he loses there is no telling what this angry mob will do next. There could be rioting in the streets or worse. So let’s hope for all of our sakes that McCain has the stomach to win this election.

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