The Greatest Fury
“The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking In the Age of Mob Politics” by Kevin D. Williamson. Regnery, 2019.
Kevin D. Williamson is an angry writer and he would like you to know it. Oftentimes Angry Kevin is a force for good. Angry Kevin slaughters sacred cows (for instance, conservative rural sentimentality and woolly-minded fiscal myths) and punishes social aberrants who talk in the theater. Anger has its uses — Williamson cites Christ scouring the Temple — and yet it also has its limits. Anger can tear down yet it can rarely build.
“The Smallest Minority” is written with the intent of tearing down mob politics. He graphically compares American politics — governmental, corporate or social — to India’s aggressive monkey population. Our mob mentality squelches individual thought, depresses its members and degrades discourse with a concerning caprice. This construct known as “public opinion” has elevated itself as a god, to which Williamson acts as a Miltonian Lucifer, crying, “Non serviam.” (Or, more graphically in a footnote, “Standing athwart History yelling, ‘Fuck you!’”)
Williamson’s anger is usually well-directed and has several strengths. First, he spends the lion’s share of the book exposing the tribalist underpinnings of our politics. Although many Americans think themselves above the fray (“My politics is just reason, yours is mere tribal grunting”), the brute fact of it is that under the surface, we are all mere gangs of monkeys. We construct democratic processes in order to avoid bloodshed and keep the peace. Beyond the evidence Williamson marshals, which is considerable, there is quite a lot of literature to back this point up. Political scientists Donald R. Kinder and Nathan P. Kamloe note that although very few Americans have a consistent ideology, our partisan identity remains very important to us.
“Although Americans, on average, are not ideological, we are partisan. Our emotional attachments to political parties are real and enduring. But for most of us, our party identification is not the result of our ideological inclinations. If anything, it’s the opposite. After deciding that we are Republicans or Democrats, we start to also call ourselves conservatives or liberals, even if we have little understanding of what those terms mean.”
Additionally, Williamson’s polemic is evenhanded. Both the left and the right remain unspared in “The Smallest Minority.” Trump is exposed as a “a cretin and an ignoramus, a deeply corrupt buffoon who does not appear to go twenty-four hours without lying in public about something,” while a gutless executive at The Atlantic is labeled “an old WASP banker with no ass.”
The book is the best, and possibly its freshest, when discussing how authoritarian corporate wokeness works. Although the potential threat from the state to free speech has been documented almost ad nauseam, comparatively little conservative ink has been spilled on the threat from Big Business.
Williamson obliges by explaining that corporations have become a threat to free thought because, “…the corporation for the moment [is the] place where values get refined and expressed, a source of social norms, and the main theater of social action for a large class of people — a class whose members are as jealous of their positions as they are insecure in them.” Because many corporate boards and HR departments are subjected to “long marches,” their enforcement mechanisms, letters of instruction and firings, are now part of the culture war. Williamson explains:
“Having the power to mau-mau a technology company or a magazine into firing an employee for holding unpopular political views is or course attractive to teacup totalitarians who pursue such projects on social media. Bullies like what they do. But the campaign is bigger and wider and deeper than that…we implicitly accept the premise that corporations are legitimate venues for the enforcement of political discipline…”
But the book has its weaknesses, mainly rooted in the polemic nature. Williamson may see Milton’s Lucifer as a symbolic hero against our modern era’s false gods, but he may do well to remember Saint Paul’s words, no stranger to mob outrage, in his letter to the Ephesians that we should not “[L]et the sun go down on your wrath, nor give place to the devil.”
The first is that the book confuses any infringement on autonomy as a totalitarian. Although Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s tax plan undoubtedly has its weaknesses, those in the highest tax brackets are hardly kulaks or victims of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war. Horseshoe theory has its limits, much like anger.
Secondly, and most importantly, is that the book is primarily a polemic and thus is defined entirely by what it is against. Williamson lays out a scathing condemnation of tribal politics, mob mentality and how our modern era of corporations and social media have enabled them.
But what does he suggest we replace them with? His suggestion is apparently to be a Miltonian heroic individual, tacking against the wind of popular opinion. But if we are so entirely hardwired to be so simian, then is there any good in this? Surely it would be as useful as telling a pickpocketing monkey, “Come now, think of the non-aggression principle!”
How can we reconcile our need for group identity with individual liberty? “The Smallest Minority” is a rather short book at 200 pages and I half expected there to be a chapter with an answer of some sort, but it seems we may have to wait until another Williamson book comes out.
In conclusion, “The Smallest Minority” is in many ways a typical Kevin D. Williamson piece: scathing, packed to the rafters with evidence and incredibly dour, if not downright furious. These have their places in public discourse, but we also must be ready to build and not simply tear down. “Non serviam” is a fitting theme for a denunciation but not quite for a blueprint.
