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With conservatives like these, who needs liberals? | page 1, 2, 3
(A recent conversation I had with Judge Bork, however, suggests that he is having second thoughts about his membership in this club because of the use that is being made of its arguments.) Like Bennett and Eastland, Kristol finds the otherwise worthy project of censorship unworkable owing to the sorry state of the American people who can't be counted on to support it. Bizarrely, Kristol attributes this resistance to the influence of the post-'60s culture and the left's institutional dominance of the American Bar Association, the law schools and the media. These institutions, Kristol concludes, would crucify any nominee to the nation's higher courts who indicated a pro-censorship bias. Kristol is certainly right about liberal resistance to censorship when liberals are convinced the censor's axe will fall on the artistic avant-garde and other left-wing communities they favor. On the other hand, the left has already shown that it wants to censor the offensive speech of its opponents and the violent imagery of the media. Kristol fails to take into account the fact that leftists can disagree among themselves. They can also be adept at employing double standards that allow them to support the censorship of others while abhorring censorship of themselves. He seems unaware of how his position makes him a bedfellow of feminist harridans like Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, and moral busybodies like Hillary Clinton and Tipper Gore. Among the commentators assembled by the Standard, only government professor Jeremy Rabkin seems to appreciate that the censors who would implement Lowenthal's proposal would inevitably be drawn from the class of political missionaries whose passion in life is to tell the rest of us how to live. "The people prepared to take the job would be ideologues -– mostly of the crazy left, perhaps also of the religious right, but certainly ideologues," he writes. (perhaps also of the religious right?!) Censorship by such zealots, Rabkin does recognize, is "a recipe for a very nasty sort of politics and is sure to be self-defeating." Once again, the strongest criticism that can be mustered against this proto-fascist agenda is that it is impractical. What is going on here? What happened to the conservative attitude that government can't tie its shoelaces without putting entire populations in danger? How is it that a government unable to hand out money to poor people without destroying families and communities in the process can be entrusted with the infinitely more complex task of deciding what is -- and what is not -- morally healthy for 270 million diverse people to hear and see? How could any self-respecting conservative not be repelled by a social prescription like Lowenthal's that overlooks this little problem of social engineering? For that matter, how could any conservative not be appalled by his analysis of the problem itself? Since when, for example, have the media become "the primary educational force in the country"? In educating the young, the primary force is and always has been the family. That's almost the primary principle of conservative politics itself. It's also the only explanation for the fact that the same "violent" TV shows and movies are seen in America's inner cities and middle class suburbs. Yet homicide is the number one killer of young males in the first and barely a factor in youth mortality statistics in the other. Despite the claims of academic pseudoscience, normal individuals are not "desensitized" by fantasy acts of violence and transformed into homicidal maniacs. It is only sociopaths who confuse fantasy violence with reality. Are we now going to define the parameters of American freedom by the standard of the sociopaths among us? Now that is a truly liberal idea. When all is said and done, the very image of Hollywood that governs the analyses of the would-be censors is itself a fantasy. Here's Lowenthal: This is not only a false analysis of what we see and hear in theaters and on our television screens. It is ludicrous. Most prime-time television hours produced by the seven networks are filled with sitcoms, whose invariable themes are celebrations of love, family, friendship, tolerance, loyalty, respect and other timeless conservative virtues. (The PAX and Family networks are even exclusively devoted to family friendly programming.) Outside the news shows, rare incidents on late-night law-and-order series and the occasional feature film, there is virtually no violence to speak of on network television. On the other hand, there are more than a dozen cable channels that children could be put in front of all day and all night, every day and every night, and receive a decent, even quality education. As for feature films shown in theaters -- do we really need to remind ourselves of this obvious fact? -- these are seen only as the result of individual choices. A ticket purchase is required for entry. Do Americans really need censors to tell them what to choose? Are there any films and shows at all that approximate Lowenthal's fevered description? Well, I'm sure there are. But do they have the effect that Lowenthal imputes to them? Bill Bennett is the only contributor to the symposium who even bothers to mention anything so concrete as an actual offending artifact. He says that the Motion Picture Association has been criticized for using the threat of NC-17 ratings to censor "Eyes Wide Shut" and "South Park." He believes that "far more" movies should be so threatened. I haven't seen "Eyes Wide Shut," but I seriously doubt that -- censored or uncensored -- it would affect my ability to treat the opposite sex decently and with respect. I have seen "South Park" and I found its anti-censorship message morally refreshing (it is beyond my ken that any conservative could find this film offensive on conservative grounds). What are the implications of Bennett's argument, except that he considers it worth delivering our right to choose what we can see and know to the tender mercies of film censors in order to protect ourselves from the possibility that a cartoon would morally corrupt us? Get real, Bill. There is a deeper and more troubling flaw in the social model that inspires these modern Savanarolas, however. It is a misconception that again contradicts a cornerstone of conservative thought. If the tobacco, gun and film industries are giant enterprises in a free market system, it means that vast numbers of people want the products they are offering. In a democracy, the people are sovereign. That's the contract we've all signed onto. If enough people find cigarettes, guns and bad Hollywood pictures morally repulsive, these products will cease to be produced. That's the remedy the old-fashioned way. Conservatives, more than anyone else, should know (and believe) this. What is truly obscene is that a magazine calling itself conservative would even argue "The Case for Censorship." Just because liberals do it doesn't make it right. Elites of all political persuasions may find democracy offensive to their own sensibilities and ideas. Sometimes, they may even make common cause with their ideological enemies to force on everybody else their ideas of what's best. But, for the sake of our democracy and ourselves, the rest of us better not humor them.
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