Hum of Hate: The Progressive Hive
Has a New Queen
by Tom Bethell
(Reprinted from
The American Spectator,
March 1999)
Readers
who go way back may recall an earlier column
[American Spectator, “Capitol Ideas,” circa
1981] in
which the beehive was used as a metaphor for the world socialist
enterprise — the
community of progressives. The Hive image, first proposed by the
writer Joseph Sobran,
illustrated the key point that liberals and Communists, seemingly
distinct, belong to the
same Hive. They share the same goals, even if they perform different
tasks. The metaphor
allows us to speak of their activities as coordinated without having
to invoke a conspiracy.
The queen bee was the Kremlin, and the worker bees toiled in
coordinated fashion to serve
the queen without ever taking orders. Real bees work in that
fashion. They communicate.
They signal openly. They serve the queen. What goes on in their
“minds” we do not know
and do not need to know. But a careful study of their signaling
patterns allowed researchers to decode them.
In the same way, liberals and
socialists and communists communicate openly. Their claims
and arguments fall into a consistent pattern. There was a period
(up to and including the
1930s) when Communists did indeed have to conspire, that is,
communicate secretly.
Alger Hiss began his career in that period. But by the 1950s open
communication had
become possible. H.G. Wells foresaw something like this in his
1928 book The
Open Conspiracy. Then, less than a decade ago, unexpectedly
and swiftly, the
Kremlin-centered Hive expired. Sometimes, for no apparent reason,
this happens with real
hives, too. The workers kill the queen. They surround her and pack
themselves in close
until she suffocates. In analogous fashion, that may be what happened
with the
progressive Hive.
The workers didn’t particularly
like the Moscow queen. She had far too many faults.
She was too weak, in a way, too unfashionable, too impoverished,
too undemocratic. The
workers wanted something more up to date, something they could be
proud of. The Berlin
Wall fell, and, in December 1989, Mikhail Gorbachev paid his courtesy
call on the Vatican.
His steely and revered predecessor, Stalin, had asked, “How many
divisions has the
Pope?” Now, it seemed, the Pope had won. In effect, the Soviet
leader had surrendered. The queen died, and that Hive expired.
The old Hive was finished, but the
workers were still alive and well. They began to look for
a new leader. It seems now that they have found one. A new Hive is
a-swarming. It is not
fully in place yet, and its fate is uncertain. There are countercurrents,
rival formations,
divided loyalties, great battles ahead. Some of the old workers have
died and have been
replaced by novices. But the old hum is again heard in the air, the
hum of hate. It is heard
in behalf of the new queen, who lives in a surprising place: the
White House. Its occupant
must be protected to the death and her enemies swiftly stung. The
old war, the Cold War,
was lost. But the new war, the Culture War, can be won. The old Queen
is dead? Long live
the Queen! In isolated pockets, grizzled old capos like Fidel Castro
and the man in North
Korea still soldier on, loyal to old banners and old slogans.
They don’t know that
it’s a whole new war out there.
The Culture War has replaced the
Cold War, and the United States has replaced the
Soviet Union as the world leader of the progressive community.
A few months ago, the workers
themselves signaled unmistakeably that they were still
supporting the same cause when they issued their familiar attack cry,
their tora tora tora:
“McCarthyism!” This time, of course, it was “Sexual
McCarthyism.” The old fatwa! In the
Cold War, it had sent the signal that those unsympathetic to
Communism must be
attacked. It seemed to be a cry for help. (“We are being attacked
for our innocent beliefs.”)
But that, of course, was a deception. In fact, it was intended to
rally the attack bees. Today,
the cry of “sexual McCarthyism” signals that those
unsympathetic to what may be called
sexual Communism. (“All orifices are created equal!”) are
perceived as vulnerable and must be attacked.
Many of those whose drone was heard
in the old Hive remain active in the new; same
people, same formation, new leadership: Gloria Steinem, Anthony
Lewis, Gary Wills, Al
Hunt, Arthur Miller, Barney Frank, Arthur Schlesinger, Jesse
Jackson, Roger Wilkins,
Betty Friedan, Jonathan Alter, Alan Dershowitz, Peter Jennings,
Sidney Blumenthal, Lars
Erik-Nelson . These are only the better known communication bees
in the Hive, which is
an entity immeasurably larger than such a list suggests. There
are millions more whose
names we do not know. Some of the old familiars are dead or in
retirement by now — Bella
Abzug, Tom Wicker, and Walter Cronkite come to mind — but there
are new recruits, some
very adept, such as the New York Times columnist
Frank Rich.
The Hive, old and new, is the
communion of apostasy, the home for heretics, the base-
community for all spiritual renegades. Now it is in full cry
once more, alive and joyously
stinging, with a heroic leader to defend the president of the
United States. He has the full
resources of the federal government at his disposal, with abortion
on demand, foreign aid
to dispense (if population-control programs are allowed), mega-bushels
of condoms to
distribute, “health services” for the Third World. Impoverished
Moscow never had it so good.
The best analysis of the old, Moscow
Hive was made in the 1970s by a Soviet
mathematician, Igor Shafarevich, a friend of Solzhenitsyn’s.
He wrote from the belly
of the beast, or close to it, for he held a position at Moscow
University. His book,
The Socialist Phenomenon, published here in 1980,
argued that socialism
had endured throughout history, usually in the form of one or
another Christian heresy. It
gives expression to the gnostic urge to rebel — the rebellion
of the educated against the
constraints imposed by Creation and by God. In earlier periods, when
of course the
socialist label was not used, it could be identified by its
insistent, unvarying emphasis on
certain goals: the destruction of private property and of the
traditional or “nuclear” family;
and above all, the dismemberment of traditional, or orthodox
religion. Throughout history,
the phenomenon has been obsessed with material equality, and with
the eradication of
individual and gender distinctions. It wars incessantly against the
normal. Shafarevich
concluded that a “striving for self-destruction,” for nothingness,
for the “death of mankind,”
was the true goal of socialism. Instinctively, without stating it or
even seeing it as the
conscious goal, the socialist phenomenon seeks the death of the
human race.
Although the new, American-led Hive
has the same goals, its methods and emphasis are
different. The great error of the Moscow Hive was that it actually
brought into being a
society without private property, and so became impoverished. This
sapped the
Hive’s power. How could such a leader, armed only with rusting
nukes, inspire a
world revolution? The new Hive is in much better shape. It retains
the old animus against
private property, which makes people dangerously independent of the
state. But
property’s role in wealth creation is now grudgingly recognized.
No more
nationalization. Taxed and regulated, private wealth is tolerated.
Also, wealth itself is
spiritually debilitating (as the Unmentionable One had warned in
the Gospels), and a rich
society will more readily abandon the old morality than a poor one.
And there’s this:
the birth rate drops off tremendously when countries move toward
capitalism. All the more
reason, then, for a death-seeking Hive to accord markets a little
belated respect.
One of the first to see it coming
was the Catholic writer G.K. Chesterton. “It has been left
to the very latest modernists to proclaim an erotic religion which
at once exalts lust and
forbids fertility,” he wrote in 1926. “The next great heresy is
going to be simply an attack on
morality, and especially on sexual morality.” He added: “The
madness of tomorrow is not in
Moscow, much more in Manhattan.” John Paul II might almost have
read that. Not long
after the Gorbachev surrender he spoke of an approaching “apocalyptic
combat” with “the
culture of death.” This phrase, echoing Shafarevich, was first
used at the Denver youth
rally in 1993. “Today, that struggle has become increasingly
direct,” the Pope added. It was
a struggle with the “works of darkness.” Because the
Denver crowds were hot and tired (it
was said), his prepared remarks about America’s role in this struggle
were omitted,
although they had been released to the press. In a subsequent
encyclical,
Evangelium Vitae, the Pope identified abortion, birth
control, and euthanasia
as the prime components of this culture of death.
The culture war went international.
In 1994, the Pope made extraordinary efforts to derail
the UN Conference on Population, at Cairo. With Clinton & Clinton
in charge, Hive goals
were now uppermost at the UN. Its Program of Action sought
worldwide “health services”
and “reproductive rights” — euphemisms for the ready
availability of birth control pills,
condoms, and abortion everywhere. Here indeed the newly invigorated
Hive under
American leadership was making progress at last. Foreseeing
“the shipwreck of humanity,”
the Pope mobilized diplomatic delegations around the world, even
courting Libya and Iran.
“I see an alliance forming between the Catholic Church and the
Muslim world against the
West. It could really change an awful lot,” said New York’s
Cardinal O’Connor (as
reported by Carl Bernstein and Marco Politi). A modest success was
achieved. Some
abortion language was changed. The Muslim world, not yet having
undergone either
Reformation or Enlightenment, is beyond the Hive’s zone of
influence. It also seems
to be forming its own hive and is potentially a threat both to
the remnants of Western orthodoxy and to the progressive Hive.
The culture of death is nowhere more
ghoulishly on display than on the World Wide Web. Its
a virtual mausoleum in cyberspace, thanato-linked, hemlock-webbed,
death-netted,
cryonomically correct, Kevorkian-devoted. In the courses on death
education for children,
the demons are right out in the open. Read how the body decomposes,
enter SuicideChat!
rooms, join the worldwide cemetery watch. It’s full-employment
heaven for ethicists
and other such promoters of cultural quicksand. Hive tycoon George
Soros is funding a
project on death, intended to “transform the culture and experience
of death in America.” A bit behind the times, there, George.
The culture of death is the rotten
fruit of the sexual revolution. And as Chesterton foresaw,
the United States now provides the worldwide leadership of this
diabolical enterprise.
Watching Clinton’s approval
ratings soar, a veteran of the Cold War, who had been
looking forward to a quiet retirement, ruefully commented: “We
were worried about the
Bomb, when we should have been worried about the Pill.” It had
succeeded in denaturing
the American family. It may be that the new Hive does have the
American people on its
side in a way that it never did with the old fashioned (economic)
Communism.
That’s the way Hive floor
manager Frank Rich sees it. In January, he urged Senate
Democrats to go for a “protracted trial with tons of
witnesses,” dragging on until the next
election. This might “help resolve the unfinished 30-year-old
culture war that has raged out
of control since Mr. Clinton took office.” He saw impeachment
as a gift that “could end this
bloody conflict peacefully” — with a victory for the forces of
cultural dissolution. Otherwise,
he warned, “our culture war might exceed Vietnam duration.”
Interesting! When Pat Buchanan
noticed, eight years ago, that we were in a culture war,
he was promptly accused of declaring it. Now they tell us! The war has
been going on for 30 years. But Rich is right. It has, too.
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