Guilt and Guts: The American political arena as vegetarian restaurant

In the spring of 1992, the day after the Los Angeles riots, I went down to South Central L.A. with a group of friends to help clean up. In our jeans and hiking boots and T-shirts emblazoned with progressive slogans, we spent the day piling rubble and ash into curbside mounds and bagging litter. The litter, of course, wasn't strictly related to the Rodney King verdict, but it was there, and so were we, and there really wasn't that much we could do anyway, but we were in our twenties, and had never been to that part of Los Angeles before, and we had plastic bags, so . . . connect the dots.

After a desultory morning raking and bagging and piling, we all went out to a vegetarian restaurant in Hollywood for brunch. I had been to this restaurant many times before, and had always felt vaguely uncomfortable. It was your classic progressive-newspaper-reading, nose- ring-wearing, irritating-political-nonsense-spouting crowd. It was the kind of place that someone with my far-right-wing beliefs (a lower top- income-tax rate spurs economic growth; the public-school system needs serious reform; America must maintain a strong military to deter our enemies) feels instantly uncomfortable in.

But that day, sweaty and tired from three hours of "helping bring the city back together," my jeans and T-shirt dirty from "healing Los Angeles," I felt something I'd never felt before in that restaurant. I felt morally superior. I had, after all, just engaged in do-gooderism while the rest of the selfish louts had been tucking into their soy frittatas and bulghur pancakes. The waitress may proclaim that "Hate Is Not A Family Value" all she likes from the comfort of the bumper of her dad's old Saab, but, sweetheart, I lived it. See this scuff on my hiking boots? See this red mark on my hand? Got them when I accidentally dropped my shovel, cleaning up after the riots. I wish I had time to lounge around here, reading the LA Weekly and sipping Red Zinger tea like some people, but I guess I just care too damn much.

I'd spent, maybe, two hours dragging my tiny shovel along West Adams Boulevard. Actually, less than two hours: I spent a lot of that time talking to a girl who had just come back from a bike trip through Vietnam. I did, basically, nothing. We did, as a group, basically, nothing. We "cleaned up" only in the teenager sense of "cleaning up," i.e., forming distinct piles of stuff for someone else to actually clean up. And yet here I was, puffed up and proud, swanning through a vegetarian restaurant on La Brea Boulevard.

Think of the American political arena, if you will, as this vegetarian restaurant. At each table sits a piece of the power puzzle-the New York Times, say, digging into its black-bean soup; over there, the NAACP ordering the maple smoothie; Tom Brokaw sits in his Teva sandals and Zapatista T-shirt flipping through an issue of Healing Bodywork magazine; Hillary Clinton as the humorless waitress. And in walks-oh, just for argument's sake-Newt Gingrich.

Now what, exactly, are Newt's chances here?

I know we shouldn't feel defensive just because we're in favor of school choice, low taxes, a strong military, and truly equal opportunity for all, but somehow, seated at a table in the vegetarian restaurant of American politics, we instinctively do. It's natural, I suppose, for anyone who's outnumbered to feel defensive and surrounded. Liberals are fragile, sensitive people. Like all fragile types, their best defense is a preemptive first strike. That was Bill Clinton's not- so-secret strategy, and it's what the teachers unions, the earth- firsters, and the welfare-staters have been doing successfully for years. Anyone who has lots of liberal friends-that is, anyone who lives in the infamous "blue" areas of the country, as depicted in the election-night maps on every network-knows firsthand about the relentless peppering of tiny pokes and prods liberals use in a political argument. The first-strike strategy they use in any debate is to force the hardworking American conservative to defend, essentially, his moral compass-"Why do you want children to starve?" "Why do you want to shut down the school system?" "Why do you want us all to die of skin cancer caused by an insufficient ozone layer?" "What's so great about selfishness?"-which, after a decade or two, creates a divided conservative population: the quiet, head-down Republican ("I'd appreciate a tax cut, sir, but I understand if one is not available") and the loutish, go-to-hell conservative ("Hillary killed Vince Foster with her bare hands").

Following the Vegetarian Restaurant Principle, a small dose of moral superiority (as small, apparently, as "I raked up cardboard this morning and you didn't") tips the center of gravity in any political struggle. And a large dose upends it altogether: When Ted Forstmann, billionaire merchant banker, offers millions of dollars in scholarships to children caught in failed schools, he transforms the entire school- choice debate in an instant, jujitsu-style.