Belated book review: Guilty
February 3rd, 2009
GUILTY
Liberal “Victims” and their assault on America
By Ann Coulter
311 pages. Crown Publishing. 2009.
Slander II
So I just finished Ann Coulter’s latest book, Guilty. Like a Chuck Palahniuk novel, it starts with a lot of promise, but gets sidetracked just as the plot starts to develop.
It begins by describing how people go out of their way to portray themselves as victims in America. Some make up hate crimes against themselves; others make up stories about growing up impoverished. Particularly interesting is how celebrities such as Halle Berry, Alicia Keys, and Barack Obama embrace their African-American heritage while downplaying their white heritage in order to acquire what Coulter calls “Victim Chic.” Then there’s Asians who complain about being stereotyped as “model minorities,” which is only harmful in the sense that it inhibits upper-middle class San Franciscans from playing the race card. This is only a fraction of the evidence Coulter cites to demonstrate that victimhood is a status symbol.
This is followed by the controversial chapter on single mothers. Here, Coulter makes a compelling case that single motherhood is deified (as if to prove Coulter right, the New York Times recently printed a squeezably soft puff piece on single mothers). The glorification of single motherhood causes Americans to overlook its negative consequences, including the fact that children from single-parent homes are more likely to end up in prison, drop out of school, kill themselves, and even become rapists. As Coulter’s latest interviews show, not everyone is prepared to consider these harsh truths. This is Coulter at her best, taking an entrenched liberal narrative and turning it on its head. The most any polemicist can do with a sacred cow; break the ice around the taboo subject, hopefully making it more acceptable to debate in polite circles.
Here’s where the conductor forgot to hit the right switch. Soon after the chapter on the complicated realities of single motherhood, Coulter turns her attention away from what I thought would be the driving theme of Guilty, the left’s idealization of victimhood, and instead focuses on her arch-nemesis, the arrogant, left-wing media. As a result, most of Guilty reads like a sequel to Slander, including b-sides from the original involving Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich. It’s full of great information (I like her breakdown of books written by George W. Bush “insiders,”) but liberal media bias doesn’t need to be discussed again, especially to her readers.
In Slander, Coulter’s point is that the media is overwhelmingly liberal. Her focus in most of Slander II is that the media is still that way, which allows leftists to behave aggressively while maintaining their front as victims. Even left-wing journalists act as if they’re part of an oppressed minority in their field. She could have done this in a brisk chapter. Instead she spends more than a hundred and fifty pages discussing how the media perpetuates the myth of liberal victimhood in one form or another. Sentient Americans know the media slants left. The science is pretty much settled on that.
Fortunately, in the last chapter of Guilty, Coulter picks up the pace again. In it, she indirectly cites an interesting Rothman and Lichter study that liberals are twice as likely to value being popular as conservatives. This may explain why artists are so liberal. Popular culture is driven by image, not substance; thus the most successful artists are usually going to be the ones preoccupied with shallow things such as popularity. It also explains why liberals are so uptight about America’s standing in the world. It’s as if they need their country to be liked in order to feel validated.
Like all of her actual books (as opposed to assorted collections of her work) Guilty finishes strongly. Towards her stirring denouement, Coulter lists a long line of political violence committed by left-wingers. The intimidating compilation starts with the violent pacifist John Wilkes Booth, and ends with a 2008 story involving two young liberals who walk into a Republican campaign headquarters, accuse old people of stealing Obama campaign signs, and are then escorted out of their opponent’s office, only to spray five McCain staffers with mace.
Behavior like this doesn’t happen on accident. All the liberal radicals Coulter describes view themselves as downtrodden, or at the very least, spokespeople for the downtrodden. The children of single parents also tend to view themselves as powerless. So do violent felons. Even if it isn’t rooted in reality, feeling powerless excuses violence, and shows how a preoccupation with victimhood leads to not just bad behavior, but often self-satisfied cruelty.
Ann Coulter could have written her entire book on these losers, creating a media firestorm and bursting the argument about the roots of political extremism wide open, starting with the contentious premise that it’s rooted in victim ideology. But she only spent a handful of pages on that, and instead we’re left with a good point about the deification of single motherhood that America doesn’t seem to be getting.
I love Ann Coulter. She’s one of my three biggest influences. Slander is the book that turned me towards conservatism. Perhaps because of that, I expected a lot more from Guilty. It’s worth reading at least once, if only for chapters one, two, and seven. Yet for all its high points, Guilty is still not nearly as good as Treason, her most focused (and entertaining) effort. In 2007, Camille Paglia wrote that Coulter seems to be regressing rather than growing intellectually. I won’t say that, partly because I don’t think I can hold a candle to Coulter’s breadth of knowledge. But I will say she’s mining in a familiar cave, when she could be finding much more gold someplace else.
Cross-posted at Modern Conservative