Cross-posted from
The Nation
Gore Vidal loved America in the way the best of the founders did.
Indeed, he seemed at times, to be the last of their number -- a fierce
defender of the purest, most revolutionary of ideals at a time when the
contemporary political class prattled on about constitutional principles
they neither understood nor valued. (At the bicentennial, in 1976, Time magazine featured a cover with Vidal in historic garb, an honor that delighted him sufficiently to earn a place for the cover on the wall of his Italian villa.)
Vidal, who has died at age 86, was a great man of letters: an author (Julian, Burr, Lincoln, The City and the Pillar), playwright ("The Best Man") and National Book Award -- winning essayist (United States Essays, 1952--1992)
on the literature of his native land and the world. To this he added
status as a life-long challenger of the Puritanism that he regarded as
the ugliest of American tendencies.
But I knew Gore as a political champion, who ran inspired campaigns for Congress,
who demanded that presidents of both parties be held to account for
high crimes and misdemeanors, who maintained a faith in democracy so
deep and abiding that he called for a new constitutional convention to
set right what was done wrong at Philadelphia and to realize the
Jeffersonian requirement of revolutionary renewal. He was, as well, a
scorching debater on topics political, as William F. Buckley learned to his chagrin in 1968.
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Like most of Gore's friends, I came to know him first on the page.
His epic 1972 essay "Homage to Daniel Shays" -- written
as voters in "the land of the tin ear" prepared to re-elect Richard
Nixon, in confirmation of Gore's observation that: "At any given moment,
public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation, and
prejudice" -- remains the greatest contemporary statement of American
Revolutionary principles.
This was where our relationship began. I loved Gore immediately, for
his dangerous wit, for his savage style, for his truth telling. "Policy
formation is the province of a bipartisan power elite of corporate rich
[Rockefeller, Mellon] and their career hirelings [Nixon, McNamara] who
work through an interlocking and overlapping maze of foundations,
universities and institutes, discussion groups, associations and
commissions," he observed. "Political parties are only for finding
interesting and genial people [usually ambitious middle-class lawyers]
to ratify and implement these policies in such a way that the under
classes feel themselves to be, somehow, a part of the governmental
process. Politics is not exactly the heart of the action but it is nice
work--if you can afford to campaign for it."
In his homage to the organizer of Shays' Rebellion, Gore imagined a "Property Party" -- or,
to be more precise, he renewed an old populist critique that employed
variations on the term -- that was made up of Democrats and Republicans
with shared loyalty to their paymasters on Wall Street.
In Richard Nixon, Gore found the crudest face -- to that point, at least -- of the Property Party.
"To maintain its grip on the nation, the Property Party must keep
actual issues out of political debate. So far they have succeeded
marvelously well. Faced with unemployment, Nixon will oppose abortion.
Inflation? Marijuana is a halfway house to something worse," he
explained, in a soliloquy that, with the change of a few names and
locations, remains fresh 40 years after it was written. "The bombing
of North Vietnam? Well, pornographers are using the mailing lists of Cub
Scouts. Persuading the people to vote against their own best interests
has been the awesome genius of the American political elite from the
beginning."
But, as delicious as his prose might have been, and as delicious as
the filleting of Tricky Dick might have been, I loved Gore most for his
possession of American history -- and for his ability to use that history
to fight contemporary battles.
"Property is power, as those Massachusetts veterans of the revolution
discovered when they joined Captain Daniel Shays in his resistance to
the landed gentry's replacement of a loose confederation of states with a
tax-levying central government," Gore wrote in 1972. "The veterans
thought that they had been fighting a war for true independence. They
did not want London to be replaced by New York. They did want an
abolition of debts and a division of property. Their rebellion was
promptly put down. But so shaken was the elite by the experience that
their most important (and wealthiest) figure grimly emerged from private
life with a letter to Harry Lee. 'You talk of employing influence,'
wrote George Washington, 'to appease the present tumults in
Massachusetts. I know not where that influence is to be found, or if
attainable, that it would be a proper remedy for the disorders.
Influence is no government. Let us have one by which our lives,
liberties and properties will be secured or let us know the worst at
once.' So was born the Property Party and with it the Constitution of
the United States. We have known the 'best' for nearly 200 years. What
would the 'worst' have been like?"
Ah, now there was the question.
And a few paragraphs later came the answer: "here now exists a
potential American majority willing to see its best interests served not
through the restrictive Constitution of the elite but through the
egalitarian vision of Daniel Shays and his road not taken -- yet."
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