James Delingpole
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But still I know that, to quite a few of my British friends, the thing I’m doing would sound like hell on sea. That’s because most of the passengers on this cruise are rich Americans — worse still, rich, conservative Americans. And you’re not supposed to like them, are you? They’re one of the few categories of people left that it’s still generally acceptable to be rude about. They’re vulgar, they’re brash, they’re far too religious, and they’re quite insanely, dangerously right-wing.
Are they though? Are they really insane and dangerous? Here are my impressions of what rich, conservative Americans are like, based on a day or two’s intensive interaction with them. They like: sunshine; good food; sport; friendly service; having a flutter at the gaming tables; nice old buildings; learning new things; politeness; hanging out with like-minded folk; holidays; fun. They dislike: being ripped off; being bossed around; bureaucracy; and (generally, though not always) swearing.
So you see, apart from the swearing — and the money — part, not so very different from the rest of us. And the fact that it is fashionable to think otherwise I find as utterly reprehensible and stupidly, self-defeatingly wrong as was, say, the sneery attitude towards Jews in Dreyfus-era Paris or 1930s Vienna. Not only are these the people who create the wealth which keeps the rest of us in work; but they are also the guardians of our culture, perhaps, even the last hope of western civilisation.
Let me give you one example: a place called Hillsdale College, Michigan. It’s the only 100 per cent privately funded university in the whole of the US, and a good many of its funders are on this boat. Hillsdale looks after its donors well: onboard lectures by celebrity speakers like Dubya’s chief of staff Karl Rove; hosted dinners where they get treated to the wit and wisdom of great men like Paul Johnson (or, in the unfortunate event that poor Paul has to pull out at the last minute, certain less well-known writers, also from the Spectator); a general atmosphere of right-wing camaraderie where you can express your doubts about President Obama or the wisdom of deficit spending or man-made global warming secure in the knowledge that you won’t be spat on as a weird extremist.
In return these people look after Hillsdale, to the tune of perhaps $50 million a year. Why do they do it? Because besides being a first-class university, Hillsdale is also a last bastion in that battle to save civilisation. And if Hillsdale is Helm’s Deep, then the orcish hordes are the forces of progressivism represented by the state and federal government.
Every year, Hillsdale loses out on around $800,000 in local government funding and perhaps $10 million in national government funding as a result of its principled stance against arbitrary political authority. The resistance began in the 1970s when the Department of Health, Education and Welfare began sending in the men with clipboards to monitor whether Hillsdale was fulfilling the ‘correct’ admissions criteria with regard to race and gender. By the mid-1980s — and one lost Supreme Court case later — Hillsdale had had enough. It would risk financial ruin by going totally private.
Lest you leap to the conclusion that this is an exclusive Wasp white-flight ghetto protecting its own, consider Hillsdale’s history. Founded in 1844, it was the first college in America to have a charter declaring itself open to all students ‘irrespective of nation, color or sex’. In 1956, it lived up to these principles when its undefeated football team refused to play in the Tangerine Bowl after game officials said Hillsdale’s black players would not be allowed to join their white team mates on the field. Hillsdale has no problem with women or ethnic minorities. What it does very much have a problem with is the injustice of state-imposed reverse discrimination.
Politically, the Hillsdale donors on this cruise come in all conservative hues: from libertarian, sweary, ex-military cigar-smokers to buttoned-up God-fearing anti-abortionists. What unites them is their passionate belief that government has got too big for its boots, that the checks and balances inserted into the US constitution by the genius of the founding fathers are now being ruthlessly, cynically dismantled by the forces of the liberal-left, that their liberty has never been in quite so much danger since the second world war.
And they’re right. Which is what I personally find so weird about the way these people are so routinely tarred as uncaring, unfeeling, ignorant, selfish and morally deficient. What these US conservatives understand, as their detractors unfortunately do not, is that government money is a fiction. The state cannot ‘create’ wealth; only the private sector can. So when, instead of being properly grateful for the private sector’s generosity, the state only abuses it by raising taxes, creating stifling regulation and punishing wealth creation, it’s hardly surprising if these put-upon, decent people resist with all their might. They’re not our enemy: they’re fighting our fight. Yet still all we do is sneer.
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