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The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics
Kevin D. Williamson — the lively, literary firebrand from National Review who was too hot for the Atlantic Monthly — comes to bury democracy, not to praise it, in his irrepressibly readable new book sure to outrage and illuminate, The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics. Funny, profane, and profound, Williamson takes a flamethrower to social-media mobs, literal mobs, and the enforced conformity of identity politics in this thinking man's political book of the year.
256 pages, Hardcover
First published July 23, 2019
244 people are currently reading
818 people want to read
About the author
Kevin D. Williamson
9 books114 followersKevin D. Williamson is National Review's roving correspondent. He is the author of The End Is Near and It's Going To Be Awesome: How Going Broke Will Leave America Richer, Happier, and More Secure, The Dependency Agenda, and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism, and contributed chapters to The New Leviathan: The State Vs. the Individual in the 21st Century and Future Tense: Lessons of Culture in an Age of Upheaval. When he is not sounding the alarm about fiscal armageddon, he co-hosts the Mad Dogs & Englishmen podcast with fellow National Review writer Charles C. W. Cooke.
Williamson began his journalism career at the Bombay-based Indian Express Newspaper Group and spent 15 years in the newspaper business in Texas, Pennsylvania, and Colorado. He served as editor-in-chief of three newspapers and was the founding editor of Philadelphia's Bulletin. He is a regulator commentator on Fox News, CNBC, MSNBC, and NPR. His work has appeared in The New York Post, The New York Daily News, Commentary, Academic Questions, and The New Criterion, where he served as theater critic. He is a native of Lubbock, Texas.
Williamson began his journalism career at the Bombay-based Indian Express Newspaper Group and spent 15 years in the newspaper business in Texas, Pennsylvania, and Colorado. He served as editor-in-chief of three newspapers and was the founding editor of Philadelphia's Bulletin. He is a regulator commentator on Fox News, CNBC, MSNBC, and NPR. His work has appeared in The New York Post, The New York Daily News, Commentary, Academic Questions, and The New Criterion, where he served as theater critic. He is a native of Lubbock, Texas.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 78 reviews
May 10, 2019
Kevin D. Williamson is an extremist – his choice of word. He disdains most everyone and everything, like a good conservative, and is also a proud libertarian. He detests Donald Trump and his administration, thinks abortion is premeditated murder, and loves to call people very, shall we say, colorful names, much like Trump does. The smallest minority of the title is the individual, as befits the libertarian creed.
Not to put too fine a point on it, Williamson is opinionated. Some of his opinions are even backed up with proof sufficient to satisfy him.
-He calls the current obsession with memes “the moron bomb”. He calls them the agent of antidiscourse, the prevention of communication rather than the enablement of it. Antidiscourse recurs throughout The Smallest Minority. It’s a major meme.
-“The modern primitive is no less primitive for having a smartphone.”
-“If the 99% can’t boss around and pillage a minority that constitutes a mere 1 percent of the population, then what’s the point of democracy anyway?” He calls it “anti-Semitism for nice people.”
-He likens political discourse to dogs barking at each other.
-Speaking of the internet, he says “Outrage is intoxicating, and like other intoxicants, it makes people stupid.”
Clearly, Williamson is a provocateur. He insists on calling the Founders the Founding Fathers. A riot is honest, in his world. “The Bill of Rights ought to be titled ‘A List of Things You Idiots Don’t Get To Vote On, Because They Aren’t Up For Negotiation.’” He likes calling Trump's sons Uday and Qusay.
A lot of what Williamson describes is inherent contradiction. So for example, the way to combat Nazis is to implement policies like the Nazis did, curtailing free speech and oppressing minorities. I first learned this 40+ years ago from a comedian named Yvon Deschamps, who is still around. After a very long bit about the evils of intolerance as the root of hatred, disunity and unhappiness, Deschamps is carried off the stage yelling “Death to the intolerant!” as the battlecry of his movement to restore humanity. You can apply this contradiction to pretty much anything in life, and Williamson has filled a book with it. But at no point does it or he prove that the conservative or libertarian way is better.
He also does not cite libertarian deity Barry Goldwater, who said political ideology was not a continuum from right to left, but a circle. For example, people on the extreme left had very similar positions to his on the extreme right. He said he had more in common with extreme leftists than with the centrists in his own Republican party. So when Williamson claims antifa antifascists are fascists: yes.
In his chapter on corporations, he misrepresents the first amendment’s right of free speech, but gets it right later: “The first amendment exists to prohibit the censorship of political speech by the state.” But in between, he rails against any individual or organization attempting to keep things calm and civil, something not protected by the constitution. It’s another of those contradictions. He criticizes any law that “censors only ‘extreme’ speech – which is of course the only kind of speech that actually needs formal protection.” These meme games fly in the face of his criticism of memes, but when he employs them, it’s clever and entertaining. Up to a point.
He also discovers the single value underlying societal life – crowd control. It’s all about conformity, and those who won’t are doomed. In politics, family, work, anywhere, it’s all about conforming. It gives people a base to launch diatribes, outrage and hatred, knowing they qualify and belong. It is also stifling. This is hardly a new thought. Crowd control is the basis of religion, the feudal system, capitalism, socialism, democracy, monarchy, communism… anywhere there are numbers of people who could upset the ruling classes.
Possibly the most memorable quote is that Republicans think “angry white guys in moribund Rust Belt towns have an existential right to a 21st century standard of living with an Eisenhower-era culture.”
The longest chapter is on democracy and the appreciation of its aspects, particularly by German philosophers. Even more puzzling is the second longest chapter, which is a treatise on the devil, satan (both capitalized and lower case), his history, role and employment in western literature. The final chapter is not a conclusion but a memoir of his firing at The Atlantic, and how he came out better for it.
Williamson flings words around, but usually manages to keep the reader’s interest, much like his despised Donald Trump, who lies so often it has lost its punch as an impeachable offense (It’s hard to reconcile with Clinton being impeached – for lying). Interestingly, Williamson has perspective. He knows what people think of him and his opinions, and he admits to numerous weaknesses. In the end, it’s an entertaining book, but the reader will wonder what the point is.
Let’s just say Williamson is an iconoclast and leave it there.
David Wineberg
Not to put too fine a point on it, Williamson is opinionated. Some of his opinions are even backed up with proof sufficient to satisfy him.
-He calls the current obsession with memes “the moron bomb”. He calls them the agent of antidiscourse, the prevention of communication rather than the enablement of it. Antidiscourse recurs throughout The Smallest Minority. It’s a major meme.
-“The modern primitive is no less primitive for having a smartphone.”
-“If the 99% can’t boss around and pillage a minority that constitutes a mere 1 percent of the population, then what’s the point of democracy anyway?” He calls it “anti-Semitism for nice people.”
-He likens political discourse to dogs barking at each other.
-Speaking of the internet, he says “Outrage is intoxicating, and like other intoxicants, it makes people stupid.”
Clearly, Williamson is a provocateur. He insists on calling the Founders the Founding Fathers. A riot is honest, in his world. “The Bill of Rights ought to be titled ‘A List of Things You Idiots Don’t Get To Vote On, Because They Aren’t Up For Negotiation.’” He likes calling Trump's sons Uday and Qusay.
A lot of what Williamson describes is inherent contradiction. So for example, the way to combat Nazis is to implement policies like the Nazis did, curtailing free speech and oppressing minorities. I first learned this 40+ years ago from a comedian named Yvon Deschamps, who is still around. After a very long bit about the evils of intolerance as the root of hatred, disunity and unhappiness, Deschamps is carried off the stage yelling “Death to the intolerant!” as the battlecry of his movement to restore humanity. You can apply this contradiction to pretty much anything in life, and Williamson has filled a book with it. But at no point does it or he prove that the conservative or libertarian way is better.
He also does not cite libertarian deity Barry Goldwater, who said political ideology was not a continuum from right to left, but a circle. For example, people on the extreme left had very similar positions to his on the extreme right. He said he had more in common with extreme leftists than with the centrists in his own Republican party. So when Williamson claims antifa antifascists are fascists: yes.
In his chapter on corporations, he misrepresents the first amendment’s right of free speech, but gets it right later: “The first amendment exists to prohibit the censorship of political speech by the state.” But in between, he rails against any individual or organization attempting to keep things calm and civil, something not protected by the constitution. It’s another of those contradictions. He criticizes any law that “censors only ‘extreme’ speech – which is of course the only kind of speech that actually needs formal protection.” These meme games fly in the face of his criticism of memes, but when he employs them, it’s clever and entertaining. Up to a point.
He also discovers the single value underlying societal life – crowd control. It’s all about conformity, and those who won’t are doomed. In politics, family, work, anywhere, it’s all about conforming. It gives people a base to launch diatribes, outrage and hatred, knowing they qualify and belong. It is also stifling. This is hardly a new thought. Crowd control is the basis of religion, the feudal system, capitalism, socialism, democracy, monarchy, communism… anywhere there are numbers of people who could upset the ruling classes.
Possibly the most memorable quote is that Republicans think “angry white guys in moribund Rust Belt towns have an existential right to a 21st century standard of living with an Eisenhower-era culture.”
The longest chapter is on democracy and the appreciation of its aspects, particularly by German philosophers. Even more puzzling is the second longest chapter, which is a treatise on the devil, satan (both capitalized and lower case), his history, role and employment in western literature. The final chapter is not a conclusion but a memoir of his firing at The Atlantic, and how he came out better for it.
Williamson flings words around, but usually manages to keep the reader’s interest, much like his despised Donald Trump, who lies so often it has lost its punch as an impeachable offense (It’s hard to reconcile with Clinton being impeached – for lying). Interestingly, Williamson has perspective. He knows what people think of him and his opinions, and he admits to numerous weaknesses. In the end, it’s an entertaining book, but the reader will wonder what the point is.
Let’s just say Williamson is an iconoclast and leave it there.
David Wineberg
August 27, 2019
This is largely an enjoyable book, but it gets bogged down often by Kevin Williamson’s writing style, which reads more like an English Lit grad student’s thesis in places than it does a social commentary. This isn’t a criticism of the book so much as an expression of personal preference. I’d prefer more Williamson, less Milton.
I’d never heard of Kevin Williamson until he was abruptly fired from The Atlantic shortly after being hired, a topic he covers in the most entertaining chapter of the book. My curiosity over what the fuss was about led me to look up several of his articles, which I enjoyed despite not agreeing with everything Williamson wrote, an unintended consequence the spoiled children at The Atlantic never imagined, I’m sure.
This book is not for the easily offended, nor for those who can’t abide an opinion they don’t agree with. For the rest of us, it’s somewhat tedious in places but overall a fun read.
I’d never heard of Kevin Williamson until he was abruptly fired from The Atlantic shortly after being hired, a topic he covers in the most entertaining chapter of the book. My curiosity over what the fuss was about led me to look up several of his articles, which I enjoyed despite not agreeing with everything Williamson wrote, an unintended consequence the spoiled children at The Atlantic never imagined, I’m sure.
This book is not for the easily offended, nor for those who can’t abide an opinion they don’t agree with. For the rest of us, it’s somewhat tedious in places but overall a fun read.
April 30, 2020
"The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking In The Age of Mob Politics" - a book by Kevin D. Williamson - is perhaps the most necessary and hilarious diagnosis of the great societal disease that has plagued our modern sense of citizenship throughout this decade.
That disease is social media ochlocracy. Cancel culture. Outrage and oppression olympics. Call it whatever you want but basically - Twitter.
Even when I do not agree with him, Williamson's prose is eternally to my envy. Elegant and devastating - contemptuous, profoundly pessimistic, harsh, even heretical; he speaks with an urgency that calls for nothing less. There is no redeeming tale, no dawn upon the horizon, and no God coming to save us from ourselves. John Milton's Lucifer, actually, is the role model.
What we see today in terms of the troubling tendency of so many people to become such creatures of rage, indignation, tribalism, and cruelty towards anyone, even their own, at the drop of a hat in light of any offense real or perceived, as well as a new political culture that reflects these grotesque behaviors all the way to the presidency, is NOT, according to Williamson, evidence of democracy's failure or sabotage. On the contrary, it is evidence of its rousing success in the sense that what we have today is the result of what "the demos" desired all along.
Williamson describes social media antidiscourse as exercises in masturbation and fecal flinging (literally his words and not mine). For all our scientific advancement, as human beings we are still only barely evolved past our primate state. And social media has given you, in the current state of your meaningless, empty, sexually-frustrated, bottom feeding excuses for lives, a perpetual feedback loop of chaos that grants an implicit license for you to be as petty, bullish, malicious, and destructive as you have always wanted to be.
The game these Twitter cretins play and the currency they use is that of status. These people are peons - pond scum, and deep down they know it. So they seek to elevate themselves and their status by joining mobs and various collective efforts to tear down or deprive the status enjoyed by others. This does not begin or end with this or that blue checkmark from the Left or Right leading or facing the retweets, likes, and blocking game. It is grassroots militant democracy in action - participated in by every schmuck, pleb, and juvenile thirsting for a chance at enjoying the briefest pleasure of social power. This is you; any of you who have ever retweeted radical partisanship or added, however minimally, to the virality or viewership of something that turned out to harm a person's life. You are, or were, such a monkey. Little different in raw function from those tiki-torch clowns in Charlottesville or those masked milkshake goons in Portland.
I confess - for all the colorful and eminently quotable aspects to his descriptions of people whose behaviors I have grown to despise and sneer upon in my own, slightly toxic, fashion - there is a slightly transparent vanity in Williamson's attitudes that does not escape observation. How convenient for a man, who, just two years ago, faced the wrath of the Twitter mob in a sudden and organized force so strong that it coerced the Atlantic, of all media publications, to fire him less than a week after his celebrated joining, to conjure up an entire ideology and even manifesto explaining why he's essentially better than all of them for daring to be an individual. But Williamson does not shy away from this. He did not write "The Smallest Minority" to elicit your crocodile tears or letters of pity. He's doing fine. Better than fine, arguably. He wrote it because though the story of human monkeying has been told before, the lessons remain unlearned. And there is no one better suited to lighting this world stage on fire than he is.
So read it and learn, you damn rage monkey.
That disease is social media ochlocracy. Cancel culture. Outrage and oppression olympics. Call it whatever you want but basically - Twitter.
Even when I do not agree with him, Williamson's prose is eternally to my envy. Elegant and devastating - contemptuous, profoundly pessimistic, harsh, even heretical; he speaks with an urgency that calls for nothing less. There is no redeeming tale, no dawn upon the horizon, and no God coming to save us from ourselves. John Milton's Lucifer, actually, is the role model.
What we see today in terms of the troubling tendency of so many people to become such creatures of rage, indignation, tribalism, and cruelty towards anyone, even their own, at the drop of a hat in light of any offense real or perceived, as well as a new political culture that reflects these grotesque behaviors all the way to the presidency, is NOT, according to Williamson, evidence of democracy's failure or sabotage. On the contrary, it is evidence of its rousing success in the sense that what we have today is the result of what "the demos" desired all along.
Williamson describes social media antidiscourse as exercises in masturbation and fecal flinging (literally his words and not mine). For all our scientific advancement, as human beings we are still only barely evolved past our primate state. And social media has given you, in the current state of your meaningless, empty, sexually-frustrated, bottom feeding excuses for lives, a perpetual feedback loop of chaos that grants an implicit license for you to be as petty, bullish, malicious, and destructive as you have always wanted to be.
The game these Twitter cretins play and the currency they use is that of status. These people are peons - pond scum, and deep down they know it. So they seek to elevate themselves and their status by joining mobs and various collective efforts to tear down or deprive the status enjoyed by others. This does not begin or end with this or that blue checkmark from the Left or Right leading or facing the retweets, likes, and blocking game. It is grassroots militant democracy in action - participated in by every schmuck, pleb, and juvenile thirsting for a chance at enjoying the briefest pleasure of social power. This is you; any of you who have ever retweeted radical partisanship or added, however minimally, to the virality or viewership of something that turned out to harm a person's life. You are, or were, such a monkey. Little different in raw function from those tiki-torch clowns in Charlottesville or those masked milkshake goons in Portland.
I confess - for all the colorful and eminently quotable aspects to his descriptions of people whose behaviors I have grown to despise and sneer upon in my own, slightly toxic, fashion - there is a slightly transparent vanity in Williamson's attitudes that does not escape observation. How convenient for a man, who, just two years ago, faced the wrath of the Twitter mob in a sudden and organized force so strong that it coerced the Atlantic, of all media publications, to fire him less than a week after his celebrated joining, to conjure up an entire ideology and even manifesto explaining why he's essentially better than all of them for daring to be an individual. But Williamson does not shy away from this. He did not write "The Smallest Minority" to elicit your crocodile tears or letters of pity. He's doing fine. Better than fine, arguably. He wrote it because though the story of human monkeying has been told before, the lessons remain unlearned. And there is no one better suited to lighting this world stage on fire than he is.
So read it and learn, you damn rage monkey.
February 23, 2022
I guess there’s no point trying to insult Kevin D Williamson.
He’s above the douche-rockets with their vulgar majoritarianism. Why worry about the counting the opinions of others for:
They are masses; misery is what they do.
Kevin's above us. I’m never going to understand his joke that Caravaggio didn't paint The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew with his dick on as many levels as him.
He’s too smart for us. Too educated. Too well mentally balanced. Once again, we bungled when we demanded his firing from The Atlantic. We allowed him to ascend to his final form: a guy who writes about being fired from The Atlantic.
He says wasn’t his opinion on abortion being premeditated homicide that was the problem. Instead, it was that outrage that he was being rewarded with a position at a “prestige” magazine. The one that once seriously discussed a book that argued that immigrants weren’t really people
It is the strap-on dildo sitting there dead and plastic and inert where Western civilization used to be.
Williamson wants us to know he’s brilliantly smart guy that operates on a different level. He’s tired of American journalism in that where there should be conversation, they can offer only indictment.
If only this book could be described in such lofty terms as “indictment”.
My problem with The Smallest Minority, as is often my problem with these books, is that deeply unserious with its scholarship.
If you are going to have a run at defining “fascism” as including communism, your chapter endnotes should include citations rather than calling people names such as ghastly hunk of prom queen jerky. Where he does “try”, Williamson leans on mid-20th Century writers, begging the question as to more recent scholarship.
Here’s a hint: read the top ranked review on Liberal Fascism by present day historians.
Williamson tries to dodge that criticism with tangential ramblings about the mental defectives and intellectually dishonest frauds and oddly defensive left-liberal critics but the point is this: What Williamson says about fascism co-opting leftist thought is not the mainstream opinion. If he wants to stand his ground on that, fine, but he should put his thesis up against any book published post 1980. Or analyse an administration after Woodrow Wilson’s of 1912-1920. Otherwise it’s his own intellectual honesty in question.
There’s also a basic definitional problem in The Smallest Minority. Williamson coins the concept that today's society is subject to ochlocracy, or “mob rule”. The Wikipedia page on ochlocracy dates to 2004 yet still suffers from serious citation issues, suggesting the meaning is unsettled. That page’s example of “mob rule” is a quote about an incident involving the Roman Emperor Commodus which is, in what must surely be a crazy coincidence, the same example used by Williamson.
The wider issue with unfamiliar words is that when Williamson quotes authorities supporting his position, they might be talking about Williamson’s concept of ochlocracy, or they might not – we don’t really know because those authors use different words that might support different contentions. I am not against new ideas, but if you’re coining ostensibly academic terms in a pretty short polemic, you might need more than cribbing from an internet page containing notations such as [dubious – discuss].
Some seething young woman with an unfortunate All-Lesbian World Bowling Champion haircut.
Free speech is the lazy libertarian’s wedge issue. About the only other right Williamson mentions positively is the late Robert Mapplethorpe's unalienable right to sodomize himself with a bullwhip which I assume is a zinger amongst the cleverer set.
So The Smallest Minority isn’t very interesting because it is another persecution complex whinge. Even if you think free speech should be covered yet again, you should ask Williamson to set his sights a little higher than 1919’s hottest judgement, Schenck v. United States when he is condescending to us on free speech case law.
My feeling is this “free speech” book is a stalking horse for culture war commentary. Williamson could have had a bipartisan discussion how corporations (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube) arrogate for themselves governmental powers over free speech. Instead, Williamson sees the problem from the viewpoint that these companies willingly form part of some vaguely leftist cultural project.
The cultural war lens warps as it suits Williamson. Campus sexual assaults are an epidemic whose existence is to be found nowhere in the actual sexual-assault data because it is the revenge young women are exacting for their exploitation and the social blessing that accompanies that exploitation. Yet when the "mob" piles in on Justine Sacco, it’s all statistics on how over 70% of cyber stalking victims are women and how the affair had all the frenzy and brutality of a gang rape. For Williamson’s firing from The Atlantic, it’s a small group of young women who bully its editor into firing him. Williamson weaponizes gender as it suits his argument.
…detonating munitions on the heads of goat-bothering savages in Panjshir until all that's left looks like a hot-yoga class following a PTA meeting in Greenwich, Connecticut.
To state:
As of this writing, I am unable to find single case of a progressive leaning speaker being targeted with firebombs on a college campus.
…is outstandingly disingenuous when right wing terrorism is one of the major threats America faces. It signals that Williamson writes in bad faith. Look at his book holistically rather than trying to wade through to find the fair points amongst the dreck. It's buffoonery masked as intellect, a man letting his personal vindictiveness dominate the discourse, right down to deliberately mis-gendering Chelsea Manning.
He will always be the man who was fired from the The Atlantic, to the extent he ever impinged on the wider public consciousness.
Maybe it is impossible to insult him about that, instead it may be best to ignore him.
He’s above the douche-rockets with their vulgar majoritarianism. Why worry about the counting the opinions of others for:
They are masses; misery is what they do.
Kevin's above us. I’m never going to understand his joke that Caravaggio didn't paint The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew with his dick on as many levels as him.
He’s too smart for us. Too educated. Too well mentally balanced. Once again, we bungled when we demanded his firing from The Atlantic. We allowed him to ascend to his final form: a guy who writes about being fired from The Atlantic.
He says wasn’t his opinion on abortion being premeditated homicide that was the problem. Instead, it was that outrage that he was being rewarded with a position at a “prestige” magazine. The one that once seriously discussed a book that argued that immigrants weren’t really people
It is the strap-on dildo sitting there dead and plastic and inert where Western civilization used to be.
Williamson wants us to know he’s brilliantly smart guy that operates on a different level. He’s tired of American journalism in that where there should be conversation, they can offer only indictment.
If only this book could be described in such lofty terms as “indictment”.
My problem with The Smallest Minority, as is often my problem with these books, is that deeply unserious with its scholarship.
If you are going to have a run at defining “fascism” as including communism, your chapter endnotes should include citations rather than calling people names such as ghastly hunk of prom queen jerky. Where he does “try”, Williamson leans on mid-20th Century writers, begging the question as to more recent scholarship.
Here’s a hint: read the top ranked review on Liberal Fascism by present day historians.
Williamson tries to dodge that criticism with tangential ramblings about the mental defectives and intellectually dishonest frauds and oddly defensive left-liberal critics but the point is this: What Williamson says about fascism co-opting leftist thought is not the mainstream opinion. If he wants to stand his ground on that, fine, but he should put his thesis up against any book published post 1980. Or analyse an administration after Woodrow Wilson’s of 1912-1920. Otherwise it’s his own intellectual honesty in question.
There’s also a basic definitional problem in The Smallest Minority. Williamson coins the concept that today's society is subject to ochlocracy, or “mob rule”. The Wikipedia page on ochlocracy dates to 2004 yet still suffers from serious citation issues, suggesting the meaning is unsettled. That page’s example of “mob rule” is a quote about an incident involving the Roman Emperor Commodus which is, in what must surely be a crazy coincidence, the same example used by Williamson.
The wider issue with unfamiliar words is that when Williamson quotes authorities supporting his position, they might be talking about Williamson’s concept of ochlocracy, or they might not – we don’t really know because those authors use different words that might support different contentions. I am not against new ideas, but if you’re coining ostensibly academic terms in a pretty short polemic, you might need more than cribbing from an internet page containing notations such as [dubious – discuss].
Some seething young woman with an unfortunate All-Lesbian World Bowling Champion haircut.
Free speech is the lazy libertarian’s wedge issue. About the only other right Williamson mentions positively is the late Robert Mapplethorpe's unalienable right to sodomize himself with a bullwhip which I assume is a zinger amongst the cleverer set.
So The Smallest Minority isn’t very interesting because it is another persecution complex whinge. Even if you think free speech should be covered yet again, you should ask Williamson to set his sights a little higher than 1919’s hottest judgement, Schenck v. United States when he is condescending to us on free speech case law.
My feeling is this “free speech” book is a stalking horse for culture war commentary. Williamson could have had a bipartisan discussion how corporations (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube) arrogate for themselves governmental powers over free speech. Instead, Williamson sees the problem from the viewpoint that these companies willingly form part of some vaguely leftist cultural project.
The cultural war lens warps as it suits Williamson. Campus sexual assaults are an epidemic whose existence is to be found nowhere in the actual sexual-assault data because it is the revenge young women are exacting for their exploitation and the social blessing that accompanies that exploitation. Yet when the "mob" piles in on Justine Sacco, it’s all statistics on how over 70% of cyber stalking victims are women and how the affair had all the frenzy and brutality of a gang rape. For Williamson’s firing from The Atlantic, it’s a small group of young women who bully its editor into firing him. Williamson weaponizes gender as it suits his argument.
…detonating munitions on the heads of goat-bothering savages in Panjshir until all that's left looks like a hot-yoga class following a PTA meeting in Greenwich, Connecticut.
To state:
As of this writing, I am unable to find single case of a progressive leaning speaker being targeted with firebombs on a college campus.
…is outstandingly disingenuous when right wing terrorism is one of the major threats America faces. It signals that Williamson writes in bad faith. Look at his book holistically rather than trying to wade through to find the fair points amongst the dreck. It's buffoonery masked as intellect, a man letting his personal vindictiveness dominate the discourse, right down to deliberately mis-gendering Chelsea Manning.
He will always be the man who was fired from the The Atlantic, to the extent he ever impinged on the wider public consciousness.
Maybe it is impossible to insult him about that, instead it may be best to ignore him.
May 16, 2019
For my money, Kevin D. Williamson is one of the most insightful, engaging, and downright interesting commentators on the political right today. I'm a loyal reader of his columns and dispatches in National Review and enjoyed reading his theater reviews that used to run in The New Criterion. If there's a silver lining to Kevin being ingloriously sacked by (as he refers to The Atlantic) that "august journalistic institution," it's that as his profile has risen, he can now be found in more (widely circulating) outlets like the New York Post and Wall Street Journal.
That is all to say, I'm a big fan of Kevin's writing and very much looked forward to reading his latest book, The Smallest Minority.
Fundamentally, this book is a defense of individualism and a denunciation of the populism, conformity, and outrage politics that have infected virtually all facets of life. That Kevin is an iconoclast is a profound understatement, and given his recent professional history, he is well-qualified to write this sort of book.
At the outset, Kevin wryly notes that he's "not going to make this easy on [us]" before diving headlong into a whirlwind intellectual history of mob politics, drawing upon ancient history, Shakespeare, political philosophy (especially that of the Germany variety), current social science, and everything in between. In roughly the second half of the book, Kevin returns to the present day, using this background material to forcefully skewer the conformism currently running loose in corporations, the news media, across social media, and our current politics. Finally, Kevin devotes a few pages to describing his experience being hired and then immediately fired by that august journalistic institution thanks to the precise mob politics he so effectively goes after in this book. He's written bits and pieces of this material before, but it's nice to be able to read it all in one place, and it's a whole lot more interesting and engaging than he gives it credit for.
This is a relatively quick read, and Kevin's wit and jocular use of footnotes helps to keep what is fairly deep and erudite philosophical material reasonably light and accessible. I was entertained, I learned something, and I now probably feel more pessimistic after reading the book than before. What's not to like?
That is all to say, I'm a big fan of Kevin's writing and very much looked forward to reading his latest book, The Smallest Minority.
Fundamentally, this book is a defense of individualism and a denunciation of the populism, conformity, and outrage politics that have infected virtually all facets of life. That Kevin is an iconoclast is a profound understatement, and given his recent professional history, he is well-qualified to write this sort of book.
At the outset, Kevin wryly notes that he's "not going to make this easy on [us]" before diving headlong into a whirlwind intellectual history of mob politics, drawing upon ancient history, Shakespeare, political philosophy (especially that of the Germany variety), current social science, and everything in between. In roughly the second half of the book, Kevin returns to the present day, using this background material to forcefully skewer the conformism currently running loose in corporations, the news media, across social media, and our current politics. Finally, Kevin devotes a few pages to describing his experience being hired and then immediately fired by that august journalistic institution thanks to the precise mob politics he so effectively goes after in this book. He's written bits and pieces of this material before, but it's nice to be able to read it all in one place, and it's a whole lot more interesting and engaging than he gives it credit for.
This is a relatively quick read, and Kevin's wit and jocular use of footnotes helps to keep what is fairly deep and erudite philosophical material reasonably light and accessible. I was entertained, I learned something, and I now probably feel more pessimistic after reading the book than before. What's not to like?
May 19, 2019
[Full disclosure: Product was an uncorrected proof received for free. I was contacted by the Publisher through this website, to read and review the book. Honestly one of the coolest things that has happened to me in the age of the internet.]
I read every article Kevin writes, I learned about Kevin while watching Red Eye every morning, when that glorious show was still on. I look forward to Mad Dogs and Englishman, his podcast with Charles Cooke. So to say I come in with a bias might be fair.
He is smart. His writing makes you think. He is different from other political writers, on both sides, in that he doesn't care so much what the reader thinks of him as making the reader the think.
The last two chapters on our satans and the autobiographical story of his firing from The Atlantic are great and really leave you wanting more (my copy was only 203 pages). The book is really a collection of essays revolving around a singular focus, Independent Thinking. I would have liked to have read some more about Kevin's work on lower class economics and culture, he really was J.D. Vance before Hillbilly Elegy was made must-read by the media, and I would implore readers to search these out on the internet.
If you look at my books read, I read a lot of books about political thought, if you have read any Stephen Pinker or Jonah Goldberg, Kevin is the funnier, punk who calls out the sh**. For people looking for an engaging challenging read about why Independent thinking is important and why humanity can never get it right, BUY THIS BOOK!!!!
Then with his next book they may send it to you for free...👍
I read every article Kevin writes, I learned about Kevin while watching Red Eye every morning, when that glorious show was still on. I look forward to Mad Dogs and Englishman, his podcast with Charles Cooke. So to say I come in with a bias might be fair.
He is smart. His writing makes you think. He is different from other political writers, on both sides, in that he doesn't care so much what the reader thinks of him as making the reader the think.
The last two chapters on our satans and the autobiographical story of his firing from The Atlantic are great and really leave you wanting more (my copy was only 203 pages). The book is really a collection of essays revolving around a singular focus, Independent Thinking. I would have liked to have read some more about Kevin's work on lower class economics and culture, he really was J.D. Vance before Hillbilly Elegy was made must-read by the media, and I would implore readers to search these out on the internet.
If you look at my books read, I read a lot of books about political thought, if you have read any Stephen Pinker or Jonah Goldberg, Kevin is the funnier, punk who calls out the sh**. For people looking for an engaging challenging read about why Independent thinking is important and why humanity can never get it right, BUY THIS BOOK!!!!
Then with his next book they may send it to you for free...👍
October 6, 2019
The author might have some interesting ideas, but instead of expressing them, he'd rather just belt out serial insults at things he disagrees with. Nothing novel here to engage with. Skip it.
January 10, 2021
Kevin Williamson is smart. Kevin Williamson is angry. The experience of reading this book -- a collection of essays on the theme of dissent -- is an experience of bouncing back and forth between these two moods.
Angry Williamson snarls about "media hate-fucks" and snarks about Jeffrey Goldberg's scrotum (really). Smart Williamson analyzes Shakespeare's views of the ordered society and Dante's conception of an insensate Satan, and makes an interesting case as to what they say about the case of Justine Sacco and the presidency of Donald Trump.
Williamson is frequently wrong (his treatment of transgender people and his views on abortion are extremist, a label he is happy to accept), but he's never boring. A writer who writes with flair and with passion is much more worth reading than a writer who is merely right.
Angry Williamson snarls about "media hate-fucks" and snarks about Jeffrey Goldberg's scrotum (really). Smart Williamson analyzes Shakespeare's views of the ordered society and Dante's conception of an insensate Satan, and makes an interesting case as to what they say about the case of Justine Sacco and the presidency of Donald Trump.
Williamson is frequently wrong (his treatment of transgender people and his views on abortion are extremist, a label he is happy to accept), but he's never boring. A writer who writes with flair and with passion is much more worth reading than a writer who is merely right.
September 17, 2019
Kevin Williamson is one of my favorite writers at National Review and elsewhere that he may appear. It's almost impossible to misunderstand him, unless he throws around one or another of those kinds of vocabulary words that make you mark your place when you head to the dictionary. His points of view are up front and not hidden behind attempts to make palatable what he believes to be true but difficult. He's witty and can be hilarious when he trains his keyboard on a target that the reader also rather mislikes, but he goes out of his way to make certain that every accusation has backup and sourcing. His The Case Against Trump made it clear why people would have been better off voting for someone else and should have been stapled to every briefing paper every GOP presidential hopeful received leading up to the primary season, so they could realize what they were doing when they tried to position themselves to pick up the coiffed one's supporters when he dropped out. The End Is Near (And It's Going to Be Awesome) clearly explains how everyone's failure to rein in government spending will provoke an economic collapse that might lead us to better ways of doing things. The Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism explains even to the meanest of intellects why that system will never work with human beings. I enjoy his podcast with NR online editor Charles Cooke, even down to the psych-out abrupt endings.
All of which means I really wanted to like The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics. I liked the idea of it: Encouraging people to take up the actual responsibilities of being citizens of our republic instead of outsourcing our thinking to systems ill-equipped to handle it, such as memes or Twitter. I think generalizing thoughts about groups of people is a good way to increase tensions between them and lead to dangerous kinds of bigotry and prejudice and that we do better as individuals a society and a country when we take people in smaller groups or even one-on-one. Those tenets are part of Williamson's basic argument in Minority.
He also points out that the United States Constitution was not designed to govern a direct democracy, but instead protect the people from the consequences of such a government when it was mishandled. After all, mob rule is just a more energetic form of democracy, in which the majority can install a tyranny as it sees fit and demand that others follow it, individual conscience be damned. These are all good thoughts and I agree with them. I don't even mind so much when Williamson works within his usual caustic tone that jabs as much as it argues, but his dyspepsia here is what eventually weakens Minority and make one hope for someone else to cover it in a more palatable tone.
In the chapter on democracy, for example, Williamson decries how a whole lot of the people who have the right to vote don't really know enough to use that right in a responsible way that will elect qualified people who can do the jobs we ask them to do. Such people are just a few generations away, he says, from chimpanzees flinging feces around at each other and yet their hands are on the levers of power. I would agree we have a lot of people who don't bring much information or wisdom into the voting booths with them. But they're not just a few generations away from chimps, Kevin. They're the same several million generations removed that the rest of us are, even though they want to act without much thinking. Being disappointed and disgusted with them is understandable and some hyperbole serves to make the case -- but at this level, laced with this much disdain? Condemn me if I'd rather laugh with the chimps than sneer with the savants, Kev, but you had the choice and the tools to approach the matter better -- and you didn't.
When taking aim at recent campus trends to do more than just bemoan or protest "undesirable" speakers but to gather in masked mobs as "antifa" and actually commit violence to prevent those events from happening, Williamson references columnist and author Ann Coulter in a footnote. I've little interest in Coulter's ideas or her manner of sharing them. If they're good they usually get expressed better by someone who's not as much of a jerk about it as she is. But in the note Williamson describes her as a "ghastly hunk of prom queen jerky." Nothing in what Williamson says in the chapter requires this kind of damning reference to Coulter's appearance; if it did he wouldn't have stuck it in a snide footnote. As an author and speaker, Coulter offers targets aplenty for those who would wish to point out that she is more of a burden which free speech requires us to carry than a pillar that supports it. Any of them would have made that point without a bitchy little ring-the-doorbell-and-run-away shot at her looks. Again, Kevin, you had the choice and the tools to do something better, but you didn't.
As a person who values the rights of the individual, the way our governmental system was set up to protect them and is worried about how modern moves like cancel culture, intersectionality and the immaturity that social media both fuels and is fed by can erode such rights, I'm glad to see discussions about those matters make it into print. As a reader who wants to explore them in a useful manner, I'll be keeping my eyes open for treatments that do so with less acid than Smallest Minority.
Original available here.
All of which means I really wanted to like The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics. I liked the idea of it: Encouraging people to take up the actual responsibilities of being citizens of our republic instead of outsourcing our thinking to systems ill-equipped to handle it, such as memes or Twitter. I think generalizing thoughts about groups of people is a good way to increase tensions between them and lead to dangerous kinds of bigotry and prejudice and that we do better as individuals a society and a country when we take people in smaller groups or even one-on-one. Those tenets are part of Williamson's basic argument in Minority.
He also points out that the United States Constitution was not designed to govern a direct democracy, but instead protect the people from the consequences of such a government when it was mishandled. After all, mob rule is just a more energetic form of democracy, in which the majority can install a tyranny as it sees fit and demand that others follow it, individual conscience be damned. These are all good thoughts and I agree with them. I don't even mind so much when Williamson works within his usual caustic tone that jabs as much as it argues, but his dyspepsia here is what eventually weakens Minority and make one hope for someone else to cover it in a more palatable tone.
In the chapter on democracy, for example, Williamson decries how a whole lot of the people who have the right to vote don't really know enough to use that right in a responsible way that will elect qualified people who can do the jobs we ask them to do. Such people are just a few generations away, he says, from chimpanzees flinging feces around at each other and yet their hands are on the levers of power. I would agree we have a lot of people who don't bring much information or wisdom into the voting booths with them. But they're not just a few generations away from chimps, Kevin. They're the same several million generations removed that the rest of us are, even though they want to act without much thinking. Being disappointed and disgusted with them is understandable and some hyperbole serves to make the case -- but at this level, laced with this much disdain? Condemn me if I'd rather laugh with the chimps than sneer with the savants, Kev, but you had the choice and the tools to approach the matter better -- and you didn't.
When taking aim at recent campus trends to do more than just bemoan or protest "undesirable" speakers but to gather in masked mobs as "antifa" and actually commit violence to prevent those events from happening, Williamson references columnist and author Ann Coulter in a footnote. I've little interest in Coulter's ideas or her manner of sharing them. If they're good they usually get expressed better by someone who's not as much of a jerk about it as she is. But in the note Williamson describes her as a "ghastly hunk of prom queen jerky." Nothing in what Williamson says in the chapter requires this kind of damning reference to Coulter's appearance; if it did he wouldn't have stuck it in a snide footnote. As an author and speaker, Coulter offers targets aplenty for those who would wish to point out that she is more of a burden which free speech requires us to carry than a pillar that supports it. Any of them would have made that point without a bitchy little ring-the-doorbell-and-run-away shot at her looks. Again, Kevin, you had the choice and the tools to do something better, but you didn't.
As a person who values the rights of the individual, the way our governmental system was set up to protect them and is worried about how modern moves like cancel culture, intersectionality and the immaturity that social media both fuels and is fed by can erode such rights, I'm glad to see discussions about those matters make it into print. As a reader who wants to explore them in a useful manner, I'll be keeping my eyes open for treatments that do so with less acid than Smallest Minority.
Original available here.
December 20, 2022
Kevin Williamson really wants you to know that he's not mad about getting fired from the Atlantic. Seriously just read this book. It'll be obvious how so not mad he is.
August 4, 2022
The title, "the smallest minority" refers to the individual. So this is a libertarian book. If that is not convincing, on the page that usually has the dedication, the author instead states that he "took" the title from Ayn Rand because she does not deserve it.
The first chapter's title is "A Volscian Commission." Its not clear to me why its called that since the Volsci were an Italic Osco-Umbrian tribe, well known in the history of the first century of the Roman Republic, according to Wikipedia, and there is no further mention of them in the chapter. Wikipedia often provides a "significance in broader culture” paragraph if it is warranted but perhaps forgot to here. It would seem to me more likely that Williamson wants to impress the reader with his intellect.
There are two chapter headings (out of eleven) that are clever, however: "The Road to Smurfdom" and "Shouting Fire in a Crowded Feedback Loop." (Tip of the hat to Hayek and Holmes.)
I believe the field of libertarianism has been so thoroughly gone over that Williamson is forced to resort to words like "ochlocracy" instead of "mob rule" and "streitbare Demokratie" instead of "militant democracy." There is also a liberal sprinkling of Latin words and phrases and Shakespeare quotations, some of them long enough to require indented margins. I'm sure Williamson knows the word for that too; he knows that the word for the squiggle or flourish at the end of a signature is a "paraph." He also uses a little symbol to mark subsections (I sure he knows the word for that too) that resembles the Fat Boy atomic bomb.
The chapter "Jeffrey and Me" about his firing or cancelling at "Atlantic [Monthly]" is quite humorous and cautionary and well worth reading. But then he goes and ends the chapter with:
But you don't need to worry about guys like Jeffrey and me. We're going to do fine.
It's the rest of you poor dumb bastards who need worrying about.
Obviously Jeffrey doesn't need worrying about since Jeff Bezos' ex-wife is his mistress; and anyone who knows the slightest thing about Ayn Rand-ism knows that her disciples don't like to be mollycoddled anyway.
While I agreed with everything I read, and I only got halfway through the third chapter, I was a little put off by the profanity and aggressive tone and will probably stick to Chuck Klosterman next time I'm in the mood for this kind of outre writing.
The first chapter's title is "A Volscian Commission." Its not clear to me why its called that since the Volsci were an Italic Osco-Umbrian tribe, well known in the history of the first century of the Roman Republic, according to Wikipedia, and there is no further mention of them in the chapter. Wikipedia often provides a "significance in broader culture” paragraph if it is warranted but perhaps forgot to here. It would seem to me more likely that Williamson wants to impress the reader with his intellect.
There are two chapter headings (out of eleven) that are clever, however: "The Road to Smurfdom" and "Shouting Fire in a Crowded Feedback Loop." (Tip of the hat to Hayek and Holmes.)
I believe the field of libertarianism has been so thoroughly gone over that Williamson is forced to resort to words like "ochlocracy" instead of "mob rule" and "streitbare Demokratie" instead of "militant democracy." There is also a liberal sprinkling of Latin words and phrases and Shakespeare quotations, some of them long enough to require indented margins. I'm sure Williamson knows the word for that too; he knows that the word for the squiggle or flourish at the end of a signature is a "paraph." He also uses a little symbol to mark subsections (I sure he knows the word for that too) that resembles the Fat Boy atomic bomb.
The chapter "Jeffrey and Me" about his firing or cancelling at "Atlantic [Monthly]" is quite humorous and cautionary and well worth reading. But then he goes and ends the chapter with:
But you don't need to worry about guys like Jeffrey and me. We're going to do fine.
It's the rest of you poor dumb bastards who need worrying about.
Obviously Jeffrey doesn't need worrying about since Jeff Bezos' ex-wife is his mistress; and anyone who knows the slightest thing about Ayn Rand-ism knows that her disciples don't like to be mollycoddled anyway.
While I agreed with everything I read, and I only got halfway through the third chapter, I was a little put off by the profanity and aggressive tone and will probably stick to Chuck Klosterman next time I'm in the mood for this kind of outre writing.
August 22, 2019
This book hovers somewhere between three and four stars. Williamson starts out laying a lot of sometimes-bland groundwork before getting back to his usual self. He discusses several decades, even centuries, of thought related to mob rule and its (tight) connection to democracy. Williamson is at his best when he is skewering modern society, and it is when he gets to this mode that the book really heats up. His thoughts on those today who use social media for affirmation and in-group bonding are penetrating and, I would argue, accurate. He doesn't seem interested in offering much in the way of solutions, besides the trite-sounding but in fact useful challenge to think for one's self and not to worry so much about what others around you think of you.
He does write a little about his three-day employment at the Atlantic, but those looking for a full dissection of that sorry episode will be disappointed. Williamson is intentionally an in-your-face type of writer, leading him down roads of crudity and vulgarism that are entirely unnecessary, and probably wrong for one who claims to be a Christian. His points are strong, clear, sometimes surprising, and can stand on their own.
He does write a little about his three-day employment at the Atlantic, but those looking for a full dissection of that sorry episode will be disappointed. Williamson is intentionally an in-your-face type of writer, leading him down roads of crudity and vulgarism that are entirely unnecessary, and probably wrong for one who claims to be a Christian. His points are strong, clear, sometimes surprising, and can stand on their own.
February 15, 2022
Author / columnist Kevin Williamson discusses the individual vs. the majority in the current atmosphere of censorship and cancel culture. The individual is what Ayn Rand called the smallest minority, and interestingly Mr. Williamson alleges that Ms. Rand is undeserving of the quote. By majority Williamson is referring to the Ochlocracy (i.e., mob rule). Imo, in this book Mr. Williamson writes with a pretentious tone and his prose was difficult to follow (although some of his footnotes and pop culture references were pretty funny). Some cool quotes / interesting arguments: On censorship he quoted Tyrion Lannister “When you tear out a man’s tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you’re only telling the world that you fear what he might say.”; On mobilizing the mob he quoted Eric Hoffer “Mass movements can rise and spread without a belief in god, but never without a belief in the devil.”; and On the problem of illiberal democracy Mr. Williamson argues that the word “democracy” has become a rhetorical shorthand for good, decent, and accountable government, and he also reminds us that what matters to a flourishing society is liberty - which is why in the United States we have long cherished deeply antidemocratic institutions such as the Supreme Court and the Bill of Rights, which both function to restrict the power of the majority.
September 1, 2019
I am an enormous Kevin Williamson fan, and love his writing, especially on economics (even though he’s a literature graduate). I was hooked when I read the “A Note from the Author: “I took the title of this book from Ayn Rand. I took it from her because she doesn’t deserve it.” The book isn’t just about social media and politics, but really about group dynamics and mass psychology. Williamson begins with “The original sin of the American intellectual is his desire to be popular.” In the UK, journalists view themselves as part of the world of literature, in the USA, they are part of the world of politics. These are the best of times by any measurable standard: poverty decreasing; longevity; medical advances, etc., yet the masses are not happy. Misery is what they do. This outrage and dread has risen along with social media. Communication is only incidental to social media. The chief commodity of social media is outrage—a fantastic insight. “Social media is the birth control pill of political discourse, as it has fundamentally changed the nature of an entire broad category of human relationships by rendering them sterile.” Some say he’s too hard on social media, but can anyone really disagree with the diagnosis here, in terms of the impact on political discourse, not your grandparents keeping track of your comings and goings on Facebook? “Outrage is intoxicating, and like other intoxicants, it makes people stupid.” He points out that “sentimentality” is not a synonym for “sweetness.” It is, rather, the tendency to be controlled by sentiment, and hatred and envy are sentiments.
We think in language. We signal in memes. Memes are the instrument of antidiscourse, according to Williamson—i.e., “communication designed and deployed to prevent the exchange of information and perspectives rather than to enable it. Its purpose is to lower the status of rivals and enemies.” Love that! This is why the desire to be popular is the original sin of the intellectual: he ceases to perform any useful function, abandons culture for Instant Culture, discourse for antidiscourse, and truth-seeking for status-seeking. Culture is conversation, and we are doing less of it these days. Language is how we think; culture is where we think. Groups do not think—people think, one at a time, and they exchange thoughts.
Williamson does an excellent defining, explaining, and analyzing Ochlocracy—periodic and desultory mob rule, along with streitbare Demokratie (militant democracy), associated with postwar Germany; the idea that liberal democracies must sometimes resort to illiberal and antidemocratic techniques, such as suppressing certain types of speech or political parties. Eric Hoffer also does a great job with this in his book, The True Believer. This is “defining danger down” according to Williamson, since most of the “dangers” that cause outrage are hardly real threats at all. This happens when we elevate the importance of hypothetical evils over real evils. Ann Coulter speaking at Berkeley, for instance. In fact, the violence takes place amongst the opponents to her free speech, or those AGs who want to jail people for having the “wrong” views on climate change—a chilling possibility. Or social media sites “de-platforming” certain views—usually on the right, Dennis Prager, Hillsdale College—under the auspices of “safety.” White supremacy is not the American zeitgeist. “Mob rule is not a mere riot: It is what happens when the mob successfully recruits the state to act as its henchman.”
Williamson is no fan of democracy. The book ends: “Democracy has always been the enemy of minority rights. It always will be. And the biggest democracies will always be a dangerous place for the smallest minority. I like the insight: “We rely on procedural democracy as a substitute for violence.” He cites the Adlai Stevenson reply to a reporter that told him he had the support of all thinking people. “That’s not enough, I need a majority!” If we had waited on a vote to free the slaves, slavery would have lasted another century or more (this is debatable, but the broader point is true). Evil ideas can have a long shelf life (USSR, 1917-1991), and Hitler rose through largely democratic means. Fascism was not an ideology but a technique, which is a great point, since it wasn’t really founded on corporatist economics, anti-Semitism, or glorification of the military. It was a technique for gaining and holding power, for the sake of power alone. Adolf Hitler, asked if he intended to nationalize German industries, is said to have replied: “I shall nationalize the people.” Along with authoritarianism, that’s an excellent description of fascism.
Williamson contrasts the views and worries Erich Fromm, Hayek, and William Whyte, author of the Organizational Man, and even though they had varying political views, all were worried about conformity to organizations. Williamson describes human resources departments as “the ninth infernal circle of the tepid and mushy hellscape of corporate culture. He doesn’t have much use for talk radio: “I do not want these voices in my head. Insane people have voices in their heads, and I am not insane.”
He does discuss his firing from The Atlantic, but in the broader context of being taken out by the mob. I’m sure glad it didn’t hurt him, and in fact got this book out quicker and moved him to bigger platforms, such as the WSJ, Washington Post, New York Post, and of course, he’s back at National Review. Be prepared to think—and sardonically laugh—your way through this book. It’s an excellent analysis of our culture today.
We think in language. We signal in memes. Memes are the instrument of antidiscourse, according to Williamson—i.e., “communication designed and deployed to prevent the exchange of information and perspectives rather than to enable it. Its purpose is to lower the status of rivals and enemies.” Love that! This is why the desire to be popular is the original sin of the intellectual: he ceases to perform any useful function, abandons culture for Instant Culture, discourse for antidiscourse, and truth-seeking for status-seeking. Culture is conversation, and we are doing less of it these days. Language is how we think; culture is where we think. Groups do not think—people think, one at a time, and they exchange thoughts.
Williamson does an excellent defining, explaining, and analyzing Ochlocracy—periodic and desultory mob rule, along with streitbare Demokratie (militant democracy), associated with postwar Germany; the idea that liberal democracies must sometimes resort to illiberal and antidemocratic techniques, such as suppressing certain types of speech or political parties. Eric Hoffer also does a great job with this in his book, The True Believer. This is “defining danger down” according to Williamson, since most of the “dangers” that cause outrage are hardly real threats at all. This happens when we elevate the importance of hypothetical evils over real evils. Ann Coulter speaking at Berkeley, for instance. In fact, the violence takes place amongst the opponents to her free speech, or those AGs who want to jail people for having the “wrong” views on climate change—a chilling possibility. Or social media sites “de-platforming” certain views—usually on the right, Dennis Prager, Hillsdale College—under the auspices of “safety.” White supremacy is not the American zeitgeist. “Mob rule is not a mere riot: It is what happens when the mob successfully recruits the state to act as its henchman.”
Williamson is no fan of democracy. The book ends: “Democracy has always been the enemy of minority rights. It always will be. And the biggest democracies will always be a dangerous place for the smallest minority. I like the insight: “We rely on procedural democracy as a substitute for violence.” He cites the Adlai Stevenson reply to a reporter that told him he had the support of all thinking people. “That’s not enough, I need a majority!” If we had waited on a vote to free the slaves, slavery would have lasted another century or more (this is debatable, but the broader point is true). Evil ideas can have a long shelf life (USSR, 1917-1991), and Hitler rose through largely democratic means. Fascism was not an ideology but a technique, which is a great point, since it wasn’t really founded on corporatist economics, anti-Semitism, or glorification of the military. It was a technique for gaining and holding power, for the sake of power alone. Adolf Hitler, asked if he intended to nationalize German industries, is said to have replied: “I shall nationalize the people.” Along with authoritarianism, that’s an excellent description of fascism.
Williamson contrasts the views and worries Erich Fromm, Hayek, and William Whyte, author of the Organizational Man, and even though they had varying political views, all were worried about conformity to organizations. Williamson describes human resources departments as “the ninth infernal circle of the tepid and mushy hellscape of corporate culture. He doesn’t have much use for talk radio: “I do not want these voices in my head. Insane people have voices in their heads, and I am not insane.”
He does discuss his firing from The Atlantic, but in the broader context of being taken out by the mob. I’m sure glad it didn’t hurt him, and in fact got this book out quicker and moved him to bigger platforms, such as the WSJ, Washington Post, New York Post, and of course, he’s back at National Review. Be prepared to think—and sardonically laugh—your way through this book. It’s an excellent analysis of our culture today.
January 3, 2020
Aside from its prose, the one thing about THE SMALLEST MINORITY that is pellucidly crystalline in its clarity is Williamson's contempt for his audience. You always know where Williamson is pointing the muzzle of his rhetorical blunderbuss, and in this book it is pointed right at you and me. (When, that is, it's not pointed at the staff of The Atlantic, from which he was unceremoniously ousted--which Williamson seems to want to forget but can't, like a scab you keep picking.)
What did we do? you might very well ask. Making smart-ass comments on Twitter is part of it; THE SMALLEST MINORITY (when it's not an exegesis on libertarian theory or score-settling) is a diatribe against social media. Which, okay, I am on too much, and so are you, probably, I mean, who actually knows. And... well, it's not good, and not good for you, sure, and if you're using it to get the rage out of your system, then that's even worse. So there's a point to be made there, certainly.
But I think that, maybe, there's a way to make that argument without...
I say that, and I don't know what I am arguing for. I would not, for the world, not want to neuter Kevin Williamson, or water him down, or whatever your preferred metaphor might be. And I am not going to pretend I don't enjoy it when Williamson rains down fire on Elizabeth Warren and then whine when a few briquettes fall my way. (Not me personally, you understand.)
So I am not going to stand here and complain because Kevin Williamson isn't nice in this book, because I don't want that. What keeps me from giving this five stars, though, isn't the aggressive, naked contempt that's displayed.
Instead, it's the egotism. I see nothing in general wrong with egotism; I have a fair-sized ego myself. It's hard to avoid charges of egotism when you're trying to sell books (like A CIRCLE OF FIRELIGHT, available at a bookstore near you on February 20, 2020, although you'll have to ask for it). But there's egotism, and then there is what Williamson displays in this book, which is--and I am not exaggerating when I say this--Satanic in its scope.
It's the egotism, I think, that undercuts the argument. The argument, such as it is, is "Sod off, Swampy." It is not you shut up, which is the tactic of the Left and the basis of "cancel culture." Williamson is here arguing for free speech and selective listening--you can say whatever you want, but don't expect me to give a rat's ass.
The problem is, from someone who is supremely egotistcal, "Sod off, Swampy" sounds an awful lot like "You shut up." Hell may be a free-speech zone, but nobody ever listens to anybody but Satan.
What bothers me about this is not that it's Williamson setting himself up as the Dark Lord of the Conservative Movement, is that we keep getting into these stupid drag-queen-story-hour slap-fights on the right, when we ought to be, you know, figuring out what, exactly, we can do about a leviathan federal government, feckless political hacks, and out-of-control entitlement programs. There's bigger game afoot, and it will take more than the Smallest Minority to bring it down.
What did we do? you might very well ask. Making smart-ass comments on Twitter is part of it; THE SMALLEST MINORITY (when it's not an exegesis on libertarian theory or score-settling) is a diatribe against social media. Which, okay, I am on too much, and so are you, probably, I mean, who actually knows. And... well, it's not good, and not good for you, sure, and if you're using it to get the rage out of your system, then that's even worse. So there's a point to be made there, certainly.
But I think that, maybe, there's a way to make that argument without...
I say that, and I don't know what I am arguing for. I would not, for the world, not want to neuter Kevin Williamson, or water him down, or whatever your preferred metaphor might be. And I am not going to pretend I don't enjoy it when Williamson rains down fire on Elizabeth Warren and then whine when a few briquettes fall my way. (Not me personally, you understand.)
So I am not going to stand here and complain because Kevin Williamson isn't nice in this book, because I don't want that. What keeps me from giving this five stars, though, isn't the aggressive, naked contempt that's displayed.
Instead, it's the egotism. I see nothing in general wrong with egotism; I have a fair-sized ego myself. It's hard to avoid charges of egotism when you're trying to sell books (like A CIRCLE OF FIRELIGHT, available at a bookstore near you on February 20, 2020, although you'll have to ask for it). But there's egotism, and then there is what Williamson displays in this book, which is--and I am not exaggerating when I say this--Satanic in its scope.
It's the egotism, I think, that undercuts the argument. The argument, such as it is, is "Sod off, Swampy." It is not you shut up, which is the tactic of the Left and the basis of "cancel culture." Williamson is here arguing for free speech and selective listening--you can say whatever you want, but don't expect me to give a rat's ass.
The problem is, from someone who is supremely egotistcal, "Sod off, Swampy" sounds an awful lot like "You shut up." Hell may be a free-speech zone, but nobody ever listens to anybody but Satan.
What bothers me about this is not that it's Williamson setting himself up as the Dark Lord of the Conservative Movement, is that we keep getting into these stupid drag-queen-story-hour slap-fights on the right, when we ought to be, you know, figuring out what, exactly, we can do about a leviathan federal government, feckless political hacks, and out-of-control entitlement programs. There's bigger game afoot, and it will take more than the Smallest Minority to bring it down.
May 28, 2019
I am pretty new to the world of books written by political commentators. While I love the punchiness and focus found in magazine and newspapers columns, I have this preconceived notion that books are just puffed-up versions of the same thing. Luckily, The Smallest Minority more than justifies its existence by showcasing Kevin D. Williamson's command of language and ideas in a much more unfiltered way than is available in his columns. Even for someone who regularly reads him, there is great amount of wealth in this book because there is so much more room for his writing to breathe.
For anyone familiar with recent Western political and social history, the core premise of this book seems so straightforward as to be obvious - Twitter mobs and individual thought have a very difficult time coexisting nowadays. Of course, any socially-aware hack could construct a long list of "takedowns" that have occurred on social media in the last decade or so, but Williamson is more interested in synthesis and history - how the mob tendency comes about, where it has cropped up in the course of modern history, how it wields power; and on the other side, why thinking for oneself as an individual has always elicited pushback and reactionary outrage, if not direct punishment. Of course, Williamson himself has been on the business end of these social media mobs (his record-speed firing from The Atlantic, AKA That August Journalistic Institution), but he threads that story in and out of the book so as to keep the focus off himself.
Williamson is an independent thinker through and through, and it really shows in the way he refuses to cater to any audience that isn't already 100% on board with his style and content. He quotes Shakespeare at length, including in the first chapter. He invokes metaphor through both Dante's and Milton's depictions of the Devil as his closing argument. His footnotes are either dense quotations from F.A. Hayek, Erik Fromm, and William Whyte, or they are snide remarks and profanity-laden insults directed at losers, wimps, and "Caitlyns." The few times he mentions Donald Trump, it's classic Kevin: "The guy is an imbicile, but his existence proves my point too well to ignore it."
But the greatest value of The Smallest Minority is the way Williamson unpacks the behavior of modern social media mobs and shows its precedent in the course of human history: cultural bullying is just as effective as, and more convenient than, wielding power through governmental means; disruptions in social comfort leads to a desperate drive for "belonging," which leads to mobs of all stripes; the corporation and the university both take on the traits of totalitarian governments within their own boundaries, all for the sake of avoiding "disruption." For every 20th-century example of these tendencies, there is an analogous 21st-century counterpart example to make it more concrete. I never said Williamson didn't provide a pretty compelling list of anecdotes; it's just that he also manages to make meaningful points with them.
This all poses a threat to the sense of the individual, a type of person who's in short supply in every age. For those people (they know who they are), The Smallest Minority is a great elaboration on why it's so important to fight for the right to be one. For everyone else, it's an insightful and provocative overview of the eternal battle between the free thinker and the insecure sheep who try to snuff them out. As for the Caitlyns out there, this book will just piss them off. No doubt Williamson wants it that way.
For anyone familiar with recent Western political and social history, the core premise of this book seems so straightforward as to be obvious - Twitter mobs and individual thought have a very difficult time coexisting nowadays. Of course, any socially-aware hack could construct a long list of "takedowns" that have occurred on social media in the last decade or so, but Williamson is more interested in synthesis and history - how the mob tendency comes about, where it has cropped up in the course of modern history, how it wields power; and on the other side, why thinking for oneself as an individual has always elicited pushback and reactionary outrage, if not direct punishment. Of course, Williamson himself has been on the business end of these social media mobs (his record-speed firing from The Atlantic, AKA That August Journalistic Institution), but he threads that story in and out of the book so as to keep the focus off himself.
Williamson is an independent thinker through and through, and it really shows in the way he refuses to cater to any audience that isn't already 100% on board with his style and content. He quotes Shakespeare at length, including in the first chapter. He invokes metaphor through both Dante's and Milton's depictions of the Devil as his closing argument. His footnotes are either dense quotations from F.A. Hayek, Erik Fromm, and William Whyte, or they are snide remarks and profanity-laden insults directed at losers, wimps, and "Caitlyns." The few times he mentions Donald Trump, it's classic Kevin: "The guy is an imbicile, but his existence proves my point too well to ignore it."
But the greatest value of The Smallest Minority is the way Williamson unpacks the behavior of modern social media mobs and shows its precedent in the course of human history: cultural bullying is just as effective as, and more convenient than, wielding power through governmental means; disruptions in social comfort leads to a desperate drive for "belonging," which leads to mobs of all stripes; the corporation and the university both take on the traits of totalitarian governments within their own boundaries, all for the sake of avoiding "disruption." For every 20th-century example of these tendencies, there is an analogous 21st-century counterpart example to make it more concrete. I never said Williamson didn't provide a pretty compelling list of anecdotes; it's just that he also manages to make meaningful points with them.
This all poses a threat to the sense of the individual, a type of person who's in short supply in every age. For those people (they know who they are), The Smallest Minority is a great elaboration on why it's so important to fight for the right to be one. For everyone else, it's an insightful and provocative overview of the eternal battle between the free thinker and the insecure sheep who try to snuff them out. As for the Caitlyns out there, this book will just piss them off. No doubt Williamson wants it that way.
October 2, 2019
Williamson's polemic provides a bittersweet dose of political realism. He is correct to caution us on having faith in the political realm, given the central role played by 'anti-discourse', which he recognises Trump in particular to be a master of.
And he is right to focus on the political game's very structure as the main peril we must combat. (Providing a number of illustrations of how it meets it's goal, to frantically alter the 'status' of different groups and feed their envy.
He makes a good deal of decent points but probably provides more heat than light overall. Kevin's scorching style can be charming and certain essays endear themselves much more than others. He highlights forms of hypocrisy, shallowness and incompetence well on a number of occasions.
One example is his description of populists who target 'corporations', assuming by that term only big for-profit businesses, yet who leave various unions and political interest groups unmolested.
Another might be his more structural critique of sexual libertinism, and the over-reliance on 'consent' alone in forming a sexual ethic. Which, as he shows, leaves women relying on this as the only 'cause' of any failings when things go wrong, as they are wont to do in relations between the sexes, especially when strangers pretend to be more than they are.
This kind of band-aid to the follies of the sexual revolution warps the collective moral vision and ends up making both partners vulnerable physically, psychologically, and even legally.
As a fellow social conservative and libertarian, I find his ire often hits the right target but there's not a great amount of comprehensive substance to a number of the criticisms, beyond the impressive rhetoric. Some of the writer's at The Acton Institute or The Imaginative Conservative have served me better in that regard and in much less lines. Although, pointing to the uneven nature of the essays in the book, Williamson does combine both at times.
His desire to make so many scatter-shot statements without due discrimination is the most annoying part of the book. This can serve him well on occasion, and we get it...provocateur, but this is a weapon not fit for all the purposes he brings it to.
The main problem with the volume of blanket statements is that they show a failure see how certain forms of community activism, when in the right place and time, and motivated by clear sensible goals, are a net communal good and that his scorn for the 'masses' involved in such endeavours is unmerited. I don't think this speaks to his own beliefs but is an unfortunate omission.
The way Kevin decribes the colours and outfits of war, before jumping to Trump and Antifa, is a bit too one- dimensional and, tied to the last point, he makes no mention of 'tribalism' done right. I would place church movements and some sports teams and their fans in that ballpark. But Williamson flippantly dismisses at least the latter elsewhere in the book.
The fact that such groups have been overly commercialised or inconsistently communal doesn't take away from true kernels of community.
He's not, but can sound almost nihilistic at times, flattening out historical differences without distinction. When he does fall into this miscommunication, it is not only misleading but boring.
As a member of the choir he is preaching to, however, and in spite of a number of bum notes I am still happy to sing along and I enjoy the contentious lyrics, commending the good points for the benefit of the smallest minority he makes and how he makes them.
And he is right to focus on the political game's very structure as the main peril we must combat. (Providing a number of illustrations of how it meets it's goal, to frantically alter the 'status' of different groups and feed their envy.
He makes a good deal of decent points but probably provides more heat than light overall. Kevin's scorching style can be charming and certain essays endear themselves much more than others. He highlights forms of hypocrisy, shallowness and incompetence well on a number of occasions.
One example is his description of populists who target 'corporations', assuming by that term only big for-profit businesses, yet who leave various unions and political interest groups unmolested.
Another might be his more structural critique of sexual libertinism, and the over-reliance on 'consent' alone in forming a sexual ethic. Which, as he shows, leaves women relying on this as the only 'cause' of any failings when things go wrong, as they are wont to do in relations between the sexes, especially when strangers pretend to be more than they are.
This kind of band-aid to the follies of the sexual revolution warps the collective moral vision and ends up making both partners vulnerable physically, psychologically, and even legally.
As a fellow social conservative and libertarian, I find his ire often hits the right target but there's not a great amount of comprehensive substance to a number of the criticisms, beyond the impressive rhetoric. Some of the writer's at The Acton Institute or The Imaginative Conservative have served me better in that regard and in much less lines. Although, pointing to the uneven nature of the essays in the book, Williamson does combine both at times.
His desire to make so many scatter-shot statements without due discrimination is the most annoying part of the book. This can serve him well on occasion, and we get it...provocateur, but this is a weapon not fit for all the purposes he brings it to.
The main problem with the volume of blanket statements is that they show a failure see how certain forms of community activism, when in the right place and time, and motivated by clear sensible goals, are a net communal good and that his scorn for the 'masses' involved in such endeavours is unmerited. I don't think this speaks to his own beliefs but is an unfortunate omission.
The way Kevin decribes the colours and outfits of war, before jumping to Trump and Antifa, is a bit too one- dimensional and, tied to the last point, he makes no mention of 'tribalism' done right. I would place church movements and some sports teams and their fans in that ballpark. But Williamson flippantly dismisses at least the latter elsewhere in the book.
The fact that such groups have been overly commercialised or inconsistently communal doesn't take away from true kernels of community.
He's not, but can sound almost nihilistic at times, flattening out historical differences without distinction. When he does fall into this miscommunication, it is not only misleading but boring.
As a member of the choir he is preaching to, however, and in spite of a number of bum notes I am still happy to sing along and I enjoy the contentious lyrics, commending the good points for the benefit of the smallest minority he makes and how he makes them.
September 26, 2019
Accurate take on the current state of mob politics. It would be hilarious if it wasn't so true. A few of my highlights on Kindle:
“The society in which each man lives is at once the basis for, and the nemesis of, that fullness of life which each man seeks.”
"These are the best of times, not the worst. That is true by almost any measurable standard: severe poverty has declined steeply for two decades around the world, fewer people are dying in wars (in 1950, 546,501 people died in battle worldwide; in 2016, that number was fewer than 90,0003), fewer people are dying from easily preventable diseases, etc. The masses never hard it so good. This is the golden age of Homo bolus. But the masses are not happy. They are miserable. They are masses; misery is what they do. It does not matter whether they have anything to be miserable about. If they want something to make them feel miserable, they will discover or invent it."
"Globalization has brought wealth and cooperation, but it also has disturbed longstanding modes of life and upended communities, especially those affected negatively by outsourcing and offshoring, changes in the nature of work which are themselves the misunderstood and ignorantly hated manifestations of the integration of global supply chains and other deep economic changes that are, gradually, making the world a radically better place."
"And that is why the desire for popularity is the original sin of the intellectual: When he subordinates his independent mind to the demands of the herd, he ceases to perform any useful function. He abandons culture for Instant Culture, discourse for antidiscourse, and truth-seeking for status-seeking."
"If you aren’t willing to stick a gun in somebody’s face over the matter, then you probably shouldn’t support passing a law against it, because all that means is that you are deputizing somebody else to stick a gun in somebody’s face over the issue, i.e. the same old violence at one chickenshit degree of separation, general will be damned."
"Defining danger down consists mainly in elevating the importance of hypothetical evils over real evils."
"And if peons are to have conformity, then they must have an emergency—a permanent, eternal, hysteria-inducing emergency that provides them with a notional case for doing what they really want to do, which is to exercise power over people they desire to hurt and humiliate and to use that punitive instinct as an organizing principle for community life. Which is to say: The antifascists are indistinguishable from the fascists."
"It is less important to the mob that we be punished for our political speech than that others see the example and never speak in the first place, thereby rendering certain ideas unspeakable in an ever-widening context, one that now encompasses almost all employment and all enrollment at colleges and universities."
"The less coherent the group is and the less its members know about the subject of their deliberation, the stronger the tendency toward polarization."
"This is the moral conundrum of the would-be censors: If freedom of speech is to mean anything at all, then it must protect speech that is unpopular, hated, offensive, marginal, and associated with people of low social status"
“The society in which each man lives is at once the basis for, and the nemesis of, that fullness of life which each man seeks.”
"These are the best of times, not the worst. That is true by almost any measurable standard: severe poverty has declined steeply for two decades around the world, fewer people are dying in wars (in 1950, 546,501 people died in battle worldwide; in 2016, that number was fewer than 90,0003), fewer people are dying from easily preventable diseases, etc. The masses never hard it so good. This is the golden age of Homo bolus. But the masses are not happy. They are miserable. They are masses; misery is what they do. It does not matter whether they have anything to be miserable about. If they want something to make them feel miserable, they will discover or invent it."
"Globalization has brought wealth and cooperation, but it also has disturbed longstanding modes of life and upended communities, especially those affected negatively by outsourcing and offshoring, changes in the nature of work which are themselves the misunderstood and ignorantly hated manifestations of the integration of global supply chains and other deep economic changes that are, gradually, making the world a radically better place."
"And that is why the desire for popularity is the original sin of the intellectual: When he subordinates his independent mind to the demands of the herd, he ceases to perform any useful function. He abandons culture for Instant Culture, discourse for antidiscourse, and truth-seeking for status-seeking."
"If you aren’t willing to stick a gun in somebody’s face over the matter, then you probably shouldn’t support passing a law against it, because all that means is that you are deputizing somebody else to stick a gun in somebody’s face over the issue, i.e. the same old violence at one chickenshit degree of separation, general will be damned."
"Defining danger down consists mainly in elevating the importance of hypothetical evils over real evils."
"And if peons are to have conformity, then they must have an emergency—a permanent, eternal, hysteria-inducing emergency that provides them with a notional case for doing what they really want to do, which is to exercise power over people they desire to hurt and humiliate and to use that punitive instinct as an organizing principle for community life. Which is to say: The antifascists are indistinguishable from the fascists."
"It is less important to the mob that we be punished for our political speech than that others see the example and never speak in the first place, thereby rendering certain ideas unspeakable in an ever-widening context, one that now encompasses almost all employment and all enrollment at colleges and universities."
"The less coherent the group is and the less its members know about the subject of their deliberation, the stronger the tendency toward polarization."
"This is the moral conundrum of the would-be censors: If freedom of speech is to mean anything at all, then it must protect speech that is unpopular, hated, offensive, marginal, and associated with people of low social status"
February 16, 2020
At present, Kevin Williamson is my favorite libertarian misanthrope. Reading this book was like sitting down in a nice pub and drinking a beer with him and discussing the nature of people and the (sad) state of our politics. It should come with a warning, he uses a fair amount of vulgarity expressing himself throughout the book, but I found it funny and not distracting.
Like a modern day secular Isiah or John the Baptist, he calls out to make straight the paths for the independent thinker. Like John, his head was served up on a platter to the howling "Caitlyns" who managed to whip up a sufficiently vociferous outrage mob to get him fired from the "Atlantic" within weeks of his hire and after the publication of just one article. Williamson doesn't dwell on this short chapter of his life, but he does use it to illustrate his thesis on mob thought. He argues that it was not his views on abortion (outlawing abortion and being in favor or "hanging" women who have abortions) that got him fired, but the fact that he held such an extreme and unpopular opinion and that in the current media environment "middle-aged white men such as Jeffrey Goldberg" [his editor at the Atlantic] are "absolutely terrified" of their "young female subordinates, whose tender if occasionally bananas sensibilities represent a kind of Sward of Damocles hanging over the scrota of their male superiors." He was a thought criminal and his presence could not be tolerated among the staff at the Atlantic.
So, Kevin Williamson was ushered back to the ghetto of explicitly conservative magazines like National Review. As Williamson describes, there are left-leaning magazines like "The Nation", and explicitly right-leaning magazines like "National Review", and there are purportedly mainstream magazines that claim, like "The Atlantic", to be "Of No Party or Clique", "at which no conservative is permitted to work except as a token house conservative, and even then only under very tight restrictions and intense editorial supervision." So, the half of America that is of a conservative sensibility tunes in to Fox News because there are no alternatives that do not constantly misrepresent and disparage their political opinions and cultural beliefs. That, is not a good thing for conservatives or the nation at large.
I found Williamson's book very entertaining and informative. While I certainly do not agree with everything he says, he is a great writer and is unafraid to gore the sacred cows of both the left and right. Maybe that's why I like him. He is an independent soul. He has maintained his independence at some cost, both financial and prestige, and remains unafraid to tell the truth (at least as he sees it). That is a rare thing indeed, and must be appreciated for its own sake.
Like a modern day secular Isiah or John the Baptist, he calls out to make straight the paths for the independent thinker. Like John, his head was served up on a platter to the howling "Caitlyns" who managed to whip up a sufficiently vociferous outrage mob to get him fired from the "Atlantic" within weeks of his hire and after the publication of just one article. Williamson doesn't dwell on this short chapter of his life, but he does use it to illustrate his thesis on mob thought. He argues that it was not his views on abortion (outlawing abortion and being in favor or "hanging" women who have abortions) that got him fired, but the fact that he held such an extreme and unpopular opinion and that in the current media environment "middle-aged white men such as Jeffrey Goldberg" [his editor at the Atlantic] are "absolutely terrified" of their "young female subordinates, whose tender if occasionally bananas sensibilities represent a kind of Sward of Damocles hanging over the scrota of their male superiors." He was a thought criminal and his presence could not be tolerated among the staff at the Atlantic.
So, Kevin Williamson was ushered back to the ghetto of explicitly conservative magazines like National Review. As Williamson describes, there are left-leaning magazines like "The Nation", and explicitly right-leaning magazines like "National Review", and there are purportedly mainstream magazines that claim, like "The Atlantic", to be "Of No Party or Clique", "at which no conservative is permitted to work except as a token house conservative, and even then only under very tight restrictions and intense editorial supervision." So, the half of America that is of a conservative sensibility tunes in to Fox News because there are no alternatives that do not constantly misrepresent and disparage their political opinions and cultural beliefs. That, is not a good thing for conservatives or the nation at large.
I found Williamson's book very entertaining and informative. While I certainly do not agree with everything he says, he is a great writer and is unafraid to gore the sacred cows of both the left and right. Maybe that's why I like him. He is an independent soul. He has maintained his independence at some cost, both financial and prestige, and remains unafraid to tell the truth (at least as he sees it). That is a rare thing indeed, and must be appreciated for its own sake.
Read
January 14, 2020I couldn't get into it. I love his articles but I'm not on Twitter and already ignore social media so it did not speak to me.
September 1, 2019
A very strange book. I've read almost everything that Williamson has written, online and elsewhere, and this is certainly among his least impressive works. His archive at the National Review will give you (for free!) hundreds of thousands of words that are worth your time and attention (no matter your political persuasion), but Smallest Minority is sort of a mess.
At one level Smallest Minority is just the standard conservative/Straussian critique of late modernity (see also Oakeshott, Bloom, Deneen, etc.), which Williamson presents without much embroidery, preferring to use block quotations from Fromm and Hayek and Strauss, etc., instead of putting things into his own words. To be sure, all of these figures are obviously correct in their critiques of late-modern/postmodern liberal democracy, so if you've never seen any of these arguments anywhere, in any context, then I suppose the book could be useful.
The novelty is that Williamson adds a hyperbolic critique of social media (including his own experiences with online mobs), using the strangest rhetorical strategy that I've seen in recent years -- snarky and Twitter-esque (apparently he doesn't see the irony?) virulent attacks on mass culture and on his critics, with cringe-worthy teenage-gonzo turns of phrase and expletives and awkward metaphors that never really work ("dumbasstical shitweasels who currently dominate our political conversation," "Instant Culture is the strap-on dildo sitting there dead and plastic and inert where Western civilization used to be," etc.). I have literally no idea why he chose to write the book in this way; I can understand wanting to avoid the dry academic style of Strauss or whatever, but there's definitely a middle ground that Williamson has failed to discover.
At one level Smallest Minority is just the standard conservative/Straussian critique of late modernity (see also Oakeshott, Bloom, Deneen, etc.), which Williamson presents without much embroidery, preferring to use block quotations from Fromm and Hayek and Strauss, etc., instead of putting things into his own words. To be sure, all of these figures are obviously correct in their critiques of late-modern/postmodern liberal democracy, so if you've never seen any of these arguments anywhere, in any context, then I suppose the book could be useful.
The novelty is that Williamson adds a hyperbolic critique of social media (including his own experiences with online mobs), using the strangest rhetorical strategy that I've seen in recent years -- snarky and Twitter-esque (apparently he doesn't see the irony?) virulent attacks on mass culture and on his critics, with cringe-worthy teenage-gonzo turns of phrase and expletives and awkward metaphors that never really work ("dumbasstical shitweasels who currently dominate our political conversation," "Instant Culture is the strap-on dildo sitting there dead and plastic and inert where Western civilization used to be," etc.). I have literally no idea why he chose to write the book in this way; I can understand wanting to avoid the dry academic style of Strauss or whatever, but there's definitely a middle ground that Williamson has failed to discover.
October 23, 2020
An advance lesson on social media culture, cancel culture, and the tribalism we are seeing today. It's an intellectual version of a Joe Rogan podcast.
Kevin is a talented writer; I knew him from the National Review and he always stood out as the best of the bunch. He does have an engaging style that comes useful when he gets lost in the reeds of an argument. Two things I would nit-pick here is that he comes off as a cosmopolitan snob sometimes and the use of footnotes to go on tangents is a practice I dislike. The latter really disrupts the pace of the narrative. Also, I took off a star because he used the terms "anos domini" to refer to the current year. He did this twice and he should count himself lucky I only took one star.
As for the argument, I did find it a bit difficult to follow at times. He got the point across with some difficulty. He really had to thread the needle when he used Milton's Paradise Lost or Dante's Inferno as examples. It was an interesting read but too lofty and presumptuous for the point that he was making.
I do agree with him on the matter (I was inclined to do so before I read the book) so I won't go too much into that. I think what the book reveals is the other side of cancel culture; almost always it comes with a reward from the aggrieved tribe (conservatives, in this case). There is definitely a grievance tour open to you if you've been cancelled. Kevin takes full advantage of that (his firing from the Atlantic forms the backbone of this book).
Overall it was a decent read. It is a bit of a grind but it has its moments. I would recommend it to people interested in the social-political climate of today, specifically on social media.
Kevin is a talented writer; I knew him from the National Review and he always stood out as the best of the bunch. He does have an engaging style that comes useful when he gets lost in the reeds of an argument. Two things I would nit-pick here is that he comes off as a cosmopolitan snob sometimes and the use of footnotes to go on tangents is a practice I dislike. The latter really disrupts the pace of the narrative. Also, I took off a star because he used the terms "anos domini" to refer to the current year. He did this twice and he should count himself lucky I only took one star.
As for the argument, I did find it a bit difficult to follow at times. He got the point across with some difficulty. He really had to thread the needle when he used Milton's Paradise Lost or Dante's Inferno as examples. It was an interesting read but too lofty and presumptuous for the point that he was making.
I do agree with him on the matter (I was inclined to do so before I read the book) so I won't go too much into that. I think what the book reveals is the other side of cancel culture; almost always it comes with a reward from the aggrieved tribe (conservatives, in this case). There is definitely a grievance tour open to you if you've been cancelled. Kevin takes full advantage of that (his firing from the Atlantic forms the backbone of this book).
Overall it was a decent read. It is a bit of a grind but it has its moments. I would recommend it to people interested in the social-political climate of today, specifically on social media.
July 3, 2019
The Smallest Minority. It’s me, and it’s you. It’s anyone who still believes in independent thought (and if that’s NOT you, reading further isn’t necessary). I hadn’t heard of author Kevin D. Williamson until this book (and then shortly after while reading Jonah Goldberg’s “Suicide of the West: How the rebirth of tribalism, populism, nationalism, and identity politics is destroying American democracy”) and I have no trouble admitting that he’s smart. He’s also saucy (polite-speak for being an ass), which is, for me, easily the worst part of this book. Unfortunately, Williamson begins and ends with this attitude, and it won’t likely bode well for the book. There are lots and lots of great political and sociological takeaways within these 220 pages. But it took me the first 50 pages to get to those nuggets. I almost gave up. But I didn’t. And I’m glad I read it, though I won’t likely be doing it again (which, is distinctly different from the aforementioned Jonah Goldberg, who’s “Suicide of the West” and “Liberal Fascism” books were both far superior and waded into lots of similar topics along the way). I would recommend this book if, like me, you’re dipping your intellectual toe into that ever-expanding pool of political and historical discourse via written books. But I wouldn’t put this at the top of the list.
August 20, 2019
I always enjoy Williamson's humor. If I have a complaint, it is that his wit doesn't show through as brutally as his articles UNLESS you go through to the footnotes. Since I was reading on an ebook, I kept clicking on the footnotes and having issues with it going through.
Yes, it's a stupid technical issue, but I had a hard time enjoying and getting the flow of some of his arguments because I kept trying to see where the footnotes lead.
I should not this was mostly an issue in the earlier chapters. Later on (maybe because I figured out the system better, maybe because of the writing, hard to say), I was better able to follow the flow.
Oh, his argument? Yes, he has a very good point in most of it. I don't totally agree with his religious points because clearly my theology is a bit different than his, but I did get his overall argument and certainly see how these mob rules are pushing our society in the wrong way.
I keep going back to his (now former) colleague Jonah Goldberg's last point in I believe it was Tyranny of Cliches--are we going to go along with the mob and burn the witch, or are we going to be the one standing up and saying that this will not stand. As the internet gives us a cover of anonymity, it seems more and more of us carrying the virtual (tiki) torches.
Yes, it's a stupid technical issue, but I had a hard time enjoying and getting the flow of some of his arguments because I kept trying to see where the footnotes lead.
I should not this was mostly an issue in the earlier chapters. Later on (maybe because I figured out the system better, maybe because of the writing, hard to say), I was better able to follow the flow.
Oh, his argument? Yes, he has a very good point in most of it. I don't totally agree with his religious points because clearly my theology is a bit different than his, but I did get his overall argument and certainly see how these mob rules are pushing our society in the wrong way.
I keep going back to his (now former) colleague Jonah Goldberg's last point in I believe it was Tyranny of Cliches--are we going to go along with the mob and burn the witch, or are we going to be the one standing up and saying that this will not stand. As the internet gives us a cover of anonymity, it seems more and more of us carrying the virtual (tiki) torches.
August 5, 2019
Remarkable little volume meditating on mob rule (not necessarily political), non-conformity, independence of thought, and much else. The tone is acrimonious even by the author's standards, occasionally reading like an angry Twitter thread, but that is forgivable because the subject is timely and wisdom oozes from its pages. The third to last chapter, Of The Devil's Party, is a brilliant synthesis of literary, theological, and philosophical motifs and stands alone, even if someone finds the remainder too vitriolic. Williamson is an acquired taste, ornery and unsentimental, but he makes - indeed he bludgeons - the salient point that freedom of speech and of thought do not neatly dovetail with the contours of the First Amendment, and that the mob need not seize political power (though they seek to do that too) to flex their muscles.
Unfortunately for Williamson, famously picayune and occasionally pedantic as regards grammar, the book is in need of a better editor. Charlotte and Charlottesville are conflated repeatedly and the stray misspelling made it into the finished product. It's not his finest work, the insults and the language distract from his insights and it looked a touch rushed to capitalize on his recent notoriety, but it is still wholly worth the read.
Unfortunately for Williamson, famously picayune and occasionally pedantic as regards grammar, the book is in need of a better editor. Charlotte and Charlottesville are conflated repeatedly and the stray misspelling made it into the finished product. It's not his finest work, the insults and the language distract from his insights and it looked a touch rushed to capitalize on his recent notoriety, but it is still wholly worth the read.
July 25, 2019
K Will is an angry man or at least it reads like that. His attitude in this book reminds me of the great Kurtwood Smith as Red in "That 70s Show" or anything else he has done since Robocop. Williamson covers lots of ground in a relatively short book about the ochlocracy of social media. He doesn't necessarily take sides but he is a classical liberal. He does compare himself to Jesus but you'll need to read deep into the book to find it. He mentions Caitlyn a whole lot and it took about half the book to figure out to whom he is referring. It is not Caitlyn Jenner. The book is well researched and well written. The vocabulary requires Google or some similar dictionary.
If you're willing, you'll learn what liberty means and the current threats against it in a well formed and humorously written treatise. It is well worth the read for the annotations alone.
If you're willing, you'll learn what liberty means and the current threats against it in a well formed and humorously written treatise. It is well worth the read for the annotations alone.
January 15, 2020
DNF
I love Kevin D. Williamson's writing at National Review and other outlets; there are VERY few journalists that write as well as he does. I listen to each episode of his Mad Dogs and Englishmen podcast that he co-hosts with Charles C.W. Cooke. His intellectual acumen always engages me. His contrarian, libertarian views resonate with me. I even enjoy his occasional journalistic bomb tossing.
Sadly, The Smallest Minority bored me. I got through about half the book and enjoyed much of what I read. I certainly agreed with most of what I was reading. It is just that when I found some time to do a little reading, I didn't feel much compulsion to go back to this one. Weird.
I gave it three stars because the writing is brilliant on so many levels. That part deserves five, but I just didn't love it.
I love Kevin D. Williamson's writing at National Review and other outlets; there are VERY few journalists that write as well as he does. I listen to each episode of his Mad Dogs and Englishmen podcast that he co-hosts with Charles C.W. Cooke. His intellectual acumen always engages me. His contrarian, libertarian views resonate with me. I even enjoy his occasional journalistic bomb tossing.
Sadly, The Smallest Minority bored me. I got through about half the book and enjoyed much of what I read. I certainly agreed with most of what I was reading. It is just that when I found some time to do a little reading, I didn't feel much compulsion to go back to this one. Weird.
I gave it three stars because the writing is brilliant on so many levels. That part deserves five, but I just didn't love it.
June 11, 2019
Williamson offers a no-holds-barred account of his hiring and shortly later firing at the hands of The Atlantic magazine. If you are easily offended by colorful language, this book may not be for you. On the other hand, if you want to learn how political correctness has polluted our cultural pool, Williamson provides a tour de force of classical literature showing how anyone who attempts to think logically and acts upon these thoughts is setting himself up for a rough ride in a world where mob violence is a constant threat.
The PC Police may want to silence men like Kevin Williamson, but as long as there are publishers like Regnery their thoughts will be shared widely and effectively. Well worth reading.
The PC Police may want to silence men like Kevin Williamson, but as long as there are publishers like Regnery their thoughts will be shared widely and effectively. Well worth reading.
August 25, 2019
Kevin D Williamson writes without question extremely well--it's the reason why I bought the book and continue to read his other work. The subject is important and his thesis is very much on point, but this was an exhausting read. Most tirades are tiring, but this one is beleaguered additionally by excessive intellectualising and unnecessary reiterations. I also felt he wandered off track quite a bit, e.g dedicating an entire chapter to the individualism of Lucifer, by comparing Milton's Paradise Lost and Dantes Inferno. While this is probably enrapturing stuff for the intellectual, KDW is equally alienating by choosing to package all of this in a profanity laced diatribe.
October 4, 2019
Whenever I looked at the cover from a distance and saw the word SMALLEST, I had a quick impression of the old James Taranto meme "The World's Smallest Violin," referring to the tiny circular motion between your thumb and forefinger when you are making fun of someone for complaining too much. And well, it was a little like that. Williamson takes his dismissal from the Atlantic very hard.
Aside from that, it is a book with something important to say about free speech and the censorship of the mob continually outraged by people who disagree with them.
I docked him a star for unnecessary and frequent use of my least favorite word. He is free to use it, and I am free to drop his score.
Aside from that, it is a book with something important to say about free speech and the censorship of the mob continually outraged by people who disagree with them.
I docked him a star for unnecessary and frequent use of my least favorite word. He is free to use it, and I am free to drop his score.
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