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Katha Pollitt and Andrew Sullivan

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1910? Them were the Good Old Days?

By Katha Pollitt
Posted Tuesday, May 5, 1998, at 5:27 PM ET

Andrew,

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Well, I'm glad you think me your equal in slyness. But do I read you correctly to say that you long for the mores of the year 1910, before the progressive income tax turned us red-blooded Americans into collectivist mice at the mercy of the Big State? You really ARE reactionary! I keep forgetting that.

The state was pretty big in 1910, Andrew. For instance, it outlawed information about birth control and many other forms of free speech; it enforced Jim Crow laws in the South; it denied women the right to vote and barred them from many occupations and activities. It used its police power on behalf of mining and industrial interests to break strikes, beat up demonstrators, and deport immigrants with the wrong ideas. What conservatives usually mean when they talk about Big Government is government that puts some kind of limit on the power of business to do whatever it wants. For all your opposition to the Big State, for instance, don't you oppose legal abortion? Even though effectively criminalizing abortion would mean an immense expansion of police power.

What really amazes me in your posts is your reluctance to admit that the US has, or ever had, any problems or injustices or wrongs that the left addressed and the right did not. You treat the left's record on everything from race to worker safety, for example, as a public-relations triumph. But it was real! (And of course I don't accept the left's responsibility for US wars in Korea and Vietnam either.) As for taxes--I would gladly give half my income to live in a country without desperate poverty and homelessness, with good schools and health care and child care for all who need it, with real environmental protection and good public services, and in which people who work for a living earn enough to live decently, as in this country too many full-time workers do not. If that meant I had less disposable income it would be worth it!

Equally unrepentant,
Katha

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