Democrat of the breakfast table - reform movement in Eastern Europe, flag-burning controversy - editorial

National Review, Dec 8, 1989 by John O'Sullivan

Democrat of the Breakfast Table

Four years ago, when I was on the staff of the London Times, I was invited to meet a leading Hungarian Communist apparatchik over breakfast. I went reluctantly. My usual breakfast is lunch, and I was expecting an "I Speak Your Weight" -- machine bureaucrat. But he turned out to be the democrat of the breakfast table. Discussing Hungarian politics with the easy frankness of a Western politician, he sketched the aims of his reform faction and how it hoped to outwit the hard-liners.

"What is the final result you are aiming at?" I asked.

"Oh, a multi-party democractic system in politics and a free-market system in economics," he replied.

I don't think they believed this when I reported back at the office. I didn't altogether believe it myself, finding the existence of such a free-thinking apparatchik more significant than his predictions. But they have come to pass. Hungary officially became a bourgeois democracy last month; it will hold free elections early next year; and there is even a possibility that the Soveit Union will permit it to leave the Warsaw Pact.

Remarkable as this transformation is, it pales alongside the events in East Germany. Long a frozen Stalinist wasteland, East Germany has experienced in a few months the dramatic exodus of thousands, an active reform movement, vast public demonstrations, the ousting of hard-line leader Erich Honecker, offers of reform by his successor, and lastly (as I write) the crumbling of the Berlin Wall.

These events have surprised even conservative anti-Communists. But they have devastated those on the Left who had always claimed that, with all their faults, the regimes of Eastern Europe still had national roots and some popular backing. As soon as even a qualified freedom of choice was allowed, The Polish Communist Party could win scarcely a single contested seat, and a Solidarity government is now pursuing free-market reforms. And the Hungarian Communists, after reconstituting themselves as a Socialist Party to save their electoral skins, have attracted only twenty thousand members, compared to their earlier seven hundred thousand. So the ratio of careerists to Communists within a relatively popular Communist Party was 34 to one.

Communisn has no popular support to speak of. It is rule by a sect. Everyone else, including the jailers and the secret policemen, is a secret opponent of the regime. As Vladimir Bukovsky said when asked how many political prisoners remained in the Soviet Union: "240 million."

Light rule by a sect might e tolerated; intrusive oppression of the Communist model can only survive by its willingness to kill people without limit. Few have the perverse moral courage required for that. When a communist regime runs out of them, it is doomed to eventual collapse or overthrow. But it may not realize the fact. Its propaganda, having deceived no one else, may yet deceive itself and its Western sympathizers. At the foot of the scaffold, it can still orchestrate applause.

Macaulay explained this with his usual savage clarity in a philippic against Southey, who favored an ecclesiastical monarchy with some of the features of totalitarianism: "Can he conceive anything more terrible than the situation of a government which rules without apprehension over a people of hypocrites, which is flattered by the press and cursed in the inner chambers, which exults in the attachment and obedience of its subjects, and knows not that those subjects are leagued against it in a free-masonry of hatred ...? Profound and ingenious policy! Instead of curing the disease, to remove those symptoms by which alone its nature can be known! To leave the serpent his deadly sting, and deprive him only of his warning rattle!"

And as if to confirm Macaulay's words, the news arrives of demonstrations in Bulgaria! It can't be long now, comrades.

* It is difficult to feel anything more than a sort of weary irritation at the three people charged with burning the flag. Don't the dunderheads realize that they are merely recruiting-sergeants for the other side of the argument?

But others are not without blame. The original decision by the Supreme Court upheld the argument that the First Amendment protects all sorts of expression, from flag-burning to nude dancing. That is nonsense. What the First Amendment protects is "speech," which is a sub-class of expression. Expression includes speech, not the other way round. If you ordered steak in a restaurant and were given yogurt instead, would the Supreme Court uphold that on the grounds that they were both food? (The answer is: yes, except in a product-liability case.) President Bush's constitutional amendment was the opposite error: an elephant gun to kill a slug.

But Congress has behaved worst of all, passing a bill which it knows in advance to be unconstitutional, when there is a constitutional remedy available. Congress could have made the legislation invulnerable by invoking Article III, Section 2 of the Constitution to strip the Supreme Court of its jurisdiction in the matter. True, this provision has lain dormant since 1869. But it was never meant to be used regularly. It exists for those occasions when, as now, the judiciary threatens to overwhelm the other branches of government. Reviving it would be a timely warning.