Next year we’re putting on an Anti-Communist Film Festival. We’ll be screening great freedom-loving films like The Lives of Others, Trial, and Red Dawn.
We also hope that it’s an excuse to have a big party. America used to be a hard-partying nation, but no sooner had we shaken off the conservative and puritanical shackles of our founding than the wokeness arose after the Cold War to stomp on everyone’s buzz again. We’ve become a nation of tight-asses both left and right.
Partying is essential to America and human freedom. In his book On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs, the Rev. James V. Schall, who was a legendary Jesuit and teacher at Georgetown University, argues for the importance of fun. Dancing, gardening and having parties are ultimately more important than politics. Having fun in so-called frivolous activities is a way of acknowledging our limits and mortality, Schall said. Jokes, ping pong, surfing, and going to the pub signal that there are limits to what we can do with our time on Earth and that our ego-driven politics aren’t really what makes us spiritual creatures. “The governance of God over his creation, His ability to bring it to its end, does not depend on the affairs of men, though it does include them,” Schall wrote. “He is present in our tragedies and our elations. The Cross is, as a Kempis said, a ‘royal road.’”
The idea of the Anti-Communist Film Festival came to me as a result of attending a lot of film festivals. Some of the best are held at the American Film Institute just outside of D.C. At the Irish Film Festival last year one of the organizers got up on stage and announced: “OK this is the last movie on the last day of the festival. I want to invite everyone to McGinty’s afterwards for some pints and some craic.” The Irish still know how to do it.
From its mental health crisis to its cranky politics, America’s suffering from a lack of fun. The new resentful and punitive left comes after publishers, drinkers, comedians, and actors if any of them show signs of having fun. You can’t attain utopia if people are racing mini-bikes and having keg parties; it’s much more important to police mask mandates and censor jokes. As I explained in a recent piece, in his book Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall, journalist Tim Mohr explores how the postwar German Stasi harassed, monitored, and beat punk rockers. It’s notable how many times the word “fun” is used by the punks to explain what they were doing. Between 1981 and 1985, one of the most popular bands behind the Iron Curtain was Wutanfall (“Tantrum”), a Leipzig six-piece that, Mohr writes, “represented a loose but dedicated opposition to the state.” The Stasi eventually shut them down.
Forty years ago, Washington Redskins running back John Riggins got tanked at a black tie dinner and told Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, “Loosen up, Sandy baby. You’re too tight.” People didn’t call the cops, send Riggo to rehab, and have all-day seminars on the “sexism” and “privilege” Riggins displayed. Justice O’Connor herself laughed about it.
Our own American Stasi came for my head in 2018, when I became a central figure in the leftist opposition research hit on Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. There were all kinds of crazy fake charges. The puritanical press was shocked we had keg parties. They were appalled at our dumb adolescent jokes and slang. As part of “reporting the controversy,” as one tight-assed reporter put it, the media unearthed The Unknown Hoya, an underground newspaper a couple of guys and I published in high school. Reporters were combing through a 1983 sheet and trying to find clues about girls, slang, and keg parties. At one point, one of the other editors called me up. “You know,” he said, “our reporting in the Unknown Hoya was more accurate than the New York Times and the Washington Post.”
How did the Left replace the old Right as society’s killjoys? In James Piereson’s groundbreaking book Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism, the author argues that modern liberalism, unlike classical liberalism, feeds off of the desire to punish others. This phenomenon, which Piereson calls “punitive liberalism,” goes back to the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963. Piereson argues that prior to Kennedy’s death, liberalism was pro-American, anti-communist, pro-labor, and for incremental change to address social ills such as racism. The Catholic, anti-communist, tax-cutting Kennedy exemplified these beliefs. This is why Kennedy was disliked by the far Left.
When Kennedy was assassinated by communist Lee Harvey Oswald, liberals went into shock. They found themselves at a loss to explain the tragedy. It simply couldn’t be possible that the conservatives were right, that Kennedy had been a martyr not to the civil rights movement but to the Cold War and that his blood was on the hands of the communists. Liberalism explained Kennedy’s death by blaming it on America. It wasn’t Oswald, a Castro-loving zealot, who pulled the trigger; it was “right-wing America,” the “climate of hate in Dallas,” and our collective historical sins. America was to blame.
Piereson summarized his theory even before his book was published in a 2004 essay in The Weekly Standard: “From the time of John Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 to Jimmy Carter’s election in 1976, the Democratic Party was gradually taken over by a bizarre doctrine that might be called Punitive Liberalism. According to this doctrine, America had been responsible for numerous crimes and misdeeds through its history for which it deserved punishment and chastisement.”
Punitive liberalism is now the manual for the American left. The right is better, although they haven’t really cut loose yet. It’s hard to imagine a bigger tight-ass than Bernie Sanders, but if there is one, it might be Matt Walsh. Walsh spends all day sitting behind a desk, deleting punitive letters about how America is being taken over by trannies and communists. He’s probably right, but it’s just as important to occasionally have fun, even too much fun. It reaffirms our limits and our creatureliness. As Father Schall knew, God made us as creatures. It’s arrogant and unwise to spend all day every day trying to save the world.