Democracy needs no apology (National Post, November 24, 2004)

I have singled out Globe and Mail columnist Heather Mallick for censure in the past, I'm rounding on her again today, and if she continues to set herself up for ridicule as Canada's paramount, almost parodic embodiment of liberal narcissism and corrosive anti-Americanism, I can't promise I won't dump on her in the future. It's nothing personal (we've never met). She just keeps putting a match to the American flag, and I just happen to walk by with a bucket of water.

In deconstructing her Nov. 20 column I was, in her words, "spoiled for choice." For starters there was her implication of moral equivalence between the terrorist execution of CARE director Margaret Hassan and the unfortunate killing of a wounded insurgent by a jumpy U.S. Marine. That's offensive. Then there was her assertion that if she were dying, the 51% of Americans who voted for President Bush would "finish me off with a bullet," although, she claims, if they were dying "I'd offer them a drink."

But Mallick's anti-Americanism -- and her extraordinary self-regard -- is old news. We know only too well that she loathes George W. Bush ("this violent, stupid president") and indeed all American conservatives with a passion that often renders her incoherent. Her infidel conservative enemy having been re-elected, she has been stocking up the mini-Falluja of her political mindscape with journalistic bombs to wreak her vengeance. Last Saturday Mallick detonated one of them in eager support for a shameful post-election attack on Bush-voters by a small cadre of embittered American Democrats.

What do incensed liberals do when their candidate loses? Some run dreadful Web sites. The site Mallick favours, www.sorryeverybody.com, features pictures of people (and their babies and pets) "holding up written apologies to the planet" for Bush's re-election. Mallick comments: "What fine people these good Americans are!"

"Fine people"? "Good Americans"? Was Bush's victory a coup by a military junta? Were the polls closed to Democrats? George W. Bush was returned to power in a free and democratic election. In whose name are these people apologizing and by what right?

Mallick and the angry losers she champions seem not to understand the nature of apologies. Individuals may apologize to others for their own wrongdoings. A company president may apologize on behalf of his employees for his company having caused public harm. A nation may apologize to the world through its leader, as Bill Clinton did in Rwanda, for having abdicated its moral responsibility.

But surely this is the first time in history that a group of people joined only by ideology and an unshakable belief in their own moral pre-eminence have apologized to outsiders on behalf of fellow citizens for whose actions they have neither the responsibility nor the authority to speak, simply because they freely and democratically elected the "wrong" man. These Democrats, and the Bush-hating world who find conduits to vent their rage in like-minded journalists such as Mallick, are really saying that 51% of Americans were more than misguided, they were guilty of thought crimes and immoral behaviour.

"Millions" of people are visiting the apology site, Mallick reports with satisfaction: "Citizens of Austria ... have accepted Democratic apologies for what Republicans did and will do, as have Swedes, Canadians and even Muslims...."

Apologies today, show trials tomorrow. No journalist should be celebrating this contemptible Web site. Their "apology" is illegitimate and cannot be "accepted" by anybody. According to Mallick's curious strain of logic, if the Conservative party wins the next election, Globe journalists should apologize for the conservative opinions expressed in the National Post and rejoice when this apology is "accepted" by socialist readers of Danish, Austrian and French newspapers.

Mallick notes that Republican Web sites have struck back, arguing it is disloyal and even traitorous to submit internal divisions to foreign judgment. Mallick characterizes them thus: "There are hate Web sites and there are stricken-with-guilt websites ... You decide." Here is the imperial liberal mindset: It is a "hate Web site" to admonish your fellow citizens for disloyalty. But it is a virtue to spread messages of self-loathing -- for that is how the apology Web sites will be interpreted -- to America's enemies.

An apology for the choice made by your opponents -- whether it comes from the left or the right -- is an attack on the democratic process itself. As a vote of non-confidence in the will of the people, it is a subversion of the very premise of democracy, and an incipiently totalitarian impulse.

I cannot imagine a similar scenario -- conservatives apologizing to the world for a Kerry win -- if the situation were reversed. All reasonable people understand, and I wish Mallick did too, that the glory of democracy lies in neither side ever having to say it's sorry.

© National Post 2004