New Kevin Williamson book discusses individualism in modern age

SANDUSKY — In good, curmudgeonly Kevin D. Williamson fashion, Williamson doubts there can be such a thing as a "diehard Kevin Williamson fan." But Williamson, a sometimes acid and often very funny pundit and author, allows on page 135 of his new book, "The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics" that he is "a pretty big Kevin D. Williamson fan."Other big Kevin D. Williamson fans seem likely to enjoy the new book, as it distills much of his recent thinking and has plenty of wit. Williamson, 47, a native of Texas and current resident of the Lone Star State, is a roving correspondent for "National Review."He spent his early years in the newspaper business and has written for many other publications and published five books. In 2018, "The Atlantic" magazine hired him and then fired him after only a few days. At about the same time, Williamson, previously very active on Twitter, quit the social media service. The new book discusses the "Atlantic" episode, but it is not the main focus of the book, which discusses freedom of expression and the threat to it from social media. After I read and enjoyed "The Smallest Minority," I asked to interview Williamson via email and he agreed. The interview is itself a good sample of his work:Q: Who do you see as the intended audience for your book (aside from diehard Kevin Williamson fans)? Do you hope to hearten people who have had bruising attacks on Twitter from the mob, and show them they are not alone?Kevin Williamson: Is there such a thing as a die-hard Kevin D. Williamson fan? I am not sure. If there is, I'm not one. But, in any case, I don't really write that way, under the influence of a marketing plan. (Perhaps my publishers wish that I would.) I write what I think needs to be written the best way I can think to write it. I write for a living and for my own amusement, and so I write the kind of prose that I like to read. If I enjoy reading something I've written, that is a decent indication that it is good. And I trust that people who enjoy reading the kind of thing I enjoy writing will find it. The late Mike Potemra, who was National Review's literary editor, once told me not to worry about a particularly flat piece of copy I turned in: "Not even Tom Wolfe tries to write like Tom Wolfe all the time," he said, which may be the best insult I've ever received. But I like Tom Wolfe, and Hunter Thompson, and David Foster Wallace, and the vivacity of their writing, the obvious pleasure they took in producing those sentences. That is what I try to do.And then I hope the people who also like that kind of thing know that that's what I'm selling. It is not very difficult to discover books that suit your tastes, now, assuming that such books are being written. But I don't have any particular therapeutic agenda of the kind you suggest, and I would never mislead readers into thinking, as you put it, that "they are not alone." Because they are alone and always have been and always will be.Q: You quit Twitter about the time you were hired by The Atlantic magazine. Do you think you will likely return? Do you have any advice for Twitter usage by other people?KW: Twitter is a sewer. Unless you're making money from it, somehow, there isn't any value in using it. It is basically an exercise in self-abasement and self-moronization. And I don't exempt myself from that, of course. Twitter certainly never brought out the best in me. Twitter is especially dangerous for writers because it offers a form of procrastination that can, if you are very good at lying to yourself, look a little like work. But staying up until 2 a.m. explaining logical fallacies to numbskull 20-year-old journalism majors at Lehigh University probably is not the best use of my time. Age makes you increasingly jealous of the time you have, and I do not feel that I have yet done the work that I am supposed to do. Whatever that is, it isn't on Twitter.Q: Is this a particularly difficult time in U.S. to avoid being pushed into joining one of the partisan "teams," such as Team Elizabeth Warren or Team Trump? Or is it always hard to be an individual?KW: This should be the easiest time in American history to liberate oneself from the entanglements of partisanship and partisan tribalism, given that both the Republican party and the Democratic party, the great majority of their respective officeholders, and the great mass of their most horrifyingly zealous supporters are so degenerate and despicable and grotesque that it is impossible to associate with them without enduring real degradation. Journalists who write about sports tend to be sports fans, but researchers who study cancer are not usually cancer fans. My political writing has more of an oncological character.Q: My favorite part of the book are the zingers you come up with to express your points, such as this sentence: "The Bill of Rights ought to be titled 'A List of Things You Idiots Don't Get a Vote On, Because They Aren't Up for Negotiation'." Do you spend a lot of time coming up with vivid formulations that will stick with the reader?KW: I'm lucky to have spent much of the first half of my life in the newspaper business, which made me a pretty fast writer. The Smallest Minority is an unusual book for me in that three-fourths of it is a more or less straightforward political book, albeit more profane and I hope funnier than the average, while the remaining quarter, mostly in the footnotes, is an annotation of what's going through my head while I'm writing the main body of the book, which often is in tone and affect rather different from what people are used to in a book of this kind. This is not a book that William F. Buckley Jr. would have written or that George Will might write. There is a great deal in it that does not consist of evidence in the indictment of this or that political figure, indictment being the dominant form of contemporary political books. But my interests and point of view aren't the sort of thing that's going to lead me to produce the sort of standard-issue conservative polemic they sell by the pound at Costco.Q: I was surprised when I read in your book that you prefer to write about literature and drama, rather than politics, although I've noticed much of your recent work at National Review points in this direction. Who are your favorite writers, and your favorite living playwright?KW: The last novel I read was Middlemarch, a couple of weeks ago, which may also be the best novel I've read. I am well-insulated from American popular culture. The United States of America Anno Domini 2019 is a voice that I am trying to get out of my head. I find that I am much happier in places where I do not speak the local language.I was a theater critic in New York for some years. On September 8, 2014, I went to what was supposed to be a production of The Winter's Tale put on by the terribly prestigious Public Theater at Central Park's Delacorte Theater, which turned into a literal campaign rally with Bill de Blasio shouting at the audience and poor doddering old Chuck Schumer pushed out onto the stage to shout "Vote Democratic!" There were also Muppets, for some reason. That was it, for me. I decided to give up theater criticism that night.The American theater has always been somewhat willing to abase itself before money power and political power, but that was abject surrender. An establishment with no more artistic self-respect than that cannot be expected to produce very much that is of interest, and the American theater does not. Looking back on my years as a critic, what's remarkable is how little of value I saw. By way of comparison, the first play of interest I remember seeing was a very modest production of Orpheus Descending in Lubbock, Texas, where, with no money to be made and no Broadway careers to be launched, the play had the opportunity to be the thing itself, which was intensely exciting. It was an inspiring performance, and terrifying. That was about 30 years ago.That being written, in the past few years I've enjoyed plays by Theresa Rebeck and Sharr White, among others, and I think often of a very good performance of Václav Havel's The Memorandum I saw a few years ago.If the 100 most important American novelists, poets, and playwrights were to suddenly be raptured up to Heaven tomorrow, the event would be of much more actuarial and religious than literary interest. The Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2018 was awarded to a gay novelist about to turn 50 who wrote a novel about a gay novelist about to turn 50. The intelligence and creativity of our time mostly are being consumed by business enterprises, technology, and science. And that isn't the worst use of human ability, I suppose.That being said, if you put me at the switch in some grand trolley-car dilemma, I'd probably spare the writers and crash the train into the Capitol.