D.J. Waldie, a onetime critic of Mike Davis, praises his immense influence but says the same things he says about Davis, but in another form. “When you have a true believer,” Waldie writes, “it is impossible to convince him of anything that runs counter to what he is already telling himself.”
So, when we reach the end of this article, there’s a story in the back, entitled Why I’ll never love Mike Davis and a story entitled Why I believe Mike Davis.
I will conclude this story with the first of Mike Davis’s famous speeches, the one that inspired a million people.
“There is no such thing as socialism because socialism is the exact opposite of what a free society would be like,” Davis told a crowd of students in Madison, Wisconsin, in a speech that was part of a series of speeches in which he said everything he believed without taking back anything he had ever said.
The student speaker gave a rambling, seemingly endless, speech that covered everything from the free market to the death of capitalism to the existence of God to the end of the world, and at the end of it he said Davis was an inspiration.
This speech — which lasted for less than an hour, I must say — was the kind of speech in which the audience seemed to believe that Davis was about to take the world on a journey to the far reaches of the universe.
Davis’s speech was an important part of the intellectual context for the Republican takeover of the United States. The last time the Republican Party had a presidential nominee who had the kind of ideas that had fired up his supporters in a way that Democrats hadn’t been able to do in decades: Reagan.
When a man who had been in politics for decades as an activist and then a politician said, essentially, that everything was going to be fine, it was pretty clear that there was no other candidate on the Republican side who could match that confidence.
The man who was running the GOP campaign — John McCain — in 2000 got a lot of credit for his campaign, but what he really did was to take the party on a trip to its roots.
Republican candidates, at times, were just as comfortable in what are popularized as “old-fashioned” positions — in areas such as social issues, religious belief
