Mind of an Outlaw by Norman Mailer

we can assume that he was one of the germinal influences in the birth of the hipster.
    Clue #5 . (And this should be enough.) My passion, as a few slow readers may have realized by now, is to destroy stereotypes, categories, and labels. So Candidate X, who has never been considered (to my knowledge) as a political candidate for anything, by either party—as indeed was once true of Eisenhower—is nonetheless an important figure in American life. To a degree he has affected the style of American manners. If he were drafted as a candidate, the emanations of his personality might loosen the lugubrious rhetorical daisy chains of liberal argument which so deaden the air about all these Demo-bureaucratic candidates.
    The rest of this column I wish to give over to a little talk about politics, most of which will be, as usual, in the first person. I have not voted since 1948, and I doubt if I will vote in 1956 even if, by some fantastic mischance, Candidate X would be drafted. (My sole motive in all this is to look for a good time. I want the next presidential campaign to be an interesting circus, rather thanthe dreary set of opposed commercials it now promises to be.) In my time I have been consecutively a sort of fellow-traveler (as was fitting for my earnest youth), a radical-at-liberty, disenchanted by the USSR on closer study, yet never quite enthusiastic about our own glorious fatherland and flag; and at present I have ended temporarily as what I have always been by temperament, an anarchist, or perhaps more accurately, a rebel. So it is obvious to anyone who knows me well that for me to write about a Democratic candidate is pretty much a tongue-in-cheek performance.
    Still, most of you will be taking your vote seriously, and to go on like this is only to offend you further. Most people, given their massage by propaganda, believe that a man who doesn’t vote is a little lower than a man who beats his mother, or, to be more psychically exact, a son who strikes his father. And perhaps even the Mailer would come off his mountain long enough to vote, if he felt any confidence that the Republican or Democratic Party was relatively the least bit more effective—for a given year—at going in historical directions one might think to be encouraging. But the curious contradictions of power and party politics are such that if I were to vote on this principle, I would be forced ever so slightly toward the Republicans. Not because I like them, mind you—I rather dislike them, they are such unconscionable hypocrites. Yet the disagreeable fact of power in these politically depressed years—like it or leave it—is that the Republican Party is a little more free to act, precisely because it does not have to be afraid of the Republicans, whereas the Democrats do. If the Democrats had the presidency, any relatively happy political action would be attacked by the Republicans as Communist-inspired; in power themselves, the Republicans find the objective situation (that is, the passive logic of events) pushes the same action and legislation upon them. So, reluctantly, they introduce what is necessary, and the predominantly Republican press and mass media accept it. (As an example, think of the end of the war in Korea, or the antisegregation efforts: I believe quite seriously that we would still be at war in Korea if the Democrats had won in ’52, for one can only begin to imagine the Republican fury at making peace—the hearty howling cries that for the firsttime in America’s proud history we had lost a war, and so forth, and so forth. So, too, with antisegregation. If the Democrats had tried to carry it through, the Republicans would have been rather pleased to collect the various little Democratic parties in the South.)
    I know this is unpleasant to all of you who believe that truth and untruth are separate, but then I have no particular desire to bring you pleasure. The antitheses of power are such today that I believe the party in