Douglas Murray Douglas Murray

A thoughtful man at the eye of the storm

Plain speaking from the former US Republican majority leader

Tom DeLay has a slightly deflated air about him in the London club in which we meet. It might be the financial accusations and personal attacks made on him for 11 years before his indictment and consequent stand-down from Congress last year. ‘I was pretty much burnt out, exhausted,’ he admits.

Or it could be the inevitable attitude of a former Republican majority leader observing Washington once more in the grip of the Democratic party — he is over here to speak at the Oxford Union, opposing the motion ‘This house looks forward to seeing a Democrat in the White House’ in a debate with the Rev’d Al Sharpton. But even observing Nancy Pelosi, Dennis Kucinich and co. jollying off to Damascus, Tom DeLay cannot get that enraged any more. ‘That’s who they are. In every war we have ever fought that’s what they do, the far Left. They undermined the will of the American people on Vietnam, on Korea, on Central America, over and over again. They are appeasers.’

Though this rhetoric might seem loud to a UK audience, it is barely audible for anyone who has heard DeLay in his heyday, or read his bullish new book. No Retreat, No Surrender: One American’s Fight has forewords by blow-hard US radio hosts Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. They set the pace for a relentlessly high-pitched example of the current US debate on the war and the Congress, reaching a kind of apogee in DeLay’s attack on ‘liberals’ for being ‘like Hitler’. It is not hard to see how a man’s genuine thoughtfulness can get lost here.

But DeLay, 60, is a thoughtful man, his small frame containing a classic example of an American ‘smallest-state-possible’ conservative. His political philosophy centres on calls for 10 per cent taxation, lifting of campaign-finance restrictions and assertions that ‘government can’t solve problems — it is the problem’.

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Douglas Murray
Written by
Douglas Murray
Douglas Murray is associate editor of The Spectator and author of The War on the West: How to Prevail in the Age of Unreason, among other books.

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