Why I love chicks

Let me start with a politically incorrect admission: I love chicks — have for a long time.

Not just any chicks, mind you, just the Dixie Chicks. I first met them many years ago, when they were just a local band in Dallas doing warm-up acts for ponderous keynote speakers like me. I still have the CD they gave me on one such occasion. The third song on their latest CD, "Taking the Long Way," strikes a particular chord in me:

"I'm not ready to make nice, I'm not ready to back down, I'm still mad as hell. And I don't have time To go round and round and round. It's too late to make it right I probably wouldn't if I could, 'Cause I'm mad as hell; Can't bring myself to do what it is You think I should."

This is a defiant song about a freedom the Founding Fathers sought to bestow on Americans, namely, to speak their minds freely and fearlessly. The Dixie Chicks did so in early 2003, undeterred by the underground constraints on free speech deplored by De Tocqueville when he wrote in "Democracy in America": "I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America." Tocqueville traced these hidden constraints to what he called the "Tyranny of the Majority" and what we now would call "political correctness." That tyrannical majority will not jail or hang dissenters and even allow them to speak freely. But it will ostracize them economically, socially and politically, sometimes to the point of ruin.

In early 2003, the Dixie Chicks had taken strong objection on their website to this country's preemptive strike on Iraq. In a heated moment, one of them remarked during a concert tour in London "Just so you know, we're ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas," though she apologized shortly thereafter with the words "As a concerned American citizen, I apologize to President Bush, because my remark was disrespectful. I feel that whoever holds that office should be treated with the utmost respect. ... [But] while war may remain a viable option, as a mother, I just want to see every possible alternative exhausted before children and American soldiers' lives are lost. I love my country. I am a proud American." Princeton's James Madison, ever worried about the executive branch's proclivity to rush into war, would have been proud of her.

That should have been it. Alas, the "patriots" who run Nashville's country music empire and whose idea of bravery is to profit from patriotic songs, rather than joining the fighting men and women at the front would not let it go that easily. As de Tocqueville would have predicted, these tough guys, the country radio they feed and the listeners who follow their dictates promptly shunned the Dixie Chicks, praying no doubt, for their economic ruin. Though the Dixie Chicks swept this year's Grammy Awards, which are not controlled by Nashville, that honor came only after the political climate had changed and the majority of Americans now grasps what the Dixie Chicks had feared as early as 2003. "Patriotic" Nashville reportedly keeps pouting.

We can all agree that the office of the President of the United States should be respected. But respect for public office is a far cry from the mindless leader-worship we saw in the highly deferential Congress, mainstream media and majority of Americans in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001 — a leader-worship that marched to the ominous drumbeat of "My Leader right or wrong." The "patriotic" hysteria of that time brooked no dissent and ostracized even knowledgeable experts, such as Scott Ritter, ex-Marine, advisor to General Schwarzkopf in "Desert Storm" and U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq, who accurately predicted before the invasion of Iraq that no weapons of mass destruction would be found there.

As an ex-German whose parents' generation practiced leader-worship to the point of world destruction, I find myself deeply disillusioned by the America I have witnessed during the past few years. It troubles me to see the majority of an ostensibly free but unduly deferential people blindly follow their leader into a poorly conceived "patriotic" war, with unquestioning belief not only in the righteousness of their nation's cause, but also in its invincibility. And it scares me as well.

In the meantime, I salute the Dixie Chicks. They — and my wife, I might add — understood in early 2003 what the great majority of Americans realize only now and had the guts to say so out loud. My hope is that young Americans will look to the Dixie Chicks and outspoken people like them as their role models, and that they will heed Bruce Springsteen's sage admonition in the preamble to one of his songs: "Blind faith in your leaders, or in anything, will get you killed." Young people had better believe it. Uwe E. Reinhardt is the James Madison Professor of Political Economy and a professor in the Wilson School. He can be reached at reinhard@princeton.edu.