Left? Right? Which?

The great warning in Tocqueville's Democracy in America, as every schoolchild used to know, concerns the "tyranny of the majority." In democratic societies like ours, any specimen of greed, self-righteousness or spite that wins the support of 51 percent of the people can be deployed to humiliate the remaining 49. The problem is even graver than it sounds. First, because, as human fail-ings go, greed, self-righteousness and spite are fairly infectious ones. Second, because majoritarian tyrannies are perceived as tyrannies only in retrospect; while they're being perpetrated, they appear in most people's minds as common sense. Today, most Americans will grant that women, blacks and gays were treated despotically a half-century ago. But if you tell them that smokers are being persecuted today, they will reply in good faith that they have no idea what you're talking about. The only silver lining is that, every once in a while, the near-unanimous wrath of the American public gets focused on a class of scumbags who richly deserve to be deprived of their rights. And today, the scumbag class par excellence of the Internet economy appears to be on the run.

Last week, the Massachusetts Senate passed?and Gov. Jane Swift signed into law?a "do not call" bill tough enough to put a lot of telemarketers out of business. Citizens can place themselves on a list that will make them off-limits to soliciting, and companies that call them can be fined up to $5000. Such laws have passed in about half of all states, and people love them. When Kentucky's do-not-call law was enacted earlier this year, a third of the state's residential phone numbers were registered within weeks; 200,000 New Yorkers signed up for their own state's list in the first month; and when Pennsylvania passed a do-not-call law earlier this summer, the toll-free number for getting listed on it was jammed for days. So ferocious is the desire to stop telemarketing that the Federal Trade Commission is considering a federal law.

No reader of this column will have to be told that evening phone solicitations for buying stocks ("I wouldn't want you to miss out on this opportunity, Mister?er, Chris") or time-shares or home-security systems are a major nuisance. One FTC estimate is that the average household receives 130 phone pitches a month. (We can leave for another column the amazing prolificacy of e-mail spammers: If I had answered even half of the Add-Six-Inches-to-Your-Penis!!! offers I've received, I'd be able to have sex in Chicago from the comfort of my desk in Washington.) But equally galling is the way telemarketers lobby Congress to protect their right to barge in on your dinner (or, if you happen to work the night or morning shift, interrupt your night's sleep). The Direct Marketing Association specializes in fraudulent statistics, claiming that telemarketing employs six million people and accounts for the absurdly high figure of $660 billion of our GNP. The American Teleservices Association (ATA) supplies the bogus "common-sense" appeals. Their lobbyist Matt Mattingly, a former Georgia Republican senator (and failed senatorial candidate last time out), was recently quoted as saying that, "If no one bought from telemarketers, there would be no telemarketers." Indeed, if no one wanted to have people knocked off, there would be no hit men, etc.

Mattingly, according to some press accounts, is mulling a freedom-of-speech challenge to these do-not-call laws. I'm a sucker for this kind of framing of the issues?you could probably convince me to jump off a bridge if you couched it in libertarian terms?but Mattingly's line is an absurdity. Most of our communications laws are based on metaphors we've built from our experience in a pre-technological age. Lobbyists view the telephone as like a right of way, or a sidewalk. Anyone can go there, and only a tyranny would limit people's right to "talk to one another." But we do have laws regarding public spaces and rights regarding private ones. Just because anyone can use the sidewalk does not mean you're allowed to erect a building on it. Just because there is a path across your land that hikers are allowed to cross does not give them the right to open a Burger King on it. Joe Telemarketer, posing as a champion of "freedom," is actually a champion of usurpation. Yes, the telephone is a way of communicating. It is also?whether we think of it as a private-sector thing or a public-sector thing?your property.

New Model Armey

Every election season piles up more evidence that the Cold War party structure has become meaningless. Not just "more fluid," or "harder to read"?meaningless. Our parties are coming to resemble sports teams in the era of free agency?they have fans who remain loyal, even if the squad has nothing in common with last year's. "Liberal" Bill Clinton abolished welfare and pursued a more conservative economic policy than any president since Coolidge. "Conservative" George Bush's signature legislative achievement is an education package that betokens the largest shift of power to Washington since LBJ. Only inertia and habit could explain why virtually all of the people who were Republicans or Democrats 15 years ago still belong to their respective parties.

First, we see Republicans criticizing Democrats for acting like Republicans. In the South Dakota Senate race, GOP Congressman John Thune has been running ads against the Democratic incumbent Tim Johnson, accusing Johnson of wanting to invest Social Security funds in the stock market. This is not exactly true?Johnson merely threw out the idea in the run-up to his 1996 campaign against Larry Pressler. (And asked what Thune's own position on the matter was, his spokesman Christine Iverson replied, "John has no position one way or the other." That's nice.) What's more interesting than one politician misrepresenting another is that Thune thinks he can get elected by spouting the Democratic line.

Second, we see Democrats attacking Democrats for acting like Democrats. In the Michigan gubernatorial primary, Jennifer Granholm won an overwhelming victory over David Bonior and Jim Blanchard, two giants of Michigan Democratic politics. This shows that the feminist money bundlers at EMILY's List?not the labor unions, which backed Bonior, and not the blacks, who mostly backed Blanchard?form the red-hot burning core of the Democratic constituency. But we knew that. What's interesting is that the slashing late ads that EMILY's List ran in favor of Granholm attacked Bonior and Blanchard as "soft on crime." Granholm thought she could get elected as a Dem by running on Richard Nixon's issues.

Third, we see Republicans attacking Republicans for acting like Republicans. In the New Hampshire senatorial party, incumbent Bob Smith?a conservative so hard-line that he briefly left the GOP three years ago because he felt it had betrayed the cause of small government?accuses his challenger, John Sununu the Younger, of backing tax increases. Okay, that plays to script: Sununu, like his father, is one of those worst-of-both-worlds Bush Republicans, who pays lip-service to conservative "values" while favoring Democratic levels of government interference. What's interesting is that Smith also accuses Sununu of voting against adding a prescription drug benefit to Medicare. The facts may be iffy on this?Sununu says he's voted for two such bills. Hasn't Smith done the same? Smith now thinks he can plausibly sell himself to the GOP rank-and-file as the guardian of an expanded welfare state.

This drifting away from ideological moorings is particularly marked in the Republican South. The belief that migration to the Sun Belt would transform the country into some kind of right-wing bastion has turned out to be wrong. These people are Republicans all right, but not necessarily of a stripe that, say, Ronald Reagan would recognize. Dick Armey traveled to Iowa last week, where he gave a speech that vaulted him to near the top of the Washington antiwar establishment. Saddam Hussein may continue to refuse to let weapons inspectors into his country, Armey said, but "in my estimation it is not enough reason to go in." That could have been Paul Wellstone talking.

In South Carolina, meanwhile, Lindsey Graham, the Cicero of the Impeach Bill Clinton crusade, is trying to get himself elected senator by running as Richard Gephardt. After last week's Senate passage of fast-track negotiating authority for the president, Graham said he wouldn't have voted for it, and set himself firmly in the protectionist camp. "America is the biggest chump in the world," he said, "and I'm tired of it." And tired of the free trade that has been part of the Republican Decalogue since 1980. To judge from the flurry of agricultural subsidies and steel tariffs that the President has ordered over the last few months, Graham has company.