Conservatives don’t get Vonnegut

The right loves to cite the short story Harrison Bergeron, but none of them actually understands its author or his politics

The other day, Ted Cruz made a feeble attempt to dunk on socialist presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. He and Ben Shapiro were riffing on Twitter about a letter Sanders wrote to the MLB commissioner decrying its plan to downsize minor league teams.

Taking Shapiro’s already absurd caricature of Sanders’ statements one step further, Cruz joked that the league should order the faster pitchers to all pitch slower, alluding to Kurt Vonnegut’s short story Harrison Bergeron.

It’s a funny little tale about a dystopian future in which a totalitarian state enforces absolute equality of ability. The villain is Handicapper General Diana Moon Glampers, a bureaucrat whose job is to assign handicaps to everyone. Those who are exceptionally strong or quick have to have bags of birdshot around their necks to hold them down. If you’re incredibly smart, you have to wear a radio device in your ear that plays annoying sounds to distract you. Beautiful people are made to look less…