The Right Is Giving Up on Democracy
Suspicion of the democratic system is driven by the fear that white Christian America is facing demographic doom.
Sure, but it was already openly out there in Romney's time that it was takers getting to vote that made it impossible to abolish entitlements and the Welfare State, and roll back progressivism all the way to McKinley's time.
And there are far more white takers than nonwhite, my friends.
It is a right wing commonplace in America today, it is very dogma, that it is illegitimate corruption for the masses to vote for economic and social policies that favor their interests, but personal and civic virtue for the plutes and anyone they can hoodwink into it to vote for policies that favor the rich and the mighty.
Recall that even Romney, an alleged moderate of the Republican Party, was channeling that right wing radical, Ayn Rand, as does everyone today who is devoted to what fraudulently calls itself the American conservative movement.
The idea is out there and has been for many decades that when democracy goes so far as to allow the masses to lock in progressivism it has gone too far, it is illegitimate, it is an intolerable corruption.
That right wing idea, foolish, cruel, stupid, and not at all conservative, widespread even among the soi-disant conservative masses who themselves are ordinary people, has been undermining not only elite but public faith in democracy for many, many decades.
That Iron Man of the right of his age and place, Bismark, knew the proper conservative move was adopt much of the agenda of the Social Democrats in order to maintain stability and retain the loyalty and obedience of the masses to his creation, the German Empire of the Hohenzollern dynasty.
That arch right-winger so beloved of Ayn Rand, Aristotle, taught a lesson she ignored, and a point echoed by that idol of libertarians, John Stuart Mill, that the mixed state is best, and must necessarily allow for enough democracy for the great body of the people to protect themselves from the arrogance, cruelty, selfishness, and greed of the rich, and thus ensure a necessary condition for any durable social order.
Even that theorist of absolutism and monarchy, Thomas Hobbes, was crystal clear that when the rich are so grasping and pitiless as to refuse to others any adequate portion of what they have, however far in excess of genuine need, they provoke crime, disorder, rebellion, and what he thought the greatest of evils, civil war, thus making themselves the enemies of peace and putting themselves in direct conflict with the first law of nature, that we are to seek peace, and pursue it.
On the other hand, few are the ordinary people of America who can be convinced to vote to sink themselves for the benefit of the rich, when the question is put quite like that.
More can be brought to boil themselves in oil if it is put to them that the Democrats, the Party of the People, are in fact the party of their enemies, global economic elites and vast swarms of hate-driven nonwhites.
And that is what the entire deceptively labeled "conservative movement" has been doing for many, many years, now, both the Wall Street wing of the WSJ and The National Review and the paleocon wing of Pat Buchanan, Ann Coulter, and the fringe elements of both.
It is imperative to understand that these people and their movement are not conservatives.
They have all along been very clear they want to abolish in America rather than fund Obamacare, Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, the Department of Education, the EPA, the vast establishment of public education, and all the other measures and establishments, whether regulatory or redistributive, commonly taken by progressive governments around the world to ensure that democratic capitalism is possible by ensuring that capitalism does not become so rapacious, so cruel, and so vicious that it is acceptable to no one but the capitalists, themselves, and the gunmen they must hire to shoot the people down.
They understand fully that our political system is too democratic to make that project at all plausible.
Increasingly, the project is more important to them than democracy.
Suspicion of the democratic system is so pervasive on the right because it’s driven by the fear that white Christian America is facing demographic doom.
The evidence is right there in the election results: Republicans have lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections, and if current polling trends hold, the GOP will be batting one for seven when the results come in on November 8.
Thanks to gerrymandering, Republicans may hold on to a U.S. House majority for a while, and they’ll remain competitive in state capitols in the near future.
But a whites-only party can’t win national elections.
And over time, the GOP’s congressional and state fortresses will crumble if the party doesn’t change dramatically.
Or if the democratic system doesn’t change dramatically.
As conservative writer Byron York noted in the Washington Examiner in May, there’s been an upsurge on the right of calls for “a test for voting, limited-participation elections, condemnations of democracy in general.”
The anti-democratic measures have been taken up with especial fervor by anti-Trump writers like David Harsanyi, Jonah Goldberg, and Keven D. Williamson, all frequent contributors to The National Review.
Go ahead and read the whole of Jeet Heer's piece.
An eye-opener, truly.
His only and central mistake is to see too much of race where what fundamentally moves most of the elites and their mouthpieces of the right is a refusal to accept a capitalist regime in which social harmony and order are bought by throttling the greed of the haves for the sake of the have-nots.
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