House of Eratosthenes

Fred Barnes starts out with a dreadful headline that states the obvious. Then he works his way through current events, and leaves you with a Thing That Makes You Go Hmmmm…

The Tyranny of the Majority Party
If Democrats insist on passing unpopular laws, they won’t control Congress for long.

[Alexis de Tocqueville] toured America in the 1830s and published his conclusions in the classic “Democracy in America.” He noted the powerful impact of public opinion. “That is what forms the majority,” he wrote. Congress merely “represents the majority and obeys it blindly” and so does the president. They are free to brush aside minority opinion, creating a threat de Tocqueville described as the “tyranny of the majority.”
:
Doing a reverse de Tocqueville, willingly endangering one’s political career by voting for ObamaCare, hasn’t fazed Democrat Michael Bennet, the appointed senator from Colorado. He was asked by CNN’s John King whether he’d vote for ObamaCare “if every piece of evidence tells you, if you support that bill, you’ll lose your job.” Mr. Bennet said “yes.”

Mr. Bennet isn’t the only potential martyr. A Democratic strategist told Byron York of the Washington Examiner that Mrs. Pelosi “believes losing 20 or even 40 Democratic seats in the House would be an acceptable price for achieving a goal the party has pursued since Franklin Roosevelt.” Now that Alabama Rep. Parker Griffith has bolted the Democratic Party, Republicans need 40 seats to capture control of the House.
:
That arrogance shaped the economic stimulus passed in February. Republicans wanted tax cuts to spur investment and create jobs. Democrats rejected that idea and enacted a huge increase in spending. As unemployment continued to rise, public opinion turned against the stimulus. Nonetheless, House Democrats passed a new, smaller stimulus bill last week with the same emphasis on spending.
:
“I regard as impious and detestable the maxim that in matters of government the majority of a people has the right to do everything,” de Tocqueville wrote roughly 175 years ago. But what about a congressional majority—which lacks a mandate from a majority of Americans—seeking to do everything? The Frenchman might have dubbed that the “tyranny of the minority.”

I’ve pointed this out before, what these people are all about. They seek to eliminate the opposition…which is fine, this is what partisan politics is all about, and our system is a partisan system.

But they go through a rather casual expurgation of reality as they achieve and then seek to make the most of their triumphs, and they drag the rest of us with them. Which is not fine. We were hearing a lot of this as President Obama was being sworn into office, how “Hope Won, Fear Lost.” Thus it was settled, everyone was on board with the democrat vision as they began to rule over us. But then again — not everyone. Stimulus I, Al Franken taking his seat in the Senate, Healthcare, Cap ‘n Trade, Cambridge cops acting stupidly. Every single week, all year long, there’s always a “them.” And then it was the “teabaggers.” Someone was always outside of this prevailing understanding of “everyone.” One end of the year to the other, the task ahead was always to vanquish them into oblivion — some more.

I pointed this out last year, after the elections were over. Their platform suffers from devastating and irreconcilable internal contradictions, before it is even brought into contact with the platforms of their enemies. They are there to represent “us”; which means “all of” us, supposedly, but on a little bit closer inspection you see it’s more like “the rest of” us after the more aristocratic classes have already been overly-represented. So yes there’s someone outside of the “all of us” but that someone isn’t supposed to count for anything. A little bit of tit-for-tat, some justified payback Tyranny-of-Majority. The hitch in the giddy-up arrives after the conquest, when the conquering army insists on fighting the battle all over again. Rather like a dog playing fetch. Exactly like that, in fact. Their brains go on this circuitous loop — we’re “everyone”; no we’re not; yes we are; no we’re not.

That’s the troubling dichotomy. You can’t have an exclusive club, if you don’t exclude. If nobody’s left out, nobody can stay in.

And so the King never quite takes the throne — first order of business after that, would have something to do with a bunch of boring old make-a-new-government type stuff. We saw as Obama built his circle full of cronies, czars and tax cheats that this isn’t really His forte. Instead, the King takes the crown off His head, throws it back in the bushes where He found it, mounts His steed and insists on fighting the battle all over again. Makes Him feel more Kingly. He’s supposed to be representing a return to democracy, representing “all of us,” and yet there’s always conflict and He doesn’t seem to know how to present Himself without the conflict. The legislation that works for “all of us” is dismally unpopular, and has to be passed not with a great flourish and fanfare, but instead with a whole bunch of bribery, kickbacks, threats, and sneaking-around.

That’s because, as Barnes points out, it’s really Tyranny-of-Minority. More people have been left out of the exclusive club, than in; it really is exclusive. More people are to be hurt by this new legislation, by design, than helped by it. That is what is supposed to happen.

In the final analysis, there really isn’t anyone in this exclusive club at all. Not out here in the real world. It’s strictly a beltway crowd. They’ve declared war on all economic classes within the country they are supposed to represent, save for the most dependent classes. They aren’t friendly with the dependent classes either, they’re simply taking a pass on trying to destroy them. And the reason they aren’t trying to destroy the dependent classes, is because they are dependent. There are other ways to control them.

Mr. Bennet isn’t the only potential martyr. A Democratic strategist told Byron York of the Washington Examiner that Mrs. Pelosi “believes losing 20 or even 40 Democratic seats in the House would be an acceptable price for achieving a goal the party has pursued since Franklin Roosevelt.

If you need any more evidence that this is about them and their egos, and not about representation at all … which I believe is the job description of a “Representative” … well then you’re just a blind ideologue.

As far as “Hope Won, Fear Lost” …

Luke: “I’m not afraid!”
Yoda: “You will be. You will be.”

You know, fear is a very good thing when there is something to be afraid of. Apparently some people would like us to forget that fact.
- philmon | 12/29/2009 @ 20:38
Great innovations should not be forced on slender majorities–Jefferson

Much less upon what exist now.
- jamzw | 12/30/2009 @ 10:01

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Recent

Items of Interest

Monthly Archives

What They Say

Links

Tyranny of the MinorityTuesday, December 29th, 2009

Tyranny of the Minority
Tuesday, December 29th, 2009