In one of the curious ironies of history, the Democratic Party, in its present form, is animated solely by opposition to majority rule; an obsession that it attempts to disguise with insincere attempts at class warfare.
There is nothing that the Democratic Party fears so much as democracy, which is why it is far more comfortable ruling through judicial rulings and the unrestricted powers of an unelected bureaucracy. Obama's two victories have given it a taste of a post-majority and post-American country ruled by a coalition of minorities, but its glee at that may be premature.
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The Democratic Party has built its house of cards on locking in political and economic privileges for the different tiers of its coalition. From food stamps to government jobs, it is the old political machine gone nationwide, dispensing money and privilege to the different group of its coalition, as a remedy for the supposed privileges enjoyed by the majority.
It still talks about equality, now and then, but it has no interest in equality, because that's too close to democracy. An equal population might start voting on economic merits, rather than the old game of special favors and privileged positions, and the Democratic Party, with its baggage train of professors who have never done anything more difficult than bore a class to death, bureaucrats who fear reform worse than death, and corporate and union bosses who expect special favors, would have nothing to offer them.
The coalition of the privileged underprivileged, united against the majority rule of the people who, unlike them, only erratically vote in their own self-interest, can achieve impressive turnouts, but that turnout is dependent on having something to gain from an election. And the closer the coalition of minorities comes to being the majority, the more unsustainable the payoffs become.
Liberalism has spent so much time working to destroy majority rule, that it has no idea what to do beyond that. Its only ideas involve suppressing majority rule through government power. It is incapable of meeting any challenge that cannot be oriented on the old familiar axis of oppressor and oppressed... and that makes it incapable of mature government.
Democrats with any economic sense turned on Obama after it was clear that he was incapable of having a serious conversation about economic reform. Those who didn't, like Bloomberg, made it clear that they supported him for his social policies, not his economic policies. After the election, Obama justified their fears by going back to pushing tax hikes and cuts to the military as the solution for out of control spending and debt.
Cutting the military has long been a fond dream of the left and there's plenty to cut. By the time Obama is done with the military, they really will be down to horses and bayonets. Raising taxes will bring in a little more money which will be thrown down the same old coalition hole as the money that came before it.
The Democrats are incapable of function as a majority party any longer. They have no solution to the country's economic problems because they are unwilling to take responsibility for them. All their prescriptions involve looting the things they oppose and transferring the money to the things they support, substituting more radical redistributionism for responsible government, and then refusing to take responsibility for anything that they have done.
The outcome of this program can already be seen in the cities where Democrats collect the most votes; from the living and the dead. But the abandoned houses, the dead streets and the factories that haven't made anything in fifty years do nothing to dissuade them from their course. Having ruined the country's greatest cities, they are certain that they failed only because the pigeons fled the coop for the suburbs and for freer cities. Give them the whole country and they will have all the money that they need to crack down on all the people who want to work for a living, on behalf of the people who want to be taken care of by the big benevolent hand of the state.
Repeat the process nationwide and the country will go the way of the cities. Economic growth will stop, companies will flee and the Detroitization of America will continue apace.
America will have government jobs and jobs subsidized by the government. Everything will be affordable, but will cost more and be hard to find. And there will be no one left to pay for any of it.
The Democrats don't imagine that they will end up here because it's not supposed to happen. But their brief modern history as a party at odds with mathematics and reality is littered with things that were not supposed to happen, but did anyway. The old crooks of Tammany Hall had no more morals than a shark on a blood trail, but at least they could count. They knew that they were dirty rotten thieves and they gloried in it.
Tammany Hall men were thieves who pretended to be social workers. Their idiot descendants are thieves who believe that they are actually social workers and that their social programs make them immune from mathematics. Tammany Hall chiefs kept count so as to know when to grab as much of the loot as possible and flee the country, like Richard Croker who fled back to Ireland with millions of dollars to continue his hobby of buying racehorses, or Boss Tweed who made it as far as Spain before being taken for a child molester. Their latter day counterparts can't count and imagine that they'll be Solar Barons living high off their carbon credit investments in their offset flying cars. Their worst flaw may be that they don't even know when to run away.
The Democratic Party was mildly respectable as a party of thieves. It is now a party of thieves tagging along behind a leadership that combines the best qualities of the Bolsheviks and the sensible management style of the Jacobins, engaged in a perpetual revolution against a power structure that consists of themselves, a dissolute upper class Republican opposition and a working class population that hates their guts, but has no idea how to get rid of them.
The Anti-Democratic Party functions in perpetual opposition, even when it is in power, blaming all its problems on their Republican predecessors, the way that their Bolshevik compatriots blamed the lack of bread on the problems inherited from the old regime. It never makes mistakes because it is never in power. It is hanging around Washington and representing the oppressed in between the Republican Administrations who show up to clean up its messes.
The Democratic Party defines itself by opposition, opposition to property, opposition to values and opposition to any and all structures that predate its latest revelation from the Angel of Political Correctness. It is constantly tearing things down and takes no responsibility for building things up again. Even its building programs are a destructive tearing down of something. It tears down coal and oil to build unworkable solar and wind stations. It tears down private enterprise to add more draining government jobs. It tears down freedom to build up government.
As a party in perpetual opposition to its own disasters, the Democratic Party is free to take power without ever taking responsibility for the uses of that power. As an Anti-Democratic party, is it not meant to be accountable to the voters or to the unfair system that they stand for. It is determined to build a system that will exist only to tear down their power and that is the gloriously dysfunctional system that we have now. The perpetual revolution for perpetual revolutionaries who are only working within the system to blow it up and then collect a nice fat pension from the system.
Such a state of affairs cannot go on forever. The Democratic Party has gotten what it wanted and that is to fundamentally transform America. But aside from a brief spurt of gloating, it cannot accept that either because it would mean ending its way on the majority that is a minority and bending down to the business of good government. And that is a little too much like having a real job with real responsibilities and real accountability.
The Democratic Party has become the left and the left does not know how to govern a country, only how to oppose the government of a country. That is why the left is invariably purged by the more sensible members of its own movement once the revolution is complete. It's either that or be stuck with them. The left knows that the only way to get anything done is to get rid of the left. It's the rest of the country that has yet to learn the same lesson.
cr
The Democratic Party has built its house of cards on locking in political and economic privileges for the different tiers of its coalition. From food stamps to government jobs, it is the old political machine gone nationwide, dispensing money and privilege to the different group of its coalition, as a remedy for the supposed privileges enjoyed by the majority.
It still talks about equality, now and then, but it has no interest in equality, because that's too close to democracy. An equal population might start voting on economic merits, rather than the old game of special favors and privileged positions, and the Democratic Party, with its baggage train of professors who have never done anything more difficult than bore a class to death, bureaucrats who fear reform worse than death, and corporate and union bosses who expect special favors, would have nothing to offer them.
The coalition of the privileged underprivileged, united against the majority rule of the people who, unlike them, only erratically vote in their own self-interest, can achieve impressive turnouts, but that turnout is dependent on having something to gain from an election. And the closer the coalition of minorities comes to being the majority, the more unsustainable the payoffs become.
Liberalism has spent so much time working to destroy majority rule, that it has no idea what to do beyond that. Its only ideas involve suppressing majority rule through government power. It is incapable of meeting any challenge that cannot be oriented on the old familiar axis of oppressor and oppressed... and that makes it incapable of mature government.
Democrats with any economic sense turned on Obama after it was clear that he was incapable of having a serious conversation about economic reform. Those who didn't, like Bloomberg, made it clear that they supported him for his social policies, not his economic policies. After the election, Obama justified their fears by going back to pushing tax hikes and cuts to the military as the solution for out of control spending and debt.
Cutting the military has long been a fond dream of the left and there's plenty to cut. By the time Obama is done with the military, they really will be down to horses and bayonets. Raising taxes will bring in a little more money which will be thrown down the same old coalition hole as the money that came before it.
The Democrats are incapable of function as a majority party any longer. They have no solution to the country's economic problems because they are unwilling to take responsibility for them. All their prescriptions involve looting the things they oppose and transferring the money to the things they support, substituting more radical redistributionism for responsible government, and then refusing to take responsibility for anything that they have done.
The outcome of this program can already be seen in the cities where Democrats collect the most votes; from the living and the dead. But the abandoned houses, the dead streets and the factories that haven't made anything in fifty years do nothing to dissuade them from their course. Having ruined the country's greatest cities, they are certain that they failed only because the pigeons fled the coop for the suburbs and for freer cities. Give them the whole country and they will have all the money that they need to crack down on all the people who want to work for a living, on behalf of the people who want to be taken care of by the big benevolent hand of the state.
America will have government jobs and jobs subsidized by the government. Everything will be affordable, but will cost more and be hard to find. And there will be no one left to pay for any of it.
The Democrats don't imagine that they will end up here because it's not supposed to happen. But their brief modern history as a party at odds with mathematics and reality is littered with things that were not supposed to happen, but did anyway. The old crooks of Tammany Hall had no more morals than a shark on a blood trail, but at least they could count. They knew that they were dirty rotten thieves and they gloried in it.
Tammany Hall men were thieves who pretended to be social workers. Their idiot descendants are thieves who believe that they are actually social workers and that their social programs make them immune from mathematics. Tammany Hall chiefs kept count so as to know when to grab as much of the loot as possible and flee the country, like Richard Croker who fled back to Ireland with millions of dollars to continue his hobby of buying racehorses, or Boss Tweed who made it as far as Spain before being taken for a child molester. Their latter day counterparts can't count and imagine that they'll be Solar Barons living high off their carbon credit investments in their offset flying cars. Their worst flaw may be that they don't even know when to run away.
The Democratic Party was mildly respectable as a party of thieves. It is now a party of thieves tagging along behind a leadership that combines the best qualities of the Bolsheviks and the sensible management style of the Jacobins, engaged in a perpetual revolution against a power structure that consists of themselves, a dissolute upper class Republican opposition and a working class population that hates their guts, but has no idea how to get rid of them.
The Anti-Democratic Party functions in perpetual opposition, even when it is in power, blaming all its problems on their Republican predecessors, the way that their Bolshevik compatriots blamed the lack of bread on the problems inherited from the old regime. It never makes mistakes because it is never in power. It is hanging around Washington and representing the oppressed in between the Republican Administrations who show up to clean up its messes.
The Democratic Party defines itself by opposition, opposition to property, opposition to values and opposition to any and all structures that predate its latest revelation from the Angel of Political Correctness. It is constantly tearing things down and takes no responsibility for building things up again. Even its building programs are a destructive tearing down of something. It tears down coal and oil to build unworkable solar and wind stations. It tears down private enterprise to add more draining government jobs. It tears down freedom to build up government.
Such a state of affairs cannot go on forever. The Democratic Party has gotten what it wanted and that is to fundamentally transform America. But aside from a brief spurt of gloating, it cannot accept that either because it would mean ending its way on the majority that is a minority and bending down to the business of good government. And that is a little too much like having a real job with real responsibilities and real accountability.
The Democratic Party has become the left and the left does not know how to govern a country, only how to oppose the government of a country. That is why the left is invariably purged by the more sensible members of its own movement once the revolution is complete. It's either that or be stuck with them. The left knows that the only way to get anything done is to get rid of the left. It's the rest of the country that has yet to learn the same lesson.
Comments
The Democratic Party I have nicknamed the "Plantation Party," because historically it has worked assiduously to keep blacks on the farm and dependent on government largess. It has never worked to free blacks from that dependency, citing an imaginary "racist" society that discriminates against them. Instead, it discriminates for blacks in order to create and retain a voting bloc that will enable the Party to expand its Plantation agenda to cover whites and Latinos and Asians and whatever other tribe it wishes to make dependent. And with each tribal group it has corralled into segregated pens, its power has increased, because to each group it promises government goodies and special privileges. What has been the Republican Party's response to this obvious tactic? As Bill Whittle remarked, that Party has little or no belief in its stated principles, and to avoid being labeled "extremist" or "racist" or insane, cries, "Me, too!"
ReplyDeleteThe Dems though are on collision course with the rest of the world due to their abuse of the reserve currency status of the dollar..and at some point the World will get angry with the never ending american money printing/inflation exporting policies. So i think they will ultimately keep the army to protect the status of the dollar, which provides them with their income. Conflict with China is possible, as the Left will blame foreign conspiracies after it runs out of domestic enemies. Similar to the way the greeks are blaming Germany for their economic problems.
ReplyDeleteExcellent article Daniel! Excellent!
ReplyDeleteThe problem is that you will never convince a Democrat that they are responsible for anything that went wrong. They will sign their own death warrants and blame it on everyone else.
ReplyDeleteThe trouble with the term "democracy" is that it's the wrong term for what the Founders intended this country to be, which is a "republic." It wasn't for nothing that Benjamin Franklin replied to a woman, after the conclusion of the Constitutional Convention, when she asked what form of government the delegates had created. He answered, "A republic, if you can keep it." He didn't say, "A democracy, if you can keep it." Most of the Founders were students of history and loathed democracies, which as a rule degenerated into literal mob rule contained by a demagogue who promised the mob bread and circuses and other goodies from the public trough. This is what happened to Rome, and the Weimar "Republic" and other nations. They became majority rule democracies, enabling the rise of Caesars and Hitlers and Mussolinis. The republic the Founders had in mind and labored in Philadelphia to create was an individual rights-protecting government, and the Constitution was a document intended to define the limits of the federal government so that mob rule and demagogues would have little chance of acquiring the powers of kings, dictators and men on horseback. It was not a document created as an open-ended legal instrument. It was intended to be closed to statism. "Democracy" is not synonymous with "republic," although sloppy, inexact, and expedient usage has blurred the distinctions between them.
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