It’s tough to get people to agree; it’s even tougher to get the minority to submit to their opposition.
But this is the nature of democracy – majority rule, over everyone else. We have recently been treated to a rare minority uprising, using a surprise set of tactics, some relating to rules of the game and others just relating to the game itself… and the results have been, for many viewers and participants, nothing less than tragic, horrific even.
Of course, you know exactly what I am talking about. The US House of Representatives and the months-long drama of getting, and replacing, a Speaker!
Dear reader, you may have thought I was going to wade into a certain crisis in the Middle East. Perhaps I would try to wrap this topic around of the US government’s expensive and counterproductive efforts to fight for Ukrainian democracy, until the last Ukrainian dies, or gets a Polish or Lithuanian passport.
Most people think that democracy is a good thing, a worthy model for any respectable, modern state. As a system for choosing things, democracy correlates snugly with our natural human craving to be part of a group that loves us back.
Yet we face a democratic crisis in Washington: 217 or 218 people must want a certain fellow to have a certain job – and that man will be third in line for the Oval. Let’s get this straight– we have a guy or a gal, elected by maybe 400,000 supporters in some Congressional district somewhere, plus those 218 others, and he or she could be President of the United States! We are literally one good fall, and a convenient and probably very satisfying CIA accident from that happening.
This decision is so important to the nation that every Democrat in the House will be voting exactly as they are told (by Pelosi), as they should in any “good” democracy. It is so important that the Republicans in the House, most of whom secretly worship and serve the uniparty, are wriggling like worms on hooks because a tiny minority of Republicans are mad as hell and aren’t going to take it anymore.
We got a glimpse of the minority anger with 15 rounds of voting earlier in the year before Kevin McCarthy could be elected Speaker. McCarthy publicly agreed to, and signed, a set of requirements put to him by this same conservative minority in order to “win” the speakership. Then, as now, the angry minority was blamed for the vacant Speakership. This mad minority is preventing “all of us” from the frantic and incessant Congressional business of driving the US off the fiscal cliff through massive debt, welfarism, and war. What a bad bunch they must be!
If we didn’t have “democracy,” and its trappings of position-preening- followed-by-secret-ballots, how ever would we resolve a way forward? What are we to do when the required obedience and submission of minority to majority fails to materialize?
Democracy has answers to these questions. First, we must demonize and dehumanize the rebellious minority – and devise new punishments for them. Congressman Matt Gaetz has certainly been demonized and dehumanized, and pretty much blamed for killing thousands of people, be they at the US border, Ukrainians, Armenians, you pick the people’s lives that would be made whole and safe if only the US taxpayer had a functioning Congress. And this is by his own party. The Democrats hate him even more, not because of the political struggle – that’s the fun stuff – but because wealth redistribution and vote buying is, maybe, slightly delayed.
How can one man stop the functioning of the US government – and if one man can do this, how is this possibly a democracy! Well, Virginia, in a real democracy, we should be able to stamp our majoritarian boot in the odd minorities faces, forever …. or at least as long as it takes to shut them up and make them conform to the wisdom of those who seem to hold power, because they hold sway, and because we all agree with them, or else we too might feel that boot on our face.
Ahh, democracy… boots are certainly required, and if boots are not enough, perhaps we can beat people into “doing the right thing” with the force of the state. My dear, dear reader, I’m not suggesting that people use force and the law to “take” land and property from one group of people and place it in the hands of a better group of people, those who can increase tax revenue using it, or use it more productively. But this is how the US Government expanded westward, it’s how every one of our parks and highways and massive dams and major cities and many large corporations were built – so what’s wrong with using a little force to get a minority of people to leave, and go away, if the majority seems to like the idea? There is a guy running for President right now in the US, maybe some of you have heard of him, polling as the next president of the US right now – and he’s getting all of his property revalued and taken by courts in New York. Because he doesn’t “really” represent the majority, how could he? He deserves this, for the good of the people.
Democracy, shemocracy. What rank totalitarian dreamed up this system? We must submit our minds and our will in order to take one step forward, or else we get the boot on our faces. We must constantly wonder if others suspect our secret curiosity about the minority position. Does it show? Should keep our gaze averted? If we end up exposed as the minority, will we too lose our liberty, our homes, our employment, our security, our reputations, our souls?
These questions are on the minds of many in Congress. They are on the minds of hundreds of millions of people living under government lockdown, like we saw only a few years ago in the most free, most prosperous, and most powerful nation on the planet, so we thought. We ask these questions every time we search the web, post on social media, make a phone call, attend a concert or sporting event, every time we communicate with another person. We increasingly are looking for compatriots and compadres, groups and locations where we might communicate freely, live comfortably, sleep at night, and have faith in the future.
Liberty and democracy really are not compatible, not even a little bit. Every vote, from start to finish, requires dominance and submission, and it does so without reason or rationality. Democracy as a mechanism for being ruled by a state is simply unreasonable. Don’t take my word for it. Ask any Israeli – the decimation of rights, property and lives of a possible future Arab majority is what “must” be done in order for the Zionist entity of Israel to survive as a political system – because that political system embraces on the surface, democracy.
Around the world, and particularly in the West, our value systems are polarizing while our political systems demand, require, and are forcing upon us, an equatorial latitude.
Maybe that’s why it feels like things are heating up.