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Democracy Uber Alles (But Only When It Goes Our Way)

Tyler Durden's picture




 

Submitted by Tibor Machan via Acting-Man.com,

Democracy – but only when it goes your way!

Over the years of watching the democratic process I’ve noticed something important.  People tend to reject democracy, indeed, fight it tooth and nail, when it doesn’t go their way.  But when it does, well, it is the tops.

Consider the case of California’s Proposition 187.  Then governor Gray Davis of California was maneuvering to essentially gut this referendum, one that won with over 60% of the votes.  So let us recognize that the leader of the Democratic Party in California has no problem rejecting what the majority of the people want when he and his friends believe that the people are wrong.

 

Former California governor Gray Davis, a typical representative of the cronyism prevalent in the US merchant State. What eventually tripped him up wasn’t his attempt to gut prop. 187 by legal maneuvering, but his perceived poor performance during California’s energy crisis. Many of his energy advisors were the very speculators who benefited the most from the crisis. It was one affront too many. Davis was the first member of California’s ruling caste to fall prey to a recall, after 117 previous recall attempts throughout California’s history had failed, and only the 2nd politician in US history to suffer this ignominious fate. During the boom of the 1990s, Davis had greatly expanded government spending, landing California with a near $35 bn. deficit when the bust inevitably struck.

Now if you believe in democracy regarding the handling of certain problems in society, whether people actually have signed up for that process, you will go along with the verdict regardless of whether you like the outcome.  That is a principled defense of democracy.

During all the health (Obama) care reform debates it is liberal Democrats who said, repeatedly, that their demand for a government supervised health care system merely expresses the will of the public and thus has ample legitimacy behind it.

That is why there is so much polling, too, by the media — it is widely believed that if “the people” want something, then it is OK. What, then, makes for a good law for champions of democracy is whether the majority wants it to be enacted.  (One reason that most Democrats used to oppose a balanced budget amendment is that they believe it would place undue obstacles before the will of the people.  Surely if they people want to go into debt [read: if that’s what the majority wants], we ought all to comply and go into debt.)

 

Healthcare Act Zingers

A couple of well-known affordable health-care act zingers. #Grubered is a well-known scandal (see “Dr. Gruber, wie geht’s dir?” and “#Grubered” for the highly amusing details) which was however at least marked by a truly candid assessment on the part of the good doctor/government advisor, who described the obfuscation tactics and the reliance on the “stupidity of the American voter” that were so instrumental in passing the law. What is perhaps less well known is that Ms. Pelosi channeled mid 1930s and mid 1940s satirists and cartoonists when she made her infamous remark about having to “pass the law so that you can find out what’s in it” – more on this below this post.

 

The people — the public interest, the general will, the greatest satisfaction of the greatest number, the will of the people, etc. — have been the objects of adoration of the leading lights of the Democratic Party.  Until the people no longer like what Democrats want, that is.

Consider prop 187.  The people of California wanted it.  But the Democrats did not.  Some years back they did want to make people in business stop hiring illegal aliens, so they enacted legislation and claimed, again, that they impose such restrictions and delegate such police powers as this requires on businesses because, well, the people demand it.

But if you keep fighting the outcome, via law suits and such, you testify to your dismissal of democracy in favor of something else — say, judicial intervention, some kind of higher law that democracy must not abridge, whatever.

Not that there is that much wrong with judicial intervention, as far as I can tell.  After all, the US Supreme Court interferes often when Congress or some other political body acts in defiance of the US Constitution, thus testifying to the conviction that there are some things that are way beyond the reach of the democratic process.

And few folks think it would be OK to, say, vote the Mooney church out of existence or to vote to shut down the New York Times.  That is because the US Constitution protects church and press from democratic meddling, no matter how eager the majority of the people are to meddle.

 

Leaving Matters to Popular Vote – When Convenient

One of the mainstays of the liberal democrats, mainly members of the Democratic Party of the United States of America, has been that in most matters we should leave decisions up to a vote.

We should vote on whether smoking is to be allowed in restaurants, how much money is too much when given to political candidates, whether zoning ordinances are to be enacted, how high taxes should be, how to run public schools, and so forth and so on.

Not OK by me, of course, but notice that it isn’t OK even by those who champion the “democracy uber alles” theme.  The process seems to be kosher only until things don’t quite go the liberal democratic way.

The flack over Proposition 187 was a wonderful case in point.  Just how hypocritical can you get!  Be a fervent supporter of people power except when people do not like what you like.  Then suddenly people power sucks.

I guess California’s majority will have to pick and choose some other issue on which to unite in order to fend off the duplicitous legalism of liberal Democrats.  I am sure there will be no problem with voting away private property rights, voting for massive government intervention in practically any area of human life, voting for extensive government regulation of business, medicine, and so on.

 

Bastiat

Frederic Bastiat had the right idea about socialist statism and the associated legalism. Generally speaking one could state that statism gives you “laws”, but not justice. To the extent that State power expands, the power of society is diminished.

 

But if there is a successful vote to rid the community of the expanding tyranny of government, the liberal democrats suddenly aren’t democrats any more.

It just goes to show you.  In their hearts of hearts most democrats are never really democrats at all but merely opportunists who make use of the power of the majority over the minority’s rights.  But should the majority not wish to go along with this plan, well down with democracy — it is the enemy of higher principles in which democrats believe only sporadically, however.

*  *  *

Addendum by PT:

As noted above, Ms. Pelosi, presumably unwittingly, channeled satirists and cartoonists of the 1930s and 1940s. In a joke appearing in the August 14, 1937 issue of the New Yorker, an anonymous author wrote (hat tip to Ben Zimmer of the Language Log):

“The wages-and-hours bill has become so complicated that it is a mystery to everybody in Washington. Congress will have to pass it to find out how it works.”

 

ofallthings

Copy of the actual “Of All Things” joke as it appeared in the New Yorker, Aug 14, 1937

 

The joke made a reappearance in a “Grin and Bear It” cartoon by George Lichty in the Mar. 12, 1947 issue of the Los Angeles Times:

 

grinandbearit

“I admit this new bill is too complicated to understand….we’ll just have to pass it to fin out how it works!” – the “senate committee on new legislation” in action.

The problem is that Ms. Pelosi didn’t intend to make a joke. There is actually a serious background to the joke – as George Madison once said:

“It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.”

Unfortunately the entire body of law is these days “so voluminous it cannot be read” and “so incoherent it cannot be understood” – characteristically, not even by those passing the laws. One suspects this is by design, as it is the easiest way to make sure that a potential criminal is made out of everybody (sometimes, as in Dennis Hastert’s case, this can lead to poetic justice being delivered).

 

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Mon, 10/12/2015 - 18:48 | 6660566 TBT or not TBT
TBT or not TBT's picture

Demagogue, the word, comes to us from the time of the first, tragic experiment in Democracy in ancient Athens.  

Mon, 10/12/2015 - 18:56 | 6660582 knukles
knukles's picture

In 1860, the Democrats* thought that it was OK to force other people to work their fields.
In 2015, the Democrats* think it's OK to force other people to pay for their healthcare.
Clinton*/Arbeitmachtfrei 2016

*yeah yeah yeah, I alreday know it's all one party, etc., etc., etc., just deal with it

Mon, 10/12/2015 - 19:03 | 6660614 jeff montanye
jeff montanye's picture

it would be at least an argument if we had gotten the kind of single payer healthcare system every other advanced economy in the world has (where healthcare costs about half of what it does here).  but we have the coercion without the lower costs and greater efficiency because the corrupt politicians (bush's prescription benefit too, remember) have to pay off the contributors (pharma, insurance, hospitals, etc.) in billions for what they gave in millions.  

Mon, 10/12/2015 - 18:56 | 6660592 TuPhat
TuPhat's picture

The author has it all backward.  What we have in this country is a tyranny of the minority over the majority.  Real democracy would be better than what we have.  I like the idea of a republic even more but that isn't going to happen.  In fact any change will probably just be a quicker slide into the abyss.

Mon, 10/12/2015 - 18:57 | 6660596 jeff montanye
jeff montanye's picture

this post is absurd.  the "liberal" democrats built up the state no more than the "conservative" republicans in the years since ww2.  it is pure fiction to think one or the other is the sole source of this evil.  bush did 9-11 and obama went with it to more war and more loss of liberty.

they play for the same team even though they wear different uniforms.

professional wrestling is more honest.

Mon, 10/12/2015 - 19:09 | 6660633 holdbuysell
holdbuysell's picture

The accurate framing of the issue is not left vs right but Fabianists and Leninists vs Individualists.

Mon, 10/12/2015 - 19:15 | 6660642 InnVestuhrr
InnVestuhrr's picture

This is what I have learned from life experience about "democracy":

The system by which the corrupt immoral politicians buy with entitlement programs the votes of the living biogarbage supergalactic moronic proletariat hordes because their their superior numbers/votes win elections and keep the politicians in power.

This symbiosis between the corrupt immoral politicians and the brain-dead freebie-addicted proletariat results in a spiral into astronomical debt to pay for the vote bribing, astronomical taxes and regulations that crush the ambitious and productive, and inevitable crumbling into mediocrity.

 

Mon, 10/12/2015 - 19:22 | 6660656 DOGGONE
DOGGONE's picture

Show history IF it is good advertising! So, NOT this:
http://showrealhist.com/yTRIAL.html

Mon, 10/12/2015 - 19:49 | 6660743 Monetas
Monetas's picture

Democracy is working .... if it avoids giving power to monsters .... the rest is gravy .... and the sky is the limit .... if we are worthy !

Mon, 10/12/2015 - 19:56 | 6660772 squid
squid's picture

It would be even better if the Robertson-Pattman act and the Sherman-Clayton act were enforced by the AG.

 

If they were, America's healthcare costs would drop by 80%.

 

And yet, here we are.

 

Squid

Mon, 10/12/2015 - 19:56 | 6660777 psychobilly
psychobilly's picture

Democracy is just another religious cult.  Tough to improve upon Mencken's thoughts on Democracy:

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~drbr/mencken.htm

Last Words

by H.L. Mencken (1926)

I have alluded somewhat vaguely to the merits of democracy. One of them is quite obvious: it is, perhaps, the most charming form of government ever devised by man. The reason is not far to seek. It is based upon propositions that are palpably not true and what is not true, as everyone knows, is always immensely more fascinating and satisfying to the vast majority of men than what is true. Truth has a harshness that alarms them, and an air of finality that collides with their incurable romanticism. They turn, in all the great emergencies of life, to the ancient promises, transparently false but immensely comforting, and of all those ancient promises there is none more comforting than the one to the effect that the lowly shall inherit the earth. It is at the bottom of the dominant religious system of the modern world, and it is at the bottom of the dominant political system. The latter, which is democracy, gives it an even higher credit and authority than the former, which is Christianity. More, democracy gives it a certain appearance of objective and demonstrable truth. The mob man, functioning as citizen, gets a feeling that he is really important to the world - that he is genuinely running things. Out of his maudlin herding after rogues and mountebanks there comes to him a sense of vast and mysterious power—which is what makes archbishops, police sergeants, the grand goblins of the Ku Klux and other such magnificoes happy. And out of it there comes, too, a conviction that he is somehow wise, that his views are taken seriously by his betters - which is what makes United States Senators, fortune tellers and Young Intellectuals happy. Finally, there comes out of it a glowing consciousness of a high duty triumphantly done which is what makes hangmen and husbands happy.

All these forms of happiness, of course, are illusory. They don't last. The democrat, leaping into the air to flap his wings and praise God, is for ever coming down with a thump. The seeds of his disaster, as I have shown, lie in his own stupidity: he can never get rid of the naive delusion - so beautifully Christian - that happiness is something to be got by taking it away from the other fellow. But there are seeds, too, in the very nature of things: a promise, after all, is only a promise, even when it is supported by divine revelation, and the chances against its fulfillment may be put into a depressing mathematical formula. Here the irony that lies under all human aspiration shows itself: the quest for happiness, as always, brings only unhappiness in the end. But saying that is merely saying that the true charm of democracy is not for the democrat but for the spectator. That spectator, it seems to me, is favoured with a show of the first cut and calibre. Try to imagine anything more heroically absurd! What grotesque false pretenses! What a parade of obvious imbecilities! What a welter of fraud! But is fraud unamusing? Then I retire forthwith as a psychologist. The fraud of democracy, I contend, is more amusing than any other, more amusing even, and by miles, than the fraud of religion. Go into your praying-chamber and give sober thought to any of the more characteristic democratic inventions: say, Law Enforcement. Or to any of the typical democratic prophets: say, the late Archangel Bryan. If you don't come out paled and palsied by mirth then you will not laugh on the Last Day itself, when Presbyterians step out of the grave like chicks from the egg, and wings blossom from their scapulae, and they leap into interstellar space with roars of joy.

I have spoken hitherto of the possibility that democracy may be a self-limiting disease, like measles. It is, perhaps, something more: it is self-devouring. One cannot observe it objectively without being impressed by its curious distrust of itself—its apparently ineradicable tendency to abandon its whole philosophy at the first sign of strain. I need not point to what happens invariably in democratic states when the national safety is menaced. All the great tribunes of democracy, on such occasions, convert themselves, by a process as simple as taking a deep breath, into despots of an almost fabulous ferocity. Lincoln, Roosevelt and Wilson come instantly to mind: Jackson and Cleveland are in the background, waiting to be recalled. Nor is this process confined to times of alarm and terror: it is going on day in and day out. Democracy always seems bent upon killing the thing it theoretically loves. I have rehearsed some of its operations against liberty, the very cornerstone of its political metaphysic. It not only wars upon the thing itself; it even wars upon mere academic advocacy of it. I offer the spectacle of Americans jailed for reading the Bill of Rights as perhaps the most gaudily humorous ever witnessed in the modern world. Try to imagine monarchy jailing subjects for maintaining the divine right of Kings! Or Christianity damning a believer for arguing that Jesus Christ was the Son of God! This last, perhaps, has been done: anything is possible in that direction. But under democracy the remotest and most fantastic possibility is a common-place of every day. All the axioms resolve themselves into thundering paradoxes, many amounting to downright contradictions in terms. The mob is competent to rule the rest of us—but it must be rigorously policed itself. There is a government, not of men, but of laws - but men are set upon benches to decide finally what the law is and may be. The highest function of the citizen is to serve the state - but the first assumption that meets him, when he essays to discharge it, is an assumption of his disingenuousness and dishonour. Is that assumption commonly sound? Then the farce only grows the more glorious.

I confess, for my part, that it greatly delights me. I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing. Does it exalt dunderheads, cowards, trimmers, frauds, cads? Then the pain of seeing them go up is balanced and obliterated by the joy of seeing them come down. Is it inordinately wasteful, extravagant, dishonest? Then so is every other form of government: all alike are enemies to laborious and virtuous men. Is rascality at the very heart of it? Well, we have borne that rascality since 1776, and continue to survive. In the long run, it may turn out that rascality is necessary to human government, and even to civilization itself - that civilization, at bottom, is nothing but a colossal swindle. I do not know: I report only that when the suckers are running well the spectacle is infinitely exhilarating. But I am, it may be, a somewhat malicious man: my sympathies, when it comes to suckers, tend to be coy. What I can't make out is how any man can believe in democracy who feels for and with them, and is pained when they are debauched and made a show of. How can any man be a democrat who is sincerely a democrat?

Tue, 10/13/2015 - 01:34 | 6661769 o r c k
o r c k's picture

Great reading, thanks !!

Mon, 10/12/2015 - 23:30 | 6661479 MEFOBILLS
MEFOBILLS's picture

Democracy is the CIA’s overthrow of Mossedegh in Iran to install the Shah. Democracy is the overthrow of Afghanistan’s secular government by the Taliban against Russia. Democracy is the Ukrainian coup behind Yats and Poroshenko. Democracy is Pinochet. It is “our bastards,” as Lyndon Johnson said, with regard to the Latin American dictators installed by U.S. foreign policy.

 

 

 

http://michael-hudson.com/2015/09/putin-the-empty-veil-of-democracy/

Tue, 10/13/2015 - 02:49 | 6661838 Ohne Deckung
Ohne Deckung's picture

The problem is not democracy as the problem is not water nor salt.

The problem is how much of anything pointing to the very green zone where it's not dangerous, not toxic in making use of it.

Democracy means commonly to find a solution between those who share a problem together in the most natural way. This is, to come together and see who has something to say, to contribute about.

And all of the share-holders of the problem at that circle are cheered to make inputs indiscriminately as well, when it must comes to a resolve to give in their vote.

These scheme to deal with problems, as natural and logically it seems but starts weakening till collapse if two conditions go wrong.

The gremium of honor to find a solution has no idea what they are speaking about, and, it's too large, too many people, what finally stuffs the same reason.

Democracy for millions is a bad joke when it is meant with to have for millions of assumed "share-holders" of a problem just one forum to go for justice about whatsoever.

No one has the capacity to be really in the picture what's going on without some spin-doctors behind maybe.

Blocks and parties take over which fight each other.

Communication problems mass up in providing the necessary information to such a body of people, that they have not at their own, meaning, they are not really "share-holders" of the problem that is sentenced to find a resolve in such a link-tank destining the fate of millions.

This circumstances table up our pudding sour and turns the given, quite naturally approach to find the best solution for a common problem into the poison "big brother" it has become.

To have a look for the right measurement is an intel long spread ago. If not finding it that equals, so the saying, you are doing something wrong.

If the amazing intelligent forum of natural design to come to a solution among brothers and sisters stretches the mass of share-holders, it turns by the nature of it number, by the design left, into a form of dictatorship, appealing to the very quality of character called psychopath which means, someone is able to define what is the best solution for all, without but to have a chance to be really in the picture what he is ruling about other than the mass, awaiting that he does it anyway.

Democracy is an immortal issue as long we are. The exploration to its borders seems to be yet of natural design too.

Tue, 10/13/2015 - 04:14 | 6661894 Klemens
Klemens's picture

All called democratic western countries (in the last 250 years) are freemason goverments!!!

The Left, the Right or the Middle parties are runnunig by this freemasons.

And the freemasons are controlled by the Synagogue!  That is "our" democratic system since the beginning!

http://www.synagoguerising.com/

Tue, 10/13/2015 - 04:25 | 6661899 BlackVoid
BlackVoid's picture

Author goes on a long tirade but fails to explain his point or proposition 187.

 

EPIC FAIL.

Tue, 10/13/2015 - 05:39 | 6661957 smacker
smacker's picture

Good article. I have always had serious doubts the democratic process and this essay goes some way to explain them.

My main gripe about democracy is that it gives power to the majority - but often the minority as in Britain where no government in my lifetime has ever achieved a majority vote to obtain power due to the electoral system - to dictate policy to everybody. It amounts to dictatorship by the minority.

The only solution to this is for there to be a strong written Constitution (effectively enforced) which recognises inalienable rights of every man, woman and child from birth and which cannot be taken away by any transient elected democratic government, even one with a massive majority.

Thus, a democratic government would only be allowed to operate within a defined framework. And this of course explains why governments despise Constitutions and why successive American govts have done their very best to castrate the American Constitution.

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