Sunday, February 6, 2011

I Don't Trust Right-Wingers With Democracy

Democracy sounds like a good idea. I mean, we all believe in it and everything, but let's not get carried away.

Look at what happened when you let right-wingers participate in the democratic process. Stupid voters install corrupt, stupid thugs, and we get things like people dying from drinking their tap-water and deli-sandwiches. We get multiple prorogations, we get torture cover-ups, we get Christian-fundamentalists trying to attack science and impose their versions of Sharia laws on us.

Sadly, I think that for now, we should suspend democracy.

I know! I know! It's a betrayal of all your teenage romantic idealism, but such pollyannish optimism is actually quite dangerous in this day and age.

Truth be told, I think that right-wingers, whether they're just reactionary social-neanderthals or "free-market" shills and chumps, constitute such a menace that "strong measures" should taken to deal with them. I advocate "taking off the gloves" and employing "harsh interrogation tactics" against them. We should utterly destroy their leaders and kill the spirits of their followers. Otherwise, this stupid minority, utterly convinced as only ignorant fanatics can be, will continue to presume upon our patience and open-mindedness, and make our very tolerance for diversity, which is one of our defining qualities, a weapon to use against us.

Blah, blah, blah. I'm actually still one of those romantics who believes that people can be trusted to govern themselves, especially if they have access to the truth. The vast majority of people can prevail against the stupid minority, and therefore, the stupid minority can keep their votes and their parties and their delusions. It is self-interested, self-serving elites, who suppress democracy, who lie, who torture, who kill, they are the enemy. And they should be confronted legally, and if they abuse their power and make a mockery of the law, then they should be confronted extra-legally as well.

All that anti-democratic stuff I wrote above was just a mirror image of the arguments of those debased individuals (who all appear to be most comfortable on the right side of the political spectrum) as they take their stand AGAINST democracy in Egypt and imagine themselves intelligent, sober, realists for so doing.

If any of that ilk read this post, they will no doubt take issue with my fantastic rhetoric directed at them, and fail to honestly engage with the fact that it's just what they say about Egyptians and the dangers of Islamic fundamentalism. Not even this disclaimer will help them, the poor, pitiful souls.

4 comments:

The Mound of Sound said...

Part of our shared frustration arises out of the extent the traditional Right has been transformed into today's Rightwing.

When you read Burke or Lincoln or Teddy Roosevelt you find a sort of genuine conservative that would today seem like devout socialists.

David Gergen, who served Richard Nixon, said he left the Republican Party when he came to realize that Nixon would never be accepted within today's GOP. That and the reality that today's movement conservatives have obliterated any trace of progressivism that the Right willingly embraced just three decades ago.

Today's Right is a perversion of conservatism. It's a radical Right, the mirror image of the radical Left we once wisely steered well clear of. It's given to intolerance, divisiveness, extremism and bitter hostility. It's insentient even at a time when society can least afford that.

thwap said...

Mound of Sound,

It's some sort of testimony to the end of something. People clinging to outworn ideas simply because they're traditional.

Too much has happened to reveal the falsity of their beliefs, so they simply celebrate their stubborn ignorance.

Orwell's Bastard said...

Man, you guys are a buzz kill tonight, aren't you.

I know a couple of people who need to turn their frowns upside down!

thwap said...

OB,

All the blood rushes to my head when I do that.