Democracy Is Dead! Long Live Liberty!
…it’s moved to the wrong.
Forgive me for not contributing to the healing process.
George W. Bush is one of the worst presidents ever. The election results were appalling. The people who voted for Bush are idiots.
In recognition of the efforts of the American people to assist him in escaping accountability for his horrific first term, I divide Republicans voters into three groups:
- Bone-mean
- Bone-crazy
- Bone-stupid
To them, the federal government is just a degraded spoil of war to be captured, looted, and cast aside when its ability to profit or harm them has been destroyed.
Bone-crazy Republicans project their own fears and failures on the Democrats, in order to have a tangible, thankfully helpless strawman to attack, and thereby convince themselves that their economic, sexual, racial, and global anxieties are being properly addressed.
Bone-stupid Republicans were lovingly profiled in a piece on Indiana voters in the LA Times. They believe George W. Bush is a nice person and, not coincidentally, believe in American exceptionalism: the idea that our nation is innately superior, and ordinary rules don’t apply to us.
Call them the anti-Chomskys. People who believe we are defined by our fine words and not our horrific deeds. People who should be required to host a child’s bloody corpse from Fallujah in their neat and comfy heartland homes to remind them they — and not agonized, Bush-hating blue-staters — are the ones who are keeping the truth and virtue at arms length.
Unfortunately, these people are wrong for the right reasons. They and their ilk have been creating justifications for opting out of liberal democracy for the last century. And now the facts on the ground are in their favor.
As the Republicans clawed their way to electoral supremacy over the last 40 years, thanks to their untiring efforts the failure of liberal democracy became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
People became alienated from a federal government gridlocked and attacked from within and without.
The best of them turned to their churches, communities, and causes to retain their moral compass.
The worst of them turned to the Republican Party to exchange their grudging participation in the national business of government for the E-ticket thrill of sliding down the slippery slope from laissez faire to moral disengagement to amoral selfishness.
Commitment to the expansion of enfranchisement, rights, and government programs that was meant to ensure the widest possible participation in our great shared endeavor of building a just and prosperous nation could be comfortably scorned and neglected.
Liberal democracy — and the Democratic Party that was meant both to energize it and draw energy from it — no longer provides a clear moral focus for these people and their aspirations.
When enough people are unmoved by the rhetoric and promise of liberal democracy, when faith in liberal democracy as the effective, necessary mechanism for social stability and national progress is lost, liberal democracy is dead.
All that’s left for the democratic process is the dreary, mendacious toil of electoral politics as both sides hope or pretend there’s more at stake than another four years at the trough for clueless and/or vicious pols.
Events and evolution played a role as well.
The moment had to come.
After all, in most of the history of the United States, faith in democracy as a social panacea has been a passing fad.
We first flirted with the idea of real one-man one vote democracy during Reconstruction, before the perceived need for healing and economic rebirth of whitey’s Southern dominion brought with it a rededication to the principles of elite republican government, Jim Crow exclusion, and finicky technocratic progressivism.
The New Deal period — culminating in the Civil Rights Act — represented the second noble attempt to redress the injustices of American society and effect social progress through the electoral process.
Conceived as a response to the twin crises of communism and fascism, the New Deal relied on a broad popular mandate for its Democratic vanguard to moderate and legitimize a more intrusive, distributive style of government and address the nation’s political and social challenges in a better, fairer way than the competing totalitarian ideologies did.
With the defeat and/or retreat of communism and fascism, liberal democracy looks more to some people like totalitarianism-lite than an urgent and necessary response to an existential social crisis.
Meanwhile, the Democrats dithered in their federal fortress even as well-financed mutiny seized the castle and raised the black flag of corporate piracy.
By the end, it didn’t matter. The fortress was empty. There was nothing to defend.
Now the New Deal Democratic Party itself is finally dead, a victim of the November 2 election.
This disengagement from the demands of liberal democracy is the drama being acted out in America under the guise of the electoral dismantling of the Democratic majority.
I can’t claim we have the people at our back. I think that trying to count the millions who didn’t vote into claiming that the Republicans don’t have majority rule is a fantasy. If we somehow drag millions of non-voters to the polls, the Republicans will do the same. Zero sum.
Clinging to the illusion that we are the party of the people blinds us to a fundamental realignment.
We’re now an interest group. An interest group that is 56 million strong and happens to hold the correct views on government finance, social security, the environment, national security, and foreign policy.
A group that has to be extremely cautious about submitting its agenda to any sort of electoral referendum, because we might get our asses kicked.
People who came to the Democratic Party from the anti-war movement (instead of the other way around) don’t have a problem being an unpopular minority.
November 2 wasn’t the first popularity contest we lost.
Think of early 2003, when pro-war sentiment was in the 60% range.
We didn’t stop then. We’re not stopping now.
But we have to abandon the idea that the ideals of liberal democracy — and the Democratic Party — resonate with an increasingly disillusioned and deluded electorate.
We will have to connect with the American people on a more direct and personal level.
The central, contested ground in American society today is liberty.
With the Democrats locked in a losing battle to defend liberal democracy, it was easy for Republicans to raise unopposed the banner of “Liberty” as a crowd-pleasing antithesis, to excuse disengagement from the moral, financial, and legal demands of liberal democracy.
But now, “Liberty”-loving Republicans, it’s put up or shut up time.
Deprived of the distraction of the Democrats and Hillary Clinton threatening the sanctity of their pocketbooks and nether parts, Republican voters will have to examine themselves and their leaders, and decide if it is really truth and virtue — or selfishness, complacency, and denial — that is driving their agenda and this nation.
How can good-hearted, patriotic Americans reconcile the rhetoric of liberty and disengagement from liberal democracy with their interests and moral obligations as citizens and human beings?
Specifically, how are catastrophic wars, unfunded mandates, runaway tax cuts, the shredding of the social safety net, environmental degradation, and corporate pillage executed by an unscrupulous and unchecked Republican regime to be reconciled with the rhetoric of liberty that the right wing now uses to excuse its outrages?
I’m willing to enter that debate. Because I believe that my beliefs and positions can be reconciled with a genuine love of liberty.
If the George W. Bush kleptocracy can be checked by sincere evangelicals, traditional conservatives, and principled Republicans, that’s a victory for me.
If churchgoers, military families, and Main Street Babbits decide an end to the bloody incompetence of our adventure in Iraq must be found, that’s a victory for me.
If Red State Americans demand that the nation adopt the responsibilities and not just the pleasing rhetoric of personal and economic freedom, that’s a victory for me.
And if the ruins of the Democratic Party must be torn down to erect a new shining city on the hill, one dedicated to a vision of liberty that offers inspiration both to caring Democrats and thinking Republicans, that’s at least a partial victory for me.
If enough Americans can defect from today’s Republican Party so that the mean, the crazy, and the stupid are once again in the minority, well, that’s a victory too.
Then I might be able to say, with genuine enthusiasm:
Democracy is dead! Long live Liberty!
Copyright 2004 Peter Lee
Peter Lee is the creator of the anti-war satire and commentary website Halcyon Days. He can be reached at peter@halcyondays.info.
