Murder Your Darlings
Until we're willing to let the hostage takers shoot the hostages, we're going to keep on losing.
A US Congressman recently announced that the electoral college is a threat to democracy and a danger to the American people.
Via The Gateway Pundit:
Raskin called the Electoral College a danger to the American people and said the Electoral Count Reform Act didn’t go far enough.
The Electoral Count Reform Act makes clear the Vice President’s role in counting the electoral votes is merely ceremonial.
Because Raskin is a politician, it’s impossible to know whether he believes what he said or if it’s just his assigned talking point. Either way, his statement demonstrates ignorance of political philosopher and history.
Athens, a Greek city-state, introduced democracy in the 6th century BC. It lasted in various forms for about 300 years before the Macedonians end it in 342 BC. While limited forms of democratic decision making would exist throughout history, the idea of allowing free citizens to choose political leaders from their own ranks would lie dormant until colonists in North America, separated from their sovereigns by a vast ocean, revived it in the 18th century.
The Continental Congress was man’s first attempt at democracy on a large scale. Athens had been a city-state, not a nation. Though other Greek city-states copied the Athenian model, there was never a broader Greek democracy. Democratic methods were limited in scope to relatively tiny geographic areas and populations. The Americans, on the other hand, introduced democratic elections to determine national leadership even before their break from the English crown.
The Articles of Confederation and, later, the Constitution of the United States were the world’s first attempt at a democratic (voting by the people) republic (government open to the public).
As I’ve written before, modern conservatives often invent their own definitions of both “democracy” and “republic,” which creates confusion and leaves the right vulnerable to attacks from the left. I stick with Montesquieu’s definitions which are best described by contrasts. To Montesquieu (and to most of the founders), a republic was a form of government open to the public. Democracy was simple one of two means of choosing political leaders, the other being aristocracy. From Montesquieu:
When in a republic, the whole people possesses sovereign power, it is a democracy. When this power is in the hands of only a part of the people, it is an aristocracy. In a democracy the people, in certain respects, are the monarch; in others, they are the subject. It cannot reign except by its votes, and the laws which establish the right of voting are therefore fundamental in this form of government.
Again, the framers of the of the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution were the first men on earth to ever institute a national democratic-republic. Their experimentations with this novel form of government eventually led to the electoral college, in part to prevent states with large populations from dominating the national government and in part to relieve the entire voting public from the burden of winnowing down a vast and growing population of citizens to a single person.
A quarter of a millennium later, a Congressman comes along and claims those framers got it all wrong. Ignoring their experimentations and history, Raskin simply declares the system for choosing a national president is anti-democratic. Ignorance on a ridiculous scale.
The threat to democracy in America is not the electoral college but Americans’ vast ignorance of philosophy and history. Ask a thousand Americans under the age of 40 who hold advanced degrees who Montesquieu was, and you’ll receive 990 blank stares. Nine will answer “a fashion brand,” and one will get it right. Such ignorance blinds Americans to the current form of government which is undeniably aristocracy. Our government is no longer open to the public. A permanent administrative state chooses who may rule, as we saw clearly with the presidency of Donald Trump.
Trump was America’s last democratically elected president. The administrative state, fearful that democracy might become a thing again, asserted its dark powers, first to hinder his presidency, then to remove him from office. The Twitter Files show beyond a reasonable doubt that the administrative state’s secret police, the FBI, used its power to prevent Trump from being re-elected. The FBI pushed the Russian collusion hoax, suspended the First Amendment, and suppressed investigations of rigged elections—rigged, in all likelihood, by the FBI and CIA. The Attorney-General, Bill Barr, thwarted every attempt to dig deeper into the 2020 election with its numerous actuarial impossibilities, its impossible vote counts where over 200 percent of registered voters cast votes.
The administrative state in Arizona recently repeated the the FBI’s methods in selecting the state’s governor and attorney general. If Raskin were worried about democracy, he would be screaming about Maricopa County, not the electoral college.
The right suffers from its own form of mass ignorance: ignorance of strategy. And our ignorance of strategy means the forces of darkness will continue to amass power, stolen from the people, concentrating that power into a smaller and smaller group of hands. Strategy requires killing your darlings to achieve your end game, something conservatives in America refuse to even contemplate.
Conservatives set some things apart as sacrosanct, among these darlings are the Constitution and the union of 50 states, voting on election day, and nostalgia for certain periods—the Reagan years, WWII and the post-war era, the Revolution era, etc. As long as the right refuses to put it all on the table, the elitist cabal and continue to steal our power and rights until the Constitution is nothing more than a decoration, like an old cast-iron hand pump in the lawn of house with city water.
The FBI paid Twitter to censor Americans for thought crimes. It’s likely the FBI has backdoors to directly censor content on Facebook and YouTube. Appeals to the Constitution delight conservatives and draw a smug chuckle from the administrative state. The administrative state’s disregard for a piece of parchment is so complete that Pennsylvania simply ignored a recent Supreme Court ruling on election processes. Do you think the FBI, which repeatedly lied to its FISA court, would even debate whether to obey a court ruling?
Until the side of liberty is prepared to murder its darlings, the side of despotism will advance and freedom will recede. Until we’re willing to shred the Constitution in deference to the philosophy and theology that inspired it, we will continue to lose ground. And the pace at which the tyrants reclaim real estate lost to our 250-year experiment in self-governance will only accelerate.
Murder your darlings or they will become the instruments of your demise.
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