Be a Lamb among Wolves
Dana Milbank has apparently taken up E.J. Dionne’s banner with regards to “saving Democracy.” Yet, Milbank’s most recent commentary, which follows the electoral shellacking and embarrassments suffered by Democrats in off-year elections, highlights why “Democracy is Overrated.”
Milbank seeks to assure dyed-in-the-wool Democrats that, if Congress had simply passed Biden’s multi-trillion-dollar spending spree, then the resulting bribes to an increasingly dependent populace would have been sufficient for former Governor McAuliffe (D- VA) and other party faithful to have breezed into (re)election. That is perhaps true.
Never is one more generous (or frivolous) than when (s)he is spending someone else’s money. Political minions, who are eager to secure position, prestige, and profit from the vicarious power that they wield, will promise anything for continued command over their fiefdoms.
But, what of the costs (both financial and societal)? Those are irrelevant to politicians and would-be beneficiaries alike. Did you get the part about “other people’s money”?
The expectant beneficiaries are eager to enjoy the windfall of government’s largess, and they are indifferent as to the source, so long as is does not have to come from them. They are content to take blatantly and unabashedly (by force … of law) from a disfavored minority (i.e. the infamous “One Percent” or the more nebulously defined but still much-maligned “Rich”).
When that proves insufficient to sate the insatiable, there is always continued deficit spending. We can merely add untold trillions more to the gargantuan $30 Trillion National Debt. We can continue to sell America’s opportunities and to mortgage the futures of generations of Americans, who are yet unborn.
Milbank, Dionne, and other “progressives” would have us to believe that “Democracy” is the ideal. It is not. They would have us to believe that an unfettered state acting at the behest of a self-serving electoral majority is forever benevolent and always benign. It is not. Inexplicably, they allege that a collection (or collective) of exceedingly flawed human beings acting in concert somehow achieve omniscience and perfect wisdom (despite their individual limitations and shortcomings). They do not.
There is nothing about the makeup of a numerical majority which implies, much less guarantees, that its proposed courses of action are in the long-term bests interests of that majority or the collective as a whole, and those actions are almost certainly adverse to the interests of any disfavored minority (or nonconforming individual). In fact, collective action often results in groupthink, and it tends to magnify and exacerbate the baser traits of our species. The majority is motivated by a perverse moral certitude, which it mistakenly believes can be derived solely from its number.
The Architect of the Constitution, James Madison, warned:
A pure Democracy … can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of Government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party, or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is, that such Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives, as they have been violent in their deaths.
Not only is a Democracy not ideal, I would argue that it is dangerous and counterproductive when practiced in the manner, which is now proposed by “Progressives” and would-be Socialists.
