"Well, the people have spoken....the bastards!"
Kinda sums up what many in the GOP are feeling today. In a hotly contested election between 2 distinctly different visions for America, many conservatives felt confident of victory. Some even predicted a Republican landslide. It is understandable that they would feel disheartened and discouraged.
But many of the election post-mortems exhibit a strain of profound pessimism not only about losing an election, but about democracy in general.
For some in the GOP, the 2012 election is what happens when democracy gets overrun by the riff-raff:
Bill O'Reilly: "It's a changing country. ... It's not a traditional America anymore, and there are 50 percent of the voting public who want stuff. They want things. And who is going to give them things? President Obama. He knows it. And he ran on it."
Donald Trump made an aborted call for revolution.
Secession petitions have been filed at the White House web site by residents of 12 states. We've fought the Taliban and Al Qaeda for 12 years, but the re-election of Obama evidently means it's time to give up on the idea of the United States. Sunshine Patriots, indeed.
But Ted Nugent's prediction that he will be dead or in jail by April is, I'm afraid, just wishful thinking.
In 2012, for the first time in United States history, recorded births of minority babies exceed those of white babies. After nearly 3 centuries of having the upper hand, white men are seeing the beginning of the end of their majority.
Clifton Chadwick, in The American Thinker, is worried:
A thing isn't good or legitimate just because the majority wants it. Democracy and freedom aren't synonyms, but most people associate democracy with freedom. The theory of modern democracy asserts that having a large enough number of supporters -- a majority of the population -- makes a government and its policies legitimate and just. This simply is a variation of the idea "might makes right."
The word for this is "populism," the name for movements that charge elite groups (the "1%") with having betrayed the public interest. It gathers followers in the hopes of gaining large enough numbers for its claims to speak on behalf of "the people" to be taken seriously. It pushes for more "fairness." Successful populism is the "tyranny of the majority," which Alexis de Tocqueville warned the Americans about in the 19th century.
What if the majority wants something evil? What if they want to oppress a minority? What if they want to tax the rich to give to the poor (which is currently happening)? Should they be allowed to?"
Not exactly what white men were saying when 'populists' were enslaving black men and pushing Native Americans off their own land. It's very touching to see white men developing a sensitivity to the plight of minorities. It's also very understandable, given our own past behavior.
You get the feeling that democracy was a game they were happy to play only when the dice were loaded in their favor.
As far as taxing the rich to give to the poor, this is is not an idea that Obama originated. I'll quote someone Mr. Chadwick may have heard of:
Adam Smith wrote:The necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor. They find it difficult to get food, and the greater part of their little revenue is spent in getting it. The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expense of the rich, and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess. A tax upon house-rents, therefore, would in general fall heaviest upon the rich; and in this sort of inequality there would not, perhaps, be anything very unreasonable. It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.
So the idea of progressive taxation didn't begin with Karl Marx.
Politics seems to be trapped in the land of extremism. Every election cycle Means the survival of the country; a great victory or a catastrophe. There is no sense of balance. The ship of state tacks to the right, then to the left. It seems a bit disingenuous to claim we are the greatest country in the history of the world, and the next moment say that all is lost.