January 21, 2010 | election
Victor Davis Hanson describes what happened in Massachusetts last Tuesday in classical terms:
In Plato’s ideal society, philosopher kings and elite Guardians shepherded the rabble to force them to do the “right” thing.
To prevent the unwashed from doing anything stupid, the all-powerful, all-wise Guardians often had to tell a few “noble” lies. And, of course, these caretakers themselves were exempt from most rules they made for others.
We are now seeing such thinking in the Obama administration and among its supporters.
A technocracy — many Ivy-League-educated and without much experience outside academia and government — pushes legislation most people do not want but is nevertheless judged to be good for them.
Columnists all over the media are trying to interpret what the capture of the Senate in the most Liberal state in the Union by a Conservative Republican means in all terms, and they are almost all missing the point. Conservatives point to exit polls which show that voters were upset by the tactics used by the Democrats to push a very unpopular healthcare bill through Congress, and the way the President is handling the war against Islamofascism as reasons why the voters vote for Brown. There is some truth in that. There is more to it, however.
The American Left is not a friend of democracy. Mark Humphreys has a very detailed study of the association with the Left and totalitarianism where he points out that there is no megalomaniacal dictator, in the 20th century, that was not supported by Leftists, and, in their current incarnation, ‘Progressives.’
The Democratic party’s left wing is composed of these Progressives who share one point of view with the majority of the Democratic Party, the distrust of the common man. They are little different from the early American Federalist party, which distrusted the public, thought the elite should be in charge, and favored national power over state power.
That is what got them into trouble with the healthcare bill. Their efforts to pass this bill were anything but democratic; they eschewed compromise and bi-partisanship. They used methods of intimidation and bribery to maintain and expand support for the bill, and they used these methods well past the point where polling showed that the American public rejected the bill.
In other words, it was their methods which made this bill so unpopular, the totalitarian pushing of an agenda against the wishes of the people.
Ann Coulter points out how this is not unusual, for the Democratic Party, and a good reason why they never hold Control of Congress for more than one term at a time.
Except when Republicans win political power, they hold onto it long enough to govern. The Democrats keep being smacked down by the voters immediately after being elected and revealing their heinous agenda.
As a result, for the past four decades, American politics has consisted of Republicans controlling Washington for eight to 14 years — either from the White House or Capitol Hill — thus allowing Americans to forget what it was they didn’t like about Democrats, whom they then carelessly vote back in. The Democrats immediately remind Americans what they didn’t like about Democrats, and their power is revoked at the voters’ first possible opportunity.
The people rejected the Healthcare bill for the reasons Ann gave; they were reminded just who the Democrats really are; totalitarians, who do not care what the people want, but will tell the people what they are going to get, whether they like it or not.
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