A couple of days ago, Kos had a story up entitled The unfathomable tyranny of democracy. I wrote a longer than acceptable (in my mind) comment that I decided should be its own post, so this is it.
Kos picked up on a good point, one I would elucidate upon - the tyranny of the majority. It is the final stage, I believe in the crackup of the Republicans as a political party, a sign that they absolutely do not even remotely accept the single foundational principle of democracy: the principle of majority rules, the competing of ideas and the one with the most support gets put into place. As such, they have chosen to abandon any claim to being Americans, to being in any way able to represent We The People of America.
I'll lay out some of it below. You see, I actually have some history with the phrase "tyranny of the majority."
Note that they are not attacking tyranny itself - they are attacking a majority actually implementing what the majority has decided. Think about it: In their thinking, the majority may not tyrannize the minority. (Do not think this is a momentary aberration. It is only the first of many times we will hear this from them.) The majority may not tyrannize - but who is it they do they say may do so? Notice that they are not rejecting tyranny. They are only rejecting the right of the people's majority to do so. Yet it is just fine with them that a President of their choosing (by majority vote, no less) could tyrannize at will. So it is patently obvious that their proscription was not on tyranny per se - only if it was done by a legislature. That is saying the Constitution, in creating a legislature in Article I, is something they completely disagree with.
Their idea of government, as has been seen, is to have a unitary President, unaccountable to anyone but himself - once he has for any reason declared (extra-Constitutionally in itself) that we are at war. Any voice by the people or its representatives is excluded from participation in governing. This is exactly what they have come to believe.
. . . .
Now, as I said, I actually have some history with this "principle" they are spouting ignorantly. It all starts with the Libertarians.
The worst thing that ever happened to the Republican Party is the Libertarian Party.
I am not crying over their seemingly imminent demise, but they used to be a reasonably sane group of loyal Americans. Not any more.
I 100% believe that had the LP not existed, the Republicans might still be safe to allow out of the asylum. But we live on this particular time line with them, and since we can't turn back time, we are stuck with them the way they are, come hell or high water.
The LP did not go so far as the Republicans brains (hidden away in their think tanks) have decided their party should go. In the LP it was an idea that floated around, and that is about as far as it went.
...I was in the Libertarian Party, way back in 1981-1982. I even managed a campaign for Congress under their banner, against Phil Crane, a really sleazy Congressman for the North Shore and northwest Chicago suburbs. (We got 4.9% of the vote - just 0.1% short of getting back on the ballot automatically the next election cycle.)
We all had to get educated in what Libertarianism is all about, and most of it was by osmosis and discussions among ourselves. The "tyranny of the majority" was one of their points that either came out of or passed through the Cato Institute, as I recall.
[Here I would like to interject this: One of the things most people don't know is that the Libertarians are also about legalizing drugs, full rights in everything to everybody, legalized prostitution, to name a few of the Liberal points. That was much of what attracted me to the LP. They are not just about killing government and free market economics.]
In 1980, Ronald Reagan had gotten elected by claiming Libertarian positions on such things as "getting the government out of your pockets" and eliminating parts of the government. In 1980, those he promised to eliminate were the Departments of Energy and Education. Of course, like the liar he was, he just had used those claims to get votes; he never got rid of those Departments, and he had no intention of doing so. You never heard one syllable of that intent, ever again. That is what liars and politicians do with campaign promises - they never speak of them again. Even his famed tax cuts weren't even tax cuts - they were just finagling with taxes: He reduced taxes on 2/3 of the people, while making up for it by raising taxes on 1/3 of the people. I was one of the 1/3, so I recall that well. "Sack of shit Reagan" was my name for him the rest of his life - he made himself popular by raising my taxes and calling it a tax cut? Screw him.
But the tyranny of the majority idea argued that in any form of democracy, the majority could, and often did, do anything it wanted to, to the minority, (which is simply not true). While this is bullshit, they argued that a majority was just like a dictator - that ONE vote over 50% entitled the majority to ignore the minority completely (which is, in fact, exactly what THEY did when Bush had Congress on his side, which was okay, as long as they were the majority - until they drove James Jeffords to switch to being an Independent and began caucusing with the Democrats. The concept made no sense in a sane society, but hey, the "real" thinkers over at Cato said so.
A LOT of the wacko extreme ideas the Repugs have adopted in recent decades are actually Libertarian ideas. The tyranny of the majority is one of them. The idea that government should only consist of the elements that authoritarian mentalities like - courts, police and military - really appealed to Republicans and their sense of rigid and unchanging order, and the LP ideas, twisted to their own ends, let them go all John Birch on the country.
Reagan's popularity helped all of that get launched within the Republican Party, even though he never actually followed Libertarian ideals up with Libertarian actions. (Not that the LP was ever going to do anything; they were all talk and posturing - and that part of it - the inaction - is what has come down to the present day: A lot of Libertarian-sounding ideas/ideals, but Republicans doing exactly the opposite while asserting that they ere doing all these dictatorial and fascistic things in the name of freedom and liberty. And in the process, they abandoned the old-line Republican principles, which were responsible and careful government done cost-effectively - managing the country in prudent ways. Since Reagan's time the Republican WH budgets had run huge deficits, and spending has gone through the roof. (Obama's deficit is that created 100% by George W Bush. Obama HAD TO MANY create the $700B TARP fund because the $700B TARP fund passed while Bush was President was utterly insufficient to solve the problem.) old-line Republicans are turning over in their graves over what has happened to their principles. Yes, the Republicans cut programs, but they added to their pet Departments, so much more as to blow away any cost-cutting benefits to the overall budget. The budget deficit could easily be halved or even be eliminated in 2-3 years if the bloated (Democrats need to learn to use that word when talking about Pentagon cuts, which are long overdue) military budget was brought under control. It used to be a choice between guns or butter. Since Reagan it is guns and we don't need no stinkin' butter.
Besides not even following the Libertarian ideas, though, the Republicans just turned the LP positions into mantras. School vouchers? A mantra. What did they do about that while they had Congress and the WH? Nothing tangible, just a bit of talk. They didn't lift a finger. It is just posturing. They didn't have to pull up the "tyranny of the majority" much since Reagan's times, since there were only two years that the Democrats had both the White House and Congress in their control - the two years they beat up on Clinton about the national health bill. And their minority then sure didn't have much tyranny pushing them around.
But the idea of getting the government out of our pockets - they turned that into the Bush tax cuts (from money saved about 40-45% from welfare programs, which was reverse Robin Hood sheit). In that case "our pockets" really meant "OUR pockets", meaning the wealthy pockets the Republicans represent. They had then - and have now - no intention of getting out of the pockets of Joe Main Street, too. Joe has to pay his way, earn his way, or he isn't a true American. That is not true of those with the biggest pockets, who don't have to do anything but follow Daddy's lead and learn how to direct the wealth to their kind and to use the government to assist in that.
The idea of flushing the government down the toilet is basically an unstated Libertarianism, to eliminate all but those "three legitimate functions of government." NO Republican wants us to get rid of the government which protects the status and accumulated wealth of rich people - courts, armies and police. But they do want to get rid of all the rest of it - and flushing it down the toilet is a metaphor they'd like to turn into reality.
Bush appointing the idiots who were dead set against certain regulatory agencies was a de facto flushing of those agencies. They didn't need Congressional action (meaning the voice of the people), which would only have been acceding to the principle of majority rules - i.e., the tyranny of the majority. Neither we nor our Representatives had any say in that dissolution of a quarter of our Executive Branch.
And the 3 rubber stamp Congresses under Bush? De facto elimination of the Legislative branch altogether, for six years; Congress was a Potemkin village - a fake legislature, one supposed to look like one but to have nothing behind the facade. It was like the Reichstag under Hitler, just there as a pretense of democracy, to keep down the screaming of those who would fight its demise.
But mainly it was a way of avoiding the tyranny of the majority - a way of eliminating the Vox Populi, the voice of the people. For six years in America, the people had no voice, not even through their elected representatives.
And certainly no tyranny by a majority. . .
It was a way to turn America into something non-American. And that - THAT - is what they are really all about now. They want to kill the government that the Constitution created. At least the branch that represents the people, because they do not think We The People count.
Now that the people seem to have a voice again, they are not liking it, not one iota. They see us reviving/re-creating our government, and they are throwing a temper tantrum over that.
We The People. Them The Idiotic Tyrant Worshippers.
Kos caught on right away to what craziness that argument is. I just wanted to fill folks in on where the idea came from.