Back in the bad old days of apartheid in South Africa, the pitch against the policy was less often racism than the scandal of a tiny minority ruling a big majority. It seemed – and was called – a travesty of democracy, the antithesis of representative government, a sort of racist tyranny/slash/oligarchy. The core of democratic governing was embodied in the concept that the majority rules. If it doesn’t, explained John Locke in Of Civil Government, you’ve got chaos.
For if the consent of the majority shall not in reason be received as the act of the whole and conclude every individual, nothing but the consent of every individual can make anything to be the act of the whole which…’tis next to impossible ever to be had.
For over 200 years the United States and every other country with a democratic constitution considered this rule unbreakable. Abraham Lincoln fought the only internal war we’ve ever had to prevent a minority of Southern slaveowners from dictating policy to the majority government at the point of a bayonet. Political parties from the Federalists to the Whigs to the Know-Nothings to today’s GOP, Democrat, and Green parties understood the rules: when a majority of the country has decided on a course, the minority has to change their minds to get its way. In a democracy, minorities may influence policy but they don’t make it.
No one, to my knowledge, ever questioned this fundamental truth. Until the Bush Cult.
In 2000 George W Bush was elected, as we now know, by a minority of voters in an election that was marked by dirty tricks and a Supreme Court that went against its own track record of legal decisions to hand it to him. In ’04, we saw an even more extensive series of illegal Republican activities that successfully curtailed or simply didn’t count Democratic votes in key states like Florida, New Mexico, and Ohio. More than two years later, we discovered that, once again, even counting the skewing of the Electoral College system, Bush had actually lost the election. By then, of course, it was way too late to do anything about it.
Apparently conservatives took these two stained “victories” and the way they were obtained to heart because ever since then the right wing, though it represents less than 20% of the public, has been acting as if it’s a majority denied its rights by a minority of whiners, weiners, and anti-American fringe DFH’s with dirty long hair and Satanic tattoos on their butts.
And we are letting them do it.
For the first time I am aware of in American history, the majority is being handcuffed, ignored, and belittled by a loudmouthed minority with the apparent IQ of a houseplant. Our media is dazzled by their mindless boobism, following Birthers and Teabaggers and 9/12ers adamantly with cameras and microphones waving by the bushelbasketful, eager to print/broadcast their latest hate-speech memes as they pretend to be “normal Americans” rather than the subnormal Beckian anti-Americans they so patently are. The Democrat party, apparently terrified of a few thousand whackos dressed up like farmers (though most of them have most likely never even seen a farm) and spouting conspiracy theories that make less sense than your average Flat Earth Society nut case, most of them functioning as cover for racist hatred of the first black president, has jumped onto the rickety Blue Dog Bus and bitch-slapped the liberal majority repeatedly without a finger being lifted to prevent it.
The United States has, it seems, become like South Africa – a majority ruled by a minority that hates them. Instead of a burning rubber tire, they’re hanging a burning Contitution around our necks but that’s not necessarily an improvement.
We are the majority. It’s up to us to remind the 17% that, whatever they prefer to believe, they aren’t. They don’t get their way any more just because they threaten to hold their breath until they turn blue or whine, cry, and threaten havoc to the cookie jar.
These people are not citizens. In fact, they are coming perilously close to being criminals (“Obama=Hitler”!? bringing Uzis to presidential events??!!). They deserve NO quarter, NO respect, and NO COVERAGE. They are pus on the body politic and they need to be ejected so the healthy tissue can start functioning again.
The tyranny of the minority must end. We were patient when they had people buffaloed, convinced to vote against their own interests. Not that they decisively lost the argument, it’s their turn to be patient. Or they may find out just how many lib-progs have guns. And know how to use them.