Republicans at Highest Levels Really Want to Do Away with Democracy for All

[Jefferson23]

** Title may sound paranoid, but when you consider everything, the title IS appropriate to their actions.


By Mark Ames, AlterNet

Posted on February 12, 2010, Printed on February 15, 2010

While Tea Party movement followers ran around Nashville last week dressed up in their Paul Revere period costumes, blathering about their heroic struggle against Obama's Islamosocialist tyranny, the right-wing elite that nurtures them, and their paid libertarian ideologues, have been openly advocating the abolition of America's democracy in favor of a free-market junta, because, as they say over and over, voters cannot be trusted to rule themselves.

Here, for example, is how one popular libertarian pundit summed up the attitude: "To be a libertarian in a modern democracy is to say that nearly 300 million Americans are wrong, and a handful of nay-sayers are right." It's a quote so common among the Republican and libertarian vanguard that it's almost irrelevant which one of them said it -- I'll get to this guy later, but suffice to know that he's a tenured professor, and sitting pretty in the same billionaire-funded world of think tanks, institutes, and PR machines that launched the Tea Party.

That's the dangerously authoritarian part of the Tea Party that we've forgotten about lately.

It's evident even in Republican Rep. Tom Tancredo's shocking "Jim Crow speech" that kicked off last week's Tea Party Convention -- when the out-of-the-closet xenophobe unveiled his Big Idea on how to preserve America's freedom, he wasn't just advocating more bigotry, but also a plan to roll back America's overly-free democracy, replacing it with a rule of elites that uses "civics literary tests" as the justification for denying voting rights to tens of millions of "wrong" Americans, like minorities and people with funny accents.

That's what made the whole period-costume fetish party so surreal: the sight of all these people re-enacting the Founding Fathers revolutionary fight for democracy, while at the same time cheering on a plan that overthrows American democracy and restricts power to a vanguard elite -- which presumably includes the kinds of draft-dodging rednecks and bipolar government-parasites like Tancredo.*Most of the gullible rank-and-file fools at the convention who snickered gleefully at Tancredo's "I have a dream ... of denying democratic rights to poor black kids's families and brown kids' families..." speech didn't understand that in all likelihood, they too would have their "irrational" voting rights canceled, because their masters despise them. And they don't even hide it. As incredible as it seems, these Republican and "libertarian" ideologues have been arguing that the real problem in America's democracy is that too many people have voting rights, leaving America at the mercy of "irrational" or dangerous voters who elect the wrong people. They have argued that the only way to save America is by overthrowing this democracy and replacing it with an enlightened, free-market dictatorship.


remainder: http://www.alternet.org/news/145648/republicans_at_highest_levels_really_want_to_do_away_with_democracy_for_all?page=entire

[Juche]

1. These people want a Pinochet or Franco to come to power

Trust me. Not long after Obama was elected it wasn't uncommon to see right wingers talking about how they wish there'd be a military coup.

Fascism tends to be an alliance between wealthy, powerful, cynical, self absorbed interests working together with poorly educated, reactionary, angry, low income working class people. That is exactly who is behind the tea party in the US.

These people seriously want a Pinochet or Franco to come and militarily overthrow the 'left wing' democratic government and force conservative social/economic policy on everyone. Thats who they really want. They don't want Palin, they want Pinochet. They have to be watched.

[salguine]

3. And they'll still be shouting their Tea Party chants even as they're being

herded into the "showers". That's the part that just kills me.

[Juche]

4. These people are morons

Many are on medicare and social security, yet rail against welfare and socialized medicine. They can't think, thinking requires higher cognitive functions. Their worldviews are based on fear, which shuts the more rational parts of the brain down.

Try and do calculus while having an anxiety attack. Imagine that level of mental numbness in charge of a political party.

[Enthusiast]

5. And they have a good excuse.

That excuse is the dangerous increase in socialist influence we observe in the country.

These right wingers will save us from this socialism just as they did in the 1930s, in Germany. Germany was in danger of socialist influence at one time. Lucky for all, they quelled this growing danger in time.

[Dyedinthewoolliberal]

2. It would seem they are making headway.

I get emails from family and friends who seems to think America would be better off with just one party. "How is that a democracy?" I ask. The answer is silence. It's like the movie 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers.' They have all gone to sleep and been replaced.

[Enthusiast]

6. Good analogy.

Not much difference.

[wolfgangmo]

7. "How is that a democracy" I ask.

I've often asked myself that about a 2 party system or about any system that uses privately owned computerized voting with no audit trail.

[DisgustedInMN]

8. This is news to whom? n/t

:shrug:

[Jefferson23]

10. I don't believe Ames is suggesting this is new, just getting worse.

[Festivito]

9. Beyond that, the people behind the people donating to our campaigns.

Soon to be completely hidden behind corporations.

Republicans are only the COMPLETE sellouts, there are more sellouts.

We must clean a lot of house,... and senate, and SCOTUS, and ... wherever.