Hate Mail - Those Who Favor Democracy Have No Business Being "Fair" or "Nice" About It

I ADMIT THAT to some disappointment that one of the earliest posts I ever wrote didn't have much impact.   That was the one in which I declared that I won't be fair to fascists and I won't be nice to Nazis.   Which I think makes a good slogan and a good basis of conduct for those who favor egalitarian democracy.  

As I pointed out in the piece, we know from history that fascists and Nazis and, I could have added our traditional and highly successful forms of those, white supremacy, male supremacy are fully able to govern large parts of the United States and continually in many of the individual states and, under our entirely rigged form of governance, the entire country.   They do right now and form the large majority of the Supreme Court.  

The motivation to write that was listening to the host of the Saturday morning show on NPR tisk-tisking a liberal for not being fair to someone who the host would never have tisk-tisked for being dishonestly and entirely partisan.   The "code of liberal ethics" (another phrase I'm kind of disappointed didn't gain more currency) which held that liberals and lefties were supposed to always behave better in regard to our opponents than the media ever held that our opponents were ever to be expected to act,  was what got me to overcome the initial reluctance to embark on what I have to admit I'm a little surprised turned into an unpaid part-time job into my senescence. 

Among the consequences of taking that stand against the media-imposed code of liberal ethics is that I also early came to disdain what I called the "process liberal" who often claimed that all they wanted was "an even playing field," in the blood sport of politics and the law.   That bullshit is especially popular with the "civil liberties" lawyer set.   The kind who can be counted on, eventually, to accept money for representing or wring an amicus brief against clean elections or other laws that don't favor the fascists and Nazis. 

Such "even-handedness" and such asserted "fairness"  is putrid bullshit and no one who really believes in equality and, so, any democracy worth struggling and fighting for can continue to fall for that line.   To hold that line is to surrender to those who will never be held to any higher morality than Trump has been held to.

It gets back, as so much does, to what those who wanted to found the United States as an independent country from Britain claimed to hold as self-evident truth AND NOT TO WHAT SO MANY OF THEM ACTUALLY GAVE US IN THE CONSTITUTION.   Either you believe in the rights and principles of legitimate governance that Thomas Jefferson gave in his argument for overturning America's rule by the British monarch and parliament or you are opposed to the very existence of even the defective and bound to fail form of liberal democracy.   And, if the founders and framers had not betrayed those principles, they would have given us an egalitarian democracy, not the thing that has failed utterly under Republican rule and reaching its current state of disaster in Trump II. 

If it is true that only government with the consent of the governed is legitimate, then there is no possibility of compromising that.   And, since it is impossible for there to be any government with universal acceptance, what is instituted has to be on a majoritarian principle BUT WITH THE BASIC RIGHTS OF ALL PEOPLE PROTECTED BY LAW.   And by that I don't mean such nonsense as that those with money have "more speech" in the form of that money, that there is a "right to lie" in mass media,  that there is any right to gull, or misinform, or dupe, or cheat, or swindle, or encourage People to fall for race, gender, ethnic, etc. hatred and betraying the principles on which they claim their own rights to be valid and the legitimate concern of legitimate government. 

There is no compromising those things or there is no legitimate governance.  AND ONE OF THE THINGS THAT ALL PEOPLE HAVE A RIGHT TO, IT IS THAT THE GOVERNMENTS THEY LIVE UNDER HAVE THAT BASIC LEVEL OF LEGITIMACY. 

The U.S. Constitution, riddled with slave-holder empowering provisions, including the unequal representation of the Senate and also the Electoral College, the explicit slavery-enhancing parts of it, the permission to states to keep People from voting (something which started to break down for white men in 1800 and which the slave-power and their ideological and actual heirs have fought against expanding ever since) is the thing which those favoring legitimate governance, egalitarian democracy, have been struggling against since before the thing was adopted. 

NO, there is not going to be a "level playing field" because the fascists and Nazis and our indigenous forms of that in white supremacy and economic oligarchs AND THEIR OWNED MEDIA will never allow one.   Anyone who is opposed to them who calls for such bullshit is a traitor to equality and democracy,  anyone who is not ready and willing to attack all of them all of the time TO DISEMPOWER THEM THOUGH THEY WHINE AND WHINGE ABOUT THE UNFAIRNESS OF IT ALL,  SHOULD GIVE UP POLITICS AND CONCENTRATE ON SOMETHING IMPOTENT AND HARMLESS. 

Anything they won't whine and whinge about is probably not doing the job and never will and the process liberals would probably run away from it if it showed signs of working.    I don't keep up with Common Cause these days, so I don't know if they've learned a lesson.   Maybe they have.  The ACLU hadn't the last time I looked.   But I don't trust lawyers to not betray us in the end. 

 

*  This has me feeling nostalgic so I'll give you the complete June 17, 2006 post with a few updates:

PRETENDING POLITICIANS HAVE THE SAME JOB DESCRIPTION AS SAINTS

You have to admit some liberals are strange. Some get up on a soap box and that turns into their whole universe. One of the oddest of these ducks is the process liberal. You can tell one by it's call, "I'm not interested in the outcome, I only want the process to be honest,". And so it's time to rip out another weak plank from the platform of The Code of Liberal Ethics before someone else steps on it and gets hurt.

This might pinch some toes but Fred Wertheimer is the great example of process liberalism. Some of you know that I've got a bone to pick with him over his teaming up with Newt Gingrich to get Jim Wright ousted, ending the only real opposition that the Reagan-Bush administration ever faced. In the most supreme political irony of our age, Fred and Newt sank him over a BOOK DEAL that by Gingrichean standards was chump change. Even if Wertheimer's motives were pure, in theory, this act marks him as the archetype process liberal due to it's pettiness, the enormous benefit it brought to Republicans and the damage it did to Democrats. You remember, Wright was replaced by the tragically ungifted Tom Foley who obsessed over marble floors in the elevators and lost the house to Newt Gingrich. I don't believe that was what Wertheimer wanted but it wasn't any surprise when it happened.

[Update 2026:  Note that Wertheimer and the group he led,  Common Cause, were alert enough to understand what a catastrophe the eventual decision in Buckley vs. Valeo was for democracy.   You can't say the same for many others who could be called process liberals, such as those who ran the ACLU and other "civil liberties" outfits and lawyers.   I'll give him that though my original criticism of him was sound.]

Process liberals bask in their own purity knowing that they are welcome on any talk show in the country and will seldom be asked a tough question or get pinned down on anything they say. They go on and answer all of the reverently posed questions about the latest sins of Democrats. They predictably bleat out their dismay over these venial sins which, they decree, must carry the penalty of eternal damnation. In the process they sell out the real progressive agenda that doesn't end in process, it ends in results, in making peoples' lives better.

They say "the ends don't justify the means" on the rare occasion someone questions their judgment. But that phrase was invented to counter people who wanted to use means that involved killing people and doing serious injury. Dictators' ends don't justify their means. But the left in the United States won't start doing that, no matter what the temptation. The left will use the untidy and imperfect process of government to defeat Republicans' lies and theft. If there is some minor naughtiness involved it's a small price to pay for child nutrition, healthcare, jobs creation, Social Security and other such benefits to humanity as the notably impure Democratic majorities of the past have produced. Remember the "post office scandal"? Looks penny ante after Bush II, doesn't it.

[Another 2026 note:  For egalitarian democracy THE ENDS ARE THE ENTIRE POINT.  AND THE ENDS OF LIBERAL DEMOCRACY ARE JUSTIFIED BY ANY MEANS THAT ARE IN LINE WITH THE MORAL GOALS OF EGALITARIAN DEMOCRACY.]      

The sentimental attachment we have for these process liberals is rather strange itself since they haven't produced much and they've prevented much good. That the Republican media values them isn't any surprise, it should be an indictment against them. They wouldn't be asked on if Republicans didn't like the results.

Note:  When I did a search for "I won't be fair to fascists, I won't be nice to Nazis"  to get a link to my original post,  "AI" attributed the phase to me, which makes me wonder who wrote about it, though "AI" didn't say who gave it what it said  with a rather accurate description of my blogging orientation.  It noted I wrote for Echidne of the Snakes where I reposted the piece later that year, so I suspect someone who read it there commented on it.   "AI" doesn't come up with original observations, it copies some person who wrote something online.   I have to say, it was kind of shocking because I hadn't expected "AI" to figure in the search for the link.   I had to do that by myself, the old fashioned way.