I SAID YESTERDAY that even those too stupid or immoral to value egalitarian democracy have a right to live under it. Enjoying, if even not realizing it, the benefits of the common good.
That doesn't mean they have a right to vote us out of equality or the real democracy that is absolutely founded on equality or it will devolve into something far worse than real egalitarian democracy. Their desires are not something they have a right to impose on the targets of their hatred, their oppression, their greed, though under our system, they were given that right by the framers under the slavery enabling and other anti-democratic features of it.
They have a right to the benefits of egalitarian democracy but have no right to deprive those of us who want that of it. Not if we are a minority as, indeed, has been the situation in many states and, I'd bet, in all states at some time. Imposing bad government on us can't constitute a "right." Not even if they can sucker a majority of morally corrupted idiots into voting against their own interests through the American "free press." That last sentence is an apt description of how our deputed democracy works in most election cycles since 1965.
It is a hard fact of representative democracy that not everyone who is governed by the government that results from even an honest vote in which voting by adults is universal and uninhibited is going to favor the resulting government.
We all, to one extent or another, are governed by representatives and officials who do things we are not going to like. We can't keep resegregating into locations in which only those of like mind will be governed by a government of their liking with every election cycle. Though the American system of the electoral college takes that unfortunate and hard fact of representative government and makes it far, far worse.* An evil exacerbated enormously by the increasing power put into the presidency - often against the explicit letter of the Constitution - and entirely more so by the Roberts Court imposition of the unitary executive form of fascist rule.
I asked how we are going to realistically and effectively deal with the dangerously large minority of American voters who are either through disability or the media induced disability perennially stupid. And, even worse, those who are selfish, racist, sexist, etc. who never will favor equality and, so legitimate democracy.
And failing some way to keep the forces that make them stupid and encourage moral corruption from succeeding, the media, entertainment, the "right to lie" how do we get AND SECURE good government, legitimate government?
I think just as there is no real right involved in the Court invented "right to lie" because you have no right to do what is wrong, I don't think that even a popularly elected government that does evil can be a legitimate government.
The South African apartheid government, the Israeli apartheid government, the white supremacist governments of many American states all have the imitation of democracy as what decides who governs. The Israeli government is an especially interesting case because Palestinian Israelis have a vote, though they are, by law and Supreme Court decision, never to actually have the chance to really govern.
The pose, the pantomime of democracy without equality is as old as the place that invented the idea of democracy, Athens. It was far more like those modern apartheid governments than anything anyone of good will would call a democracy now. Slaves, non-native Athenian men, women, had no say in government. And the instability that is guaranteed with a non-egalitarian "democracy" was characteristic of their "democracy."
Though I doubt it will be done, it's extremely desirable for us to come up with a different word for the idea of egalitarian democracy if for nothing else than that the word is used to name everything from apartheid governments to governments such as that of North Korea and other anti-democratic, autocratic, hellholes.
I can't pretend anymore that the mere pantomime of democracy in an age of idiocracy can produce legitimate government. Even as I can't pretend that anything other than egalitarian democracy can produce a government with wide enough support to be honestly considered legitimate. If I have doubts about democracy of that sort, I know any non-democratic government, one by any elite, even one purported to be of good will, will quickly devolve into at least as bad if not worse.
Still, I don't see any reason to pretend to owe government which is a product of the worst in People any kind of right to rule over and abolish the common good.
THE CONSEQUENCES OF GOVERNMENT, EVEN "DEMOCRATIC" GOVERNMENT IS WHAT, IN THE END, DETERMINES THE MORAL LEGITIMACY OF IT. A "vote" doesn't change that.
I don't have much of an idea of how to deal with the terrible reality we have gotten into under the libertarian notion of freedom - one of those products of modernism as discussed below - and the fact that we have a right to egalitarian democracy. The "freedom of the press" as defined after the Sullivan Decision and a number of porn-permitting rulings has corrupted the very foundation of legitimate governance, The People. That is why so many of them were duped into believing the fascist "reality TV" fake CEO, Trump, would be a good president. That is why an earlier though less bad Hollywood B actor, Reagan was president for eight years. It was all through an appeal to racism, selfishness, hatred of the least among us, people elsewhere, all brought to us by the freedom given to lie and spread hate.
We will either give up much if not all of that failed, disaster promoting notion that we are free to do and encourage what's wrong AND DEADLY TO EQUALITY AND DEMOCRACY, or we will live under the results of the freedom to lie and hate. And we are under no moral obligation to do that.
* The fascist, eye-lined, Thiel meat-puppet J. D. Vance squealed, in that college freshman way, that rank choice voting was, "too haaaarrrrrrd!" Which is a lie. Maine is a state with an inadequate educational system (which state isn't, these days) but we've caught on to it quite well and it works very well to keep the last choice of a majority of Maine voters from winning the election. That was a result of probably the worst governor in Maine's history, Paul LePage being governor here for eight years even as the large majority of Mainers hated him. That would get me into the folly of "third parties" which is also a part of what got us LePage.
All elections should be structured to avoid the last choice of the majority winning an election, but, then, all elections should be done without the media injecting lies and the encouragement of selfishness, bigotry and ignorance as a feature of "democratic government."
That question in the title is a real one. It's one the "process liberals" the ACLU types, the lawyers, etc. would seem to say we owe them the right to destroy lives and democracy, itself. To which I say they can go soak their fat heads.
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