Democracy is a Joke

So I've been watching our priests, or at least what passes for our high priests in this modern age, that is, the media. You can probably guess what they are talking about. So now that John McCain has chosen Sarah Palin as his running mate in this latest political saga it seems as if the Democrats are reeling; maybe they should have gone with Hillary after all. Speaking of the Devil, it seems as though Senator Obama has "dispatched" Hillary Clinton as well as several other prominent female Democrats to campaign for him. Nobody can deny that this is all because McCain has chosen Palin and he fears that he will "steal" the female voters that many Democrats feel to be theirs by divine right. Yes that's right folks, the supposedly progressive party in this country is gettin' down on the GOP for stealing "their" women like a bunch of Hatfields when their sister runs off with the McCoy boy.

Need I explain the stupidity that has ensued in this allegedly great nation of ours since Johnny Mac selected Palin to replace Cindy McCain as his woman of choice on the stump? The fact that John McCain has selected a running mate with two X chromosomes has sent the media into a frenzy about the role of female voters in the election. Will they vote for a woman simply because of their chromosomal similarities, or will they take the high road like the .0000001% of African-Americans who will not be voting for Senator Obama this year and vote on the issues rather than the image. As much as I want to see myself as advanced enough to trust the female sex with its voting privileges, I am afraid that there are a good too many of them who can't be trusted to see anything through any other prism but gender, much as there are many minorities who refuse to see anything through any prism but race. I suppose that as a white male I just don't get it; most other politicians are white males to begin with. I daresay that the proponents of identity politics might be right about the wrongness of all those boneheaded white males who look down upon it with disdain, we might just start paying attention to the race and gender of politicians if all of history were reversed. However, let me tell the reader that I personally would never fall into the trap of identity politics, the central reason being that I am wise and the majority of the populace is not,

I must admit that I am something of an elitist, not in the economic and cultural sense but certainly in the intellectual sense. There are smart people and there are dumb people; that is the iron rule of all of life. The smarts are naturally just so marginally better that it places them on a plane slightly higher than the dumbs. I am not to suggest that mere intellectual ability makes one smart whereas a lack thereof makes you dumb; the smartest person on Earth might be a homeless man and the dumbest person on Earth might be a college president, the thing that makes you smart is your ability to see how the world works and where it is naturally going, to think without mindless idealism and emotion clouding your mind. A lot of seemingly intellectually gifted people, including some more intellectually gifted than myself that I could probably name right here, believe that democracy is the greatest political system in existence and that it will never be surpassed. The Angels from Heaven seemingly descended and immaculately conceived the idea of democracy in the heads of a few starry-eyed idealists two or three centuries ago; from that day forth the superiority of democracy could not be questioned and anyone who did would be immediately branded as a heretic. Soon democracy became a synonym for all that is good in a society and we arrived at our current point.

I am afraid that I must offer my dissent and state that I am no friend of democracy. I am skeptical of any system that would entrust dumb people with such great power, and democracy is by definition such a system. Allow me to use an example that happened to me to day to illustrate the prime stupidity of this seemingly great social system. I once signed up for the Glenn Beck newsletter, and I honestly don't know why I did because I always end up deleting it. When I opened up my email today, the title of the newsletter was "Sarah Palin bikini pics" and in spite of my heterosexuality, I chose not to look. The fact that an old geezer chose a woman who prances around in a bikini and has only a couple years of experience running one of the least populated territories on the face of the Earth to be his possible successor to the most powerful office in the most powerful nation on Earth does not make me proud to be an American, it makes me utterly ashamed. This, of course, is the stuff of democracy. Democracy is doomed to fail from the start, and ours is failing; we may be wealthy and powerful but we are utterly stupid. Majorities are always vulgar in taste and base in morals, in reality the best men have always been a very small minority; it is thus that majority rule is one of the most laughable ideas in human history.

Let us examine the amount of stupidity that it takes in order to embrace democracy. First, the democrat (and I emphasize the small "d") must conclude that a ravenous, greedy, and relatively amoral public can be expected to be frugal with the public treasury when they have the full power to vote as much of it into their own hands as possible, secondly the democrat must conclude that the same public will willingly pay for the burden of providing themselves with so many public expenditures, thirdly the democrat must contend that liberty can survive in spite of public hysteria, in fact it is the ability of the public to vote their hysteria into law the makes us free in the first place. More hilarious yet is the comparison of democracy to monarchy. Democrats presume that men staying for a short office with no incentive to manage the nation wisely for any but a few years will be more responsible than men whose property is the kingdom, one that they must manage wisely if it is to last into their old age and into the generations of their children. Democrats additionally contend that liberty will prosper under democracy and that majority rule under which sheer number can easily overwhelm a dissident whose rights have been violated provides for a more vigilant defense of liberty than under a monarchy whose entire system can be overthrown simply by taking him and a few nobles out of the way when he violates individual rights, rather than attempting to fight an entire populace. Ultimately however, regardless of one's perspective the system of democracy always lies on the premise that the rabble is made up of men who are fundamentally good and that they can be expected to choose morally and prudently every time. Additionally, the philosophy underlying democracy itself is based naturally upon the idea that whatever is popular is right; the "popular fallacy." The idea of majority rule, it turns out, is not only foolish but also fallacious.

After stacking up all of my conclusions, I am still not totally sure as to whether or not my heart is so hardened to the concept of democracy that I would endorse its immediate elimination. If democracy were eliminated I don't know if I would still be a satirist because I probably wouldn't have any idea as to what else to dedicate my life to ridiculing. However, if democracy were eliminated I can tell you what I would replace it with; I would replace it immediately with the Old Republic of limited government designed only to protect our God-given rights to life, liberty, and property. Furthermore, I must confess that I am something of a philosophical anarchist; I would cut down even the most basic government as far as it would go and if indeed experiments proved that the market could indeed provide things like streets, justice, and defense then I would abolish the state altogether with no hesitation. Unfortunately for me, the majority is never going to vote to get rid of democracy; it looks like I am stuck with it so I must be satisfied to with ridiculing; indeed, if there were nothing I thought stupid enough to ridicule then life would be a very boring business.