“5 Things Conservatives Lie Shamelessly About”: A Neat Little Rhetorical Trick, Tell Lies So Fast Your Opponents Can’t Keep Up
Mark Twain once famously said, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” Twain wasn’t praising lies with this comment, of course, but modern-day conservatives seem to think he was dishing out advice instead of damning the practice of dishonesty. Conservatives have figured out a neat little rhetorical trick: One lie is easy for your opponents to debunk. Tell one lie after another, however, and your opponent’s debunkings will never catch up. By the time the liberal opposition has debunked one lie, there’s a dozen more to take its place.
Science educator Eugenie Scott deemed the technique the “Gish Gallop,” named for a notoriously sleazy creationist named Duane Gish. The Urban Dictionary defines the Gish Gallop as a technique that “involves spewing so much bullshit in such a short span on that your opponent can’t address let alone counter all of it.” Often users of the Gish Gallop know their arguments are nonsense or made in bad faith, but don’t particularly care because they are so dead set on advancing their agenda. Unfortunately, the strategy is so effective that it’s been expanding rapidly in right-wing circles. Here are just a few of the most disturbing examples of the Gish Gallop in action.
1. Creationism. It’s no surprise creationists inspired the coining of the term Gish Gallop, as they have perfected the art of making up nonsense faster than scientists can refute it. The list of false or irrelevant claims made by creationists, as chronicled by Talk Origins, numbers in the dozens, perhaps even hundreds, and more are always being spun out. Trying to argue with a creationist, therefore, turns into a hellish game of Whack-A-Mole. Debunk the lie that the speed of light is not constant, and you’ll find he’s already arguing that humans co-existed with dinosaurs. Argue that it’s unconstitutional to put the story of Adam and Eve in the science classroom, and find he’s pretending he was never asking for that and instead wants to “teach the controversy.”
“Teaching the controversy” is a classic Gish Gallop apology. The conservative wants to make it seem like he’s supporting open-minded debate, but instead he just wants an opportunity to dump a bunch of lies on students with the knowledge that they’ll never have the time and attention to carefully parse every debunking.
2. Climate change denialism. This strategy worked so well for creationism it makes perfect sense that it would be imported to the world of climate change denialism. Climate change denialists have many changing excuses for why they reject the science showing that human-caused greenhouse gases are changing the climate, but what all these reasons have in common is they are utter nonsense in service of a predetermined opposition to taking any action to prevent further damage.
Skeptical Science, a website devoted to debunking right-wing lies on this topic, has compiled a dizzying list of 176 common claims by climate denialists and links to why they are false. Some of these lies directly contradict each other. For instance, it can’t both be true that climate change is “natural” and that it’s not happening at all. No matter, since the point of these lies is not to create a real discussion about the issue, but to confuse the issue so much it’s impossible to get any real momentum behind efforts to stop global warming.
3. The Affordable Care Act. It’s not just science where conservatives have discovered the value in telling lies so fast you simply wear your opposition out. When it comes to healthcare reform, the lying has been relentless. There are the big lies, such as calling Obamacare “socialism,” which implies a single-payer system, when in fact, it’s about connecting the uninsured with private companies and giving consumers of healthcare a basic set of rights. In a sense, even the name “Obamacare” is a lie, as the bill was, per the President’s explicit wishes, written by Congress.
But there are also the small lies: The ACA funds abortion. Under the ACA, old people will be forcibly euthanized. Obamacare somehow covers undocumented immigrants. Congress exempted itself from Obamacare (one of the lies that doesn’t even make sense, as it’s not a program you could really get exempted from). Healthcare will add a trillion dollars to the deficit.
The strategy of just lying and lying and lying some more about the ACA has gotten to the point where Fox News is just broadcasting lies accusing the Obama administration of lying. When it was reported that the administration was going to hit its projections for the number of enrollments through healthcare.gov, a subculture of “enrollment truthers” immediately sprang up to spread a variety of often conflicting lies to deny that these numbers are even real. It started soft, with some conservatives suggesting that some enrollments shouldn’t count or arguing, without a shred of evidence, that huge numbers of new enrollees won’t pay their premiums. Now the lying is blowing up to the shameless level, with “cooking the books” being a common false accusation or, as with Jesse Watters on Fox, straight up accusing the White House of making the number up. Perhaps soon there will be demands to see all these new enrollees’ birth certificates.
4. Contraception mandate.The ACA-based requirement that insurance plans cover contraception without a copay has generated a Gish Gallop so large it deserves its own category. Jodi Jacobson of RH Reality Check chronicled 12 of the biggest lies generated by the right-wing noise machine in just the past couple of years since the mandate was even announced. It is not “free” birth control, nor is it “paid for” by employers. The birth control coverage is paid for by the employees, with benefits they earn by working. The mandate doesn’t cover “abortifacients,” only contraception. No, birth control doesn’t work by killing fertilized eggs, but by preventing fertilization. It’s simply false that the prescriptions in question can all be replaced with a $9-a-month prescription from Walmart, as many women’s prescriptions run into the hundreds and even thousands a year. No, it’s not true that the contraception mandate is about funding women’s “lifestyle”, because statistics show that having sex for fun instead of procreation is a universal human behavior and not a marginal or unusual behavior as the term “lifestyle” implies.
5. Gun safety. The gun lobby is dishonest to its core. Groups like the NRA like to paint themselves like they are human rights organizations, but in fact, they are an industry lobby whose only real goal is to protect the profit margins of gun manufacturers, regardless of the costs to human health and safety. Because their very existence is based on a lie, is it any surprise that gun industry advocates are experts at the Gish Gallop, ready to spring into action at the sign of any school shooting or report on gun violence and dump so many lies on the public that gun safety advocates can never even begin to address them all?
A small sampling of the many, many lies spouted by gun industry advocates: That guns prevent murder, when in fact more guns correlates strongly with more murders. That gun control doesn’t work. That gun control is unpopular. That any move to make gun ownership safer is a move to take away your guns. That a gun in the home makes you safer when it actually puts your family at more risk. That guns protect against domestic violence, when the truth is that owning a gun makes abuse worse, not better. Even the standard line “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” is a distracting bit of dishonesty, since most gun deaths aren’t murders but suicides.
How do you fight the Gish Gallop, when trying to debunk each and every lie is so overwhelming? There are a few tactics that help, including creating websites and pamphlets where all the lies can be aggregated in one place, for swift debunking. (Bingo cards and drinking games are a humorous version of this strategy.) A critical strategy is to avoid lengthy Lincoln-Douglas-style debates that allow conservatives to lie-dump rapidly during their speaking period, leaving you so busy trying to clean up their mess you have no time for positive points of your own. Better is a looser style of debate where you can interrupt and correct the lies as they come. I’ve also found some luck with setting an explicit “no lies” rule that will be strictly enforced. The first lie receives a warning, and the second lie means that the debate is immediately terminated. This helps prevent you from having to debunk and instead makes the price of participation a strict adherence to facts.
By: Amanda Marcotte, AlterNet, April 2, 2014
“Irrational Hatred Of Obamacare Is Hard To Fathom”: The GOP’s Relentless Opposition Has Been Puzzling
My friend Isatou has just received an invoice from Kaiser Permanente, testament to her new coverage through the Affordable Care Act — usually called “Obamacare.” She’s thrilled to finally have health insurance so she can get regular checkups, including dental care.
A reasonably healthy middle-aged woman, she knows she needs routine mammograms and screenings for maladies such as hypertension. But before Obamacare, she struggled to pay for those things. She once had to resort to the emergency room, which left her with a bill for nearly $20,000. (She settled the bill for far less, but it still left her deeply in debt.)
She is one of more than 7 million people who have signed up for health insurance through the ACA, stark evidence of the overwhelming market demand. Despite a badly bungled initial rollout, a multimillion-dollar conservative media campaign designed to discourage sign-ups, and a years-long Republican crusade against it (50 votes to change the law), millions got health insurance.
That hardly means Obamacare is a raging success. It’s much too early to know how it will affect health outcomes for the previously uninsured. But it’s abundantly clear that the ACA has already made great strides in improving access to health care. And that alone is quite an accomplishment.
Now, young adults can stay on their parents’ health insurance policies until they are 26 years old — a boon in an economy where many young folks are struggling to find decent jobs. Now, patients with previously diagnosed illnesses (“pre-existing conditions,” in insurance lingo) can’t be denied coverage. Now, the chronically ill don’t have to worry about hitting a lifetime cap that would deny them essential procedures or pharmaceuticals. Now, working folks who don’t get insurance through their employers can purchase affordable policies.
Factoring in the Medicaid expansion, the ACA has extended health care coverage to an additional 9.5 million people, according to the Los Angeles Times, which gathered data from national surveys. Needless to say, millions more would have been covered if so many Republican governors, mostly located in Southern states, had not callously refused to accept the Medicaid expansion despite the fact that it is largely paid through federal government funds.
The GOP’s relentless opposition has been puzzling. Republicans have resorted to extreme measures to try to derail Obamacare, including an implicit threat to prevent the National Football League from participating in a marketing campaign to encourage people to sign up.
Oh, did I mention 50 votes to repeal or alter the law?
Even acknowledging that our politics have become bitterly polarized, I don’t understand this one. Even taking into account the GOP’s irrational hatred for President Obama, I don’t get it. Even though I know that Republicans believe in less government, I don’t understand their approach to Obamacare.
First off, the ACA adheres to market-based ideas, many of which were first suggested by conservatives. Instead of a single-payer system like, say, Medicare, the ACA relies on private insurance companies. It adopts the individual mandate that was supported by many Republicans, including Newt Gingrich, back in the 1990s and later adopted by Mitt Romney in Massachusetts.
Second, Republicans are free to offer up a health care scheme that is more in keeping with conservative principles. But the “repeal and replace” mantra is rarely heard anymore since it has become increasingly clear that the GOP has no intention of coming up with a plan to replace Obamacare. While there are various counter-proposals floating about, none has garnered the support of a majority of Republicans in Congress.
Is the ACA perfect? Absolutely not. There is much in the law that needs to be worked on, refined, improved. But the GOP doesn’t seem interested in that. Instead, its members have taken to engaging in increasingly ridiculous criticisms, including the charge that the White House has made up the number of successful enrollees.
It’s strange. Could it be that Republicans are simply furious that millions of Americans like Isatou finally have health insurance?
By: Cynthia Tucker, Winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary, is a Visiting Professor at the University of Georgia; Published in The National Memo, April 5, 2014
“A Most Revealing Week For Republicans”: What Matters Most To The GOP, Protect The Rich, Injure The Poor
If you haven’t done so yet, I urge you to take three minutes here with me to reflect on this unusually revealing week. Three big developments—the Obamacare enrollment deadline, the Paul Ryan budget, and the Supreme Court’s McCutcheon decision—return us to first principles, so to speak; remind us of what our two parties (and the philosophical positions behind them) are really and truly about. And they remind me, at least, of why the Republican Party, on a very basic level, can’t ever be truthful with the American people about what matters to it most at the end of the day.
So what is it that matters most to the Republican Party? A lot of things do, and for different Republicans, the answer will be different: abhorrence of abortion, disgust at social relativism, hatred of big government. These things matter. But they don’t, in my view, matter most. What matters most, especially to elected Republicans in Washington (that is, more so than the rank-and-file), is this: Protect the well-off from redistribution of their wealth to those who don’t deserve it.
On what basis do I make this claim? Well, I’ve been watching Republicans on Capitol Hill pretty closely for many years now. There are, Lord knows, a number of topics on which they are not exactly what you’d call amenable to compromise. The climate-change denialism, the constant attempts to chop away at reproductive rights (which are constitutional rights), et cetera.
But I think it’s fair and accurate to say that, especially in the Obama era, two issues have obsessed the party more than all the others: opposition to tax increases, especially on the wealthy; and a zeal for cutting the budget, which really means cutting domestic spending programs.
In other words—protect the rich, and injure the poor. These are the points on which they’ve fought tooth and nail. After all, think about this: They could have had a major concession from Obama on entitlements (chained CPI) if they’d been willing to allow an income-tax increase on dollars earned above $250,000. But even that couldn’t reel them in. It’s true they did allow an increase on dollars earned above $450,000 (for families) in the fiscal-cliff deal, but their backs were really against the wall on that one: They relented to that small increase only because the country was hours away from a major tax increase (the expiration of the Bush tax cuts), and it was clear to everyone that the Republicans were going to shoulder most of the blame.
As for cutting the federal budget, downsizing government—and we all know doing that hurts poor and working-class families most directly—well, wasn’t that the chief impetus behind the creation of the Tea Party? Remember Rick Santelli’s creation-myth rant, about the anger at the people who took mortgages they couldn’t afford. (Classic liberal-conservative divide, rooted almost entirely in psychological outlook: Liberals tended to blame the banks that hornswoggled people, while conservatives tended to blame the people who let themselves be hornswoggled.)
That’s the game. Redistribution, as in loathing of. That’s the glue of the Washington Republican Party. And it’s wrong to think of it as just an “economic” issue. It is, to them, a moral one. Don’t believe me? Take it from Arthur Brooks, head of the American Enterprise Institute, who wrote a famous Wall Street Journal column back in April 2009 headlined “The Real Culture War Is Over Capitalism.” Reread that. Money, a cultural issue. Defenders of free enterprise, he wrote, “have to declare that it is a moral issue to confiscate more income from the minority simply because the government can.” He also charged these same defenders with the task of defining true “fairness” as “protecting merit and freedom.” I shouldn’t have to decode those two words for you, I shouldn’t think.
But here’s the thing: Brooks’s candor was and is rare. It wasn’t a risk of any kind for him to express those views to the readers of the Journal’s Op-Ed page, who would strongly agree. But most Americans don’t agree. Most Americans support redistribution to one degree or another. They support progressive taxation, they support many or even most categories of government spending, and so on. We—liberal Democrats, centrist Democrats, and moderate Republicans, to the extent that they exist—argue about how much spending, but not about the very notion of spending. Real conservatives stand outside this conversation: They believe that virtually no redistributive spending is justified. But they know that’s a highly unpopular position, so most of the time, they can’t say that. They have to say other things.
Now let’s circle back to this week. What Republicans really think about Obamacare, as E.J. Dionne put it in The Washington Post yesterday, is that “they don’t want the federal government to spend the significant sums of money needed to get everyone covered.” But they know that sounds cruel, so they can’t say that. So instead of inveighing against redistribution directly, they’ve spent months talking about its unworkability. Well, that’s been proven wrong (so far), and so now they’ll just say, as they have been this week, that they don’t believe the numbers. Then they’ll fish out more alleged horror stories that don’t check out. But they won’t say what they actually think.
In the same way, Paul Ryan puts out a budget document that makes dramatic cuts on programs for poor and working people, which makes four domestic promises in the summary—“Expand Opportunity,” “Strengthen the Safety Net,” “Secure Seniors’ Retirement,” and “Restore Fairness”—but in its numbers does the opposite. Ryan’s budgets have always been first and foremost about attacking redistribution aggressively. But he can’t say that. So he just says the opposite.
And what does the McCutcheon decision have to do with all this? Very simple. Redistribution happens because redistributionist politicians have the nasty habit of getting elected. They get elected, in part, because of campaign-finance laws that limit wealthy conservatives’ ability to influence outcomes. In this sense the campaign-finance reform laws of the 1970s are themselves redistributionist—they were explicitly designed to level the playing field, which is a hoary cliché but expresses a proper goal, i.e., not letting the wealthy own Congress lock, stock, and barrel.
McCutcheon tells us, to an extent that even Citizens United hadn’t quite, that Chief Justice John Roberts detests this electoral redistributionism, and as Jeffrey Toobin wrote this week, has as his goal “the deregulation of American political campaigns.” Roberts’s opinion says: “It is not an acceptable governmental objective to ‘level the playing field.’” You can’t ask for it to be put more plainly than that. (Roberts doesn’t face voters and has a job for life and can speak with more candor than senators.)
Savagely fighting the delivery of health care to financially struggling people; slashing the federal programs that help these people get by; rigging elections so that rich conservatives (who outnumber rich liberals substantially) have more control over who wins them. These may seem disparate battles, especially the third one, but the motivation in each case is the same: Protect the well-off from redistribution of their wealth to those who don’t deserve it.
You’ll rarely hear an elected Republican admit this. But it’s usually the motivation. And we saw it this week in starker relief than we usually do. But don’t despair too much: They may yet prevail on campaign spending, but Ryan is going to lose, and Obamacare is going to win. So maybe, even though they won’t talk about it openly, people are onto them anyway.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, April 4, 2014
“A Vile And Wicked Plot”: How Barack Obama Trapped The GOP On Health Care
Barack Obama has done many dastardly things to Republicans. He regularly ridicules their arguments. He insists on being treated as though he were legitimately the president of the United States. And most cruelly of all, he beat their standard-bearers in two national elections. Is it any wonder they loathe him so? But one thing Obama has done to the GOP has gone unnoticed: he made it impossible for them to be serious about health care policy.
By now you’re well familiar with how the core of the Affordable Care Act—a ban on insurance companies denying coverage for pre-existing conditions (also known as “guaranteed issue”), accompanied by an individual mandate and subsidies for people of moderate incomes to purchase private insurance—was originally a conservative proposal. The idea was that unlike in most other western countries where a large government program like Medicare covers all citizens, you could achieve something close to universal coverage and health security through the use of markets. When Mitt Romney installed it in Massachusetts, it worked quite well and everybody was pleased. But then Barack Obama came along and embraced it, so all good and true conservatives had to conclude that it was not only a terrible idea in practical terms but a vile and wicked plot to rob Americans of their freedom.
And that has left Republicans in a difficult spot. They would very much like to have market-based health care ideas they could rally around, if nothing else than to demonstrate to the public that they sincerely want to fix what’s wrong in America’s health care system. But the theft of the guaranteed issue-plus-mandate-plus-subsidies framework has left them with nothing but unappetizing scraps off the health care table, none of which will do much of anything to address problems like the large number of uninsured Americans.
There’s a ritual people like me have taken to of late. Republicans announce that they’re about to release a health care plan. Then we say sarcastically, “Gee, let me guess. It involves 1) tort reform; 2) letting people buy insurance across state lines; 3) incentives for more use of health savings accounts, and 4) high-risk pools for people with pre-existing conditions” (here’s a recent example). And we’re always right, because those are the Big Four conservative health care ideas, and nobody can come up with anything different.
Here’s the thing about these ideas: neither any of them individually, nor all of them collectively, would even begin to tackle the things that ail the American health care system, the things the Affordable Care Act was meant to address. Tort reform—which means making it difficult or impossible for patients to sue for malpractice—won’t bring down costs like conservatives think it will. We know this because a number of states have enacted the kind of tort reform Republicans advocate for the whole nation, and it had no impact on spending. Realistic assessments of the effect of tort reform on medical spending conclude that if there’s any impact at all, it would be tiny (I discussed this issue at length here).
Letting people buy insurance across state lines would be fine if it was accompanied by national standards for policies; you’ve surely forgotten it by now, but the more liberal House version of the ACA created a national insurance exchange instead of 50 state exchanges, in which you could have bought insurance from anywhere. But a well-regulated system isn’t what conservatives want; they propose to remove the ACA’s regulations and then initiate a race to the bottom, where the least-regulated state would offer cheap insurance to lure customers who wouldn’t realize the limits of what they had bought until they got sick (here’s an explanation of just how bad an idea this is).
As for health savings accounts, we already have them. They’re a great deal for people who are healthy, but not so much when you actually need care. And high-risk pools are a terrible solution as anything other than a temporary stopgap—they put all the sick people in the same pool, meaning covering them is extremely expensive. That’s no help to the tens of millions of Americans with pre-existing conditions.
Which brings us to Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, who is almost certainly running for president in 2016. There aren’t a lot of Republicans who have a good understanding of health care policy, but Bobby Jindal is one of the ones who do. Back in 1996, at the tender age of 24, he was appointed the head of the Louisiana Department of Health; George W. Bush later made him an assistant secretary of health and human services. So he’s well familiar with this issue, and surely has a reasonably good understanding of which policies are likely to have a large impact and which are likely to make no difference at all.
But Jindal is hamstrung, like all Republicans, by the fact that they can’t advocate anything Barack Obama has ever supported. So when he released a health care plan yesterday, it was a predictable mixture of small-bore proposals (Wellness incentives! Eliminate fraud!), and the Big Four conservative ideas. For good measure, he threw in a version of Paul Ryan’s plan to turn Medicare from an insurance program into a voucher program, where the government would give seniors a certain amount of money and then they’d seek private insurance, with the invisible hand of the market bringing prices down, all previous evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.
In fairness to Jindal, he has tweaked a few things from the standard conservative playbook. He would require insurance companies, once they’ve sold you insurance, to continue your plan even if you get sick—but doesn’t say how he’d protect the tens of millions of Americans with pre-existing conditions who would have trouble getting covered in the first place, other than state high-risk pools. And there are a few smaller features of his proposal that make sense. For instance, he’d change the tax treatment of health insurance so everyone could get the same favorable treatment that people with employer-provided insurance get. That would increase the fairness of the system, even if Jindal’s assertions that it would magically cut the ranks of the uninsured by 9 million and dramatically slow health care spending are absurd on their face.
But if we repealed the ACA and instituted all of Jindal’s proposed reforms, we’d still have all the problems we had before the ACA was passed. And I suspect that if you gave him a truth serum, he’d admit that none of what he proposes would have much of a salutary effect. But that’s where conservatives are. Barack Obama stole the one market-based idea they had that might actually bring us to something close to universal coverage. They have no idea where to go from there, and that’s how it’s going to be for the foreseeable future. They’ll feel the need to keep saying, “We have a plan too!” And when everyone says, “OK, tell us what it is,” it will be the same old thing, and no one will take them seriously.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, April 3, 2014
“Showing Its True Colors”: The GOP’s Case For Scrapping Democracy
When I wrote a recent column describing the GOP’s new voting laws as a “war on democracy,” I expected a sharp response from the Right. What I thought I’d hear were variations on the following: “No, Republicans aren’t at war with democracy. We’re just trying to fight voter fraud and make sure elections are held fairly and uniformly within states. And that’s a goal that enhances democracy.”
Not only is this how the issue is usually discussed by Republican politicians; it’s also the way nearly every political dispute in the United States over the past century has been framed — as a clash between different camps over which one can claim the mantle of “democracy” for itself. People will routinely assert that some other group, party, or position is anti-democratic in its aims and ideals. But no group, party, or position comes right out and explicitly denounces democracy in its own name.
At least until recently.
Allow me to quote a representative email written in response to my column: “I just read your piece on the GOP changes to voting laws. It’s complete garbage! Americans who have no skin in the game should not be voting! The way things have evolved in the last 200 years is nothing short of disgusting! People who don’t offer anything tangible to the country are given as much say as people who pay 400k in taxes per year? Ridiculous! How did we regress so far?”
An anti-democratic outlier? Five years ago, I would have thought so. But now I’m not so sure.
This was the week, of course, when the Supreme Court’s five-member conservative majority knocked down limits on aggregate contributions to federal political campaigns, opening the door for the rich to exercise even more influence on the political system than they already do. It was also the week when Rep. Paul Ryan unveiled his latest budget proposal, which would gut food stamps and other aid to the poor. And as I wrote about the other day, this is a political season that has seen the Republican Party working to make it harder for poor people and members of minority groups to vote.
Then there was venture capitalist Tom Perkins suggesting a couple of months ago that only taxpayers should be permitted to vote — and that those who pay more in taxes should be given more votes to cast in elections. And that came less than two years after Mitt Romney was caught kissing up to wealthy GOP donors by denigrating the “moochers” who make up 47 percent of the country’s population.
Ladies and gentlemen, that many data points make a pattern. We seem to be living in an era in which the Republican Party is turning against democracy in an increasingly explicit and undeniable way.
Within the context of the nation’s recent political history, this is a shocking prospect. We’re used to a constant evolution in the direction of ever-more democracy. At the time of the country’s founding, the franchise was limited to white male property owners. Then the property qualification was eliminated. Then the vote was extended (de jure) to black men. Then to women. Then to all blacks (de facto), with most of the remaining obstacles to the exercise of voting rights by minorities and the poor removed by the mid-1960s.
What growing numbers of Republicans appear to want is a reversal of this trend — a reform of the political system to exclude large numbers of Americans from having a say in politics while augmenting and enhancing the electoral power of the rich.
This might be unprecedented in American history, but it’s certainly not unthinkable. Despite our fondness for describing ourselves as a democracy, the American system is already far from being wholly democratic. A pure democracy would pick leaders by lot, indiscriminately assigning citizens to political office for fixed terms according to chance. This year your Aunt Bess might be president. Next year it could be a 19-year-old mechanic from Omaha. And so on, haphazardly hopscotching through the population at random.
The institution of elections introduces an element of hierarchy into the system, since it presumes that some people are more capable than others of exercising political rule and that voters can recognize this quality when they see it.
What the GOP appears to be inching toward is a rejection of the democratic presumption that all American citizens should have a say in making that determination. Interestingly, the anti-democratic argument doesn’t seem to be arising directly or primarily from a concern about the quality of the people’s political choices — a perennial and nontrivial objection to democratic forms of government going all the way back to Plato.
Instead, Republicans and their wealthy donor base appear, above all else, to be up in arms about the lack of deference shown to the rich, with the implication being that those at the top of the economic pyramid deserve greater public honors (and power) than they currently enjoy. (That certainly seems to be the subtext of this rather self-pitying Wall Street Journal op-ed by billionaire industrialist Charles Koch.)
Aristotle would have recognized this line of argument instantly. It is the classic case for political rule of the few. Aristotle would also have been unsurprised to learn that those making this claim use their wealth as evidence of personal virtue or excellence that entitles them to honor and deference.
What the ancient philosopher could not have anticipated is the role that free-market ideology would play in convincing nonwealthy members of the Republican Party that the self-enriching activity of entrepreneurs (“job creators”) self-evidently demonstrates their public-spiritedness and worthiness to wield political power without challenge.
Politicians of both parties are fond of saying that whatever election looms before us is the most important in recent memory. But if Republicans continue to stand against democracy itself, the hype, for once, will be true — and for a long time to come.
By: Damon Linker, The Week, April 4, 2014
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