(Jack Ohman via GoComics.com)
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For your evening’s amusement, may I suggest Doghouse Riley’s evisceration of the latest Brooks atrocity?
DO you find it as curious as I do that David Brooks can trot out three sociologists, or economists-turned-sociologists, to back him up, but is apparently unaware of the existence of historians?
The people who pioneered democracy in Europe and the United States had a low but pretty accurate view of human nature. They knew that if we get the chance, most of us will try to get something for nothing. They knew that people generally prize short-term goodies over long-term prosperity. So, in centuries past, the democratic pioneers built a series of checks to make sure their nations wouldn’t be ruined by their own frailties.
How many things are wrong with that paragraph, not counting its publication in the New York Times? Should we try to count? Should we start with the standard rejoinder of the American right–home of the Republican party–that we live in a Republic, not a Democracy?
That playground retort–designed, I need not remind you, to cover the anti-democratic inclinations of the Republican party and the man who presumes to explain Democracy to us here–soon turns serious; assuming we’re speaking of the Modern, not the Ancient, World, the “people” (funny how fastidious “conservatives” are about avoiding gender-specific collective nouns when the subject is something females were excluded by brute force and religious dogma from participating in) who “pioneered democracy” (horrid construction designed to prove Brooks’ point for him without effort) were wealthy aristocrats who intended (and did) to preserve their own advantages above all. The authors of the Magna Carta and the various founding documents of the United States had no intention to share governance with the demos. The real European “pioneers” of democracy were the French, and we know what Brooks thinks of that…
Apart from the Usual Gang of Idiots Miscreants, what’s on the agenda for the end of the weekend?