Democrats still trying to delegitimize the Bush victory
Gerard Jackson
If nothing else, the 2000 election campaign revealed the totalitarian undercurrent of the Democratic party. A Manichean approach to their enemies is an inherent feature of totalitarians. In their minds the world does not simply consist of "them and us" but of good and evil. "We're good and they're evil".
And as everyone knows, at least the 'good people', one cannot compromise with evil. The rule of law and the idea of fair play can not and must not be applied to evil, meaning those who disagree with us. So when Gore said the election was a choice between good and evil he meant it.
This is why conservative administrations are not considered legitimate in our universities, most newsrooms and certainly not Hollywood where celluloid intellectuals confuse sentimentality with compassion, knowing with learning, political correctness with liberty and mind numbing intellectual conformity with righteousness.
Where the conservative candidate is a likeable and obviously good natured he becomes an "amiable idiot", as Howell Raines described Ronald Reagan, totally unfit for the highest office in the land where only a good and caring man should reside, even if he is a rapist. Where, as in the case of Nixon, he is seen as distant and devious he becomes the devil's emissary, embodying everything that is selfish, destructive and evil in conservatism and needs to be driven from the Oval Office, exorcised from the country's political culture to be cursed and eternally damned.
It is this totalitarian groupthink that plagues the Bush administration, generating bitterness, social tension and division wherever it can. Though Bush clearly has the ability to reach out to the traditional wing of the Democratic Party, its left wing is driven by hate. Bush's narrow victory has been one of the left's most dishonest weapons. To these profound thinkers majority rule equals democracy (when it suits them). It does not and the Founding Fathers made that fact crystal clear.
These men were not merely of their own time but were also intimately acquainted with the past. They recognised the danger of majorities, the fickleness of crowds, the power and recklessness of clever demagogues. History was not just their guide, it was a handmaiden. They would have known of the Athenian Assembly that put to death eight victorious generals for not recovering the remains of those who drowned in a storm after the Spartans sank twenty-five Athenian ships at the battle of Lesbos. Several days later, moved by remorse, the Assembly put to death those who had persuaded it to execute the generals.
Knowing their history as well as human nature the Founding Fathers developed the Electoral College as a means of preventing those whose "talents for low intrigue and the little arts of popularity" would otherwise make them president, as Alexander Hamilton so aptly described them in Federalist Paper No. 68. In The Federalist No. 10 James Madison declared: "It will be more difficult for unworthy candidates to practice with success the vicious arts, by which elections are too often carried." .
Clinton is living evidence that the electoral college is not foolproof. However, it is still better than nothing and any attack on it is an attack on the Constitution, not that that ever deterred the left. Tim Russert got the process rolling by telling Tom Brokaw that Gore could have become America's "shadow president." This is just a slight glimpse of the pivotal role the mainstream media is playing in trying to subvert the Bush presidency.
Everyone hates a bad loser. Bush fought a clean election and he won it fair and square and the great majority Americans know this, despite the continuous carping of the Democrats' Leninist hardcore. But to these Democrats, including the likes of Raines, Krugman and Sulzberger, destroying any Republican administration is a moral imperative and any means that are used to achieve that end are morally justified.
But in an open society morality usually has a way of eventually making itself felt — just ask the rabid Raines.
Gerard Jackson is also Brookes' Economics Editor
BrookesNews.Com
Saturday 14 June 2003