Subscribe to BrookesNews’ Bulletin
Expect Democrats to try and delegitimise a Bush victory
Gerard Jackson
Because I am in the process of packing and moving I have had no time to write articles for this week’s edition. This is why I am posting previously published articles. However, these articles have been chosen because their content is still highly relevant. The following article was published in The New Australian 10 November 2000. It is with genuine regret that I can now say that my prediction was 100 per cent correct.
If nothing else, this election campaign has 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 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 the 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”, like 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 will plague a 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. A narrow victory for Bush will be the leftwing Democrats’ main weapon if it can be shown that Bush did not carry the popular vote. After all, 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 products of their own time: they were also intimately acquainted with the past. They recognised the danger of majorities, the fickleness of crowds, the power and reckless 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. The process has already started with Tim Russert telling Tom Brokaw that Gore could become America’s “shadow president.” This is just a slight glimpse of the pivotal role the media will play in the process of trying to subvert a Bush presidency.
Now there is speculation afoot that if Bush is declared the winner Gore will create a political crisis by dragging the results through the courts, with Democratic lawyers seeking out judges who will support their complaints no matter how trivial or visibly false. I for one doubt this will happen. [I was wrong]. Though Gore might win the popular vote we should recall that the Republicans also won the popular vote in 1998 but still lost to the Democrats.
Everyone hates a bad loser. Bush fought a clean election. If he wins it will have been fair and square, which cannot be said for Gore, and the American people know this. Gore and the Democrats could face a dangerous backlash if they are seen to be sabotaging the democratic process, possibly to leading to electoral challenges from conservatives.
Gore’s bragging that he won the popular vote could be indicative of a refusal to accept a Bush victory. The regiment of Democratic lawyers descending on Florida is not a good sign. In any case, considering the Democrats electoral chicanery that “popular vote” might just turn out to have as much intellectual and moral substance as Al Gore.
My bet is that if the result favours Bush the Democrats will accept the reality of the situation and ask Gore to concede defeat graciously as did Nixon in 1960, despite the outrageous electoral irregularities that the Democrats had committed. But then again, Gore is no Nixon and the Democrats, thanks to its radicals, are not democrats.
Wiser heads in Democratic Party know that if the party overturned a Bush win in Florida only diehard Democrats would consider Gore presidency legitimate. The consequences do not give rise to pleasant thoughts. Moreover, they are alert to just how much electoral fraud the Bush camp could uncover if Gore went for a legal challenge.
Finally, it should never be forgotten that Gore’s success was built on a foundation of lies and that bodes ill for America.
BrookesNews.Com
Monday 30 June 2008