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Sunday, January 10, 2010

Buchanan: Democracy, Another God That Failed

Democracy, Another God That Failed
(American Conservative) -- by Patrick J. Buchanan

“America is Losing the Free World,” was the arresting headline over the Financial Times column by Gideon Rachman. His thesis: The largest democracies of South America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia — Brazil, South Africa, Turkey, India — are all moving out of America’s orbit. “(T)he assumption that the democracies would stick together is proving unfounded.”...

Writing in World Affairs, Geoffrey Wheatcroft quotes author Aaron David Miller (The Much Too Promised Land) that across the Middle East America is “not liked, not respected and not feared.”

What makes this “frightening,” says Wheatcroft, “is that many American politicians and commentators … have yet to grasp this reality. Such ignorance is evident in the bizarre notion — current even before George W. Bush took the oath of office — that America not only can and should spread democracy, but that this would be in the American national interest. Why did anyone think this?”

Asks Wheatcroft, “If the United States is not liked or respected throughout the Arab countries, why on earth would Americans want to democratize them?”

Excellent question. Some of us have been asking it of the democracy-uber-alles neoconservatives for decades. Yet, these democracy worshipers not only converted Bush, they demanded and got free elections in Lebanon, the West Bank, Gaza and Egypt. Big winners — Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Muslim Brotherhood...

In World on Fire, Amy Chua writes that in Third World countries there is almost always a “market-dominant minority” — Indians in East Africa, whites in South Africa, overseas Chinese — which, in a free-market, attains higher levels of income and controls a disproportionate share of the wealth.

When democracy arrives, however, the racial, tribal or ethnic majority votes to dispossess these market-dominant minorities...

If racial and religious bonds and ancient animosities against the West trump any democratic solidarity with the West, of what benefit to America is democracy in the Third World? And if one-person, one-vote democracy in multiethnic countries leads to dispossession and persecution of the market-dominant minority, why would we promote democracy there?

Why would we promote a system in an increasingly anti-American world that empowers enemies and imperils friends?

Is democratism our salvation — or an ideology of Western suicide? ...MORE...LINK
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Chris Moore comments:

It has been said that democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to eat for lunch. So it's really no surprise that a majority would vote itself largesse at a minority’s expense.

Of course, there are ways around this, as we are seeing in America, where market-dominant minority plutocrats have bought-off and intimidated the politicians with their wealth and networks, and those politicians then vote the interests of the plutocrats (e.g. the Wall Street bailouts, the Iraq war scam, open borders for low wages, etc.)

Perhaps the definition of the modern American republic, then, should be two plutocrats and a politician voting on where that politician should direct a country's resources.

Also, I don't believe the Buschons, Neocons and Neoliberals were ever really interested in spreading democracy any more than I believe the Communists were ever really interested in spreading "social justice." Democracy was merely the pretext for the former's Zionist, war profiteering, oil imperialist, Mideast hegemony agenda.

None of this disproves the general tenor of the Constitution, and what most of the Founders apparently believed, which is that government should be decentralized and extremely limited so that conspirators, demagogues, opportunists and money powers couldn't infiltrate and use it to advance their own corrupt, poisonous and ultimately totalitarian agendas.

So I don't think the Constitution has failed America; I think Americans have failed the Constitution. Perhaps the biggest shortcoming of the Constitution was that it didn't create enough mechanism to deal with those moral and ethical reprobates who have for decades now been angling and scheming to overthrow it for their own selfish, narrow and destructive interests.

If Americans should be spreading anything, it is the anti-elitist, original Constitutional principles emanating from the desire for a nation of liberty -- and they should start by spreading it throughout their own homeland.

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