The Point

So what are we to make of all this, my previous six posts: David Frum, a Republican, espousing his views on dismantling the Republic. Arguing to install mob rule as the new order, lamenting the fact that if we had only abolished those inconvenient impediments to majority rule like the Senate, the judicial branch and the Electoral College, we could have installed the right choice, America’s choice to the presidency. And that would have been Hillary. You can’t be serious. And Joe Walsh, the conservative, afflicted by all accounts with Trump derangement syndrome, reversing his course mid-career to pare his conservativism down to a “fiscal-only” status, while supporting the Democrat party line on social issues, including support for Joe Biden. How would losing those three Supreme Court appointments have satisfied the Republican base or supported conservative values moving forward? Is there any true conservative that would trade those three seats for four years of Hillary Clinton in the Oval Office, which, by all accounts, would have been Obama 3.0 much like what we are seeing now from the Biden Administration? The short answer is no.  David Frum is no more a Republican than Joe Walsh is a conservative. And by identifying as such, they are merely providing the leftist media with trained seals to roll out and perform on command as an example of what they would like all Republicans to be: progressives. So we should take this media exercise for what it is: yet another example of an attack from the left with a new tactic, a new spin.  This time it’s a trusted voice whispering in your ear, one of your own leading you basket of deplorables to the promised land and enlightenment. A brief review of Mr. Frum’s writings would lead anyone to conclude he is certainly not a Republican.  At best he’s a RINO and he barely qualifies for that. And regarding Joe Walsh, bitter over the lack of Republican Party support, enraged that over 50% of registered Republicans would support Trump as a third party candidate, is no more than an opportunist in seeing a social liberal stance as a way to advance his career in the media in a progressive market. He will certainly not endear himself to conservatives with his vehement anti-Trump rants and violent swerve to the left on social issues. We see you for what you are.  

 

 

A Message For Messrs Frum and Walsh

 Hopefully you have read my previous posts: A message to David Frum and Joe Walsh of which I spoke: Democrats vote en bloc, they stick to their talking points and they never, ever criticize other Democrats.  And when was the last time you witnessed the democrats engaging in educating rather than riling up their base while engaging in respectful debate with conservatives? Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff and that cast of political savages treating their conservative colleagues with respect? By respectful, I have to assume you mean like the way Democrats respectfully treated Brett Kavanaugh? Talk about an alternate reality.  So exactly how did this go down, Fred, Joe?  Did The Atlantic and TIME magazines offer you blood money to sucker punch Rush on his deathbed while giving you an opportunity to plug your respective magazine and talk show? Sure looks like it.

 

A David Frum Ache

As you have no doubt gathered by now Mr Frum of The Atlantic fame had struck a nerve with me. My diatribe continues: Although he concedes that the American system of government has evolved, and by evolved he means it has been diluted to his satisfaction, Mr. Frum levels the accusation that it remains anti-majoritarian, distrusting the “unpropertied” majority. Sticking in his craw was a rant by Utah Senator Mike Lee who last year tweeted out “We’re not a democracy…Democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace and prosperity are. We want the human condition to flourish.  Rank democracy can thwart that”. Mr. Frum belittles Mr. Lee for reducing Madisonian theory into “so few characters”, not that Twitter allows more, but the fact that we are indeed a Constitutional Republic with safeguards to preserve us from mob rule tends to enrage the left when it becomes inconvenient.  Say, when Trump was elected after Hillary captured the popular vote. Yet the fear of mob rule, or tyranny of the masses, has been an essential tenet in American government and is not strictly an American born concern, nor the exclusive property of the framers.  Alexis de Toqueville, a French aristocrat and political scientist, studied the American experiment and concluded “a decision which bases its claim to rule upon numbers, not a rightness of excellence” is indeed an “abandonment of rationality”.  Similar arguments by Herbert Spencer in 1851 concluded that “there is evidently a limit to the power of the majority” and John Stuart Mill in 1859 who stated that there “is an inherent weakness to majority rule in which the majority of an electorate pursues exclusively its own objectives at the expense of minority factions”. Even Abraham Lincoln, recently hijacked by the left, reacted to incidents of mob mentality: “Having ever regarded government as their deadliest bane, they make a jubilee of the suspension of its operations; and pray for nothing so much as its total annihilation”.  He went on: “when the “mobocratic spirit” takes root among good men, government may then be effectually broken down and destroyed”. Never violate the laws of the country; and never to tolerate their violation by others”.  The “Penman of the Constitution”, statesman Gouverneur Morris said “I see with fear and trembling that we may be under the worst of all possible dominions….the dominion of a riotous mob”. Black Lives matter protesters and Pennsylvania board of elections, take note. So in essence, our founders were “threading the needle between liberty and order” based on their learned observations of history in Europe where governments began as monarchies or dictatorships which, in cases where they evolved into democracies, were subject to the fluctuations and vagaries of mob rule which ultimately devolved into governments run by monarchs and dictators in an attempt to restore order.  Madison himself warned in the Federalist No. 51 of the inherent dangers of “tyranny of the majority”.  And in a quote perhaps attributed to Ben Franklin: “Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner”. “But it takes Mr. Frum three pages before the point of this exercise rears its ugly head: Donald Trump.  Mr. Frum is consumed by Trump.  He rails against the fact that Trump was elected with only 46.1 percent of the national vote stating he “was elected not by the preferences of the American people but by the anti-majoritarian mechanics of the Electoral College”that “installed a flimflam man in the Oval Office”.   There you have it. A Flimflam man.  Really? He goes on to use everything from the insurrection on the Capitol to the repeal of Obama’s DACA executive order and rescinding of Obama’s joining the Paris Accord, which imposed crippling green regulations on American industry, as evidence of our poorly crafted government that allows the Senate to be controlled by a minority that represents 41 million less people than the majority.  This flawed government is what he claims forced Obama to resort to the pen to save us. And “control” is perhaps a misrepresentation.  The Senate minority has the ability to block legislation but that is certainly not putting them in control. The system is in place to foster bipartisanship, compromise and to prevent the majority from ramming through blatantly one-sided legislation laden with pork.  But you know that, Mr. Frum, the Democrats do the same damned thing when they are in the minority.  It’s apparently only inconvenient when the other side does it.  And glossing over these topics you use as evidence, which are themselves fodder for a hundred posts, is insulting to your audience. Or more likely, just preaching to the choir. Where is DACA supported by a majority of Americans? 

Mr. Frum

 I'm back at Mr. Frum. Under the title, “The Founders were Wrong About Democracy” he states his case: “the authors of the Constitution feared mass participation would unsettle the government, but it’s the privileged minority that has proved destabilizing.”  There you have it, the buzzword of today: Privilege.  Noteworthy only in the fact that he didn’t tack “white” onto it, although that is the implication. He opens his article and peppers it repeatedly with quotes from the Founding Fathers to make his case, the first from Madison: the mass of people would be susceptible to fickleness and passion, who labour under all the hardships of life and would secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of its blessings such that the major interest might under sudden impulses be tempted to commit injustice on the majority”.  His conclusion, obvious from the start and tainted through the prism of today’s equality politics, is that wealth and property is concentrated in an elite minority and the Founding Fathers saw to it that it would stay there, rather than being equitably distributed to the masses, by rigging our constitutional form of government.  Taking it one step further, he accuses the framers of erecting governmental obstacles, a “necessary fence against impetuous councils”.  What are those barriers? The Senate, “an elite few serving longer terms”, the federal judiciary, “confirmed by the Senate and serving for life” and of course the Electoral College, an “indirect election of the president”.  Well, if you put it that way, let’s just tear it all down. Right! And I'm still not quite through with Mr Frum; bear with me, more to follow.