Tuesday, September 17, 2019

*A "Republic Of Virtue" Or A "Republic Of Lunatics"?- Musings On Late Bourgeois Electoral Politics-The 2010 Elections

Markin comment:

A few years ago, in the lead-up to the 2008 presidential elections in America, I started to(and I emphasize the words started to) try to write periodic commentary about the trials and tribulations of the bourgeois political process, mainly to contrast that process to communist politics as the path to solutions to the current overwhelming problems of humankind. Frankly, after several months I had to give it up as one of the most futile political tasks that I have tried to do since I was a kid politico and loved, really loved, to get down and dirty with the intricacies of playing the bourgeois political horse races. (You know questions like who would win the Texas 23rd Congressional race, or the 12th California and how those races would affect the balance in Congress. Whoa!) Just that few months was enough to convince me that I would rather have an honest high-grade heroin addiction than to be that kind of political junkie again. There is no cure, no known cure anyway, for that ailment. I’ll just stick to my “high communist” political junkie routine, thank you very much.

That said, I must confess to a certain bewilderment over the current crop of, mainly although not exclusively, tea bag party, or tea cup party, or whatever they call themselves, candidates who have captured a wing of the Republican Party (with some spillover to the Democrats as well, or at least some of their candidates are starting to talk that way) and are holding it hostage to any sense of living, and breathing,in the 21st century. Frankly, I long for the days of a genuinely rational irrational candidate like the late Arizona Senator and 1964 Republican Party presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater. At least that man had some connection to the ideas of the Enlightenment that animated the dreams of the founders of this woe begotten immigrant country.

And I guess that is really my point in this commentary. Something is very, very wrong when a candidate, in this case the recently nominated Republican Party Senatorial candidate from Delaware, Tea-ster Christine O’Donnell, had in public, come out at some point (I heard this statement on the radio and did not get the full context) against masturbation , male masturbation in any case. Now whether offenders on the first offense are to be hung or drawn and quartered, or both, is not clear but this is a women with a very, very solid 14th century agenda. And, of course, it is easy to pick on Ms.(I guess it is okay to use that honorific) O’Donnell as a convenient target but the point is that there is a whole rash of them, Democrat and Republican alike, who are spewing this same swill, mostly about cutting government to the size of their salaries and the cost of the military, the police and, of course, the inquisition, I mean, the courts. This at a time when the outmoded bourgeois system could use, and stands in need of, a few rational defenders.

That brings up my last point that I have already telegraphed in the headline to this comment. In the early days of the American republic, right after the victory over Great Britain, there was quite a lot of controversy (never fully resolved) about who should govern society, the men (and in those days it was all about men, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, et. al) of disinterested public virtue or the rabble (or those who were more than willing to play to the rabble, the rabble, by the way, then as now being you and me dear reader). A then important argument about the way American society would be run. Now remember those were the days when the democratic experiment on this continent was an isolated light in the wilderness of world politics. A real step forward in human progress. What does this current crop of sadists, masochists, sado-masochists, maso-sadists, unreconstructed foot-fetishists, unemployed court jesters, punishment freaks, chain-whippers, chattel slavery worshippers, and their allies have to do with all that. I repeat-I’ll just stick to my “high communist” political junkie routine, thank you very much. The fight for a workers party that fights for a workers government could hardly be timelier.

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