AlterNet: Republicans at Highest Levels Really Want to Do Away with Democracy for All

[marmar]

AlterNet / By Mark Ames

Republicans at Highest Levels Really Want to Do Away with Democracy for All
There's a dangerous right-wing alignment in the making; race-baiters proposing 'civics literacy tests' and elite free market ideologues who see democracy as inefficient.

February 12, 2010 |


While Tea Party movement followers ran around Nashville last week dressed up in their Paul Revere period costumes, blathering about their heroic struggle against Obama's Islamosocialist tyranny, the right-wing elite that nurtures them, and their paid libertarian ideologues, have been openly advocating the abolition of America's democracy in favor of a free-market junta, because, as they say over and over, voters cannot be trusted to rule themselves.

Here, for example, is how one popular libertarian pundit summed up the attitude: "To be a libertarian in a modern democracy is to say that nearly 300 million Americans are wrong, and a handful of nay-sayers are right." It's a quote so common among the Republican and libertarian vanguard that it's almost irrelevant which one of them said it -- I'll get to this guy later, but suffice to know that he's a tenured professor, and sitting pretty in the same billionaire-funded world of think tanks, institutes, and PR machines that launched the Tea Party.

That's the dangerously authoritarian part of the Tea Party that we've forgotten about lately.

It's evident even in Republican Rep. Tom Tancredo's shocking "Jim Crow speech" that kicked off last week's Tea Party Convention -- when the out-of-the-closet xenophobe unveiled his Big Idea on how to preserve America's freedom, he wasn't just advocating more bigotry, but also a plan to roll back America's overly-free democracy, replacing it with a rule of elites that uses "civics literary tests" as the justification for denying voting rights to tens of millions of "wrong" Americans, like minorities and people with funny accents. ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/news/145648/republicans_at_highest_levels_really_want_to_do_away_with_democracy_for_all

[heli]

1. 'Literacy tests'? Most teabaggers would have fallen asleep watching William F. Buckley, Jr.

[creeksneakers2]

2. The rank and file are pretty bad too

They love to cheer about how they are against government power but have no problem when that power is given to the GOP or the financial elites. The tea party leaders know this. We are on the verge of a tea party takeover. Its frightening.

[DKRC]

3. Paul Weyrich lives on

Paul Weyrich, father of the right-wing movement and co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, Moral Majority and various other groups tells his flock that he doesn't want people to vote. That's why the GOP is obsessed with voter fraud---only they want to disenfranchise voters because as Weyrich said back in the '80's...the more voters there are---the less of a chance the wingers have in any election.

"Now many of our Christians have what I call the goo-goo syndrome -- good government. They want everybody to vote. I don't want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people, they never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.


http://crooksandliars.com/2007/06/07/paul-weyrich-goo-goo-syndrome

These are the elites that the Tea Party are railing about; they simply aren't looking at the Right where these bastards are holed up.


K&R

[bvar22]

4. There is an aspect of this I find attractive:

Sarah Palin wouldn't make The Cut.

[Odin2005]

5. many Libertarians are extremely anti-democratic.

To them "Democracy" means "people voting to confiscate my money".

[athenasatanjesus]

6. I don't know how this has ever been in question

Democracy is liberal by very definition it's designed to give everyone a voice its the communism of political systems.

[Silent3]

7. Not too many of the teabaggers would pass a civics test themselves.

They haven't got a clue what "freedom" means other than a word used in us vs. them slogans, nor the slightest idea about how a Constitutional democracy should function.

[anonymous171]

8. A lot of technocrats on the left like those kinds of things as well.

Elitism is not confined to the right or left. It is a product of class, not ideology.