Brad deLong tells us:
it took me only two months–two months!–to conclude that America’s best hope for sane technocratic governance required the elimination of the Republican Party from our political system as rapidly as possible.
Since Republicans are supposedly terrorists, elimination is apt to mean lining them up against a wall and shooting them.
Democracy is internal peace. It means both sides have decided to live together and tolerate each other. When one side decides it is not going live with the other side, not going to tolerate it, there is nothing the other side can do. Democracy can only continue so long as no substantial minority wishes it to end.
War is easy, peace is hard. Peace requires both sides to continually make an effort to keep the peace. It takes two to make peace, only one to make war. If the Democrats decide they do not want democracy, there can be no democracy. Republicans can win or lose, but if they win, their leader will be a Pinochet or a Sulla, not a Reagan. Or both sides might lose, and the country could wind up with rule by warlords and people’s militias, probably a more attractive option than rule by Sulla.
The experience of Latin America shows you cannot hold an election when one side is trying to win by any means necessary. If one side is prepared to win by any means necessary, the other side has to stop them from winning by any means necessary, in which case the election is at best not be plausibly democratic, and at worst will be full scale civil war.
In each election, the Democrats have engaged in more ballot box stuffing than the last one. At some point this is going to get out of hand.
Brad DeLong needs to be careful what he wishes for. Very, very careful. The country that comes out of a war is never the same country that went in, even if your side wins, and there’s nothing that says you’re going to like it, and this is especially true of a civil war. Liberals need to cut the “eliminationist” rhetoric, and fast, before someone decides to start taking it seriously, on either side. Of course, I understand that this would require someone to actually take DeLong’s deranged bleatings seriously, but hey, there’s a first time for everything…
Brad DeLong is incapable of saying something unapproved. If he says X, X has widespread acceptability within the ruling class – not necessarily consensus within the ruling class, indeed usually not consensus, but always, a position that is getting somewhat close to consensus, or has in the past been consensus. He is not a voice in the wilderness, but a voice of the rulers.
Guys like Brad DeLong are incapable of doing anything concrete, even eliminating people. Say what you want about murderers like Che Guevara or Adolph Hitler, but at least they could make the dirt fly. I don’t see DeLong doing much besides killing people with PowerPoint.
What the more radical part of the left is calling for is for the government to ignore the outcome of the 2010 election.
When the government ignores election outcomes, the government soon finds it necessary to eliminate members of political parties.
An election is simply a special kind of war. Two armies show up on the battlefield on the same day. They count each other. And then the one that would lose if they actually did any fighting surrenders.
As long as all three steps are performed consistently and in the proper order, you have “Democracy”. If any of them are skipped, you have “civil war”. The latter condition contains less silly posturing and a lot more blood, but they’re not the fundamentally different categories of activity that a lot of people like to think.
There are a lot of leftists passionately and indignantly condemning Obama for surrendering. They compare him to Chamberlain negotiating with Hitler. The implication is that, just because the Democrats lost the election for the house of representatives, they should not act as if they lost. They should continue to exercise power irrespective of election outcomes.
It is not the consensus among the ruling elite, but it is a fairly widespread view amongst the ruling elite, that the left rules by right, by the fact that the government bureaucracy is all leftist, and if the politicians cannot run adequate PR for what the bureaucracy wants to do, bureaucracy need to fire the politicians and replace them by those who can.
And of course, DeLong’s splutterings are nothing compared to the vile spewings of foaming wackos like Tim Wise, who often actually comes close to calling for anti-white genocide, and who recently opined that he wished that Andrew Breitbart and his entire family would die in agony. Gotta love those tolerant, non-judgemental, non-violent liberals.