Is Democracy’s Sun Setting?
11th August 2013
John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, makes pessimism a high art.
It’s not clear that American democracy, as it has developed to the present, really is so wonderful. One of our big political parties somehow manages to market itself as the party of the Little Guy while owning the allegiance of all the Big Guys in town. (The biggest of them all is second-largest shareholder in the party’s main propaganda organ.) The other party is heavily favored by non-Hispanic white voters yet is in financial thrall to donors and interest groups determined to drown that voter segment in a sea of cheaper immigrants.
Been there, said that. Speaking of China:
Of the 25 Politburo members before the 18th Party Congress [last November], 19 had run provinces larger than most countries in the world….A person with Barack Obama’s pre-presidential professional experience would not even be the manager of a small county in China’s system.
What do they know that we don’t?
The drift of our own political culture seems to be confirming the Founders’ intuition that representative government can only work in a population possessed of some minimum level of virtue—thrift, restraint, industriousness, stoicism in the face of misfortune, willingness to defer gratification, and concern for the common good.
No wonder the country is headed down the drain.