In his recent post Democracy Depends on the Consent of the Governed, Booman writes regarding the failed attempts of the U.S. to impose a U.S.-style democracy upon various and sundry countries that have felt the wrath of the Permanent Government in terms of violent action. (By the way…the concept of “a U.S.-style democracy ” is about as chimerical an idea as I have ever encountered.)
Read on for more.
He writes:
Self-determination and human rights are wonderful ideas, but they don’t work unless there are coherent and cohesive communities in which to implement those ideas.
This is precisely the problem with the U.S. today. There are very few remaining “coherent and cohesive communities” in this country.
Not really.
The old idea of communities coalescing around a church…often in reality a cultural and ethnic coalition (Irish, Italian, Anglo-Saxon, African-American, etc.) and often also an economic class coalition as well (Southern Baptist, High Episcopalian, again the Irish and Italians and other immigrant Roman Catholic groups plus the grand tradition of African-American churches)…is almost nonexistent now. Purely ethnic and class communities still survive, but they are neither coherent nor cohesive. They are mostly groups of seriously economically disadvantaged people clinging together in an economic emergency. About the only truly cohesive and at least moderately coherent communities that are organized around ethnicity (and its close supporter, language) of any appreciable size with which I am familiar are the various Hispanic ones plus the Koreans. The black “community”…at one time the most coherent, cohesive social community in all of America, in my opinion… was so broken by the CIA-permitted led drug scourges and its concomitant street terrors/economic collapses that they will probably never rebuild themselves as a real force here. Yeah, we’re “post-racial” alright, at least so it appears in the media. Why? Because the black population was the single most potent enemy of the Permanent Government in the ’60s through the ’70s and well into the ’80s. Confine the rebellious and uncontrollable members of that society to prison, convince the upwardly mobile ones that they are now an accepted part of American life…”Why, we’ve even got a black preznit now!!!”…and there goes the opposition.
So where exactly are these “coherent and cohesive communities” that are necessary right here at home if we are to successfully pursue domestic self-determination and human rights?
Damned if I know.
The media-swaddled, whining, self-entitled babies of the middle class? Please!!! Coherent? I don’t think so. Cohesive? They will sell their mothers down the river for a good mortgage on a home in an “acceptable” neighborhood.
The working classes of all races? Mostly too frightened of going broke to act cohesively with one another. Look at the labor movement for all you need to know about that shit.
Who’s left?
The millennials? Please. Try again. They are mostly so enmeshed in their own fanciful digital worlds that they do not have any idea of the painful realities that wait around the next couple of corners of their lives. They are totally unprepared for anything more complicated than their next tweet. (As are most of the so-called “progressives,” by the way. Witness the drooling idiocy of so many people here and on dKos.)
So it goes.
Booman has a point, but that point can no longer be applied to his own country. If the U.S. cannot maintain truly “coherent and cohesive communities” in which to at least try to effectively implement the grand ideas of self-determination and human rights, how can it require the same things from countries that it has itself destroyed with massive wars?
I got yer “cohesion.” Right here!!!
Democracy…and the cohesion necessary to maintain it… begins at home, Booman. Until we back offa the world feed trough, notch in our belts, stop our foreign adventures and take a good look at what is happening here we have nothing to offer the rest of the world except the spectre of an over-armed police force that will maintain the status quo even if it has to kill it first.
Bet on it.
If you maintain your position as a supporter of the DemRat wing of the Permanent Government UniParty, you are as guilty as the original architects of the Iraq War. Not to the same degree, but still guilty.
Word.
Later…
AG
