Changing the Rules Ain't Gonna Help

friendly advice to our Democratic friends

Sometimes I wonder about our Democratic friends when they propose one more dodge to give themselves more power.

There’s John Kerry:

“Our First Amendment stands as a major block to the ability to be able to hammer [disinformation] out of existence.

There’s Hillary Clinton:

social media companies must moderate content on their platforms or else "we lose total control."

Glenn Greenwald talks about the stupidity of this “tell” with Megyn Kelly.

There’s Tim Walz:

Minnesota governor Tim Walz on Tuesday reiterated his support for abolishing the Electoral College and switching to a national popular vote as the sole means of electing presidents and their running mates.

And Kamala Harris on the filibuster:

Vice President Harris says she would support eliminating the filibuster in the U.S. Senate in order to bring back federal protections for a woman's right to an abortion as they existed under Roe v. Wade.

I understand the frustration of our Democratic friends. They see their power slipping away, the power they have enjoyed, father and daughter, since President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his first hundred days in 1933.

And since the world to them is all about politics and having the power to execute their agenda it is utterly “inconceivable” that Republicans should be hindering their Journey to the Promised Land.

It is monstrous that X / Twitter should be allowing “disinformation” that challenges the liberal world view or even the occasional liberal “fact.” I get it. Up until Elon Musk bought Twitter the Democrats, with their Intelligence Community inserts in social media could censor speech that challenged the ruling Narrative.

Yes, but. What if your ideas are wrong, as with COVID. And your science is bought and paid for with government grants, like climate change. Can’t you see that all knowledge is tentative subject to revision. I’m reading Strange Beauty, a biography of physicist Murray Gell-Mann by George Johnson. And do you know: after developing the quark theory of subatomic “particles” the physicists had a problem. They couldn’t figure out what it all meant.

It is unthinkable that the Republicans should have patiently built up a conservative majority on the US Supreme Court over decades to overturn in 2022 the 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade that discovered a right to abortion in the US Constitution. I get it: women should have the right to abortion and shut up peasants.

But, after a century of women’s liberation, isn’t it time to think about where we are and where we are going? For instance, if it’s a bad idea to pollute the environment, then whatabout polluting young women with The Pill, that, experts are starting to agree, causes depression? And what do studies say about the lifelong mental harm to a woman carrying forever the memory of the abortion she had in her early twenties?

It is outrageous that the Constitution’s Electoral College should determine presidential elections by a majority of states rather than a majority of voters, so that small conservative states have an outsize influence on the selection of a president.

But suppose that the destruction of the Electoral College has all kinds of follow-on effects, completely unanticipated by today’s politicians and activists? Such as, maybe some conservative states wanting to leave the Union?

Really, liberals! It’s not the end of the world. Not yet. You chaps still dominate the culture, dominate politics, dominate the day-to-day Narrative. Your folks all dominate education, and your folks dominate government and regulation. You are really complaining that you don’t have “total control.” Oh, of course. As usual, Hillary Clinton said the quiet stuff out loud.

And really! If you still need more control that you already have maybe it’s a signal. Maybe you are interpreting the failures of the last few years: the Great Recession, the slow Obama growth, the failure of the late COVID unpleasantness, the soaring national debt, as the work of troublemakers interfering with your good works. But maybe, just maybe, the problem is with your ideas, your programs, your people, and not with the troublemakers in the opposition.

Don’t you understand? It’s not a good idea for the government and the ruling class to have total control. Because political rulers and honchos — that’s you — are actually pretty scuzzy people. Time and time again they want to do stupid stuff, and when their stupid stuff is revealed as a total failure they still won’t stop. Hello Stalin, Mao, Maduro.

And another thing. From my point of view, as a racist-sexist-homophobe settler-colonialist insurrectionist, I’d say that with your leaders, from Obama to Hillary Clinton to Biden to Harris, have not been promoting your best. Bill Clinton was a remarkable leader, but it’s been downhill ever since.

Now, if I were influential in the corridors of power, I’d be telling my political friends that Houston We Have a Problem: we can’t go on like this. We’ve got to have an All-Hands meeting to talk about our performance over the last few years. We need to figure out what went wrong. We need to figure out how to reboot our party with better ideas, better candidates, and an honest review of where we went wrong.

But they aren’t. Instead all they are doing is trying to game the system.

Not a good look.