A Serious Question
Is there anyone who thinks that the College of Cardinals would elect an avowed atheist Pope?
That would appear to be an absurd question with an obvious answer, but let’s shift the context. Why would people give the reins of the US government to people who don’t believe in government?
Grover Norquist is one of the many in what is being called “the conservative wing” of the Republican Party who openly advocates dismantling the government. The basic reason he gives for tax cuts is to weaken the government. The smoke screen about tax cuts improving the economy was disproved under Reagan and again under the Shrubbery. The economic effects are extremely limited in scope and have no lasting value. The crumbling American infrastructure shows the real costs involved: the government has failed to maintain the country.
Glenn Greenwald looks at John Yoo, one of the architects of the Shrubbery’s view of governance. Mr. Yoo doesn’t believe in the basic structure of the American Constitution, the separation of powers.
These, and others, don’t believe in the United States of America, but they have power and influence in its government. Why would anyone expect these people to be able to create an effective government? They don’t believe in it.
Think about the cavalier manner in which they ignore the laws, they regard regulations as evil, they dismantle government structures through outsourcing, they manner in which they label government employees as “bureaucrats”. They are the government, but they hate it.
There is a word for people who don’t believe in government: anarchist.
3 comments
Well, neither John Woo or Grover Norquist are anarchists.
Woo is clearly a totalitarian while Norquist, though he talks small government, is all about a government of favoritism and redistribution to cronies.
And, create an effective government?
Surely no one, not even their supporters, expected that of the cheney regime unless it was a government effective at creeping up on the rapture and delivering the spoils of peace and war.
Anyone who would believe your hypothetical is certainly not anybody I’d consider fit to hold an office of trust or honor in the government of the United States, since canonically any man elected to the papacy must at least be a practicing Catholic, and in practice it’s been at least five hundred years (or more) since the last time the College of Cardinals chose anyone who wasn’t already a cardinal.
But the answer to your derivative question lies, I’m sad to say, in the fact that most voters don’t think about politics in those terms. I’m sorry to have to say that as far as I can tell, most voters don’t think about voting, except maybe occasionally for a month or so ahead of the election. And most of them don’t make their decisions based on fitness for office or abstruse general views. They decide based on who tells them the most of whatever it is they want to hear.
Hence, God forgive us, the Shrubbery. Twice.
If you think about the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, one of the comparisons often made was “the trains ran on time.” These people have removed the clocks and are tearing up the rails. They aren’t building anything. They aren’t pulling power into their hands, they are dispersing it. Their legislature is producing less and less legislation.
As large as the deficit is, there have been hundreds of millions of dollars unspent on various projects, $200 million unspent in research funds for the Department of Homeland Security alone.
Where are the monuments that totalitarian regimes always build? The WTC site or New Orleans would have been prime targets for Stalin, Hitler, or Mao to build something massive and ugly.