The authoritarian mindset

Last night, the Senate Parliamentarian ruled that a minimum wage hike couldn't be included in reconciliation. 

This was, of course, disappointing. However, the way in which Rep. Ilhan Omar responded was even more disappointing.

Both right and left are infected with a virus which seems to tire them of the democratic process. Donald Trump was the apotheosis of that in the Republican Party. Many on the left are looking for the same among Democrats.

Too many on both sides would be fine with a dictatorship, as long as they were the Gauleiters or commissars. They have given up on democratic compromise, on the give and take of politics. 

Now, I put the blame for this state of affairs squarely upon the right. From the Southern Strategy to the Gingrich Revolution, the right has been building to this crescendo for decades. It long ago decided that democracy would always scupper any plans they had for domination, and must be either managed or erased in order to achieve their political project.

But the virus has jumped species, and now many on the left are infected by it.

I'm certainly not defending the filibuster. It's an archaic instrument which has no place in a modern democracy. But to call for the firing of the Senate parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, simply because she did her job, is a symptom that authoritarianism is infecting the left. 

You don't always get what you want in a democracy. When that happens, you find another way to achieve you aims, within democratic norms. Majoritarian tyranny, even when your intent is "noble", is still tyranny, and will eventually have a blow-back.

The West is in crisis. I'll write about this next week, but it's had decades of peace and prosperity and now too many of its citizens are narcissistic and bored. They see the slow workings of government and politics and crave for excitement and revolution. Or they see Others finally being allowed into the commonwealth, and are offended to their core that they may no longer be the dominant ones. The niceties of democratic politics are as a ball and chain, holding them back from some glorious future.

If the West is to stand against the likes of Putin's Russia and Xi's China, it needs to rediscover a new love for what made it powerful in the first place: democracies which are built upon consensus and a realistic view of the world. A liberal dictator is no better than a conservative one. The West, and especially the United States, has to regain its moral footing, or the future will be far from glorious.