From: aaiken@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (Andrew C. Aiken)
Subject: Re: Suburbs swing to Clinton (Goose Liver)
Organization: Indiana University
Date: Thu, 10 Sep 1992 20:25:16 GMT

In <1992Sep10.192140.4710@ils.nwu.edu> hooker@aristotle.ils.mwu.edu ( BOB HOOKER) writes:

>In article <aaiken.716135322@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu>,
>aaiken@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (Andrew C. Aiken) writes:
>> 

>>  Christopher Hitchens wrote an article in Harper's several
>> months back about how the American political process has been debased by
>> polls.  He pointed out that polls were first used by the opponents of
>> the early twentieth century Progressive Movement -- as propaganda.  
>> 	Behind every poll there is the implicit assumption about the
>> correctness of democratic ideology.  That is, a poll states, in numbers    
>> rather than in words, that if a "people" desire say, a nationalized health 
>> care system, then its rulers are remiss or cruel for not providing it.  This
>> manifestation of direct democracy undermines, as did the populist 	>Savaronola,the edifice of liberty.

>Governement to my knowledge, seems to have no problem conducting policy
>which flies in the face of polls;  gun control, tax increases, family
>leave, foriegn aid, pay increases etc.  If anything our government is more
>like the Politburo then mas democracy.  

>Our declines may be more at the hands of detached members of elite cliches
>then made popularists living by the latest numbers. 


	Precisely my point -- but the clique has read its Montesquieu.  It
knows that no government can be sustained, which has not the perception
of legitimacy.  Gun control, tax increases, and so on are considered 
what the people "really want," and we are told, like naughty children,
that our love of freedom is merely an excuse for selfishness.

>>  	In an earlier day, when Opinion reigned with a lighter hand, we
>> had better candidates than now.  Coke or Pepsi?  Bush or Clinton?  Who
>> shall be the steward of our nation's decline into yet more elaborate
>> (and elaborately justified) barbarisms?  

>Well I think if anything the American has been cultivated to an almost
>sheep like state of unhealthy civility.  Alittle barbarism (little is the
>important term here) might be just what our culture needs to be reborn. 
>Like Bacchus dancing into tired Greece,  bringing with his drunken masses
>the birth of the highest art form; tragedy,  Chaos must nightly wed with
>his lover Order inorder to produce the new born child Culture.    If you
>fear Choas, instability,  if you prize tradition,  if your idea of culture,
>of society is a perpetual motion machine visit the Despotic nations of the
>east,  the poor Chatolic societies of the West,  the Islamic, the Tribal. 
>Order is no greater enemy then Chaos.  

	But what sort of chaos?  Certainly you do not mean absolute
lawlessness.  I prefer the fewest possible number of laws.  I prefer that
the diversity of mind and body that is so typically American come from
below, from the community itself, rather than from above, by Multiculturalist
Mandate.  What magic has been driven from our cities in the name of Urban
Renewal?  If by Order you mean soldiers garrisoned in the schoolhouse, and
regimented conformity, and a people cudgeled into Programs that were fashioned
from the broken-up pieces of the Bed of Procrustes, then I am no lover of Order.


Andrew Aiken

>  


Xref: sparky alt.rush-limbaugh:4540 talk.politics.misc:44673