Friday, July 23, 2010

ACORN the Zombie Evil

The reason ACORN won't die as a righty bete noire has nothing whatever to do with fact. It has everything to do with the raison d'etre of the organization: the expansion of the franchise, and the further involvement of the poor and lower classes in government. That these citizens pay taxes, and are subject to the laws of the Republic, is irrelevant.

Every move--I repeat, every move--on the right regarding elections, the franchise and voting rights has always been to limit it. They have no interest whatever in the right of millions of their fellow citizens to vote, despite their claim that the middle class and lower middle class vote Republican because they see through the left's alleged elitist wrongheadedness.

The common righty insistence that we live in a republic rather than a democracy, as if the two are entirely separable in theory or practice, as if the former depends for its legitimacy not a whit on the latter, often boils down to a frank distrust of the people to run the government, and, certainly, a view that, if voting for their own interests, they'll vote Democrat, and that they, unlike the rich, will never place their own interests above those of the country. They say this frankly, out loud, repeatedly and without apology. They claim that the Constitution and the Founders' original intent enshrine this as a fundamental basis of the country, now sanctified and never to be changed or challenged, from which any deviation constitutes an immoral step towards state tyranny. Seems to me that Democrats could present this in a public forum in a way that makes it clear, hangs it around their necks like an albatross, in a context that also attacks it and offers an alternative.

So why aren't they doing it?

(grumbles, spits, rereads Lawrence Tribe and Akhil Reed Ahmar on the Constitution, and Justice Stevens' opinion in the Citizens United case, and throws a copy of 'Atlas Shrugged' on the pyre)

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