KEENE: Democrats slowly abandon democracy

We’re a people too stupid to govern ourselves without liberal leadership-
The Washington Times
Tuesday, October 11, 2011

In recent years, some have given voice to a growing fear among conservatives that the American left is more committed to achieving its policy goals than to working within the confines of the U.S. democratic system. This fear has always been dismissed by just about everyone else as paranoid because in a free, democratic society the ends never justify the means.

Since the founding, this political consensus has underpinned the stability and political success of the American experiment. Democrats and Republicans may disagree, but, with one tragic exception, neither has been willing to suspend the Constitution, take up arms or call for a revolution because the other prevailed at the ballot box.

But that consensus seems to be fraying. As the polls have turned against them, many Democratic liberals are beginning to doubt the wisdom not only of allowing people to make their own decisions, but of letting voters have anything approaching a free hand in electing those who will lead them. Most people, after all, can’t be expected to know what or who is good for them. They make mistakes, and mistakes are not easily tolerated by an elite convinced that it knows best.

Oh, elections are good enough when they turn out right, but that isn’t always the case. Thus, three years ago, when the electorate was getting downright tired of an incumbent president who seemed to be messing things up, Democrats characterized themselves as, well, democrats. They couldn’t wait for the elections of 2006 and 2008 because they knew they were on a roll. Their presidential candidate was talented, articulate and an ideologue of the first rank. It seemed that the millennium was at hand with a committed liberal in the White House and soul mates at the helm of both the House and Senate.

Those first days after the 2008 elections were heady. James Carville for one declared in essence that we had reached the end of political history and that folks had better get used to the fact not only that happy days were here again, but that the evil Republicans had been vanquished and might not be seen knocking at the gate again for at least a generation. But things haven’t turned out the way the liberals assumed they would.

After a few initial successes in Congress, the ideological overreach and arrogance of the rookie president and his allies on the Hill spawned the tea party and cost the president’s party the House. Now he faces what everyone acknowledges will be a tough re-election campaign that could, even if the president prevails, leave the Republicans in control of both houses. It seems that it has taken not a generation, but a mere three years for the Republicans to be not just knocking at the gate, but threatening to knock it down.

The result has been a retreat from the rhetorical belief in democracy that has characterized both parties in the past. It has popped up just about everywhere on the left. President Obama himself has moaned about the difficulty of working within the confines of the constitutional system and particularly being forced to work with Congress. He has said, in fact, that it is “temptingâ€