Tag Archives: government

“Democracy Wanes in South Asia”

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Sadanand Dhume uses as his canonical examples Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh, wherein riots forced the removal of despotic governments and their replacement by popularly chosen leaders. In Nepal in particular, new elections have been set for next March.

Dhume did point out popular failures in Pakistan and Myanmar; however, his apparent concept that popular uprisings are, of necessity, antidemocratic is badly flawed.

This is what our own Declaration of Independence has to say about such popular violence.

[W]henever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

A government deciding unilaterally and with little to no warning to censor—abolish!—major communications systems, a government that has had a single Prime Minister for 15 years during carefully controlled elections with opposition candidates routinely jailed, a government dominated for 17 years by a single pair of brothers whose government did little to protect its population from routine violence—each of these governments with their long train of abuses and usurpations… would seem to be prime candidates for the people to decide that their governments’ evils are sufferable and so to move to exercise their right…their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards.

What must Dhume think of the Color Revolutions in Ukraine, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Armenia, or the People Power revolution in the Philippines, each of which involved the successful popular overthrow of Despotic governments and their replacement with more democratic institutions?

We’ll see what happens in the subsequent elections, particularly in Nepal. Dhume may be correct vis-à-vis his examples, but it’s much too soon to tell.

A Constitutional Amendment Proposal

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As  Nicholas Ballasy, of Just the News, wrote Saturday, the Federal government is once again nearing the end of a fiscal year with no serious plan for funding the next year. His lede:

Congress is on its way to missing a “basic” budget deadline for the 29th year in a row, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

And just to emphasize the point:

Meanwhile, the deficit so far into the current fiscal year is larger than the same period last year.

Hence my Constitutional Amendment in its outline if not in its final wording:

If, at the end of any fiscal year, the following year is not fully funded—that is all 12 of the necessary appropriations bills are not enacted into law—then the only Continuing Resolution that is allowed is this one, which is automatically implemented beginning on the first day of that following fiscal year:
All spending by the Federal government is reduced by 10% of the prior year’s level, with the exception of spending on our national debt and our national defense. These two will have their spending held unchanged from the just concluded fiscal year. The spending reduction includes all Federal government spending, including so-called entitlement spending and all “off the books” spending.

This Continuing Resolution will continue in effect until the Federal government is fully funded for a fiscal year by enacting each of the dozen appropriations bills for that year. The Continuing Resolution, including the year-on-year spending reductions, will continue in effect for all subsequent consecutive fiscal years across which the funding failure continues. This means that if Year0 concludes at a spending level with Year1 not fully funded, then Year1’s spending level will be reduced to 90% of Year0. If the funding failure continues into Year2, then Year2’s spending level will have an additional 10% reduction, for a total reduction to 81% of Year0’s, and so on into Year3, Year4, etc.

Amending our Constitution is, by design, a difficult process, and that’s correct: our Constitution is our blueprint for governing ourselves rather than for us being governed; it cannot function as a limit on government if it’s reduced to a reflection of what we think ought be done in the moment and from moment to moment. Nor is a Convention necessary; We the People can convene ourselves to create and then push through an Amendment. It is time, though, to get started; it does take time to propose, write, and then ratify the thing.

“socialize the agricultural system”

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That’s what the Democratic Socialists of America Party, Progressive-Democratic Party Mayoral candidate for New York City Zohran Mamdani’s first and still most important party membership, wants to do, among other classical socialist things.

The destructiveness of government ownership of production everywhere else is widely demonstrated around the world, a destructiveness of national prosperity and of the weal of the ordinary population, all the while concentrating the remaining wealth in the hands of the Know Betters who run the socialist government.

The rest of us, though, should study the collectivization of the kulaks—the dekulakization—which was Joseph Stalin’s seizure in the name of small-c communism of all of the agriculture production facilities right down to the land itself. That socialist paradisical seizure led directly the deaths by starvation of five to seven million (estimates vary) Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarussian children, women, and men.

It’s obvious that members of DSA, most especially Mamdani, either have not studied the outcomes, or they have, but care not a whit about the toll.

Rights from Men, Not from God

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That’s the view of Virginia’s Progressive-Democrat Senator Tim Kaine.

The notion that rights don’t come from laws and don’t come from the government, but come from the Creator—that’s what the Iranian government believes. It’s a theocratic regime that bases its rule on Sharia law and targets Sunnis, Bahá’ís, Jews, Christians and other religious minorities. And they do it because they believe that they understand what natural rights are from their Creator. So the statement that our rights do not come from our laws or our governments is extremely troubling.

Kaine is deliberately distorting (because I don’t believe so intelligent a man doesn’t know better the logic he’s tacitly using) the situation: he claims that because others make similar claims, they must all be equally false. Analogies, as Kaine is using here, can be useful in clarifying phenomena, but they also can be useful, as Kaine is doing here, to obfuscate and to seem to disprove phenomena (without any capability to prove or disprove anything).

Kaine chooses to ignore the differences between a culture, one the one hand, in which its citizens believe fundamental rights come from our Creator and that government is subordinate to the sovereign people. In our culture, our laws are intended to defend and implement those fundamental rights, not to create them.

That’s in contrast with nations (not necessarily the cultures of those nations) whose governing men and women insist that government is sovereign and its people subordinate and whose governing men and women speak words of rights coming from God but who appoint themselves as God’s interpreter and then define those rights for themselves, adjusting them from time to time at need to maintain their power.

In Kaine’s view, our fundamental rights would come from men like Kaine, who Knows Better and would define our rights in accordance with his superior knowledge, and women like Kamala Harris, whose handed-down rights would be salads of words, or Nancy Pelosi, whose handed-down rights would be State Secrets, allowing us to know what is in them only after she chooses to publish them.

In Kaine’s world, too, “rights” would evolve as the men and women in power change over time, and that would evolve as the men and women in power change their minds over time while they’re in power. Because they are rights created by men and women, they cannot be fundamental, intrinsic in our being. They are merely political rights, politically granted and politically taken away as the men and women in power deem fit.

This is entirely consistent with the Progressive-Democratic Party’s goal of fundamentally transforming our nation (Barack Obama) and of fundamentally changing our economy (Joe Biden). This is the risk we face in 2026, 2028, and subsequent elections.

H/t ralflongwalker

The Core of the Progressive-Democratic Party

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It’s moving ever closer to Party’s grass roots. The face of that core is Progressive-Democratic Party New York City Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani and his parallel membership in Democratic Socialists of America. DSA’s core position is

“dismantle and move beyond” America’s capitalist society and create a “wholesale socialist transformation of our national and global economy.”

DSA’s platform is specific, too, including such nakedly socialist things as these:

  • city-run grocery stores
  • free bus rides
  • increased public funding for hormone therapy and surgery for transgender people
  • rent freeze, not just rent control
  • ending “all misdemeanor offenses”

It’s not just Mamdani, either. The Progressive-Democratic Party selected its own socialist candidate for mayor of Minneapolis, Omar Fateh, who is a carbon copy of Mamdani. It’s true enough that Party then unendorsed (leaving him on the ballot) Fateh, but only on a technicality regarding their convention nominating process and only in response to some opprobrium. But here, Party spoke their truth in selecting Fateh and now only is covering its political behind.

In the end, the two, these most public two, are simply concretizing prior Party commitments: then-Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Barack Obama’s brag just prior to his first election that he was just “days away from fundamentally transforming” our nation, and then-Progressive-Democratic Party President Joe Biden in his State of the Union address saying that he intended to “fundamentally change” our nation’s economy.

This is Party initially acting at the national level and now trying to move down into our cities.