Revolting
Disgusting column in The New York Times from Thomas Friedman. He longs for autocracy since democracy isn't giving him everything he wants. (Friedman, of course, knows exactly what we need, and freedom's just getting in the way.)
posted by LAGuy @ 1:17 PM
5 Comments:
Eh, he's just trying to be a bit controversial to drum up readership. I think Republicans in congress will have no choice but to stop sitting on their hands once they win back some seats in the midterm elections. Nobody's going to send them to congress based solely on promises of "blocking everything Obama tries to do."
Republicans are not sitting on their hands, they're actively trying to stop bad legislation, which is their duty in a democracy. (It's also a feature of Democracy, though Friedman actively despises it in his column.) Obama offers them nothing so what else can they do? (Furthermore, anyone of any party who runs for Congress saying "I will do at little as I possibly can" has got my vote.)
But this isn't the problem I have with Friedman. His ill-tempered statements about Congress are nonsensical and brain-dead, to be sure, but that's not the ugly part of his column. It's his longing for a system like China's, even if he's trying to make a cheap point. It's really no better than writing "I'm not saying I want to go back, but there are times I wish we could return to open segregation."
There's a meaningful difference between longing for authoritarianism and saying that authoritarian systems provide some advantages when competing against democratic systems, and we'd do well not to ignore them. I believe he was trying to say the latter; you believe he meant the former. I've read his column for a long time, and your position is inconsistent with everything he has claimed to stand for in the past.
Assuming one were starting over with a clean slate, "do as little as possible" might be a workable idea. (Heck, it might even be the central idea of our federal government, under a different reading of the Commerce Clause.) But when you've already got entitlement programs that are spiraling upward in cost, doing nothing is unreasonable.
"I don't long for the return of segregation, I just think there are a lot of advantages it had over our system today. It's just too bad what's good about segregation can't be part of our system."
Friedman (and this isn't actually the first time he's done it, but it's rare he's so open about it) simply knows what we need, and is actually angry about the greatest feature of our democracy--the power of the minority to at least have a chance to make an argument. Friedman (either stupidly or dishonestly) tries to characterize any opposition to his ideas as having no intellectual content or political reason to exist--thus we get his longing for authoritarianism, where they don't need to put up with any lip from anyone when they're doing something important.
No one has any plans to get rid of entitlements--most bills are plans to create more. Thus anyone who promises to do as little as possible is better than the alternatives.
Friedman's worse. He blames Republicans for not standing in line to be punched by Obama, but he also blames them for blocking Obama's plans. Republicans don't have the votes to block Obama's plan, so if Friedman should blame anyone, it's the awful American republic that those blue dog Democrats are afraid of screwing over.
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