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The Kek Wars, Part One: Aristocracy and its Discontents
It's a great (IMO) series I found through Peter Grant's site.
[EcoSophis]...When the first flurry of requests for a post about what I call the Kek Wars came my way, I decided to wait a while before responding. My thought was that after a year or so, the losing side would get around to dealing with the fact that it lost, the tantrums would subside, and it would then be possible to have a reasoned conversation about what happened and why. One of the more interesting features of the 2016 election and its aftermath is that the tantrums haven’t subsided. That’s not quite unprecedented‐as we’ll see, it has some very specific and revealing precedents earlier in American history‐but it’s a good indication that something out of the ordinary is in process.

...It’s equally possible, for that matter, for a democracy to make it impossible for the majority to influence the political system or make its wants and needs felt. There are various ways of doing this, but the most popular in recent centuries was given a useful label by Margaret Thatcher’s famous slogan "There Is No Alternative." If the political establishment of a representative democracy decides that only one set of policies is thinkable, and all major parties sign on to that set of policies, it’s usually possible to shut down any discussion of alternatives even if the policies in question have disastrous consequences for most of the population.



Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2018-08-16
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=520879