Jeb Bush’s Favorite Author Rejects Democracy, Says The Hyper-Rich Should Seize Power

[Jack Rabbit]

From Thinkprogress.com
Posted May 26, 2015

Jeb Bush’s Favorite Author Rejects Democracy, Says The Hyper-Rich Should Seize Power
By Ian Millhiser

At the height of 2011’s debt ceiling crisis, then-Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) offered a candid explanation of why his party was willing to threaten permanent harm to the U.S. economy unless Congress agreed to change our founding document. “The Constitution must be amended to keep the government in check,” McConnell alleged. “We’ve tried persuasion. We’ve tried negotiations. We’ve tried elections. Nothing has worked.”

Few politicians are willing to admit what McConnell admitted when he confessed that elections have not “worked” to bring about the policy Republicans tried to impose on the nation in 2011. Elected officials, after all, only hold their jobs at the sufferance of the voters, and a politician who openly admits that they only believe in democracy insofar as it achieves their desired ends gives the middle finger to those voters and to the very process that allows those voters to have a say in how they are governed.

Charles Murray, an author who GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush recently named first when he was asked which books have had a big impact upon him, is not an elected official, so he is free to rail against democracy to his heart’s content. And that is exactly what he does in his new book, By The People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission.

Pay no attention to the title. Government “by the people” is the last thing Murray cares to see. Murray admits that the kind of government he seeks, a libertarian fantasy where much of our nation’s regulatory and welfare state has been dismantled, is “beyond the reach of the electoral process and the legislative process.” He also thinks it beyond the branch of government that is appointed by elected officials. The Supreme Court, Murray claims, “destroyed” constitutional “limits on the federal government’s spending authority” when it upheld Social Security in 1937. Since then, the federal government has violated a “tacit compact” establishing that it would not “unilaterally impose a position on the moral disputes that divided America” (Murray traces the voiding of this compact to 1964, the year that Congress banned whites-only lunch counters).

Read more at the link.

This is the reason why recent elections have been important and why defeating the new proposed trade deals, the passage of which will be a power seizure by the hyper-rich, is important.

[louis-t]

1. I thought they already had.

[Ichingcarpenter]

2. That was my reaction to it also

[Initech]

3. The hyper rich already have seized power, and that's the problem.

And they did so in the form of two SCOTUS decisions - Bush v. Gore and Citizens United v. FEC. We need to take the power that we've given the corrupt back.

[hedda_foil]

4. I just read the whole piece and it gets even worse. And yes, it's happening now.

Last edited Tue Jun 2, 2015, 11:19 AM - Edit history (1)

Murray's book sounds like a justification for the power of the super-rich.

By The People, however, rejects outright the idea that Murray’s vision for a less generous and well-regulated society can be achieved through appeals to elected officials — or even through appeals to unelected judges. The government Murray seeks is “not going to happen by winning presidential elections and getting the right people appointed to the Supreme Court.” Rather, By The People, is a call for people sympathetic to Murray’s goals — and most importantly, for fantastically rich people sympathetic to those goals — to subvert the legitimate constitutional process entirely.

“The emergence of many billion-dollar-plus private fortunes over the last three decades,” Murray writes, “has enabled the private sector to take on ambitious national or even international tasks that formerly could be done only by nation-states.” Murray’s most ambitious proposal is a legal defense fund, which “could get started if just one wealthy American cared enough to contribute, say, a few hundred million dollars,” that would essentially give that wealthy American veto power over much of U.S. law.

Murray, in other words, would rather transfer much of our sovereign nation’s power to govern itself to a single privileged individual than continue to live under the government America’s voters have chosen. It’s possible that no American has done more to advance the cause of monarchy since Benedict Arnold.

[Fortinbras Armstrong]

13. I've been saying for years that libertarians actually support plutocracy

But were either too stupid to realize it or too dishonest to admit it. I see that Murray is actually admitting it.

Of course, the upshot would be a major reduction of individual liberty, which is why I tend to go for the "too stupid to realize it" most of the time.

[Demeter]

5. That's it. Buying a pitchfork and making a torch

Last edited Mon Jun 1, 2015, 02:13 PM - Edit history (1)

[They_Live]

11. If they have their way

you'll only be able to rent those. And they'll be tracked.

[librechik]

6. very controversial author much attacked in the 70s & 80s

for claiming his study found that African Americans are naturally superior to whites in sports and other physical attainments--while not successful in more intellectual areas implying blacks not intellectual like whites are.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Murray_(political_scientist)

Murray is a dog whistle racist . Good Move, JEB.

[deutsey]

9. I was wondering if he was the same as the Bell Curve guy

[Orsino]

7. It would be terrible if the hyper-rich seized political power. n/t

[secondvariety]

8. This Murray guy

is a special kind of evil. I all ready knew what a worm Jeb! is. His choice of authors just confirms it.

[gregcrawford]

10. There must be a sane psychiatrist...

... out there with the cojones and literary chops to write a coherent dissection of the conservative mindset that entertains the absurd notion that such bilious crap is something to admired. Charles Murray is nothing more than a racist sociopath who craves dominion over the lives of others.

The fact that Murray's philosophical flatulence inspired Jeb Bush should IMMEDIATELY disqualify him in the public mind from ever seeking elective office again. But the mental defectives that would vote for yet another Bush are congenitally incapable of comprehending the unbridgeable contradiction inherent in screeching about freedom and the Constitution even as they try to elect a man who has as much as stated, by expressing solidarity with Murray's beliefs, that he would deny them their freedom as he shredded the Constitution.

Now my head hurts.

[Octafish]

12. Reminds me of Leo Strauss and PNAC...

...they don't think democracy is all that when it comes to government of the banksters and warmongers, by the banksters and warmongers, and for the banksters and warmongers.

PS: Good to read ya, Jack Rabbit! No wonder Jebthro wants us to work until we're 70 or whatever it is to get Social Security, like Yossarian and Col. Cathcart raising the number of missions...never getting there...