Rules for radicals
Joseph Stiglitz in his Nov 5 article, “Can US democracy make a return?” has torn another page from Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals and used it to paint President Trump as a dictator hell-bent on destroying democracy.
Mr Stiglitz complains, “the minority is dominating the majority”, but he well knows the US is a republic which distributes representation in a way that has evolved since its inception and sometimes produces results which would be different if there were a simple democracy which passed laws directly by popular vote. Mr Trump did not design this system, merely conformed to it, just as the Democrats have exploited it for decades.
A dictator seeks total and exclusive power, often by force. Yet President Trump has nominated two justices to the Supreme Court who may be characterised as constitutional originalists or textualists, indicating they will uphold separation of powers among the three branches of government.
This is to be distinguished from former US president Obama’s record of appointing judges inclined to legislate from the bench according to their personal inclinations.
Mr Stiglitz says the majority wants more gun controls (despite no evidence of its effectiveness in reducing violence in America) and Mr Trump is limiting the will of the majority to enact it. Actually this is only accomplished by repeal of the 2nd Amendment, a constitutional requirement. Mr Stiglitz’s employer wants to enact gun control by decree. The “democratic” socialists, such as newly elected Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, want nothing less than open borders and the overthrow of capitalism at any cost. So I ask, who really desires a dictatorship in the US?
Socialism is only possible under an authoritarian regime which deigns to seize the means of production (often by force) and deny the individual control of the fruits of their labour.
Mr Stiglitz, as liberal academics are want to doing, seems to have sold his soul to the Open Society foundation and rejected the US Constitution entirely. Fortunately, despite his unashamed efforts to propagandise globalist sentiment, common sense will prevail in the United States.
MICHAEL SETTER