I'm Beginning to Understand How It Feels to Live in a Majority-oppressed Nation
I'm Beginning to Understand How It Feels to Live in a Majority-oppressed Nation
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/node/98256
As George W. Bush was blundering his way into a minoritarian Middle East nation he did not understand, I understood from a historical perspective how its Sunnis had managed to rule over the Shia, even though, as noted, the Sunnis were a minority. The Ottoman Empire — whose official religion was Sunni — once ruled over the territory that became Iraq and which provided a buffer to the Shiite empire of Iran. Following the Ottoman Empire's fall, British colonialism reinforced Iraq's powerful Sunni minority over the Shia majority, which ultimately led to the Sunni dictatorship of Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush's blunder.
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As an American born and raised, I possessed no real understanding of any of that — until now, living, as I do, in this American nation increasingly ruled by the arrogant, unlearned, chronically dyspeptic few.
Now obviously the United States of today is not another Iraq of the early 2000s; not yet, anyway. But we the American majority are now daily experiencing the frightful sensation of being ruled by boorish political warlords hatched from sparsely populated fiefdoms of unutterable ignorance and unremitting hostility to civilized life. We are the nation's predominant centrists, moderates, liberals, progressives, socialists, Never Trumpers and Mugwumps — known broadly as Democrats — committed to civil rights, human liberty, freedom of conscience and democratic rule. And yet where we've not already lost power, we're losing it to the other guys — those Husseinlike Republicans.
So much of our growing impotence is — to use that overused word — structural, coupled with a complete and rather innovative lack of Republican scruples. Barely, just barely do Democrats now control the executive and legislative branches; yet even though their rank and file vastly outnumber the opposition, that control is at huge risk of being lost in 2022 and 2024 because of built-in, perfectly legal Republican advantages. Which means there's not a helluva lot Democrats can do about it.
The Trump Party's ruthless gerrymandering that would embarrass yesterday's Tammany leaders will almost certainly permit a fevered few to recapture the House; control of the Senate is, as always, at the mercy of voters in less populous states, where the uncivil brood; and the archaic, nitwitted and grotesquely undemocratic Electoral College, which enthroned our last two Republican presidents — both receiving less votes than their opponents — could easily present a trifecta of minority-based executive power.
As for the third branch of U.S. government? That instantly returns us to those two Republican presidents who were never democratically elected. For they appointed, for life, six of our nine Supreme Court Justices, who have ruled of late that states run by Husseinlike Republicans may pass nakedly unconstitutional laws which can then stand for months and, while they're at it, inhibit the voting rights of whatever and however many citizens they choose.
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