David Brooks reveals the Right's seditious plan for America:

[riqster]

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/05/20/opinion/brooks-the-big-debate.html?_r=0&referrer=
Snips:

The answer is to use Lee Kuan Yew means to achieve Jeffersonian ends — to become less democratic at the national level in order to become more democratic at the local level. At the national level, American politics has become neurotically democratic.

The quickest way around all this is to use elite Simpson-Bowles-type commissions to push populist reforms.

The process of change would be unapologetically elitist. Gather small groups of the great and the good together to hammer out bipartisan reforms — on immigration, entitlement reform, a social mobility agenda, etc. — and then rally establishment opinion to browbeat the plans through.

If the Guardian State’s big advantage is speed at the top, democracy’s is speed at the bottom. So, obviously, the elite commissions should push proposals that magnify that advantage: which push control over poverty programs to local charities; which push educational diversity through charter schools; which introduce more market mechanisms into public provision of, say, health care, to spread power to consumers.

Pretty much sounds like what the Repubes advocate, doesn't it? Take our money and our rights, and leave us to twist in the wind.

[yallerdawg]

1. Sounds like...

trickle-down democracy.

[riqster]

8. It will work just as well as it does in economics.

[dionysus]

2. charter schoold and charities... where have i heard these new, groudbreaking ideas before...

[riqster]

7. Yup. AMFYOYO is their MO.

[dawg]

3. The arrogance of the so-called "great and the good" is breathtaking.

Does it ever occur to these people that their policy prescriptions, which always seem to coincidentally serve their own self-interests, might be wrong?

[riqster]

4. Nope. They are the elite because they are the best and the brightest, and thus are always right.

Never mind the facts...

[octoberlib]

5. 'Neurotically Democratic' ?

Because, you know, too much Democracy is always a bad thing and only ' the great and the good' know whats best for the ignorant masses. There's so much contempt here, I don't where to begin. Too bad Republicans can't just install a right wing Fascist dictator. It would make things ever so much easier.

[riqster]

6. Well, of course the elite have contempt for we lesser beings.

How could they not despise such lowly trolls as we?

[factsarenotfair]

9. In other words, as much white supremacy at the local level as local "elites" can manage without

the pesky federal government intervening. For example, the pastor who turned Cathedral Bible College into a forced labor camp is just what Brooks envisions.

David Brooks doesn't seem evil, but he is AS EVIL AS DICK CHENEY, maybe worse.

[riqster]

10. I'd say Brooks is a product of the elitist milieu that spawned him.

And yeah, as evil as they come.

[bemildred]

11. Brooks is a shallow moron. Watch him talk sometime. nt

[riqster]

12. I have heard him on entirely too many occasions. You are quite correct.

But his being a tool with all the depth of a glob of spittle on a sidewalk doesn't mean he can't cause harm.

[bemildred]

13. We have lots of people just like him, or even more ignorant, who like to pontificate

about their imagined inferiors and what must be done to "help" them.

[riqster]

14. S'truth.

And have had them throughout history. The English and their Empire, American colonists, and so on.

[bemildred]

15. It pays very well. nt

[riqster]

16. For a while, yeah.

[bemildred]

17. Well, like I said, shallow. nt

[hootinholler]

18. Rec'd because I think it important we know what this dipstick is advocating. n/t

[Yavin4]

19. An "elite Simpson-Bowles-type commissions"? Hmmm. Like the PNAC?

Gather small groups of the great and the good together to hammer out bipartisan reforms — on immigration, entitlement reform, a social mobility agenda, etc. — and then rally establishment opinion to browbeat the plans through.

Hmmm. By "browbeat", does he mean gathering false evidence and lying to the American people and drag us into invading and occupying Iraq?

Is that what he's talking about?

[riqster]

20. The definition is quite illuminating:

brow·beat
ˈbrouˌbēt/
verb
intimidate (someone), typically into doing something, with stern or abusive words.
"a witness is being browbeaten under cross-examination"
synonyms: bully, intimidate, force, coerce, compel, hector, dragoon, bludgeon, pressure, pressurize, tyrannize, terrorize, menace;

Pretty much the same methods as Iraq, yeah. Just applied to the entire US government.

[Enrique]

21. let's just have the neocons run everything

[riqster]

22. Pretty much what Brooks said, just edited.