Last Straw

This is the first in a new series track­ing people who find the whole demo­cracy thing incon­veni­ent¹ and would rather those pesky cit­izens just shut the $%!@ up so they can get on with trans­fer­ring the world’s wealth from the hands of the many into the hands of those who are actu­ally entitled to it, the few.²

Jenni McManus is editor for the The Inde­pend­ent, a New Zealand-based busi­ness weekly, and here she is expound­ing her idea of demo­cracy and how the incom­ing Prime Min­is­ter of New Zea­l­and should inter­pret his mandate:

If forced to choose between break­ing elec­tion prom­ises and the country’s eco­nomic sur­vival, voters’ inten­tions are clear. Key wasn’t elec­ted simply to imple­ment his mani­festo but to man­age and lead the eco­nomy out of the crisis.

Trans­la­tion:

We have our Pearl Har­bour Mr Prime Min­is­ter so the choice between a small attack on New Zealand’s wealth and a full out assault to trans­fer every ounce we can into the hands of few is clear. Don’t worry about those pesky voters and their silly ideas about demo­cracy, my psychic abil­it­ies tell me that their “mood for change” is that they actu­ally want to be fucked up the ass.

She fills out her cre­den­tials by offer­ing this piece of advice to the incom­ing Prime Min­is­ter from one of the ulti­mate des­pisers of demo­cracy, Roger Douglas, writ­ing in his 1993 book omin­ously titled Unfin­ished Busi­ness:

Do not try to advance a step at a time. Define your object­ives clearly and move towards them in quantum leaps. Oth­er­wise the interest groups will have time to mobil­ise and drag you down.

1. Well, in actual fact, these people love demo­cracy, at least by their defin­i­tion of the word. They see demo­cracy as James Madison wanted it to be, speak­ing at the secret debates of U.S. con­sti­tu­tional con­ven­tion in 1787, as a means to pro­duce gov­ern­ments that will “pro­tect the minor­ity of the opu­lent against the major­ity,” i.e. to pro­tect those with prop­erty from those without. For the pur­poses of this series I am using a more pop­u­lar defin­i­tion: that the cent­ral insti­tu­tions of soci­ety have to be under pop­u­lar con­trol. [↩]
2. They don’t actu­ally say this is their object­ive but even those of them with good inten­tions are so blinded by their ideo­logy that they just don’t care if this is the out­come. [↩]