[lbo-talk] Tell them we are democrats (was: freedom to swim)

Marv Gandall marvgandall at videotron.ca
Sat Jun 27 15:39:23 PDT 2009


Perhaps a Christian Republic of the United States of America presided over by a Supreme Council of Baptist and other fundamentalist clerics with the power to vet candidates for political office would not, as some argue, be inferior to the present system weighted in favour of the rich and powerful. The new Christian Republic would almost certainly be the product of a mass uprising, as in Iran, and we'd need to experience it in order to find out.

For certain, we'd have misgivings about the new regime's attitude towards women, gays, trade unions, civil liberties, capital punishment, science and education, etc. and, if the Iran pattern were to repeat itself, the blood-soaked repression of the left.

But then if the new regime were to, say, sanction the election of Mike Huckabee, a self-professed populist, as President, engage in some modest redistribution of income from rich to poor and from city to countryside, and announce an isolationist foreign policy predicted on the closure of US bases abroad, it's easy to suppose that, for some of us at least, these positive features would outweigh the earlier misgivings - to the point of defending the new regime against efforts by urban-based liberal youth to overturn it.

While the Naders and the Michael Smiths and probably even the Obamas would be proscribed from running for office, some consolation might be gained from the fact that the new Christian Republic, despite it's backward views on gender relations, might allow Sarah Palin to become the first woman president of the (CR)USA.



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