Infantilization - Emily from Give

Infantilization - Emily from Give War a Chance touches on a subject for which I excoriated the Strib's editorial team last week - the Democrats' infantilization of the voters.

As she was reading through some anti-recall campaign literature, she found this:

I caught a quote, though, as I was reading through this sample ballot that struck me hard, and summed up in very few words exactly why it is that I loathe the ideas of the Democrats:

"What if our children could recall their parents every time they made a tough decision?" -William Jefferson Clinton
Since you asked, William Jefferson Clinton, I will tell you exactly what would happen.

Seeing as how children are uncivilized, uneducated savages in training to become otherwise, the world would probably plunge into utter chaos. Think Lord of the Flies. Cubed. Now that you mention it, they probably wouldn't stop at a recall. They'd execute parents for making kids do their homework instead of watching cartoons.

This is a theme I've been harping on for years; even in private, relatively unguarded conversation, many Democrats I know regard government as a "parent" whose job it is to keep the kids from beating the stuffing out of each other.

And I keep trying to ask them "doesn't this strike you as the most caustically un-democratic notion you can have in a country built on the notion that we are a free association of equals, not a collection of subjects?"

In too many cases, the eyes lapse into that "does not compute" trance.

Posted by Mitch at October 13, 2003 06:01 AM