'Tawney Republicans' and the Anti-FHD Con

Nice.

Linda Stewart, the only OC mayoral candidate with the character to refrain from having a litmus test piss all over the Hometown Democracy initiative (and punished accordingly in the campaign contributions department), narrowly edges out uber-asshole Matthew Falconer in this Orlando Biz Journal online straw poll.

Pleasant too to see nominal 'democrat,' and CoC endorsee Bill Segal coming in dead last.

For shits and giggles, I looked up Teresa Jacobs' campaign website, and found this spiel on the FHD/Amendment 4 issue [emph mine]:

"...Our Founding Fathers were very wise when they created this great experiment we call America as a Constitutional, representative democracy. I believe the problem today is not our representative democracy. I believe the problem is our representatives..."

First, then, the ordering up of some powdered-wig and knee-socks patriot-porn ("The Founding Fathers") for papering over how top-to-bottom fucked-over have been Ye Shyte-Oute-of-Lucke "Constituents" of this Reagan-Revolutionary "great experiment" in letting growth and development run roughshod over the public interest for a generation (and more), and indeed even pretending that such construction-trades heavy growth provided an in-any-way sustainable proxy for a bona fide economic base--a jenga-like exercise, this, in reckless, regressive, anti-conservative (were the term to retain any of its original, Burkean meaning), aggressively malfeasant governance.

This ripoff fever dream of Sunbelt-suburban conservatives generally, and Florida conservatives in particular, was always destined to end in the bitter tears of statewide economic disaster, but it happened to have done so as a shrapnel-bit of the global clusterfuck that was/remains the Global-Finance/$8 trillion US Housing Bubble collapse of 2008. A disaster-within-a-disaster, it now ensures the lucky endowment to Florida's "Constituents" a worst-hit, last-to-recover status in this national Fail-a-thon, which I always thought was best described as the "Great Collapse," but which seems to be more commonly now referred to as the "Great Recession".

Call it "George Washington's pendulous balls," it's still an epic, quite possibly irredeemable failure of leadership and free enterprise dogma, one that any fair assessment of reality should cast the Teresa Jacobses of the political-economic sphere deeeep into the outer fringes of the electoral wilderness.

Jacobs' little FHD/Amendment 4 spiel concludes:

"...if we treat the symptoms rather than the source of the problem, things are likely to get worse, not better...There is already talk of legislatively gutting the comprehensive planning process if Amendment 4 passes."

First, the symptom/disease confusion is a nifty way of lumping together growthism's victims (outside-the-loop 'mere citizens') with the perps (insider, political donor-class growth machiners) in a nice little package called "representative democracy". The institutions are blameless and awesome, dontcha know (after all, the Founding Fathers pulled these, fully formed out of their beautiful slavocratic minds). No no no, little buddies, it's a curious plague of bad-apple individuals that are to blame here. And maybe too the childlike stupidity of voters, who err in voting the wrong types into office...except of course when they vote for someone like Teresa Jacobs, that is, who's inexplicably different and Founderish and right.

Yeah.

The internets tell me today, March 6, is the anniversary of the infamous Dredd Scott ruling. Not to minimize the grave horrors of our republic's Original Sin, but if we're going to invoke "Founding Fathers" in a debate about growth and the (non-)failures of representative democracy, consider how the Dredd money-quote, courtesy of the even-now-writhing-in-hell Chief Justice Roger Tawney, speaks not a little to the arrogance and implicit inferriority-assignation of the growth mis-management history of Florida, and the corresponding disconnect between voters and self-serving, self-flattering elites:

It is difficult at this day to realize the state of public opinion in relation to that unfortunate race [blacks], which prevailed in the civilized and enlightened portions of the world at the time of the Declaration of Independence, and when the Constitution of the United States was framed and adopted....

They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect..."

We finally managed to un-slouch our standards of 'civility and enlightenment' beyond the point where human beings were openly and legally

"bought and sold, and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever a profit could be made by it",

But it's a damned fool who can't recognize this toxic, predatory combination--this 'keeping inferiors in their place,' while 'turning a buck on the deal if you can! ' stuff--doesn't persist in the politics of "two Americas," as the lamentable John Edwards used to call it. It persists in just the sort of arrogance of these anti-FHD politicos, these failed-up-to-their-eyeballs muckety-mucks telling people the sky will fall, and the glory of the Founding Fathers be sullied, if local voters are given this small, proscribed taste of a more participatory democracy.