I don’t say this very often but Alexander Hamilton was right when he complained that Americans would someday suffer from “an excess of democracy.” Hamilton said that because he thought the newly created Confederation of the United States needed to become a monarchy. In the same speech Hamilton warned that this excess would lead to the rise of demagogues. If only he were around to read Twitter or the comment sections of online newspapers. On Twitter, the use of the symbol (#) that was normalized on touch-tone phone pads, the “octothorpe” or “pound” button, followed by a sappy expression of “support” is the latest form of demagoguery. Cowards who have no intention of rescuing kidnapped Nigerian girls from Islamic terrorists can become superheroes without ever leaving their McMansions by tweeting “selfies” taken with handwritten notes to the kidnappers. In the same spirit, imbeciles who wouldn’t know the chemical difference between a “fracking fluid” and the latest energy drink fad can try and thwart the process of collecting the oil needed to power their electronic threats, by posting threats of recall petitions and the like in online comment strings.
In the case of the Nigerian girls, if our super-losers knew they were being duped into helping a PR campaign to raise American support for increased military operations in Africa, likely to result in the kind of liberation one half million dead Iraqis enjoyed, would they persist? Would the arm-chair tree huggers opposing fracking in St. Tammany persist in their ill-informed campaign if they knew that their loud-mouths will be used to support erecting deadly windmills across someone else’s “clean and beautiful” view or to raise taxes in support of outrageously expensive, subsidized solar energy schemes?
Hamilton was right about something else, following a wise and heroic leader like George Washington is a great idea until Washington dies and is replaced by the cowardly imbeciles
masquerading as leaders today.