Throne-Kissing Swine

No, Jonah Goldberg, fuck you.

Maybe, just maybe, France and Denmark can handle the systems they have because they have long traditions of sucking-up to the state and throne? Marty Lipset wrote stacks of books on how Canadians and Americans have different forms of government because the Royalist, throne-kissing, swine left America for Canada during the Revolutionary War and that's why they don't mind big government, switched to the metric system when ordered and will wait on line like good little subjects. Liberals constantly invoke Sweden as a governmental model without paying much heed to the fact that Sweden's government succeeds as much as it does because it governs Swedes. And maybe, just maybe, the reason America doesn't have a sprawling European welfare state is that America isn't Europe. And, unlike some of our liberal friends, Americans don't want to be Europeans. Indeed, that's why so many Europeans move to America, so they can be Americans.

Jonah has previously written that the US should invade Canada simply to slap us around and make us real men, so all things considered I guess I should take "throne-kissing swine" as a compliment. Except that, like all Republicans, Jonah Goldberg has spent every day since 9/11 justifying every autocratic push by the White House, every unconstitutional crime, and smearing all those who disagree as disloyal.

Really, where does a modern GOP operative get off slamming the English, French, or Canadians for unseemly deference to authority? The English made a party game of executing their rulers when they got too uppity throughout the 1600s, and guess what? No more uppity rulers. Ditto France, though later. Canadian democracy exists today because of the rebellions in Lower and Upper Canada. The last American rebellion was the Civil War, where half the country decided owning, raping, and killing black people was a privilege worth killing their countrymen for. That principle -- treason in defense of slavery -- is one that Bush's colleagues in the Republican party have repeatedly defended. John Ashcroft -- sworn to enforce the laws of the United States when he was Attorney General -- repeatedly said in interviews that he was cool with the Confederacy.

Yes, Canada, the UK, and Sweden still have monarchs. In all those cases monarchs have all the potency of castrati. In contrast, the American Presidency and its concentration of unfettered executive power is an anachronism in the modern world. The Republican model of government has been adopted by dictators across the third world for exactly that reason.

What any of this has to do with health care is a mystery to me, but Ezra gives it a good try. Frankly, I think it's a waste of pixels. Goldberg isn't making an argument, he's just feeling threatened by the actual facts that, yes, other countries run their affairs objectively superior to the United States. So we must therefore be throne-kissing swine. What a child.