I just came across an old article in which George Will had called out Senate Democrats for supporting campaign finance reform. He said it was an attempt to allow “government to regulate the quantity, content and timing of political speech.” Back in the real world, it was an attempt to prevent the wealthiest among us from buying the government and subverting it to their purposes. Still, Will’s take was that “all progressives are Hobbesians ....”
Oh, snap!
Thomas Hobbes was an English philosopher (1588–1679) “infamous” for starting from the construct of the social-contract and arriving at the “astonishing conclusion that we ought to submit to the authority” of absolute, “sovereign power.”
You can see Will’s point. Who among us, when the topic turns to absolute, sovereign power, does not decry its damnable support for campaign finance reform?
Still, it seemed a bit strained to claim that progressives are authoritarians for protecting the right of the average American to a republic, while conservatives are freedom loving for nurturing an aristocracy of wealth. It is Republicans who should be infamous for starting with the legacy of the Founding Fathers and arriving at an absolute, brutish plutocracy.
But the argument about the real heirs of Thomas Hobbes reduces to the following: Republicans serve corporations and wealth; Democrats look out for the rest of us. It is that simple. Democratic messaging should be that simple, too, and that direct.
No one who works for a living ever should vote Republican.