A very strange man in many ways, and in some ways not quite the person his myth made out, or his millions of fans hoped he was. But there's time to talk about that later.

Right now, between him and Bob Crow, there is a huge hole in the Left in Britain. Lets hope nothing happens to Dennis Skinner, Ken Livingstone, or Bob Holman.

Kings and political leaders are remembered for the ideas they imposed on those they governed, but all real progress comes from ideas that begin at the bottom and force their way to the top. For example, the demand that women be given the right to vote was first ignored by the powerful. When the campaign grew, it was denounced as dangerous and the suffragettes were imprisoned, some went on hunger strike and were forcibly fed by wardresses. Then when the argument had been won you could not find anyone in power who didn’t seem to be claiming that they thought of the idea in the first place.

The early seventeenth century launched into the public domain arguments about freedom and equality and democracy which we would now all regard as normal--even though at the time they were considered totally destructive of the status quo.

It's a shame that the modern Labour party is practically cryptoconservative. In fact, the whole range of current British political choices viewed from the outside is horrible. Is it possible the leading 4 parties in the UK are worse than the leading 2 in the US? That may be going too far, not sure....

"I suppose the process of acceptance will pass through the usual four stages:
i) This is worthless nonsense,
ii) This is an interesting, but perverse, point of view,
iii) This is true, but quite unimportant,
iv) I always said so."
-- J.B.S. Haldane

Of all things, what boosted his profile and popularity the most among my generation - even before he was a leading light in the anti-Iraq war movement - was appearing on the Ali G show. Where he took the most outrageous statements deadly seriously, and demolished them calmly and plainly and from principle. In an age of Blair and Mandelson that won the respect of a lot of people, I think.

(also, unlike Bob Crow he didn't give me a bruise on the ankle that left me hobbling for a week, but that's another story)

Ken Brown @1: Bob Holman? Is that a typo or my failure to have heard of someone I should have heard of?

Tony Benn: let's also recall that he was a champion of Wilson's "White Heat of Technology"; a strong supporter of Concorde, instrumental in the development of the AGR Advanced Gas-cooled Reactor program, and other cutting-edge industrial/technological projects at a time when the government was in the business of having an industrial policy rather than presiding over a deregulated wasteland patrolled by packs of feral bankers and dominated by foreign sovereign wealth funds.

Benn's diaries of the 1960s and 1970s are very readable. His famous teetotalism probably helped his career: well into the 80s a high proportion of politicians were pissed almost all the time (Ministers present at cabinets that made terrible decisions often say vaguely in their memoirs that they 'were distracted' or 'felt tired' or 'must have nodded off for a moment') and Benn was inherently energetic anyway.

He was a proud dirigiste from the days when governments were not afraid to intervene: demolishing slum housing and building tower blocks, reorganizing the Butler Act education system into comprehensives (his beloved wife Caroline seemed to see comprehensives as a cure for absolutely everything). At best, enormous amounts of effort and energy went into making life better for everyday people; at worst there was a technocratic philistinism that swept away lots of perfectly good Victorian streets and grammar schools.

He asked a lot of good awkward questions about democratic control of capitalism and I'm very sad that he's gone.

An awful lot of Left politics in the UK can leave one feeling pretty grubby; Benn's admirable personal character (high-minded commanding officer of The Awkward Squad) counted for a lot.

If you needed an additional excuse to rematch Ian Richardson's witty turn as Francis Uruquhart, M.P.: You might think that, but I couldn't possibly comment.

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com

That's disturbing.

Because if there's no process for removing a person from the seat of power, then -- as the quote goes on to say -- it's no longer a democracy, but a dictatorship.

It's supposed to be. People in power need to know and acknowledge that their power can go away. Any other system is basically either tyranny or tyranny in waiting.

Perhaps I am, but the answer for the second two examples (Joe Stalin or Hitler, would appear to be "Wait for me to die.", or "Come after me with such overwhelming military force that I kill myself, surrounded by the rubble of my country." Democracy 'tweren't involved.

So if the answer from a Rupert Murdoch or the Kochs or George Soros or Michael Bloomberg or (insert your favorite hobgoblin here) is "I don't care to be gotten rid of," what then?

If in fact the only way to remove someone from power is to kill them, then (as noted) we no longer have a democratic system, and must work to regain it.

But what then shall we do with the unelected we disapprove of in a "democratic system"? Write their names on pot shards and banish the ones who collect the most crockery?

Are there no limits to "democratic systems?" If we tire of someone we (or some of "we", personally, I think Jenny McCarthy is a waste of space) dislike, how are we to get rid of them?

I think you are reading "how can we get rid of you" as referring to the person, rather than the person's presence in a role. My reading is "If we want a TV personality who isn't an anti-vaccine crank, how can we get the current anti-vaccine crank out?" That's an easy question; stop watching, and convince everyone else to do the same.

Same with all those you list; stop listening to them, or to propaganda they pay for, and convince enough of your fellow-citizens that what they're putting out is propaganda and should be ignored.

You don't get to skip the "convince your fellows" step.

So, the hundreds of thousands of people who want Jenny McCarthy to shut up and go away aren't as loud as McCarthy herself, so she gets to be on TV.

It's fine that THAT isn't democratic (and we don't have to watch the show, after all). It's less fine that the Koch brothers have so loud a voice. They really are making our increasingly-alleged democracy into an utter sham.

I've just been reading the paperback version¹ of Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein's book, It's Even Worse Than It Looks. While there are a few players who stand out, the basic picture they describe is not one of individual rogues getting out of hand. We're dealing with a concerted attempt by a self-selected group, attempting to capture and utterly suborn the government of America, with no regard to the damage they cause to anyone else.

¹ With new preface and afterword catching up through Obama's reelection.