Obama a Muslim? Sad Reality of Democracy.

It's Not Just Sad, It's Unavoidable

DOES DEMOCRACY WORK? HERE'S ANDREW SULLIVAN DISCUSSING THE REALITY OF AMERICAN VOTERS AND THEIR PERCEPTION OF OBAMA.

Neil Gillies, an Obama supporter who runs a local environmental nonprofit group, glumly recounted the gibes that his wife, a schoolteacher, hears regularly from her students. “They’re convinced [Obama] is a Muslim, a terrorist, a guy who’s coming to take away their guns,” Gillies said. “It’s just sad.”

THIS IS FROM DANIEL LARISON (ONE OF THE BEST CONSERVATIVE JOURNALIST) RESPONDING SULLIVAN'S COMMENT.

I tend to agree, but I find it sad mostly because of what it says about the deplorable ignorance of vast numbers of voters and the inevitability of such ignorance in a mass democracy. Why we should want to export this kind of government to other parts of the world has never been clear to me, when it isn’t clear that it contributes to either good government or healthy politics in this country. Democracy is identitarian and necessarily so. Democracy is dangerous to liberty for several reasons, but one reason is that it contributes to collectivist attitudes and what Kuehnelt-Leddihn called “nostrism,” one form of which is nationalism.
No one who has been paying attention for more than an hour to this campaign could conclude that Obama is a Muslim, but that’s just the problem: millions and tens of millions of voters haven’t paid and won’t pay that much attention until later this year, and by then these memes will have spread far and wide through chain e-mails and word of mouth, by which time it will be too late and attitudes will have become settled.