On multiple occasions, local progressive thinker Tom Sgouros has made use of the scene in The Princess Bride in which the sword-master character calls out the evil-genius character for his gratuitous use of the word, “inconceivable.”

“You keep using that word,” Inigo Montoya says to Vizzini. “I don’t think it means what you think it means.”

It’s a very useful phrasing, and I’m beginning to feel that it applies to “representative democracy” in the United States.  Even a quick sampling from my recent bookmarks illustrates the point.

Eric Owens expresses surprise to find “Democrat Elizabeth Holtzman of New York, who sat on the House Judiciary Committee during the Watergate era,” using the pages of the left-wing magazine, The Nation, to offer detailed advocacy for President Obama’s impeachment:

The last straw for the retired Congresswoman was the revelation that the president “directed the wiretapping of hundreds, possibly thousands, of Americans” (a number that is likely conservative).

“As a matter of constitutional law, these and other misdeeds constitute grounds for the impeachment,” writes Holtzman in her bombshell treatise. “A President, any President, who maintains that he is above the law — and repeatedly violates the law — thereby commits high crimes and misdemeanors, the constitutional standard for impeachment and removal from office.”

However, by the time one gets to Holtzman’s call for “organizing rallies, spearheading letter-writing campaigns to newspapers, organizing petition drives, door-knocking in neighborhoods, handing out leaflets and deploying the full range of mobilizing tactics,” the skeptical mind begins to think it’s a clever ruse to draw out the Tea Party for some betrayal and mockery.  As Rush Limbaugh has suggested, America is not going to impeach its first black president.  He can take all the $100 million sightseeing “excursions” he wants, even as his administration’s policies put the United States on the wrong side of democratic protests in Egypt and our European allies discover that Obama’s executive branch is not just spying on its own countrymen, and Americans will just wait out the next few years.

The racial question is significant, in part because it shows the upper boundary of political correctness to be destructively profound, but more to the point, it is inconceivable that the power brokers in the media and behind the national scenes will let a progressive Democrat face the consequence that Holtzman prescribes.  It’s Paula Deen versus Alec Baldwin on a global scale.

In short, our society’s various channels of information have become enthralled with a Narrative, and it works against the country’s ability to use representative democracy to adjust it’s course. A Colorado “anti-journalist” illustrates the point, pumping up the politics of a fraudulent vote scandal rather than reporting on it.

In other news, Glenn Reynolds summarizes the inexorable progress of the “comprehensive immigration” legislative monstrosity thus:

JUST FREAKING STOP WITH THIS CRAP, OKAY? House Immigration Bill Drafter: I Don’t Know What Everything Means in My Bill. I want short bills, regular hearings, and an open conference committee. No more big bills that even their authors don’t understand.

We hear quite a bit about the evils of money in politics when it comes to getting people elected, but not so much about the evils of money in forming policy.  Bills are laden with payoffs for votes and deliberate complexities that disguise the benefit to some special interest or other.  It’s tough, though, for a democracy to be representative when the big thing — the policy achievement that does something that voters need done, like getting immigration under control — is sublimated by a bunch of small things that serve the ends of individual legislators.

Meanwhile, Mark Tushnet questions the role of the Supreme Court, without regard to political affiliation:

Consider the Supreme Court’s decisions this past week. Conservatives liked the rulings upholding property rights, limiting affirmative action and striking down a key element of the Voting Rights Act. Liberals liked the decisions striking down the federal Defense of Marriage Act and allowing California to have gay marriage. Only a few people, though, think that this mixed bag of results should lead us to rethink the whole system. But it should.

What justifies giving the Court the last word on our constitutional rights?

Thus, the really big things — the deep social and cultural questions that a healthy society would work out with itself over the course of generations — become subject to the expedited rulings of a handful of unelected judges.  This muddies representative democracy not just by placing policy outside the reach of the population that must live by it, but also by creating another big thing (the appointment of judges) to mix in with the decisions of one’s votes.  The most pressing issue of the day may be economics or education, but some single issue in need of protection might be more affected by the type of judge that the candidate will help appoint once in office.

And turning to Rhode Island, Moe Lane on Redstate notes that Rhode Island’s unified Democrat theory of politics leaves us voiceless on the matter of ObamaCare:

I don’t wish to be cruel to the voters of Rhode Island: but this is what happens when you let your state be exclusively run by, and exclusively represented by, Democrats. I’m sure that looking for an alternative seems all very icky for voters in that state: but whether it is ickier than the 13-17% rate hikes that the insurance companies are pushing for, and will very soon get, is only a rhetorical question for hardcore Democrats who still adamantly refuse to admit that they severely messed up with Obamacare.

In this case, the sheer and intimate reach of government into our lives makes it impossible for votes for particular candidates to be premised on any one policy, or even several.  Are you voting on healthcare? Or on education? On immigration, infrastructure, economic development, abortion, same-sex marriage?  Property rights?  Safety net?  National security, environment, or energy?  Or maybe just the specific checks the representative manages to have cut for people in your town?  Or maybe the volume of television commercials?  Perhaps out of party loyalty?

When it all comes together, we’ve allowed our system to be covered in so much junk that voting can’t really provide feedback on anything real.  When feedback does get loud enough to be heard, the Narrative is there to hush it up or drown it out.  And when something slips through expressing the will of the people in contravention of a ruling elite, there are bureaucratic regulations, union contracts, investment agreements, executive orders, and judicial rulings to keep everything on the predetermined line.

Rhode Island got a small taste of representative democracy during last week’s budget debate, when the people elected by the smaller communities in their districts took advantage of a rare opportunity to assert themselves.  Here’s hoping that the people of Rhode Island give it enough consideration to figure out what it was and to go in search of more.  Otherwise, it may prove to be an aftertaste — a bit of the old banquet that had stuck in the teeth of the Party and finally shaken loose.

In that case, we’ll find ourselves like Vizzini, fallen before an opponent who “outsmarted” us by building up an immunity to the poison that we both have swallowed and dishonestly keeping that information from us in the context of the game.