TIM CAVANAUGH: Silencing John Lewis Is What Democracy Looks Like. “Here’s Lewis doing the slow burn as a mob of apparatchiks without portfolio debate whether to risk their ‘agenda’ in order to let him speak. If you want evidence for the case against pure democracy, this is it. . . . One important characteristic of mob rule is that it tends to get the outcomes the ruler wants, not the outcomes the mob wants. In this case, the group clearly voted to let Lewis talk, even if that meant risking a slight breach of the day’s agenda. But the point here was not to get a voting result but hive-mind unanimity. Of course unanimity can’t exist among human beings, so the real purpose of the exercise is to keep checking the crowd’s ‘temperature’ until you get the result you want. And what apparatchiks want, always and everywhere, is to put process above product.”

If this were a Tea Party group, people would be screaming racism.