If, by honorable tradition and common law, misrepresentation by one party to a private contract voids the deal, should misrepresentation by a political party to the social contract void that deal as well?
Let's say, for instance, that midterm exit polling found that 48 percent of the participating electorate believed that a recently passed, oh, let's say, health care bill should be repealed (and just to make things interesting, let's also stipulate that roughly the same percentage believed the bill should be preserved).
Let's say a political party had campaigned against the bill, had shaken its outraged fist at the bill as an insufferable transgression against the electorate's will, and had promised the public a repeal of the bill, should the party gain majority power -- which that party promptly does.
But let's also say that the new majority party had misrepresented the bill's character to the voting public, from whom the victorious party now claims an invincible mandate.
Let's even say that said political party was as outrageous in its misrepresentations as its fist was mightily outraged. Let's say, for instance, the party had professed that the bill would be a costly venture to the public treasury; indeed, that the bill would grossly exacerbate the nation's already intolerable deficit and deepen its long-term debt, even though the nation's fiscal experts -- who had no campaign budget -- were projecting precisely the opposite.
Let's say the party had professed as well that the nation's most vulnerable subjects, the elderly, would, as a result of the bill, see a monstrous reduction in their health care benefits from the government -- truly monstrous, in fact, a hair-raising half-trillion-dollar monster.
Let's further say, just to go to the outrageous extremes of wildest imagination, that the party had even protested that the bill's villainous proponents had designed one of its provisions as an instrument of foul and official murder; that, alas, your beloved life-givers in their autumnal respite would soon be standing before grayish, grainy, Orwellian extermination panels in the mad government's dash to reduce the surplus, excess, useless population.
Yes, I know, we've gone too far in our hypothetical example -- straight into reductio ad absurdum, the enemy of all rational debate. But if we hadn't -- if we had avoided the patently absurd and stuck only to the politically silly -- would any reasonable person argue that the new majority party still possessed a legitimate mandate, a valid social contract?
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