"Irish Democracy" is Alive and Well and Living in America!: Instapundit
Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds highlights three recent examples of "Irish Democracy" (massive, passive resistance to governmental dictates and rules) over at USA Today. "America's ruling class has been experiencing more pushback than usual lately. It just might be a harbinger of things to come," he writes. Among the cases are the FCC's spiking of its "Critical Information Needs" study and gunowners in Connecticut ignoring new registration rules (Instapundit links to Reason's own J.D. Tuccille on this score). And then there's the Department of Homeland Security's withdrawal from creating a national license plate registry:
The DHS put out a bid request for a system that would have gone national, letting the federal government track millions of people's comings and goings just as it tracks data about every phone call we make. But the proposal was suddenly withdrawnlast week, with the unconvincing explanation that it was all a mistake. I'm inclined to agree withTechDirt's Tim Cushing, who wrote: "The most plausible explanation is that someone up top at the DHS or ICE suddenly realized that publicly calling for bids on a nationwide surveillance system while nationwide surveillance systems are being hotly debated was … a horrible idea."
Reynolds talked about related stuff in his excellent 2006 book, An Army of Davids.
