Topic: Democracy
The Magus of American Democracy “We have got to face the reality that liberal democracy is the most demanding of all political faiths … That is its price. That is also its glory. For, believe it or not, there are such things in the world as morality, as law, as conscience, as a noble concept of humanity, which, once awake, are stronger than all ideologies.” -Dorothy Thompson - 1934by Larry Ward
(Libertarian)
Sunday, January 13, 2008
There is a great deal of entirely justified and understandable cynicism about democracy these days, and yet, the best among us are fervently engaged in a struggle to exercise the apparatus of our American democracy to elect a real President. (Need I name names?) Some who are even nastier than me, ignorant and hostile morons appointed to celebrity status by Fox News, for example, might call this hypocrisy. They might say we don't like democracy- unless it gets us what we want. That is exactly our complaint against current incumbents in positions of power and trust in America. That is why Mr. Bush Jr. jests that dictatorship would be more convenient than the charade of democratic election.
How can we answer this charge? We really can't if we repudiate American democracy, so let's not. Instead let's understand that American democracy is somewhat more than majority rule and that it is not American democracy but the perversion of American Democracy that is repugnant. Dorothy Thompson (a.k.a. Mrs. Sinclair Lewis) explains that perversion so briefly and perfectly that I just let her speak in the next paragraph. Her comments were motivated by Mr. Roosevelt's administration but apply equally or more so to more recent administrations.
"The repeated assertion of the Administration and its apologists that it has a mandate is typical ... By hook or by crook, through the democratic instrument or by coercion, one gets majority. One then uses the power that that majority gives to destroy the minority and make it impossible for the minority ever again to become the majority. ... This is, of course, not democracy. It is the modern technique of usurpation."
Sound familiar? Clearly, we who support Ron Paul for President and support the Constitutional and common sense principles that he champions, are at present, in the minority. Otherwise our candidate would have won in the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries. Clearly, Fox Television Stations, Inc., acts as apologist for the administration in the current Presidential debates. Its ad hominum attacks on Ron Paul and all Ron Paul supporters and its exclusion of Ron Paul from televised forums among Presidential candidates are examples of coercion to get majority support for candidates of one particular ideology- which candidate is not terribly important.
Nor does it matter what we call that ideology. "The only trouble you have fighting city hall", says that delightfully individual American soul, Jack Kerouac, "is that it keeps changing its name". The administration is not concerned with whether the next President is Republican or Democrat, male or female, African American, young or old, Christian, Mormon, Jew, even Islam or anything else. It is only concerned that the next President continue policies of war abroad and abortion of individual liberty at home.
The term "top tier" articulates the view that minorities don't qualify for inclusion in public debate. But if minorities are excluded from debate, then it is not democratic debate but merely the pretense of democratic debate and the result is not a democratic election. This is the "by hook or by crook" by which recent Presidential elections have been usurped. It has been accomplished in the same way that the magician rigs the trick in which you are invited to "Pick a card. Pick any card". The Magus uses a deck with 52 identical cards. In elections, we are invited to chose from among ideologically identical candidates. In both cases, it is imperative to get the rube off the stage immediately after the trick is done. Once your vote is tallied, you become a non person and your vote is used as a blank check for any policy adventures upon which the elected party wishes to embark.
Ron Paul supporters need to pay close attention to our candidate's comments on the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries. Vote fraud is a red herring. Pursuit of vote fraud engages us in unseemly quibbling that just looks like sour grapes and gives the other side more ammunition for ad hominum attack. I would speculate in fact, that the other side would obliquely promote challenge to vote tallies. Let's not fall for this ploy and become friends of Ron Paul of the sort that motivate the proverb, "God defend me from my enemies but God SAVE me from my friends".
The problem is not vote fraud but a majority of voters made up of generations that have been born into a political environment that is polluted by government agencies like the IRS, the Fed and, say, the DMV. We are conditioned to think of them as inevitable and unalterable institutions. We are like fish born into polluted water. Never having been in fresh water, we assume that the polluted water into which we were born is as good as it gets. When one fish returns from a swim into cleaner water, it is difficult for us to understand what he's talking about. But our countrymen are not fish. It is the nature of fish to turn on a dime. It is the nature of a democratic republic to be slow to change course.
The erection of these multitudes of new offices and their deployment of swarms of officers to harass us and eat out our substance, has been accompanied by ruthless and relentless propaganda. The exponential growth of electronic communications in the last 50 years has been accompanied by equally exponential growth of propaganda that is designed to silence our intuitive rebellion against multitudes of new offices and swarms of officers, and to erase all memory of America's real founding principles.
The challenge we face is to awaken that memory and move the majority and we can only do that if we awaken that memory in ourselves. I believe it is possible because I do, believe that, "there are such things in the world as morality, as law, as conscience, as a noble concept of humanity".
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Whose Dorothy Thompson? You may be sure that Fox News don't want you to know- but I do. The essay I quote from here is out there on the net. But another and more useful Thompson essay that fills in many of the blanks in our understanding of the, "something big" that Ron Paul speaks of is called "The Record of Persecution". It is not published anywhere in print or on the net that I am aware of, other than at my web site. I scanned it from an out of print book published in 1934. Both essays can be read in the critical essays section of the editor's select list at my web site, CreativeSedition.com. The Lewisohn essay there called, "The Revolt Against Civilization" is also out of print and extremely enlightening.
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