Anonymous Report This Comment Date: November 26, 2007 03:07PM
All I can say is..... Yeah! He even talks about the dicks in the group around
here....(
red text)
By Robert Higgins
Discussions of calamitous government actions – engagements in pointless,
costly, and bloody wars; counterproductive actions to avert or shorten economic
recessions; botched relief and reconstruction efforts after natural disasters
– often arrive at, if they do not begin with, condemnation of government
leaders. Thus, in the United States, for example, people have blamed Harry
Truman for ordering U.S. military forces into the Korean war, Herbert Hoover for
worsening the economic bust of 1929–33, and George W. Bush for presiding over
the FEMA fiasco associated with Hurricane Katrina.
As soon as such a denunciation has been made, however, a critic invariably
intervenes to challenge its perspicacity and to propose a seemingly more
discerning, if disquieting, alternative: don't blame leader X; blame the people
who elected him. Given that in accordance with the protocol of majority-rule
democracy, leader X was in a position to make the bad decision only because he
had received more votes than the other electoral contenders, the critic
maintains that the devastating government blunder we have witnessed represents
nothing but the blessings of democracy as H. L. Mencken described them:
"democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and
deserve to get it good and hard."
This seemingly incontestable objection to blaming democratic leaders themselves
for their harmful decisions appears not only to let the scoundrels off the hook,
but also to shift the blame to a huge, incorrigible group of citizens or –
horror of horrors! – to the democratic system itself. Thus, one who has
stoutly maintained that Truman, Hoover, and Bush brought about the dire outcomes
in question and should be held accountable, if only in the court of historical
judgment, finds himself on the defensive. He cannot deny that millions of voters
cast their ballots for Truman, Hoover, and Bush and therefore that, roughly
speaking, they "chose" the persons who as heads of state proceeded to
make a hash of things.
I maintain, however, that the critics themselves are the less discerning parties
in this debate. Closer to the mark is the wit who observed, "Our
politicians know what they want, and they act as if we deserve to get it good
and hard."
The critics' mistake is to trace responsibility back only one step, when several
more steps must be taken to expose where the ultimate responsibility for
"choosing" leader X lies. Yes, the people had a choice between
Democrat X and Republican Y, and they gave, say, X more votes than Y. But who
did what to make X and Y the major-party candidates in the first place?
Ambrose Bierce, among others (including yours truly), did not doubt that
representative democracy is a sham: "You can effect a change of robbers
every four years," he wrote. "Inestimable privilege to pull off the
glutted leech and attach the lean one! And you cannot even choose among the lean
leeches, but must accept those designated by the programmers and showmen who
have the reptiles on tap."
Anyone who prefers the plodding analytics of modern political science to this
vibrant and clear-eyed commentary will find that Thomas Ferguson's view of the
electoral system bears striking similarities to Bierce's, and is heavily
documented, to boot. Ferguson maintains that in order to become a major-party
candidate, a person must obtain the financial support of a substantial faction
of wealthy people. In his words, "as long as basic property rights do not
emerge as the dominating issue," then "competition between blocs of
major investors drives the system."
Alternative sources of electoral financing, such as the many dispersed
individuals who might prefer that the government compress itself into a
night-watchman configuration, cannot organize themselves effectively or raise
sufficient funds to swing the selection process toward a candidate of their
choice. Hence, the major parties that put forward the actual candidates never
place this plank or others that might have great popular appeal in their
platforms. Parties are essentially organizations whose purpose is to secure the
greatest share of the government loot for themselves – and for their principal
financial backers, in particular – so the last thing they want is to put a
stop to the looting.
I hold no brief for Friedrich Engels, but no one ever spoke the unvarnished
truth more plainly than he, when he observed: "[W]e find here [in the
United States] two great gangs of political speculators, who alternately take
possession of the state power and exploit it by the most corrupt means and for
the most corrupt ends – and the nation is powerless against those two great
cartels of politicians, who are ostensibly its servants, but in reality dominate
and plunder it." Can anyone seriously deny that this state of affairs,
which Engels was characterizing in 1891, still exists in exactly the same
form?
So, the people choose their smarmy and transparently dishonest leaders, to be
sure, but they choose only from "the reptiles on tap." Forming a new
political party is futile. Dissident parties that seek to challenge the status
quo cannot accumulate the wherewithal to place their candidates on the state
ballots, familiarize the voters with their names, publicize their policy
positions, and bring substantial news-media attention to bear on them. Moreover,
the major parties have rigged the electoral rules to favor – quel surprise!
– the major parties, especially their incumbent candidates. In an irresolvably
disputed election, the major parties can turn, as the Bush gang did in 2000, to
the justices of the Supreme Court, each of whom gained his position by virtue of
making himself attractive to major-party officeholders and their
investor-supporters.
If the people at large
are to be blamed, they must be blamed not for the way they cast their ballots,
but for their toleration of the whole predatory political setup that shamelessly
passes itself off as a regime "of the people, by the people, for the
people" – surely one of the most successful Big Lies of all time. Yet the
people have been so massively miseducated, propagandized, cowed, and treated
with cynical disregard of their rights for so long that, for the most part, not
only have they lost all capacity to stand on their own feet, but, worse, they
have in most cases come to love the Big Brother whose boot is grinding their
faces. Willingly, sometimes eagerly they present themselves and their children
to be sacrificed on the altar of their own exploiters, leaving the survivors to
carry home the folded flag, persuaded that Johnny not only did his
"duty," but acted "heroically" in devotion to the Greater
Good. For making the state their god, they may indeed be rightly condemned, even
as we also denounce the false prophets who led them down the statist path to
their own destruction.
As for Truman, Hoover, Bush, and the rest of them, of course we may properly
blame them for their bad decisions, regardless of who paved their roads to
power. Leaders must always bear personal responsibility for how they turn the
wheel, once they have occupied the driver's seat. It is one thing for us to
understand the economic, social, and ideological milieu in which key players
elevate certain persons to positions of political power; it is a separate thing
for us to declare those persons guilty of the harmful and wicked actions they
take when they exercise the power.
November 26, 2007
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