Governing Ourselves, For A Change

AMERICANS, for all their lip service, have never preferred democracy. This is especially true of the wealthy elite, who quite rightly fear that political power evenly distributed would bring about an egalitarian society and create the unacceptable specter of redistribution of personal wealth. Madison, like Plato and Aristotle long before, and Louis Brandeis long after, understood well that political equality cannot be separated from economic equality. In a true democracy, the two would have to work together. Everybody has his own solution. Plato taught Aristotle that wealth should be shared; Aristotle was skeptical. James Madison, a wealthy man, favored plutocracy, said so, and backed it up in his constitution of 1787, which we so cherish and admire, though we sometimes abuse it, today. Justice Brandeis kept his thoughts to himself. The average American workplace is a dictatorship, as is the average American classroom. Workers and students are constrained to simpering acquiescence and slave wage labor, with little or democratic pretense of amelioration. True democracy is the greatest threat to elite rule, governance from top down. Here are a few relevant quotes. The public are "ignorant and meddlesome outsiders who must be put in their place." Power must be possessed by the "intelligent minority of responsible men" who themselves must be protected "from the trampling and roar of the bewildered herd." The purpose of the herd, the ignorant masses, according to America's founders, is to choose, every few years, from among a carefully limited and selected number of responsible, intelligent men of property, thus relegating the common citizen to a place as spectators, not participants. Accordingly, the unwashed masses are not the best judges of their own interests. Hence, we have a republic, a representative democracy, owned and controlled by our wealthy elite, rather than a direct democracy owned and controlled by the common people which requires popular participation and, as much as possible, a well informed public. We the people seem to be content with our status as spectators, and always have been, just as our founders intended. We simply do not trust ourselves to govern. Nor should we, if we do not care enough to do something about it, to water the tree of liberty, as Jefferson, with a little revolution now and then. Just one more point to ponder. Our leaders today are no different than our previous ones. If America's billionaire corporate masters truly believed in popular participation and democracy in government, they wouldn't spend billions of dollars purchasing political power, and billions more clinging to it. We the common masses are bought and paid for, with our consent This arrangement will continue as long as we agree to it. if you think Donald trump is some kind of "populist", or man of the people, reconsider. There is not a single true populist in the republican party. Trump and the republicans would severely truncate government power, but would do nothing to curtail corporate power, which would fill the vacuum left by a government in exile. Conservatives, much as they rail against the central government, have no objections to corporate power, which to them is freedom, which is actually only another type of tyranny, tyranny of the very wealthy elite. We the people have far greater hope of stealing political power from our corporate masters by working through government than by forcing corporations, which are inherently tyrannical, to democratize. What remains to us the people is to pick our poison.