Sometimes you hear something that is so clarifying that it realigns nearly everything you understand to be true about a subject. I have found myself exhausted at trying to ascertain what has happened in America to the trusted institutions we once revered and held as definitive. It seems year after year and election after election, we have moved further and further away from a government subjected to the will of the people and instead have careened in a Fibonacci spiral of acceleration towards a ultra managed, top down bureaucracy built on a spiderweb of rules. I have struggled to understand it. Growing up in a Republican oriented family and having spent most of my political life on the conservative side of the “so called” spectrum, I have watched a significant shift in just the years I have paid attention to what is left of the Democratic Party.
In 2002 I was as bought into the “fight them over there, so we don’t have to here” ideology as any die hard Republican. I embraced the entire narrative that there were weapons of mass destruction, that Iraq was somehow the Taliban or ISIS or ISIL or I Don’t Know Who, and that evaporating the whole place into silica glass was probably the best solution. You know who wasn’t? The Democrats. There were people like Paul Wellstone and Tom Daschle who I was programed to vilify who were in opposition to that kind of action. They were skeptical of the Bush administration and their march towards war. I thought it was bitterness from the election of 2000 and the stolen election business. But as time went on and the war perpetuated itself, year after lousy year, it became abundantly clear that being skeptical of war was the better position to hold. Ron Paul gave me permission to leave the Republican reservation and wander into the land of free thinking.
In our silly system of “you only get two” that should have led me to explore the Democratic Party. But by 2008, the year of the Ron Paul Revolution, the Democrats had already started their embrace of the system. Sure, they had a new, younger candidate who was exciting and full of promises - but the party was un-apologetically embracing the government management and take over of everything. Health Care, the environment, the micromanagement of the people through the tax code, all were the stated way that the Democratic Party were going to manage the people into a more perfect union. They started to embrace the control of speech, take donations from Wall Street and defense contractors - everything they had always claimed to be opposed to. They vanquished good voices from their party and turned the gavels and committees over to the most wankish and warish of their tribe. It certainly wasn’t a home for a disaffected Republican and it certainly wasn’t moving towards a liberty oriented life.
The Republicans on the other hand began the unique transformation from permanent minority stooges, who loved the state and its ordained institutions like corporatism, equally as much as the trough of donations that came with it, to one that included a more populist type faction within the walls of the old wineskin. There was the tea party of 2010 and the willingness of more libertarian enclaves of the Republican world to give credibility to the logical and sane aspects of the Occupy Wall Street arguments. And of course there was Donald Trump - the bombast, blow hard with no chance at winning and so much dirt in his background that he was destined for defeat.
Regardless of what was tossed his way, the system couldn’t take him out. The election of 2016 was a disruption so great that there was a literal gnashing of teeth in the streets. Trump had rhetoric about draining swamps and deep state operations and fake news - all things that many of us knew from our exile to the wilderness of the politically homeless. Regardless of what people thought of him, he was not what anyone in the permanent state wanted. He was uncontrollable and had been the choice of the people. That was more than unacceptable to the state. He was a wild card and unmanageable, and they unleashed a barrage of accusations, impeachments, and lab created chaos so that he would be eliminated. Trump got a lot wrong in the last months of his presidency and the loss of the election in 2020 was made possible by the state’s assault on this populist movement. The mail in vote debacle of November was their legitimized method of assuring the outcome in the “right” direction.
Make no mistake both the new Democrats and the entrenched Republicans were driving that ship. The populism, which is always allowed on the fringe during elections, had gained too much of a foot hold for the uniparty. Their system of living and government was threatened and it had to be squashed. 2020, the law fare, and the felonizing of Trump was supposed to be the end of it. Surely sane people, they thought, would dismiss him to the ash heap of history. The end result for those Washington types was that no matter the illusion presented to the people for their vote, the apparatus was who was going to win. It could look like a contest of extremes, but they wanted the candidates who were safe and acceptable to their form of democracy.
Which brings me back to my opening thought - Sometimes someone says something that brings a clarity of awareness that you can’t unsee after you have seen it. Eric Weinstein was on the Modern Wisdom podcast with Cris Williamson and he broke down the conflicting definitions of democracy - the one held by the people of the world and the one held by the powerful. His breakdown shed incredible clarity upon why both parties have become one monolith. He described it this way:
“We have a very strange thing happening where democracy is the greatest threat to democracy, now how can that be? It’s two different concepts of democracy. Once concept of democracy is the will of the people, you hold plebiscites, and even if you do it with an electoral college or political parties, you do it by, of and for the people. The other idea of Democracy is that of the institutions that sprang from democracy, once upon a time and those institutions have to be kept strong. Those are two very different ideas about Democracy.”
It was like a lightbulb going off.
Nicole Shanahan, the vice presidential candidate of the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. campaign spoke with Dave Smith about this same idea. She said that “people in the Democratic Party…don’t really know who’s making the decisions, but they acquiesce to the structure.”
The structure of democracy, this strange remnant of the World War 2 victory, is more important to preserve than the will of the people. The spiderweb is too deep and too tangled for the world to survive peacefully without the structure being the most venerated aspect of the American politic.
Meanwhile the structure strangles the people. The burdens of compliance, paying of taxes, speaking the right speak, playing along in the shell game of illusionary money are placed upon the back of the average American, all while their voices are being diminished by the devotion to the institution of Democracy. The dedication to this preservation has made a world so filled with strangleholds and chokepoints that no average person can survive. The well connected can escape it all by political donation, and legal defense teams, while the average citizen pays the lions share of the burdens.
Brexit, The election of Trump in 2016 and other disruptions in the political pathway of normalcy, cannot be allowed because otherwise people might ask the serious questions about why they are subjected to what they are.
Taxes, alliances, treaties, trade agreements all would be subjected to the examination of the people; something far too cumbersome and risky for the preservation of the Democracy of Institutions. As Eric Weinstein said, “this remains and unsolved problem.”
It certainly does - because as is usually the case in dishonesty, the covering up takes a lot more effort than saying the truth. It’s likely why those that buck the system and want to expose it to the American people are banished, maligned, or assassinated.
If we awaken to this damage of definitions, we might yet have a chance to advocate for the unburdening of the people by the shackles of an overbearing government who defends their dishonest institutions at all costs. Popular populists cannot win in their world - but they must win if we are ever to taste the life of freedom again.
Essay 72 - The Definitions of Democracy