Oh, democracy. Isn't it grand?

Picture Old Rightist H.L. Mencken in today's election season... He would have a blast of fun laughing at the stupidity. It is little more than a fight between kindergartners on the playground. Men will spend hours and hours----days even----on the "lipstick on a pig" comment. All the while the more important news and issues get a back seat. Though, the supposed dividing lines of the battle field in the kindergarten playground are sharply set. One side you have the Democrats and the other side you have the Republicans. Each member of one or the other is as partisan as he can be, drinking the usual talk-radio style kool-aid; cheering on their sports team. Both sides, now even the Republican side, pledge revolutionary "change" in Washington, D.C. if only their side is elected. The major political party heads tell the masses to swing the pendulum, which confines itself in motion to the two major establishment parties, their way. By doing so, they say, major happenings will happen and the masses will at last be rescued from the usual unchanging confinements of Washington as usual. But, then, I am still not sure what the word "change" means. No one will tell me. Maybe this word----this shibboleth----has a different definition when it is applied in a political context (thereby making the word vacuous.)

Sen. Barack Obama (or is that "O-bomb-a"?) desires an expanded role for the U.S. military in the world. In no way does he fundamentally question or challenge the presence of an American empire, with troops in over 100 nations. This, to him, should be conserved, not changed. He wants no cessation. Parallel to Sen. John McCain (or is that "McNeocon"?), Obama has voiced support to extend empire and to antagonize Russia, and hence to get going Cold War II, by expanding NATO to places such as Georgia. He claims that we must only "end the Iraq War responsibly." (Hmmm, that sounds familiar.) The dreadful pick, in both an overall sense and even in a narrow strategic-political sense, of Sen. Joe Biden, Obama's choice for VP, is someone who voted for the Iraq War and vigorously opposed antiwar voices. Biden is a Washington "insider" politician if there ever was one, with his original acclamation for the war. Any troop withdraws from Iraq, according to Obama's so-called "anti"-war point of view, should be sent into the constitutionally undeclared Afghanistan War. (Funny, I thought it was Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda that caused 9/11----not Afghanistan or its former government.) He is all for taking the fight in the drug war international; for example in South America. And, yes-yes, he has kissed the ring of the Israel lobby. There's your man of "change"! Oh, democracy. Isn't it wonderful and grand? We get the great "freedom" to pick between him and John McCain. What a great beacon of liberty. All nations should have this great liberty, even if they do not want it. (We will show them!)

And Sen. John McCain? No need to iterate that he presents no fundamental changes in respect to the issues of empire and illegitimate wars. A couple of years ago, by the way, many GOP card carrying members would curse his name. Well, that was then. Gov. Sarah Palin, I suppose, has washed him clean. [Although, I must say that the partisan left-liberal reaction against this woman has been very amusing. Now from a narrow strategic-political perspective, picking her I feel was a brilliant move. Obama is in trouble.] But where is the mainstream anti-war left today? With O-bomb-a. Well, now we get to see their attachment to an anti-imperialist stance in its true mephitic light. The great paleoconservative Paul Gottfried, author of After Liberalism, seems to be correct when he says an anti-empire coalition alliance with the left is impossible. Their anti-war views are illusory. (Notable exceptions excluded.)

Even in domestic issues, the similarities outweigh the dissimilarities. And most of the "dissimilarities" are rhetorical in nature, nothing more. Paleolibertarian Thomas Woods, co-editor of We Who Dared to Say No to War, has said that: "On taxes, the Democrat favors a top income tax rate of 39.5 percent, and the Republican favors a top rate of 35 percent. Well, ain't democracy grand! We get to debate a whole four and a half percentage points." Although, in the big picture, it has been asked, are taxes in fact the big issue in the economic debate? Is not the monetary issue of more importance, more urgency, and of a more fundamental nature? The answer looks to be most definitely yes. Then again, is there any disparity at all between the two major presidential candidates? No, there is no difference at all. Neither of the two have any idea----but if they do, they will not say anything because the solution would demand that they have less power----of why there is a recession now. They do not understand what caused the housing bubble and what to do to prevent another bubble in the future from developing. After all of these years of statism and its socialism, economic problems will continue apace. (Sadly, though, the economically illiterate will always blame the "free market.")

A local talk radio station in my area has a promo that says that this election "is the most important election of our lifetimes." (Didn't they say that the last presidential election?) It probably is the nature of democracy, in a quintessential sense, to be one of picking between "two evils," as they say. Since mass democracy has the strong tendency for mass centralization of governmental power, it seems that such a thing is destined to happen. Thus all attempts at mechanical reforms are futile reforms trying to fix something that is inexorably bonded to democracy.

One of the goals of the sacrosanct and "progressive" form of government known as democracy is to divide men up so as to pin them against each other. The masses as a potentially cohesive bunch must not see the government, and the entire freeloading establishment, for what it really is, after all. It must do this especially when this divided up division expressed through the democratic election process (Democrat vs. Republican) is, at least for the most part, deceptive in actual existing differentiation (which was suggested above as a natural development in democracy). The masses must not think of the (non-fictitious) distinction between civil society and the government, but only to think about the (fictitious) division that is created in mass elections to give the illusion of self-government or self-rule. That is, the public must become blind to power and their newly focused eyes must become diluted in their cognizance of democracy. The masses must be made to think there is no distinction between civil society and the government. As the distinction between civil society and the government ceases to exist in the minds of men, the divisions created from democracy must become front and center in the minds of men. The latter pushes men to think of democracy as a form of government that in reality takes the former distinction completely away. That government, as the Marxists would say in a different context, withers away under democracy. That government is the people. That we all rule ourselves. That might makes right. That majority say so makes right. And so forth.

And so, as Joseph Sobran says: "Democracy has proved only that the best way to gain power over people is to assure the people that they are ruling themselves. Once they believe that, they make wonderfully submissive slaves."

So it does. Men then start to be more open to the use of the apparatus of government. They become more accepting to an enlarging Leviathan. Infighting, in democracy, is created in terms of using the state in, for example, wealth redistribution within civil society. All of this feeds the growth of the state in an accelerating manner. Consequently, the so-termed intermediate institutions of family, community, church, voluntary groups and associations start to diminish to the degree to which the government conquers them and takes over their functions and roles in society. The isolated and lone individual that remains becomes increasingly dependent on the government. Society thus becomes atomized, and increasingly political. Edmund Burke's "little platoons" crumble.

Another way the establishment system sustains itself is by having the masses convinced that they very much need a Leviathan State. Or else, chaos would be unleashed. The establishment needs to protect the population, they say, from freedom. It also needs to protect the population from "terrorism," "racism," "sexism," "discrimination," "big business," "the Church," "global climate change," etc. "The whole aim of practical politics," wrote H.L. Mencken, "is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." This, in addition, gives an important perceptiveness of how empire maintains itself with a supportive public. To excuse its existence it needs some enemy, any enemy.

Democratic elections are about numbers. It is about quantity, not quality. This was helped brought about and strengthened via the shift from a more hierarchical-aristocratic republic to a free-for-all (one-man, one-vote, one-woman, one-vote) democracy. To note again, it is also this shift that has helped generate the acceleration of power, as described above. Today, though, this is too taboo to talk about. Democracy has become a god.