Accountability through periodic free and fair elections is a good thing in itself, apart from any effects it may have on the quality of government or economic growth. The right to participate politically grants recognition to the moral personhood of the citizen, and exercise of that right gives that person some degree of agency over the common life of the community. The citizen may make poorly informed or bad decisions, but the exercise of political choice in and of itself is an important part of human flourishing.The above statement must be among the most inane to have been uttered by a serious student of the political order. From a scholar of the stature of Francis Fukuyama it is simply preposterous and is explicable only as the price of publication in today's globalist world order, where the money power controls almost every avenue of public expression, including book publication.
Francis Fukuyama: Political Order and Political Decay
Carroll Quigley, the historian of the New World Order, stated in a lecture on The Mythology of American Democracy:
Democracy is not the highest political value. Speeches about democracy and the democratic tradition might lead you to think this is the most perfect political system ever devised. That just isn't true. There are other political values which are more important and urgent—security, for example. And I would suggest that political stability and political responsibility are also more important.
In fact, I would define a good government as a responsible government. In every society there is a structure of power. A government is responsible when its political processes reflect that power structure, thus ensuring that the power structure will never be able to overthrow the government. If a society in fact could be ruled by a minority because that elite had power to rule and the political system reflected that situation by giving governing power to that elite, then, it seems to me, we would have a responsible government even though it was not democratic.
Why Democracy in the West Gave Way to Plutocracy
What passes for Western democracy is, in fact, responsible government as Quigley defines that term. At the end of the 19th Century and during most of the 20th, democratic responsible government could pass for mass democracy because the mass of the people, when united, had significant power, which meant that the political parties contending for the votes of the masses had to represent, in some measure, the interests of the people.The power of the proletariat depended primarily on three factors:
First, were the demands of industry and commerce for a vast army of factory and office workers, members of which were represented by the powerful labor unions that, through strike action, could make or break firms, and on occasion, dictate to governments;
Second, was the need of the military for millions of men ready to "lay down their lives for their country;"
Third, was the availability of cheap state-of-the-art weapons that made rebellion of the masses a serious threat. At the turn of the 20th Century, an American citizen could purchase both a Winchester repeating rifle and a Colt revolver for less than a hundred dollars.
Today, those three factors are politically insignificant. Global wage arbitrage has off-shored the textile industry, car parts manufacture, electronics and much else from the West to the Rest, fatally undermining the bargaining power of labor unions. War is no longer a business of relatively untrained conscript armies slugging it out with bayonets and horse-drawn artillery. Today, war is conducted by limited numbers of highly trained professional soldiers operating complex high-tech weapons systems.
While cheap weapons are still available, large state investments in riot police and in internal security agencies such as America's Homeland Security combined with mass surveillance by agencies such as the NSA insures that, in any violent struggle, the people will be defeated by the government.
Thus as Carroll Quigley wrote in Tragedy and Hope:
...the New Deal ran its course, and since about 1950 or so we have had [in America] plutocratic control.As the people have lost almost all real influence, the money power, which is to say the financial institutions, the great commercial and industrial corporations, plus the politically dynamic members of the billionaires club, wield immense power through the funding of "democratic" election campaigns, by the employment of lobbyists, and by the provision of incentives to politicians, both bribes and, legally permitted, after-office pay-offs that include corporate directorships, absurdly inflated book advances, medals, and enoblements.
Party Politics: A Choice of Faces, Not Policies
It is, however, easier to manage a docile populace inclined to adulate the Gates's and Buffett's in whose interests they are ruled. Therefore, an important role of the politician is to establish public positions that appear to serve the interests of the masses, while in fact serving the powers that be — the art of "triangulation," as Clinton advisor, Dick Morris termed it.Competition exists in politics among the main political parties, but this is a competition for the privileges of office not of ideals or policies, for all major parties are funded by the same financial and business interests, which contribute campaign funding and pay-offs for services rendered without regard to nominal party affiliation.
Thus, as Carroll Quigley wrote in Tragedy and Hope:
The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to the doctrinaire and academic thinkers.
Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so the the American people can 'throw the rascals out' at any election without leading to any profound or extreme shifts in policy.”
How the Money Power Trumps Other Sources of Power
The Military
Although money is not the only source of power in the Western democratic state, it trumps all others. Thus the military, for example, can be relied upon to serve the plutocratic interest because loyal senior commanders are rewarded after office with both honors and lucrative post-military employment, particularly with the arms manufacturers, security firms and mercenary military contractors.The Security Services
The security services are managed in a similar fashion. John Scarlet, for example, former head of MI6, Britain's military intelligence, who provided Tony Blair with the "Dodgy Dossier," a report based on material cut and pasted from the Internet to justify war on Iraq, was awarded the Order of the British Empire and made a Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George (KCMG). John Adye, former head of GCHQ (Britain's equivalent to America's NSA) was also dubbed KCMG (Kindly call me God).The Rule of Law
Other restraints on the money power may include constitutional limits (if a written constitution exists), the judiciary, and a rule-of-law tradition. But these limitations are breaking down. In the US, the Constitution is little more respected than "just a goddam piece of paper" as it is said to have been described by George W. Bush. Torture, false flag terrorism and assassination are now accepted tools of the Western democratic government.Religion
Religion in the West is now, politically, almost entirely irrelevant. Blasphemy is protected speech, pornography is protected speech, mass slaughter of the unborn, or even the partially born, is justified by a woman's "right to choose." Religious scruples about homosexuality are legally prohibited "Hate speech."Elected Leaders
From time to time, a political leader may think that by virtue of their position or charisma, they may lay out a program of government of which, like Wycliffe's Bible of 1834, is "for the Government of the People, by the People, and for the People." But John Wycliffe, like John F. Kennedy, discovered that the powers that be have no patience either with democratic government or charismatic leadership that disregards the essential interests of the existing power structure, whether religious or secular.For the most part leadership consists in negotiating politically feasible solutions to the demands of the various power factions. An astute politician may occasionally either cajole or hoodwink the major interests into accepting policies that serve the general interest, but presumption in those who serve as puppets of the hidden power is rarely tolerated.
Western Democracy and the Sovereign Nation State
A nation is the people of a defined territory. A nation state is thus the government of a territorially defined people. A sovereign nation state is a self governing nation state, and a democratic sovereign nation state is, therefore, an independent, territorially defined nation that is governed in the interests of the people. As such, following the mid-20th Century transition of democracy to the present-day pseudo-democratic plutocracy, there are no democratic sovereign nation states in the West. Moreover, under the influence of the plutocratic interest, the so-called nation states of the West are being driven toward disintegration to be followed by reamalgamation of the parts within supra-national state structures, administrative organizations, and defense establishments such as the EU, the World Trade Organization, NATO, and the UN.This is the drive to global governance, the arrival of which was announced, perhaps a little prematurely, in 2009 by EU Council President, Herman van Rompuy. The end game is the transfer of assets of the nation states to plutocratic control, and the transfer of governing powers from locally elected democratic legislatures to global institutions run by unelected officials, the latter selected by the plutocratically controlled governments of the remnants of the former sovereign nation states.
Related:
TPM: Princeton Study: U.S. No Longer An Actual Democracy
Patrick Buchanan: Caesar Obama
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