America is not a democracy, never has been and was never intended to be. America is an oligarchy: originally an oligarchy of rich owners of land and slaves, but today an oligarchy largely of the chiefs of the civilian and military security agencies in collaboration with tech billionaires, the corporate media, and the educational bureaucracies.
It is true that the legislative branch of government is elected, but in the election of the upper house, or Senate, the US Constitution gives equal representation not to each citizen, but to each state. Thus, in Senate elections, the vote of each of Wyoming's 582 thousand residents counts for as much as the votes of 70 of California's 40 million residents.
Such inequality was fully intended by the Framers of the American Constitution. Allocating an equal number of Senate seats to each state ensured dominance of the Senate by representatives of the land- and slave-owning class versus representatives of industrialized states with rapidly growing blue-collar populations.
Today, by virtue of the absence of campaign finance limits, electoral bias in favor of the property owning class remains, even as the nature of the property owned has changed (although perhaps not as much as might appear, Bill Gates being reportedly largest farmland owner in America).
Moreover, campaign finance is only one of many ways in which the Money Power influences the outcome of US elections. Of obvious importance in this respect are the news media controlled by a handful of giant corporations, whose chief function it is to catapult elite propaganda.
There is, in addition, a new election-determining factor closely allied with the Money Power, namely, the great state bureaucracies, in particular the "education" establishment and the agencies of national security.
The prime function of the "education" establishment is to brainwash the masses, the main object being to render them submissive to the government directives and slogans of the day, whether they be to promote the wearing of face masks, contempt for Christianity, or belief in the whiteness of racism.
The functions of the agencies of national security are more complex but include the creation of narratives necessary to rationalize criminal wars of aggression, the suppression of populist movements at home, and the orchestration of regime change operations both at home and abroad.
These elements — the Money Power, the mass media, the educational establishment and agencies of national security, seem to provide the American oligarchy with immense stability. But the fake democracy adopted by the Framers of America's Constitution as a necessary evil, an evil that was intended to be circumvented by the various means of top-down control of the public mind, exposes the oligarchy to a great threat. It is the threat of the demagogue: the silver-tongued charismatic genius who can emerge at any time, but who in all cases prior to 2016 have been successfully eliminated: Huey Long, for example, shot, so it is believed, by an aggrieved loner; JFK and RFK, shot by aggrieved loners, or so one to expected to believe; or Governor Wallace, shot by an aggrieved loner, or so one is expected to believe; or Martin Luther King, shot by unknown assassins.
But the elimination of charismatic political interlopers by the hand of lone nuts or unknown assassins, has given rise to widely held conspiracy theories that a have shaken faith in the integrity of the ruling elites. What then to do? Why rig the 2020 election and turn a triumphant Trump landslide into a humiliating defeat at the hands of a tottering 78-year-old who heads a clan of thieves.
Fortunately, many will think, Trump accepted the humiliation of a fabricated defeat rather than launch Civil War II. But America's model of government is broken, and with it America's educational system, which is now seriously corrupt. Neither credibility of the political system and media nor the effectiveness of the educational system can restored without a massive reform. Such reform would have to include:
(1) A commitment to truth not propaganda and the recognition and reward of merit in education, which means the rooting out of political correctness in all its manifestations;
(2) A breakup of the corporate media monopolies and their replacement by a free press, which is to say a press of many independent voices.
(3) A revision to the franchise including: (a) lifting the voting age from 18 to something like 31, by which time the average citizen may have at least some slight grasp of what constitutes good government; and (b) denying the vote to public servants, welfare recipients, and non-tax-paying citizens.
(4) The institution of election-day, in-person-only voting with paper ballots counted by hand in full public view.
But if, as is safe to assume, no such reforms occur, the US will continue on course for a Soviet-style implosion and break-up, with Joe Biden, perhaps, playing the role of the hapless Gorbachev, and Donald Trump haranguing the crowd from atop an MI Abrams battle tank — its 105 mm M68 gun pointed at the Oval Office Window — playing the role of Yeltsin.
Related:
New York Post: Octopus of Big Tech is strangling America
