by Kevin Alfred Strom
A CORRESPONDENT who had read one of my recent essays wrote to me, incredulously asking me if I was actually so wicked as to “condemn democracy.” I asked him to consider the facts and think, instead of just regurgitating the quasi-religious shibboleths that were imparted to him by the public schools:
James Madison certainly condemned democracy. So did Mencken and Saki and many others. And so do I.
If the majority is allowed to seize your property or make its opinions into law whenever it so chooses, how is that different from an autocracy? (With an autocrat, bad as that system is, at least you have a chance that the ruler will be wise or benevolent or both. With democracy, there is no chance whatsoever.)
That is why the founders opposed democracy and gave us a constitution that would protect us from it, just as much or more as it protected us from would-be kings.
They tied down the government with the stringent chains of the Constitution, which, especially the Tenth Amendment, severely restricted the areas in which government could do anything at all.
But politicians, notably Lincoln and the Great War Criminal but also many others including G.W. Bush and Obama, have found that, through bluster, intimidation — and packing the court (and the law schools) with those whose main goal was avoiding the founders’ strictures — they could get away with trashing the Constitution on almost every level.
The result is that we now do indeed have the “democracy” that the founders were trying to avoid; with the thoughtless majority easily manipulated into doing almost anything the ethnically distinct media masters want them to do.
The result is that we openly tolerate the invasion of our southern border while we slaughter innocents by the hundreds of thousands in the Middle East who never constituted even a slight threat to America.
The result is that we have a National Security surveillance state which arrogates to itself the right to “monitor” almost everything we say and do, and spy on our formerly private transactions and interactions.
The result is that we now have almost totally given up the right of freedom of association and must hire and buy and sell and send our children off to school all in accordance with our masters’ latest arcane formulations based on the race and ethnicity of their “subjects.”
The result is indefinite detention without trial.
The result is “extrajudicial rendition.”
The result is Predator drone attacks on apartment buildings containing mothers and children.
The result is the openly admitted ordering of the assassination of an American citizen by one of those Predator drones.
Yes, I condemn “democracy” as it currently exists in the country which is, quite anachronistically, still called by the name “United States of America.”