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     The image the American people have of “democracy” shapes their understanding of authority and power, and consequently their view of government. An alluring image for democracy lends to the State an apparent philosophical legitimacy and evokes acquiescence and allegiance from the public. As such, it should be expected that a “democratic State” would be interested in maintaining an image for democracy which sustains or enhances the State’s power and control. In fact, one might expect the State to inflate democracy’s image and to encourage its veneration. Those in power might be expected to desire a morally flattering explanation for their power, and those who are under that power might prefer to employ rationalizations which compliment their self-image and amplify their sense of comparative national prestige or worth. Quite simply, those in power have an incentive to portray democracy and democratic government in ways which facilitate their power, and to create and perpetuate memes which keep the public acquiescent and obedient. It should be expected that over time the public’s image of democracy (and their expectations for it) would come to be disconnected from reality and eventually become delusional and mythological.

     This is in fact what has happened. The ruling class maintains and enhances its reign by cloaking itself in the delusion and deception of democratic imagery. The public’s view of American government is manipulated by the use of the concept “democracy” as a description for this government. Citizens are encouraged to submit to the government based on some ostensible legitimacy of democratic theory, but American democracy is not in actuality what it is portrayed to be. It does not function according to the principles or in the manner in which it is “justified” to the public. Democracy’s beatified image and its ignominious reality are practically inverses. Although the justifying rhetoric remains, the system has been co-opted. It functions as an illusion protecting and sustaining an elite oligarchy, a government-class mega-bureaucracy, and a regime of totalitarian despotism.​     

The Myth of American Democracy

DEMOCRACY’S ABSURDITY

     The US has become a culture of the unexamined fetishization of the democratic form. The average person’s conception of democracy is a romantic confusion. Where the public is not simply reflexively and uncritically reciting that democracy is “the best of bad alternatives,” its apologists are forever proclaiming their faith that there are ways to rectify the system’s problems. “If only” less money, easier registration, a different voting method, less special interest access, more transparency, more accountability, etcetera etcetera, then it would work as intended. There is very little reflection upon the possibility that it can’t work; that it is fundamentally corruptible and exploitable, no matter how much it is dressed up with platitudes and pious intentions.
     Americans want to believe that the dysfunction of the democratic political system is a product of bad-actors within it, and that the system itself is venerable or redeemable. It is not. The system is a consequence of itself. The system is dysfunctional. The system invites and rewards dysfunction.
The system is not “broken,” it’s intrinsically defective and inappropriate. To continue to contend it is more than what it is, continues to enable what it is. Only when people stop believing in democracy’s theoretical sanctity and mythical effectiveness, will they have the proper skepticism and circumspection about what government should do, and consequently seek other more private and voluntary solutions to social problems.

    

     The fundamental principle of democratic governance—that confrontational, contradictory ideologies can be brought together and “compromised” into a common, coherent solution—is absurd. Attempting to create a social structure based on trying to reconcile two or more fundamentally at odds ideologies is insane. The “compromise” of two or more incompatible views produces not beneficial hybrid solutions, but instead convoluted, incongruent, conflictual, self-contradictory, inefficient, counter-productive quagmire.
     Democracy is not holistic consensus, it’s syncretism:  it’s an attempt to unite without logical unity. “Middle ground” between two contradictory positions is not a magical coherence, it’s a confused jumble. Compromise does not make an effort “bipartisan,” it makes it bi-ideologically incoherent. It’s like trying to build a high-rise building based on the blueprints from two antagonistic architects with opposed visions.

     “Majority rule” does not involve consistent, coordinated rule by a set of rational, ideologically coherent principles. The majority is not a cohesive, enduring, responsible, singularity. It’s a shifting, uncoordinated, discordant, apparition. The majority on any particular issue is composed of people who do not agree on other issues, and who each have differing goals, values, priorities, and time-frames. There is no assurance that issues related to, and affected by, the particular issue under consideration will have the same-majority support, or be resolved in a manner compatible with the intentions motivating the majority in this instance. Political majorities are comprehensively irrational. There is no over-riding ideological discipline which keeps the government coherent. Government policy is not accountable to a single consistent vision or set of standards. It grows ever more inconsistent, self-counteractant, unintelligible, prodigal, dysfunctional, and oppressive.

THE STATE’S SELF INTEREST AND SELF-AGGRANDIZEMENT

THE POLITICAL CONVERSATION

     Politics is not a search for truth—it’s a quest for power. Truth is whatever lends itself to the acquisition of power. Power creates its own truth. Politics is about creating the impressions that induce those conclusions in the public which are most desired by the power-holders. “Truth” is, by and large, incompatible with politics.
     The quest for democratic power influences the entire information environment; the entire milieu of knowledge, judgment, and disposition. Politics shapes the world—adversely. It makes it deceptive, corrupt, manipulative, abusive. It bestows upon the political class the power of defining reality. The “political frame”—crafted according to the establishment’s interests—begins to dominate perceptions and bias judgments regarding actuality, motive, intent, character, and worth. Facts are conjoined with politically-influenced interpretation and the public is indoctrinated with agenda-laden information. What the public experiences is a politically constructed reality. Information sources consist of objectivity-disrupting agenda amplifiers. The public’s ratiocination and discernment is covertly preempted and abdicated to the discretion of the ruling elites.

    

     Politics is conducted using a dialogue and terminology intended to manipulate, not communicate. The public is not shown an objective reality reported by neutral and circumspect observers, they are force-fed scripted, choreographed, propaganda campaigns. There is a massive disinformation component to the State which spends its time attempting to control and even induce the public’s opinions and reactions. The information the public receives is meticulously designed for them in order to produce the impressions and responses which the establishment desires. A society dominated by the political method becomes one in which the heuristics are defined by the political establishment. Reality is defined by the narrative orchestrators; the craven power mongers and political machinery intent on control and domination.
     The political conversation itself is pure make-believe. It’s banalities and equivocations, code words and demagoguery, sweet sounding nothings, platitudes, empty promises, delusive emotional manipulation, and seductive deceptions. Politicians equivocate on terms, change formulas, cherry pick statistics, select the “authorities” they agree with, and obfuscate. They speak ambiguously, superficially, equivocally, duplicitously, and in code words, creating false impressions and encouraging hopeful assumptions.

     Political discourse is dominated by disputatious language, specious reasoning, pathetic argumentation, faulty logic, sloganeering, deceptive phrasing, mischaracterizations, intentional ambiguity, subterfuge, demonizing, fatuous platitudes, the absence of charity in argument, over-simplification, ignorance of complexity, tired memes, and manipulative narratives. There’s a profusion of senseless blather; sophistry, bombast, demagoguery, shibboleth, chimera, canard, fatuousness, pontification, subterfuge, hyperbole, and more. This is the democratic discussion space. The general public does not even understand how to have a constructive dialog, or how to recognize and judge good debate.
    
The masses are most effectively motivated by communication methods which are incompatible with dispassionate, rational examination of an issue. The political dialogue is about manipulation, not clarity or accuracy. It’s about the tactful use of language to make ambitious yet ambiguous claims which avoid actual accountability. It’s about conniving and manipulating, and “controlling” the voter’s impression, rather than a forthright presentation and evaluation of the facts and issues. In the effort to most-effectively motivate the public, the public is degenerated, and the process creates political and social dysfunction.

     The system encourages misunderstanding, incivility, confrontation, conflict, divisiveness, and ultimately aggression and violence. People deal with others impersonally via the political memes constructed for them and intended to marshal them into warring factions replete with imagined grievances, denied entitlements, and moral atrocities. The establishment riles up their constituencies by encouraging them to envisage fanciful forms of injustice for the purpose of politically exploiting their resultant delusional indignation. They are encouraged to see others as outsiders intent upon exploiting them, and as needing the government in order to control these evil others and to disburse the magically self-generating “fair share” they are being denied. The public is willing to descend into and accept a political process of complete debasement and incivility in order to be able to secure the right to coerce others—to force their views on others. They have no discipline or courage to do other than obeisantly follow the establishment controlled paradigm in all its disgraceful, putrid depravity.

    

ACCOUNTABILITY

     The history of the United States is one of constant expansion of government power. It is delusional for anyone to claim the US Federal Government is bound by its Constitution today. It is far outside its original bounds, and the “checks and balances” intended to moderate its operation are illusory and non-functional whenever the political party on each side of the ‘balance’ is one and the same, and the coincidence of ideological objectives encourages the disregard of institutional constraints.
    
The US government engages in a continual process of encroachment and usurpation pausing only at the point where it risks causing irrepressible revolt or revolution. The new standard for the constitutionality of government action today is whether or not the public revolts—after the fact—against the government’s usurpations. If the public doesn’t notice, acquiesces, or can be frustrated or beaten back, then they are said to have sanctioned, legitimized, and ensconced the extra- or contra-constitutional powers. Government has simply chosen to discard the notion that it can be legitimately constrained by a constitution of any form. The federal government essentially just declares what power it “rightfully” has, and there is no entity capable of refuting or rejecting it.

     The State has immensely more powers and control today than it did at its founding—or even thirty years ago—and there is no reason to believe the State has any intent or incentive to reduce its power or control in the future; it’s a one-way street heading toward an ever-increasing totalitarian despotism.
     The political establishment works to ensure the public remains indoctrinated with a particular view of democracy and the legitimacy of government which keeps citizens psychologically and emotionally invested in the system. Elections serve to change the electorate, not the government. They function as a diversion to redirect anger and discontent, channel frustration, mitigate revolutionary impulse, and provide the illusion of hope and change. Democracy today is an asset of the State and its dictatorial clerisy. It insulates and safeguards the system and its establishment occupants. Democracy does not control the State—the State controls democracy. Democracy does not prevent the State from defining its own authority and power, and domineering its citizens. The State uses democratic mechanisms and sentiment in order to consecrate and aggrandize itself.

     The State is naturally self-aggrandizing. Government expands and perpetuates itself. It is not an impartial, self-disinterested system. The system itself functions as a gatekeeper to who may enter and influence the system. Those who enter the service of the State are predominantly those who do not object to the authority of the State. Those who are disgusted by the State are not present within the apparatus of the State to prevent it from expanding according to the enthusiasm of those who worship the State. A process which prefers Statist mindsets, will incline toward Statist results.
     Those who desire to work in government generally have an attitude biased in favor of government, and their inclinations will produce government-favorable, government-aggrandizing results. Members of the government are—for the most part—not interested in protecting the public from government. Most often they seek an expansive and invigorated government capable of dominating its citizens and dictating behavior, relationships, and outcomes. They smugly see and proclaim nothing but the government’s (their own) indispensability.
The ambitions of those entering government, as well as the parameters of the institution itself, produce particularized mentalities and operational norms which result in an ever-metastasizing scope and size for government.

     

THE NEW TYRANT

     In order for democracy to be functional and to persevere, however, the government must be kept structured such that it remains understandable to, and under the effective control of the public. Expansive government reaches a point where it is no longer practically restrainable by the public, and it becomes its own sovereign, irrespective of its alleged “democratic” nature. The larger and more complex the government is, the more the citizen is incapable of understanding and controlling it. The more unfathomable government becomes, the more capable of deception, manipulation, and larceny it becomes. When government is so big that it can not be fathomed, and so ubiquitous that it is omnipresent, it is by this very circumstance despotic and un-trustable. The US government today can not be rationally assented to. The federal government is so big, complicated, and convoluted that democratic comprehension, accountability, and sane policy are impossible. The more “democratic” it becomes, the less the public has any control over it. Leviathan government is intrinsically undemocratic.

    

     The public has no reliable idea of what the system is really producing. They are required to assess the system based on the mendacious and contradictory agitprop peddled by the ruling establishment, or on their convoluted, mysterious, and uninformed impressions. “Democracy” is an empty moniker only. The system is so beyond the intent and capability of its democratic premises that it is preposterous to continue to suggest it is what it is called. The federal system has morphed into a monstrosity under which democratic mechanisms of any extent are ludicrous.
     The government’s actions are so complex and far-reaching that it’s impossible to track or accurately quantify their impact and consequences. Voters simply have no clue regarding what is happening in the US Federal Government’s fifteen cabinet-level departments and over fifty regulatory agencies, or how the trillions of dollars in the budget are being spent.
Voters don’t understand which policy produced the current conditions, nor which policy is best under the current conditions.
     The alleged guarantee of government accountability is the threat of removal from office, but this virtually ensures the public will remain permanently deluged by pandering disinformation and emotional manipulation. Politicians can claim the results to be almost anything they wish to portray them as. Furthermore, even if voting a politician out of office were an effective method of ensuring his accountability, the voters are still saddled with the burden of attempting to reverse the objectionable policies or consequences he promulgated.

    

     American democracy is essentially dead. “The people” are powerless and completely manipulable given government power, technology, and control over information and thought. “Democracy” has come to be rule by a totalitarian cabal of illuminati—exercised from behind the pomp and circumstance of an illusory procedural farce serving to enfeeble, bewilder, distract, misdirect, pacify, and delusion the masses into acquiescence.
     The US political system is far beyond the point where its terms can be considered reasonable. They are perverse and vile. The system assumes itself justified in forever escalating its impositions and dictates, and yet entitled to deference and obedience. The system requires its conscripts to object using only those methods inadequate to repel its aggressions and arrogance. The system is at a breaking point where its terms are recognized as being the mad devices of a tyrant class. The system offers no option to respond to, or escape from, its despotism and insanity but reprisal and indignant violence.
     The political struggle of today is the clash of two irreconcilable visions—one aligned with and benefited by the power of the State, and the other attempting to defend itself against this power. The State is not neutral—its interests are in destroying anything which does not submit to its ever-expanding power. For the individual—and ultimately society—there are two options:  reject the myth of democracy, or be destroyed by it.

    

     It’s critical to recognize that democracy does not preclude tyranny. When the culture is indoctrinated to believe that all problems should be solved by government, then tyranny can also proliferate under the guise of “democratic legitimacy.” American democracy has been evolved into an infrastructure for tyrannical rule. It’s not democracy or freedom—it’s totalitarian despotism with an elective facade. The tyrant is no longer a plainly recognizable distant monarch or an ensconced federal dictator, the tyrant is now the hegemonic influence of democratic sophistry and hyperbole; the tyrant is now a population disoriented within the miasma of an enticing but delusional democratic demagogy.
     The modern democratic-collectivist outlook hustled by the political illuminati holds social rationality to entail a necessity for big government. Extensive government is presumed to be integral to community, cooperation, and decision making. Government-organized and directed coercion is the replacement for voluntary cooperation. “Desiring less government” is equated with being anti-social or sociopathic. Advocating for autonomy, pluralism, or voluntaryism, or working to limit, inhibit, constrain, roll-back, disempower, dismantle, discredit, or delegitimize the State is portrayed as extremist, unpatriotic, or insurrectionist. Those who are opposed to expansive or unlimited government authority are to be ridiculed, maligned, stigmatized, isolated, or molested.

    

     American democracy in the twenty-first century is a sham. It’s an enchanting conception which has been co-opted, corrupted, and employed to bewitch the public into perceiving its servility as sovereignty. The primary function of democracy today is to provide a facade to conceal the reality of totalitarian rule by an autocratic illuminati establishment.
     The ideals of liberal democracy—individual self-ownership, self-determination and sovereignty, individual rights, liberty, justification of authority, rule by consent, limited, controlled, checked state power, decentralization and subsidiarity, pluralism and tolerance, etcetera—are today largely just deceptive or delusional double-speak supporting an antithetical reality. Democracy today functions as a method for subverting the individual and empowering “the collective”—which amounts to decision making by an authoritarian, oligarchic establishment professing themselves to be the voice of the collective. The classical liberal ideals of democracy have in actuality been eviscerated and the illuminati have instead substituted an oppressive, totalitarian regime of purported egalitarian paternalism.
     The future of American democracy is not about liberty, constitutionalism, individual rights, privacy, voluntary association, pluralistic living options, or limited government—it’s about universalizing the reign of elite-sanctioned reason. Government will become ever-more totalitarian, and this totalitarianism will be increasingly premised on the assertion of a “self-evident” “legitimacy of rationality.” An elite-vision conforming rationality. Whatever strategically promotes the elites’ vision qualifies as a rational action. If an action has been ordained to be “right” by the political establishment authoritarians, it is therefore legitimate and necessary—regardless of popular sentiment or constitutional obstacles... American democracy be damned, in all but the national psychosis which sustains it.

    

by Trenton Fervor

     Democracy today is a ruse behind which the ruling elites exercise power. It consists of deception and manipulation in both premise and practice. In its premise, the democratic conception is fundamentally absurd:  it proposes that an ideologically coherent, consistent, and efficient social policy program can be constructed by formulating each aspect of the overall program through a process of majoritarian amalgamation of contradictory, incongruent, and confrontational views. It supposes that good things come from rule by meta-ideologically discordant and collectively incoherent government. In its practice, the democratic political conversation itself is a carefully crafted gibberish based on fantasy, flattery, ambiguity, equivocation, demagoguery, beguilement, and inspiring nonsense. The reality is that democracy is an incoherent, dysfunctional, corrupt, manipulative, fraud. It’s a sacrosanct myth; a false pretense used to subvert and control.

     While the power establishment would be quite satisfied to have the public remain emotionally and psychologically indentured, paralyzed, and subservient within its “antiquated” conception of the system, American democracy must be examined and judged based not on its historic aspirations, venerated image, or imagined grandiose vision, but on its actual composition and effect. Democracy should not be allowed to retain its supposed legitimacy based solely on a beatified conception which continues unexamined in the light of practical experience. It should not remain authoritative based only on a hollow and delusional reverence.

     A discussion of American democracy today must be about revolutionabout recognizing that a revolution has already covertly occurred. American democracy has already been overthrown. The government has already transformed itself beyond the democratic conception, and beyond its constitutional tenets and bounds. American democracy today exists as a system to empower the political establishment and to control, manipulate, and exploit the “demos.”
     American democracy today is evil. Not the ideals underlying the democratic conception—democracy as the alleged embodiment of those ideals; democracy as the alleged vehicle for those ideals; democracy as the charade which conceals the establishment’s perversion and subversion of those ideals. Although democracy sounds charming in its rhetoric, in practice it’s a myth and a fraud.
The American belief in democracy has become a national psychosis. The dynamics of modern power can not be tamed by democratic mechanisms.

    

     To most Americans “democracy” is a familiar term, but a misunderstood and often misused concept. The public is most often scarcely able to explicitly or coherently specify what it entails. For the most part, when people are asked “why democracy?” they are able to recite only a few worn mantras—nothing of any practical value to them.
     Democracy in America is most often described with a bombastic adulation and ardent faith. Most American citizens believe they live in a profoundly democratic society—indeed, the most democratic society on earth—and their sense of identity and mindset is strongly influenced by the hype and myth of their democratic lore.
     A seductive “democratic rhetoric” flows nearly instinctively from all aspects of society, and it creates a culture of unexamined mantra and hyperbole. The education system indoctrinates the youth with apologia and epistle about democracy’s dominion. The older generation considers it part and parcel of their morality, decency, and pride. Politicians and other statist sycophants pontificate about its sanctity. Democracy’s legitimacy and worth are assumed to be axiomatic.
     The public is not often counseled on the defects of democracy—it’s impermissible or uncouth to raise that view. The educational system and the political establishment are concerned mainly with beatifying democracy, and even the “impartial press” views its role to include “exposing those who try to damage the legitimacy of institutions” and to inform the public so as to “preserve democracy.” To question democracy is essentially heresy or treason.

     The American polity is generally lead by—and worships—a seductive illusion which enchants and distracts from their political reality. The public is kept enthralled and enamored with the concept of democracy, to the actual disregard or destruction of the ideals which underlie it. The nation has been brainwashed to believe in the unquestionable righteousness, superiority, and efficacy of the democratic system. There is a huge disconnect between the justifying philosophy and the actuality.
     American democracy does not work the way in which it is justified to people. It does not, and can not. American democracy is a system of false pretense, deception, manipulation, dysfunction, and ultimately tyranny...  American democracy is a myth—a sham. 

The above material was excerpted and or adapted from the book

“THE MYTH OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY: 

The Deification of Democratic Governance and the Subversion of Individual Liberty”

Copyright 2013 by Trenton Fervor, ISBN: 978-1-4759-8100-1,

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“Now-a-days, men wear a fool’s cap, and call it a liberty cap. I do not know but there are some, who, if they were tied to a whipping-post, and could get but one hand free, would use it to ring the bells and fire the cannons, to celebrate their liberty... The joke could be no broader, if the inmates of the prisons were to subscribe for all the powder to be used in such salutes, and hire the jailers to do the firing and ringing for them, while they enjoyed it through the grating.”                  – Henry David Thoreau

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