Demonstrations of Dead Democracy Deniers

We all have first hand experience of democracy. It might be three friends choosing between two restaurants or a school class choosing between choices of an outing.

Majority decides. Decisions, whether on policy, laws or choices, are the products of democracy. On the show-of-hands level, the products come out crisp, clean and quickly. National level democracy demands an extensive, long and complicated process, logistically vulnerable, culturally inflexible and economically corruptible. Governmental democracy is dead in nearly all countries. The decisions of the governments favor a minority at the expense of the majority. Call it what you will, it’s not democracy.

The ruling elite (the 1%) and their administrators (government and media) deny the absence of democracy, but they fool fewer and fewer people. We need merely remind ourselves that democracy means rule of the majority and stare the opposite squarely in the face. The majority of the people do not want
to give their money to banksters,
to feed the war industry,
to lack privacy,
to fear sickness under a profit hungry medical system,
to work for wages below existence sustainability,
to be thrown out of work because poor people can be exploited elsewhere,
to see super-profitable corporations pay little or no taxes and receive subsidies from the government,
etc.

It is not suprising that the rulers, and those who benefit by serving the prevailing order, deny the lack of democracy. The ”progressive” deniers are another question. They demonstrate not only the difficulty in swallowing this painful truth, but also demonstrate crucial cracks in their extensive education. Common people, ordinary workers and citizens of the hoods have more knowledge about the structure of the nation and nature of the government than these graduates of academic institutions. The majority of the people are well aware that money rules and that democracy is a bullshit badge worn by the plutocracy. The progressive deniers have difficulty seeing through the arrogance of their education to get these obvious truths in focus.

Dan Dangl, for example, states in an article titled Who Rules the World? that there’s ”a widely-shared view that the US is indeed not a democracy. In fact, this perception was confirmed in a research study released earlier this year by professors at Princeton and Northwestern University.” Notice that Dangl doesn’t state that the US isn’t a democracy, but that there’s ”a widely-shared view” to this effect, and this ”perception” is confirmed. You probably think I’m a nit-picker, but the bold-faced subtitle to his article reads, ”How a concentration of wealth and political power undermines democracy.” How can something that doesn’t exist be undermined? Dan resists denying the death of democracy, because he would have to say what the US is, if he says what it ain’t (sic).

This denial of dead democracy characterizes a large portion of progressive intellectuals who criticize symptoms of the prevailing order while diverting from the causes. They defend the myth of democracy with fundamentalist determination, even if they must contend that the democracy is undermined, weak, faulty, subverted, crippled or any other epithet to keep the democracy icon standing. They typically claim participation in the election process could remedy the situation. Former congressman Dennis Kucinich exemplifies this by encouraging people to defeat Republicans in the next election and thereby ”begin to restore a badly broken democracy.” Kucinich must have been visiting another planet during the recent Obomber (sic) administration.

Here’s how the academic heavies express the denial in The Oxfam Report on inequality, ”This massive concentration of economic resources in the hands of fewer people presents a significant threat to inclusive political and economic systems.” Oxfam is too pompous to use such a common word as democracy and therefore speaks of ”inclusive political and economic systems” – which is not dead but threatened.

Here are a few titles that can be used in the countries or organizations falsely claiming to be a democracy:
Plutocracy = rule of the wealthy
Oligarchy = rule of the few
Corporatocracy/Corprocracy (Corporate dictatorship) = rule of the corporations
Kakistocracy = rule by the worst
Kleptocracy – rule by thieves
Military dictatorship = rule by the military (or by a military-corporate complex receiving at least 50% of all taxes)
Fascism = rule by a marriage of business and government

Any country that can wear all of these titles should be regarded as a totalitarian state. Should the totalitarian state dictate conditions for other states and countries, it should be regarded as a Totalitarian Empire.

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“The dictators aren’t naked.
They’re dressed in magical synthetic democracy
that only the privileged can see.”
Dartwill Aquila

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