Political Antigens: Destroying Democracy in the Name of Democracy
Furious at rejection by the American electorate, the Deep State, through its two principal tools, the Democratic Party and the monolithic corporate media, have engaged in an Orwellian four year war against American democracy, against freedom of expression, and against individual liberty, all, purportedly, in the name of “protecting” them. A no-holds barred war structured to disassemble the American polity by setting race against race, gender against gender, friends against friends and fracturing the concept of family in the name of “equality”; by reigniting the Cold War against Russia and China in the name of peace; by using the spread of a dangerous pandemic in order to destroy an unfortunately (for them) thriving economy, and, by installing the Orwellian concept of an antithetical ministry of “truth” (defined as “deception”) as the new normal.
The fury expressed externally may reflect a self-loathing at their inability to enthrone the Democratic Party’s monarch despite having utterly rigged the 2016 presidential election, both internally, to insure that notwithstanding profound popular rejection, she attain the prerequisite nomination, and then, by manipulating the other major party’s primaries so that a candidate she could defeat, notwithstanding her unpopularity, would be selected. But, while successful, such machinations proved inadequate; the federal system conspired to pull defeat from the orchestrated jaws of victory and the victor was the utterly unpredictable and bombastic Donald Trump. Worst of all, he turned out to be less inept as president than the Democrats had promised he’d be. Not that he has been a good president, at least as measured in the long term, but his many successes, although suppressed and distorted, were an unpleasant surprise. To make it clear, the author is not a supporter of President Trump nor will he be voting for him, the author is an avowed leftist, but a real leftist, not the kind trapped in the Democratic Party. He merely believes that opposition ought to be ethical and civil, that when credit is deserved it ought to be acknowledged, and that society ought not to be destroyed in the political process. Because of the foregoing he has been accused by family and friends of being a Russian stooge (at best). Hurtful, but, in the end, perhaps given the times, unavoidable. As a caveat, he confesses that he reads RT, a Russian news source (and finds it useful), but he also reads, on a daily basis, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Huffington Post, MSNBC, CNN, the Christian Science Monitor, Fox News, the Guardian, Al Jazeera, and numerous alternative news sites including Truthdig, Common Dreams, the Duran, Consortium News and the Medium.
The great Democratic Party defeat of 2016 made it clear to the Deep State that neither democracy nor liberty, nor freedom of expression nor peaceful coexistence could be tolerated in the future. The time had come for more direct intervention, for censorship and for large scale brain cleansing; the time had come to generate civic dysfunction using every tool available, especially the politicized judiciary at the district and circuit levels that the Democratic Party led Senate of 2013 had wisely planted when it changed the rules for judicial selection. However, the damnable law of unintended consequences stuck its ugly head into the fray and, adding even more frustration to fury, the GOP captured the Senate in 2014 and, with the unanticipated presidential defeat of 2016, the Democratic Party’s restructuring of the judiciary to ensure long term power was foiled. Harbingers of more political chaos in the future, it was the damnable GOP that selected new Supreme Court justices and judges at the district and circuit levels, and, as in a bad divorce, it was the citizenry of the United States that has been shamelessly battered and abused as a result. Chaos, in all its glory reigns for the nonce, with structured oligarchic order waiting in the wings.
So, where do we find ourselves as we head to the federal elections this time around?
As divided internally as at any time since the Civil War with no resolution in sight. Truth has become an irrelevant inconvenience dealt with by a deceptive corporate media on the one hand and multidimensional censorship of opposing voices on the other, censorship not only through lack of access to the corporate media but also by limiting contrarian access to social media Internet platforms (e.g., Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.). Even worse, by loosening an army of both carefully trained and supported and unwitting trolls on those who dare to share information critical of the Deep State, the Democratic Party or the corporate media by introducing information that contradicts their narrative. Foreign sources, especially having anything to do with opponents on the world stage are especially verboten. Leakers of truthful information are tortured, imprisoned or exiled (think, for example, of David Snowden and Julian Assange, the prometheuses of our age), with the focus shifted from the accuracy of the message to the origin of the messenger while planted and orchestrated leaks of misleading information have become omnipresent. Hyperbolic faux news reigns supreme, Hallelujah!
That’ll teach anyone to defy the Deep State and its money-to-power-to-money machine! And if it causes despair and misery to the citizenry, well it’s a hard but necessary lesson. “Democracy” in the United States was not meant to be populist and rebellious but rather, as our Constitution makes obvious, a ratification process for decisions made by our oligarchic masters. As the illusory Borg once exclaimed on television, “resistance is futile”, fortunately the Deep State’s resources are virtually endless and our attention spans and patience are brief. A happy coincidence. Manipulation should be easy, 2016 a mere aberration. We’ll soon learn and return to political docility, … or else!
From an academic perspective, analysis leads some of us to conclude that there is still hope for the populace, albeit barely, that perhaps resistance is not futile and that we need not reinvent the wheel to attain it. Some of us have come to realize that effective dictatorship does not require a one party state but can be even more effective in an illusory “democracy” limited in terms of real participation to two political carefully cast wholly owned actors, but that increasing the base of political participation to four or five actors makes control by the Deep State much more expensive and difficult, kind of like overloading an electrical current or in more modern terms, the Internet system, so as to render it ineffective.
We have the means, at least for now, at least theoretically, to liberate ourselves from political and economic slavery, but we may not have them for long. The maverick presidency of Donald Trump has woken the sleeping tiger of autocracy in the United States, not from Mr. Trump’s denizens but from his ironically and oxymoronically named opponents. But if we don’t act soon we may soon find that our window has closed. That is why we are subjected to the omnipresent crescendo of “lesser evil, lesser evil” until soon, evil will really be the only option as “not yet” morphs into never.
It may well be this November or never.
_______
© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2020; all rights reserved. Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.
Guillermo Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at www.guillermocalvo.com.
