Democracy, a foolish idea

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You mean neither Obama nor Shrub had any children in cages?

Maybe I'm just old and bitter but my take on American politics is that its more like a Harlem Globetrotters Basketball game. Its not really a basketball game at all but a show. The Globetrotters and the Washington Generals are both paid by the same people and the outcome is always known. Same with Washington DC politics, both teams work for the same people (its not us) and the outcome is the same whether you vote D or R. Yes there are hierarchies, cliques, alliances but what the public sees in mostly theater.

well, I only learned about them with Trump - but I'm not American/living anywhere near the Americas, so I only get to know about stuff going on over there if it's salient enough for my news sources....

It seems to me more like professional wrestling. A lot of talking smack in the media, opposing alliances within face/heel factions, betrayals, switching sides...and then they all go to the same bars, laugh, and buy each other beers at the end of the night. The scripts are never perfect or completely certain, there’s a lot of improvisation, sometimes people get hurt and accidents happen, so the script has to change with circumstances. But they pretty much try to keep a steady focus and maintain the narrative.

Just like in pro wrestling, there’s no narrative when conflicts actually get resolved. The heel is bloody and barely able to keep going. Just when he gets pinned, his buddy crawls out from under the ring with a metal chair and takes out the ref AND the face. Heel rolls over and happens to drape his arm limply over the face just when the ref regains consciousness. Heel wins the world champion heavyweight title. The next week they have a rematch. Same script, except this time the face’s buddy knocks out the heel’s buddy after the ref gets knocked out. He gets in a fight with the heel. Face and ref regain consciousness about the same time, ref sees face’s buddy knock the heel out with a chair, face gets disqualified. Face loses shot at title, but this results in a yearlong feud with factions fighting other factions, cheating, disputed wins, rematch after rematch, interference and disqualifications, and even scandals involving “wives” and “girlfriends” getting caught in bed with the enemy. Every little infraction will be settled “once and for all” in the ring. And when one of these superstars faces the ultimate disgrace, they either quit or they get fired, and new drama starts afresh.

Pro wrestling is just soap opera with too much testosterone, and I do love soap operas, too. On the soap “The Bold and the Beautiful,” Brooke has passionately meddled in the relationship between her stepson and her daughter, even to the level that she INSISTED that Hope forgive her husband Liam for cheating on Hope with Brooke’s stepdaughter Steffy, YET Brooke shows shameless hypocrisy when she meddles in her father-in-law Eric’s marriage to her enemy Quinn who she has just discovered being unfaithful—Brooke, btw, was formerly married to Eric who she shares an adult daughter with. All of this started when stepson Thomas, her husband Ridge’s son with Brooke’s rival Taylor, bumped his head and began hallucinating that a mannequin that looks just like Brooke’s daughter Hope was real and was talking to him. Hope’s husband Liam saw Thomas kissing the mannequin, assumed it was Hope, cheated on her with Thomas’s sister Steffy, which led to a pregnancy scare.

The problems aren’t meant to be resolved, hence the drama in soaps and pro wrestling. It captivates an audience, heightens emotions, and gives people something to tweet about. You want to see abject HATRED on the internet? Search #boldandbeautiful on Twitter sometime.

The EXACT SAME THING happens on the political stage. Politicians can gauge through social media when audiences’ eyes are glazing over. Audiences are perhaps more predictable than storylines. There was no real need to go on lockdown or mask up during the Biden Flu epidemic. Insisting that people do so generated drama and offended people’s sense of freedom and individual rights. Elections have been won and lost over lesser things than that. Democrats have gotten quite good at kicking the healthcare, race, and victim class identification cans down the road while Republicans have made entire careers out of reacting to it not unlike gamer YouTube and Twitch channels. The public buys it, too, and party is irrelevant. It’s a scripted game, and you pick who you’d rather cheer for. Maybe you like underdogs and you vote for losers. But you don’t vote for problem solvers. The question of healthcare was supposed to be settled once and for all with Obamacare, yet it actually CREATED problems, plus not enough people wanted to vote for Clinton but nobody wanted to run against her, either. Trump solved many problems through executive actions but was held up by his own people in Congress. He was a problem-solver, and problem solvers ruin careers of people who thrive on problems existing. This is not a plug for Trump, btw...I just mean that many of his voters voted on his campaign promises which he immediately set to work on and successfully delivered for these voters. Settling feuds does not keep audiences watching soaps, pro wrestling matches, or politics, and Trump preferred to control the script. George W. Bush was adept at staying on script and tweaking it to his advantage, but his goal was never to sweep it away entirely. Trump wanted to completely rewrite it, and that threatened too many Republican career politicians. There are Republican pols who’ll never recover. Biden sticks to the script like it’s porn or something, and as long as Republicans still have something to complain about, Biden will EASILY get his 4 more years. And Republicans don’t want the next four years because they have nobody to run. Trump was our last hope.

So if you follow the script, you know what’s coming next. Biden will get four more years. So over the course of these eight years, Biden will come out as the COVID King, national hero, etc., but will suffer some crisis after his final midterm if not sooner. Might be something economic, who knows...might be something manufactured by his own party that ONLY Democrats can handle, might be some scandal that Republicans blow up to high Heaven. I doubt he’ll face impeachment. But it will end with Republicans not having a strong candidate at the end and the election of another Democrat campaigning on promises of fixing problems the country inherited from Trump. Or Bush, even. Whatever. And the public will lose interest, there will be another disease, terrorist attack, economic crisis, or even a war, and Democrats will run out of options with whoever follows after Biden. A conservative messiah will swoop in, save us all, and we’ll probably get a couple of one-termers beyond that and eventually get a period of Republican dominance. But it won’t be any of the usual suspects. Their day is done, and I’m talking about people like Jeb Bush, Mitch McConnell (who might have been an excellent president 20 years ago), Ted Cruz, Kasich, Huckabee, Paul, or Santorum. They’ll be long gone and the next strongest Republican potential probably hasn’t even graduated high school yet.

You know what? When that kind of two-term Republican gets elected, I bet he’ll be a former starting quarterback for a SEC team who double-majored in drama and political science before earning his MBA and then getting accepted to law school, working his way through city council, mayor, state legislature, senate, and eventually POTUS. He’ll take all the time he needs to learn the script and make friends. He’ll get the top job in the country because nobody else wants it!

AngelRho, I agree completely. Your Pro-wrestling analogy is perfect!

Well, we've only got "representative" democracy, not the real democracy the Greek chap originally had in mind where everybody got a vote on every issue (except the slaves ). And "representative" democracy isn't all that representative. Government is formed by a first-past-the-post system, usually disenfranchising just under half the voting population, and then does what the hell it likes for 5 years, usually acting pretty much the way any corrupt, self-serving group might be expected to act.

I'm not saying proper democracy is particularly great either. I don't relish the thought of a bunch of Sun readers having a say in every law. I strongly suspect there's no system of government that would be very good.

Well, you don’t want to think that your life might be disrupted or controlled be either a majority or a coalition of minorities that have absolutely no relevance in your own culture or way of life. As it is, the overarching, general way a republic is run empowers the majority while making sure that minority interests aren’t outright crushed or persecuted. In the US, the use of secret ballot is designed to protect people with opposing ideas from persecution. In reality, what happens is people publicly voice their support on issues and candidates, which in turn causes people who keep their mouths shut to become marginalized.

There was a time in American history when the media didn’t make public appearances or use their real names. There was only the exchange and dissemination of ideas, and people didn’t have to fear for their lives to say what they had to say. Now it looks as though people WANT to be known for controversy and TRY to be persecuted for their beliefs. There’s a reason I don’t identify with my real name on the internet with the exception of Facebook.

I suspect a country is too large a group to enjoy the comfort that consensus would bring. Possibly that's one of the attractions of small communes that try to collect together a group of like minds to live by agreed, shared values, and I sometimes think the only way to resolve the immense dissatisfaction people tend to have towards their leaders would be to cut the nation state down into small, autonomous villages, though even that isn't without its problems.

I suppose you're right about governments protecting minorities. Although recent leaders such as Trump and Boris have shown a disturbing contempt for anybody of different views, there have always been checks and balances built into the system, and one way or another even the most extremist leaders don't get it all their own way. Otherwise by now there would be no benefits system left in the UK and the NHS would have already been given away to private enterprise. Things do gradually swing to the right or left over time, but it's a slow process. There's usually a lot of back pressure from somebody who's strong enough to apply it.

Sure, there are problems with that, but I’d be ok with it! Before Lincoln, the USA was plenty happy being a Republic still in touch with its confederate roots. Bringing the US under total, centralized, federal control was one of the few mistakes Lincoln together with Republicans made back then. If Lincoln could have succeeded earlier with his initial plan for reconstruction, would that have staved off his assassination? I’ve always wondered if Lincoln’s death wasn’t actually a Republican conspiracy.


I have no love at all for “minorities” save the smallest minority of all: the Individual. The only defense I have for Trump is he reflected similar values to my own in that regard, and there is never any need for anyone to respect the views of others.

Having said that, it is destructive to persecute others for disagreeing. You aren’t obligated to give them a microphone or allow them in your house, but you can’t hunt them down, either. There is a need for a system that allows dissenters a voice without exposing them to victimization, hence why secrecy is important in tandem with checks and balances.

The back pressure I worry most about is not from the majority, but rather from minorities whose power is drawn from a permanent victim status. No one should have to live in fear of rules that serve minorities at the expense of everyone else any more than they should fear the whole world is against them. The problem US citizens face is that policies are driven by minority interests for the sake of those people belonging to minorities. All I have to do is claim some special status, take things before an appeals court, and I can do whatever I want at the expense of everyone else. Doesn’t matter who I am, either. As long as there is a balance of power among the executive, judicial, and legislative, neither the majority nor minority have anything to be afraid of. As of right now, SCOTUS is SLIGHTLY right-leaning, Congress is playing on the teeter-totter, and the executive looks like a deer caught in the headlights. If you don’t like Trump, you could still at least say you knew what would happen tomorrow and make plans accordingly. When two branches of government are too afraid, unwilling, or unable to act, you have a level of uncertainty that makes things needlessly difficult. At present, I’m wondering if that many people actually know Biden is president. Doesn’t seem like much is really happening out there.

And in large parts of the U.S., minorities (or anyone else who *could* vote Democratic) are disenfranchised by voter suppression laws and the War on Drugs (which was really the War on Blacks).

Only supporters of Bernie and the Squad support a European-style system. I don't know where moderates stand.

Conservatives would never go for it because many European countries (Germany and Sweden in particular) have anti-hate speech laws and strict anti-discrimination policies, which to them means that white people and Christians are being "persecuted", and that those nations are one step away from "legalizing pedophilia".

What “voter suppression” laws? If you mean immigration, then fix immigration. People who aren’t eligible to vote should not have a voice in government. I don’t want foreign citizens making decisions for ME. I don’t want criminals making those decisions, either.

Closed borders don’t really make much sense, and they don’t really make things better for the US. If people want in, let them in. Don’t give them special favors, but don’t keep them out, either. Mexicans have a marvelous advantage over US citizens: Low cost of living and abundant resources IN Mexico. All they lack is money. Working seasonally in the US to support family in Mexico is, no sarcasm here, a genius move. Believe me, if I thought I had any chance of getting residence in Mexico and avoid the cartels but actually WORK in the US, I’d move my family to Mexico TODAY. Or Belize...I’ve only ever heard good things about Belize. Closed borders and convoluted, recondite immigration laws are stupid. Anyone who wants to build this country up and improve my quality of life can come over any time. They can eat dinner at my house. My wife makes great spaghetti.

I have my doubts as to whether drug laws actually target blacks unfairly, though. That’s a cultural thing. How do you change a culture that’s built on violent behavior? Well...I think we immediately have to rule out genocide. I’m going to stop my reply just short of trying to answer that question, but all I can say is that if the same anti-drug laws apply regardless of race, then what is it about black communities that drugs and violence are as prevalent as they are (evidenced by the disproportionate incarceration of black people)? Either you fix the culture, reduce penalties, or legalize drugs (that’s the one I’d vote for). Once you legalize drugs, though, you have to mop up the mess of addiction. You basically have to legalize self-destruction. If this is entirely cultural, could you live with setting a large ethnic group up for mass suicide? I’m less concerned about that, but could YOU live with yourself being a racist?

Strip all complexities away and ---

Democracy is the only system (such as it is) where the rights of the individual are placed above the rights of the government.

There are democracies better and worse, but consider the alternatives

Well, sure.

- But there are a surprising number of people who want desperately an autocracy.
For these it would be so much better if there were no decisions to be made, and so no responsibilities.

For some, an autocracy would be comforting, like being snuggled tightly. Freedom for these is a burden.
For others, an autocracy would feel like being crushed. Freedom for these is the breath of life.

Not sure there's no going back. Historically, England was once pretty much a dictatorship, with nonsense such as the Doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings, and yet here we are today with a certain amount of people-power. Exactly what conditions caused the change, I don't know.

I'd be less against autocracy if we had somebody like Gandalf running it, but that's not going to happen. Instead it would be a self-serving parasite, either immediately or after a while. It's a shame though. Imagine having one dictator who was fair and just, cutting through all the wrangling, stopping all the criminals using loopholes, lifting everybody out of poverty at a stroke, organising our resources according to what's needed the most. Sounds almost like socialism, except run by a committee of one with no checks and balances.

Good points and hope yer right.
This whole contest today is the Enlightenment vs. the thousand years preceding

The cages were constructed during the Obama administration.