Is democracy dead in the West?
Have we driven the stake through the heart of our democracies?
1792 –1822
Ozymandias,
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
"History teaches us that the capacity for things to get worse is limitless." ~ Chalmers Johnson, American political scientist, author of Dismantling the Empire
We live In the dark age of conceited grandiosity, where politicians see themselves as all-powerful potentates ruling over all when they are no more than stooges serving the oligarchs all bought and paid for. The oligarchs because of their obscene wealth and grotesque agency see themselves as the final arbiters of how societies are defined. They are the predatory barbarians who see monetary greed and robbery as the only societal values necessary, and are more than willing to wage forever wars for their forever avarice.
Our failures as mankind originate in our refusal to address the challenges we must. We are more than willing to dance around the symptoms of the “disease” but loathe to name and act on them.
How would we feel if we went to our doctor and he or she listed off our symptoms but never named the disease or prescribed a curative? This is especially true in the world of politics where everything is symptomatic but solutions and progress elude us.
We cannot bring ourselves to name and address the ruinous ideologies destroying our societies. For a few examples: Imperialism, Militarism, Neoliberalism, Fascism, along with others. These are among the taboo words never to be uttered, rarely mentioned or discussed, highly censored left to rip through our societies smothering democracy and the norms of honesty, decency and civility.
There are dominating powers and vested interested determined to see the status quo is maintained to their advantage— damn the consequences however evil, degenerative and extinctive the end result may be. A degenerative and failing status quo is so easily maintained when war, social chaos, endless propaganda and cultures of fear and apathy prevail.
American Legal scholar and educator (1899-1977) Robert M. Hutchins like so many others warned us about the vulnerability of Democracy to forces so willing to corrupt and undermine it. As he says above its extinction is slow and incremental, not detectable by those not attentive to diligently guarding essential freedoms.
The great irony of the collapse of democracy is that its demise has been at the hands of those who are supposed to be its guardians and the apathy and indifference of its stakeholders, all victims of the time we live in and our eternal predisposition to indulge in human folly.
America has its share of the world’s great universities and world class scholars and academics, like Hutchins; but they are the great brain trust not allowed to influence government. They are banished from the mainstream and too often cast as dissidents when they are the true patriots. Crass politicians, oligarchs and vested interests run the country while the brain trust of wisdom and knowledge are spectators to the berserk spectacle.
This is the great rift at the very core of America’s existential crisis. Over a hundred years ago president Woodrow Wilson bemoaned the rise of the bankers monopoly, that was foreclosing the American dream.
Such countries are frozen in time as governments are emasculated by the vested interests controlling them. Where presidents and prime ministers see themselves as grand potentates they are mere lackey’s to the tyranny they serve.
In a world where science and technology were coming to dominate Hutchins was very alarmed that universities, as the seat of all learning, were being turned in vocational schools, merely prepping students to enter the corporatist capitalist business world. He strongly argued that a sound liberal arts education based on studying the humanities and classical literature was foundational to whatever career choice students made their after.
It is highly arguable that a contributing factor to the social chaos of today is in part a failure of liberal arts education— computer technology is no substitute for Shakespeare and our universities are more corporatized than ever.
I was so lucky as to grow up in the intoxicating freedom and affluence of the post WW ll years. Years later, when my real education began, I became aware of the dark clouds rising during those innocent times. The atomic bomb, the Korean War and the assassination of John F. Kennedy and too many others during the 1960’s punctuated the coming storm. Historical context is what gives events and issues their meaning and relevance. A wilful ignorance of history and the humanities stalks our societies.
Where the latter years of the 20th century marked the rise of empire, the 21st marks its decline as the homelands become hollowed feeding the maw of the empire and its voracious appetites.
The so-called debates of the recent presidential election between Harris-Trump were theater of the absurd politics, two toddlers in a sand box dishing our their invectives and lies. All in sharp contrast to the Kennedy-Nixon debates of 1960 when it was an intelligent debate on policies and issues with the questions posed by four independent journalists. With Biden banished to the hustings Harris proved once and for all she was not in the game. The debates took the measure of how far politics has degenerated over too many decades, where it is open season on graft and bribery.
In my waning years I feel my education is just beginning there is so much left to catch up on. I might see the spark of a return to a new a reinvigorated re-democratized West; but as it stands now it is a very bleak landscape. The vortex of imminent collapse is spinning out of control with no countervail to check its wars and chaotic gyrations.
The West is at a point of culmination known as the decline and fall of empire. After the fall becomes rebirth, renewal and a better model but only if we are open to it accepting the inevitable cycles of history, and the rise and fall of empires as dictated by the folly of those who construct them.
Shelley’s Ozymandias is very appropriate to our times. Economists Michael Hudson, Richard Wolff and others are expert at explaining our times. They are the true prophets of knowledge and wisdom, while politicians are the false prophets of the “higher immorality”.
Where we are so willing to blame our “enemies”on foreign shores they are largely fabricated nemeses to justify, more militarism, more wars, greater empires. Without doubt the historic record shows we only speak the language war where they are the peace seekers, building prosperity and a better world. They are older more mature cultures, who have had their fill of wars, revolutions, famines, and colonization. They recognize the essentiality of peaceful co-existence and global reciprocity.
We must see the world as it is, not how flagrant propagandists and despots want to manipulate it to their liking. We might consider the not so mighty West, so full of despair, has sponsored three world wars in just over a hundred years, and we are still stuck in the 20th century.
Those of us populating the West see ourselves as the champions of liberal democracy, but it has died many deaths over many decades. We can have democracy or empire but not both. Wars and militarism cannibalize nation states. We are seeing the death knell of 500 years of Western racist imperialism. The advent of Neoliberalism 40 years ago was the negation of social contracts between western governments and their populations. Now we see the end result.
As the East is building better tomorrows and a new world order (BRICS) the West continues to wage war on the world. In its unyielding denialism America and NATO allies refuse to acknowledge too many fundamental realities:
The West only speaks for 12% the of world’s population. China and the ASEAN countries are 30 % of the world’s population. China alone has four times the population of the USA.
You would think the West would show some regard for the huge differences in East/ West and show a greater regard for the rights of the majority.
Western despots cannot acknowledge they have spent trillions of dollars and murdered millions waging wars for the last 75 years. Now they are exhausted, morally and fiscally bankrupt.
China’s success is because they have a planned economy under government control, have focused on peace and prosperity and have poured billions into developing new industries and technologies.
The West has squandered trillions on war and militarism and governments are in corporate capture so they cannot plan progressive economies. They are no more than puppets to their corporate/oligarch overlords, trapped in the cycles of endless war.
Trump’s ramshackle government is ill-equipped to restore the Republic and predisposed to doing even greater harm. He and his cabal have a strong aversion to peace and reconciliation but this is the very agenda they must follow as a first step toward resuscitating democracy in America and its satellites.
“On the evidence contained in Coll’s book, neither the Americans nor their victims in numerous Muslim and Third World countries will ever know peace until the Central Intelligence Agency has been abolished.”—Johnson, Chalmers. Dismantling the Empire: America's Last Best Hope
What Democracy? The west is an echo chamber of oligarchy. Names like Bush, Kennedy. Cuomo, Cheyney, Trudeau keep repeating endlessly. Before long there will be more Trumps showing up too.
Was never democracy.
Democracy is dead? It never born Sir. And if it was growing somewhere, CIA and US/UK nazi imperialists have shut it down immediately with coups, wars and assassinations.
The democratic participation of people or elections are chump bait. History tells not me certainly. ;)