THAT IS THE rich white men who framed the Constitution and staffed the government in the early years before, first, the "Jeffersonian Revolution" swept the Federalists aside in 1800 and then the "Jacksonian Revolution" did even more so which brought less rich and even poor white men into the realm of power. And in doing so in many cases they disenfranchised such Black Men as who had the vote in several of the several states.
I remember the day about eighteen years ago while thinking through some issue to write a piece to post at Echidne's blog it came to me that the biggest fault in American democracy, what had doomed it from the start was the fetishization of "freedom" under inequality when equality was, actually, the genuine foundation of decent government.
I've noticed in the same period after me noticing that that a number of others in my reading and hearing, Marilynne Robinson, David Bentley Hart, etc. have also noticed that there is a basic problem with the widespread notion under liberal democracy of libertarian freedom, the kind of "freedom" which so many idiots of my generation fetishized under the sway of the "civil liberties" industry and infantile libertarian scribblers, directors and producers in the post-literate lore of entertainment and the media. Flower-child freedom, a largely upper-middle-class and elite class fad was just a continuation of that fetishization relieved of even the minimal requirements to uphold what was taken to be affluent respectability. That's not something that was unknown among the truly affluent, especially for white males who have always enjoyed the exploitative pleasures of the demimonde while enjoying the trappings of respectable propriety - which included them exploiting, cheating, robbing, maiming and killing Poor People, the Destitute and members of minorities. I never had much use for the hippies who, in so, so many cases went right from that fad to becoming the most bloodthirsty capitalists as it gave way to Nixonian greed and the mounted for distraction nostalgia marketing of the 1970s.
It is really stunning how the use of a word to mean quite different things can blind even and, perhaps especially, those with college-credentials to even the most glaring differences. I would propose that few other areas of language hold more of those terms than the American style discourse surrounding alleged virtues such as "freedom" and, now, "rights". Our Constitutional system is built on the exploitation of such differences of, by and for the privileged, the affluent, those whose skin color and gender and last names give them an automatic advantage over those who they can freely exploit, rob and destroy. I think that if I looked hard at the career of Little Bobby Kennedy I'd see that in all of his "lefty" lawyerly activity that was the end result of it many more times than not. I recall that about the same time as that revelation of the difference for democracy between "freedom" centered thinking and non-thinking and equality, I outraged a number of so-called liberals and maybe even some lefties on the blog comment threads by calling Alan Dershowitz an advocate of torture who plays a civil libertarian on TV. I think that in many cases, certainly among those who staff the "civil liberties" industry, that that is the case in more instances than not.
It isn't to be marveled at that such a slippage in the connotation and denotation of the ideas surrounding "freedom" and "rights" is of little concern to those in the scribbling-producing-directing-acting classes, both writers and the stupider professions among those. Freedom without responsibility to even distinguish between the truth and the most flagrant of lies has been a professional boon to all of those. Even among those whose public persona and, perhaps even actual part-time commitment, the stuff of their PR operation there are many like that, those who would never entertain the idea of making the media liable for even life destroying lies because it might lead to Hollywood making married make-believe couples sleep in twin beds again or some George Carlin from saying seven words on stage.
It is stunning how even those who have understood the past two decades enough to understand the role that lying in the media has played in destroying even the flawed "liberal democracy" that Americans have had instead of real, egalitarian democracy, will not take that step into admitting that that lying in the media is going to destroy it all. Around the world liberal democracy is under attack and, in more cases than not, billionaire cleptocrats targeting the equivalent of our indigenous fascists, the white supremacists, are winning. And lies in the mass media are what is doing it for them, lies about money, lies about race, ethnicity, religion, GENDER, especially gender and race is what is doing it. But I have yet to hear a single media figure or alleged defender of democracy among those hand-wringing bemoaners of the death of truth admitting that the vague 18th century poetry of our First Amendment is the problem here. Elsewhere such notions exist in other words, though in many places they never much went for such poses.
The American Constitution with such privilege and inequality embedded into it and the legal apparatus that grew under it is a guarantee of the eventual destruction of "liberal democracy" here. The rich-white-guys who had a hippy style fashion for notions of democracy and republican governance sort-of, for a time, wanted to have that so long as they could retain their privilges. They knew they'd have to install the privileges of those of their class in other towns, counties and states to be able to pull that off, so, they installed those for their fellow rich-white men. The Southern states, especially Georgia and South Carolina, blackmailed them into privilege slave-holders and they and those in the lower population states among them insisted on instilling other corruptions of inequality into the thing, the Electoral College and the anti-democratic Senate. Even when they had gotten that ratified, they weren't done with the rigging of things, there is no accident that the infamous gerrymander which gave Republican-fascists the House was an innovation of such as the framer Elbridge Gerry who John Adams eulogized as a good, moral and upright man.
In the United States we are seeing what I think was an inevitable consequence of the corruption baked into our Constitutional system, corruption that has only increased under the Supreme Court distortion of meaning with it and, not infrequently, especially now, in direct violation of the words contained in the Constitution out of legal habit and outright lying from the bench.
In my less optimistic periods, I doubt that anything like a real democracy will survive because getting over the lapse in meaning of the words used to think about these things will prove impossible.. Certainly the media will do everything it can to make sure equality and so any real democracy never happens. It can count on the petty levels of privilege allowed to poor-whites, working class and lower men and the women associated with them and its protection against those who are no danger to it will keep the billionaires and their hirelings in power. That is what the FOX Lies-Joe Rogan phenomenon is all about. Keeping the oligarchs and aristocrats, the billionaire plutocrats in power is aided in nothing so much as the basic cowardice of those in the majority-ethnicity working class and the working poor who know it is dangerous for them to attack their real oppressors, the rich, opting, instead to kick down instead of up. That has been in place since the first aristocrats encouraged the racism of the underclass almost as soon as they got here and started rigging things for themselves. The myth of the reliable revolutionary underclass is an absurd fantasy dreamed up by affluent, college-credentialed lefties. Revolutions have such a way of keeping things exactly as they were at best and generally worse off than before. I have little faith in such story-telling, anymore.
But the stakes are so high that it is a self-indulgent and corrupt privilege to give up the fight. I'd rather get killed by the white supremacist-Republican-fascists than give up. I'd rather die fighting than in front of a trench I'd been made to dig or against a wall. I'm certainly not going to go for that greatest indulgence of the college-credentialed class make me surrender, calling me names. Our untellectual class are such a bunch of incel like boy and-gal cowards.
