How We Got Here

[George] Mason had other objections to the Constitution.  He disliked the commerce power, the treaty-making provisions, the continuation of the African slave trade for at least twenty years, and the power of the president to grant pardons especially "to those whom he had secretly instigated to commit" crimes and "thereby prevent a discovery of his own guilt."  These complaints about the Constitution were magnified by the lack of a Bill of Rights.  Mason feared that the Senate and the President would combine "to accomplish what usurpations they pleased upon the rights and liberties of the people,"  while the federal judiciary would absorb and destroy the judiciaries of the several states."

Paul Finkelman:  James Madison and the Bill of Rights:  A Reluctant Paternity

George Mason was certainly right about much of the above, what else are we seeing but a criminal president who is shielding himself and preventing the exposure of his crimes in cahoots with the most anti-democratic parts of the government, the Senate and the Supreme Court and all in good Constitutional order.  He was wrong if he thought that merely adding a Bill of Rights, especially the "freedom of the press" was going to effectively end the dangers that he, correctly and with great foresight saw in the Constitution.   I think it would have been impossible for him to understand the power of modern mass media to corrupt The People, to make them stupid and superstitious about politics and government.  He might have been able to imagine the decades long smear campaign against Hillary Clinton but he certainly didn't think that a Supreme Court would give an effective grant of that power to smear and lie with impunity using his beloved concept of total press freedom - perhaps he, as I have, naively believed that no one was so deranged as to believe there was a right to lie so absolute that even someone as lied about as Hillary Clinton would be blocked by the Bill of Rights from clearing her name.

Paul Finkelman has become one of my favorite historians of the United States, I have read and re-read many of his articles and find he is both thorough and penetrating in his analysis of the primary documentation.  I am sure he would disagree with some of what I have concluded about the deeply flawed Constitution but not so much on the deeply flawed men who wrote it and adopted it.  

That quote from Einstein, found in the article I linked to about Xavier Zabrini's philosophy has lodged in my mind because I think it gets to the bottom of what is wrong with so much of our attempts to deal with the unprecedented disaster that the Trump crime spree has been.  "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them".

But what else have we been doing but trying to solve the serial disasters that the Constitution has brought us in the past twenty years with the same thinking that got us here?  What got us here is the ability of the media, the "press" to elevate Donald Trump, a real-estate gangster and thuggish goon to become president of the United States and the very Constitution as interpreted by federalist fascists has kept him there and which could reimpose him on us - never forget he got in, as Bush II did on the power of the Electoral College, losing the popular vote. 
 
George W. Bush imposed against the very act of counting all of the votes by the Supreme Court in one of the most outrageous acts of judicial politicing in our history.   He was maintained there by the acquiescence to that outrageous act by the loftiest organs of the media,  The New York Times, the Washington Post, the broadcast networks and all three of the cabloids (MSNBC not having cultivated it's "liberal" image so as to effectively compete against the others) and, lest it be forgotten,  National Public Radio and PBS.  

Donald Trump is a 100% creation of the "free press" a geek show huckster and snake oil fraud and con-man whose entire persona is a construct of what the "free press" did with the raw material of the Dudley Dursley style soul rotted by his vile parents.  He's only one of a number of those, the Republican caucus in the Congress is full to the brim with them.  

It is one of the things that has impressed me with how the billionaire oligarchs have done this, through the "free press" through social media, and I know they did it with the hired help of lawyers, media professionals, public relation professionals, etc. who have absolutely no qualms about working to destroy democracy as long as they get paid a enough to do it and who probably wouldn't be bothered much about democracy disappearing.  You can have a rather pleasant life under even the worst dictators for a while, if you have no morals or conscience.   

They are certainly doing what the civil liberties soaked supporters of the Constitution are not doing, learning the lessons of their mistakes and successes.   The next time they will do it even better than they have now, and they've played the civil liberties champions and devotees of absolute free speech for total and complete suckers as they remain stuck in the very same thinking that got us here, to start with.  They have to, it's right there in the Bill of Rights as interpreted by the Supreme Court in line with the role that we allowed them to assert for themselves, the right to be the final word on what we must do, whether by 5-4 decision or by whatever majority on that court says.  

That failure to learn from history, to learn from even our own serially imposed experience of the disasters we have endured for the past twenty and fifty and two-hundred years is going to destroy egalitarian democracy and with it any meaningful right to free speech and free press. I can think of nothing that more effectively refutes the regard that our elites hold themselves and their modern, science informed rationalism than the spectacle of the United States devolving into a crime gang governed oligarchy.   Trump has, obviously, given away any claim the United States has to world leadership to Vladimir Putin and the gangster crime family that rules Saudi Arabia and whatever other gang of criminals who can dangle a real estate deal in front of his piggish face.    That Trump is certainly the stupidest person to have ever been president, Taft was an intellectual titan, by comparison, is absolute proof of how we got here.

We, the People, entertained to death by The Apprentice and other ersatz "realities" presented on TV, made stupid and ignorant and decadently stupid by entertainment media have been led here by clever people playing on our strongest weaknesses, our conceit, our love of pleasure, our appetites, our greed, our suspicion of the least among us, of "others" and, not least of all the same regional resentments and interests that plagued the founding of this country.   And that, my fellow countrymen, was done through the free press - as the movies, TV and the internet are so deemed to be - the strongest force in the forming of character in the modern world.