IT IS ONE OF the less quoted statements made at the Constitutional Convention by, perhaps, the most democratic and, in my opinion, wisest of that group of slave holders and financiers, Benjamin Franklin, who, after a paragraph in which he gave his very conditional agreement to the Constitutional system that was set up - he was especially suspicious of having a single chief executive, he favored a committee of three, a triumvirate as being some measure of protection against a dictatorship. His agreement to the Constitution was certainly not that he expected it was perfect or even safe, his agreement was expressed, not without some appeal to the bigotry of the majority of the Founders but in a modesty that I don't think was necessary. He could have just said, you're going to pass this thing whether or not I like it but I know Pennsylvania is likely to reject it if I don't acquiesce to it.
The second paragraph in his final speech to the Constitutional Convention identified the only real force that was a protection against despotism, The People and how he expected the Constitution would, with time, in fact fail.
In these Sentiments, Sir, I agree to this Constitution, with all its Faults, if they are such; because I think a General Government necessary for us, and there is no Form of Government but what may be a Blessing to the People if well administered; and I believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a Course of Years, and can only end in Despotism as other Forms have done before it, when the People shall become so corrupted as to need Despotic Government, being incapable of any other.
His capitalization of "People" is something I would gather he did in writing because it is not orthodox. As the only legitimization of any government comes by the consent of those governed, The People, it should always be capitalized in the honorary way that is always done when it is those dangerous servants of them, the president, the congress and, especially the supreme court.
We are in the kind of time he foresaw, right now, our having had the second Hollywood presidency of the fake, phony, corrupt, casino Nero Trump proves that.
I think that he did, in fact, identify the way in which a republic can be moved to devolve into a dictatorship, the corruption of The People, exactly the kind of corruption that the mass media brings, through lies, through addling an effective margin of voters through dishonest, propagandistic entertainment, through the cheapening of human and other life, the environment the encouragement of every vice from pride and vanity and envy and greed and racism and sexism such as has increased enormously since Hollywood and other entertainment fueled a backlash against the push for equality in the 1950s through the very early 1970s. The media, freed by the first Hollywood President, Ronald Reagan, was freed from every responsibility to give even a marginal proof of public service and the dive to the bottom of the cesspool was taken. Only there is no bottom to that cesspool that has been discovered, yet.
Those in the mass media who didn't do it because they consciously understood the relationship between the corruption of The People and that their interests in an anti-democracy was the same as those of Putin and other foreign dictator-gangsters, that it was in their financial self-interest to destroy democracy, those who didn't go through that thought process did it because pandering to the worst in us is very profitable. Money is the ultimate value in commercial media and, in fact, as NPR and PBS show, among the "non commercial" media. They sold out as fast as the for profit media sector did. Let's see if you find the irony in me saying that.
Franklin's, to some of us, startling statement, "when the People shall become so corrupted as to need Despotic Government, being incapable of any other," is and should be disturbing, it is the idea that a dictatorship is preferable to no government at all. I would put it differently, I don't think it's preferable, I think it's inevitable. When legitimate civil authority, authority of, by and for The People, based in the equal service to all The People on the basis of good will is absent the gangsters will move in and they will rule. The pipe dreams of the idiot anarchists and the wet dream of libertarians (right and play left) is a delusion that never happens. They, often in their snobbery (play left) and selfish bigotry (real right), imagine that they can have it all, the benefits of a regime of good will beneficial to them and an absence of any responsibility on their part to the general welfare and good, but that's not how life goes. We take the chance on an egalitarian democracy with our responsibilities to it or we get gangsterism like we will likely get when the Republican fascists game the system to destroy equality, to destroy common good, to destroy representative government through their rigging of the system Franklin was so skeptical of even as he acquiesced to its adoption. Will we learn anything from the experience such as we have not learned from George W. Bush's regime or that of Trump? Our "best and brightest" don't seem to have learned much.
Update: What's really ironic is that since I abandoned secularism I became far, far more radical than I was even eighteen years ago when I was already going too far for some of my fellow lefties at Media Whores Online and Eschaton and the other lefty blogs I commented on. I'm considerably to the left of the Marxists as they all favor gangster government while I favor making progress towards The Beloved Community and beyond that.
I respect what Liz Cheney is doing on the January 6th committee, I would guess that she is the designated truth teller about her Republican-fascist colleagues because the Democrats on the committee know that if they exposed them they would be widely dismissed by journalists, by the free press BECAUSE THEY ALWAYS DO DISMISS TRUTH TELLING BY DEMOCRATS. That is how that piece of shit Elon Musk will get away with calling the great Senator Elizabeth Warren "Karen" because she has the gall to want billionaires like him to pay their taxes. I'd go much farther than she will go and call for the abolition of all billionaires and millionaires by taxing them into a size that is not dangerous for egalitarian government of, by and FOR THE PEOPLE.
I respect what Liz Cheney is doing even as I am sure we disagree about pretty much everything else and I think her father was a war criminal who should have spent the rest of his life in prison.
The Gospel of Jesus is, as Walter Brueggemann pointed out, so radical that we can't make that jump into the "Kingdom" of "Thy will be done." That's not a passive construction because any will being done here and now will only be done by us doing it. Show me where any secularist out does that for a statement of radical aspirations.
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