Sleepless Night Thoughts

CRITICAL AS I AM, YOU SHOULDN'T SUSPECT that I think that everything about the United States is wrong, or at least wronger than, say the British system, though there are things that are certainly better under the parliamentary system even there.   And the Brit system with its baked in anti-democratic elements, many of those hold-overs of pre-democractic rule by the aristocracy is certainly not the best example of one.  

First, a way in which a parliamentary system can be better, as the history of the last decade of many terrible Prime Ministers being forced out BY THE MEMBERS OF THEIR OWN PARTY shows,  they have a way to do that.  Under our idiotically bad 18th century, horse and carriage and slow boat assuming slave-holder favoring Constitution,  we have gotten rid of exactly one of the many really, really bad and flagrantly criminal presidents in our history.   That one exception was when the WWII fighting, dictator defeating members of the Congress convinced Nixon that he would be impeached and convicted in the Senate - and it would have been with members of his own party voting to convict in the Senate.   A number of Republican Senators convinced him to step down.  THAT WAS THE ONE TIME IT WORKED, IT WILL NEVER WORK THAT WAY AGAIN.   WE WILL NEVER SEE A CONSERVATIVE PARTY IN THE UNITED STATES AS MORAL AS THE REPUBLICANS WERE, THEN.   And, notice this,  that one example was an example of the Constitutional myth of impeachment being short circuited NOT AN EXAMPLE OF THE CONSTITUTION WORKING AS IT, IN FACT, NEVER HAS AND NEVER WILL.  I make that prediction knowing that when my predictions don't work it's always in the past turned out to be better than I predicted.   Though I'm sure that Republicans now are quite capable of impeaching and convicting a Democrat in ways that they never would a Republican who is the worst and proven criminal president in our history SOMETHING WHICH THEY HAD TWO CHANCES TO DO DURING TRUMP I.  

Second is more speculative,   it is the suspicion that the American federal structure may somewhat insulate us from as easily slipping into centralized fascism,  power, at least theoretically distributed among the 50 states.   That is until some atrocity like the Roberts Court doesn't overturn even that basic structure of American government.   And the Roberts Court as previous courts, are entirely capable of overturning, distorting, totally turning black letter Constitutional content into the opposite of what it says using the mother language of lawyers, lying, to do that.  And under our system there is nothing that is going to stop them from doing it.  At least there might be some organized, governmental opposition to it.   In Britain, as the Starmer government is doing by making any dissent it chooses to suppress illegal,  in some pretty horrifying ways, across the country, the centralization of power in London is an example of how that might be accurate.   The laws it is shoving though right now, from what I can gather, would make even receiving information from disapproved sources NOT EVEN PUBLISHING IT, JUST RECEIVING IT, could be a major crime with a prison sentence attached.   Of course, as in the rest of the Starmer 

These are some sleepless night ideas that came to me as I turned over the appalling idea that is being floated in the Brit press - at least as big a sewer as the American "free press" if not worse - that the crypto-fascist-civil-liberties-lawyer,  Keir Starmer, now that he's been dumped as, perhaps the most hated and rapidly fallen Labour prime minister in history, should be made a chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court.  Can you believe Starmer would ever prosecute the worst of the Israeli criminals who did exactly the same things that got Nazis the death sentence at Nuremberg?    That would never happen, he's done everything he can to put Brits who point that out in prison for long terms.  That's one of the things that turned him from a guy who won an election to massively hated in two years.   Though since it's lawyers and journalists making the proposal to make that thuggish "civil liberties" lawyer-liar the chief prosecutor of the ICC.   I'm sure they have no problem with that idea.   When you don't care about the truth to begin with, nothing has to cohere.  And a totally free media will not, in large part, care about the truth. 

But all of that is secondary.   I don't have any idea that liberal democracy can survive because it lacks the equality that gives everyone a stake in protecting it from the ever increasing powers of organized wealth, technology and the ever greater media stultification of populations around the world.   Until equality becomes the foundation of democracy everywhere,  as long as lies are treated as being better than the truth by courts and governments, democracy will be in danger and that situation won't continue, it will die.  I guarantee that. 

This conversation about why Starmer fell is worth listening to.