Democracy In The United States Is Dying (VIDEO)

When the United States achieved sovereignty, the circumstances of their independence were without precedent. After all, a haggard bunch of farmers (with a lot of help from the French) successfully fended off highly-trained soldiers in service to an empire on which the sun never set. When building this new nation, British intellectuals suddenly free of their mad king took to task establishing a “just” means of legislating, drawing heavily from the writings of John Locke, Immanuel Kant, and David Hume, among others, to establish the philosophical approach to the government in the infant nation for which they were tasked with care.

But, no ghost was more influential in the establishment of the United States government than Greek philosopher Plato, whose 2,000 year old text, Republic, still to this day holds both literary and scholarly merit, especially when it comes to politics.

The core of Republic is “just” politics and the nature of justice. The democratic system in which we operate, in Plato’s view, is considered an “unjust” system of government. Plato’s contribution to the establishment of the United States’ system of government — the democracy — is in the philosopher’s views on democracy, which he considered a fairly unjust system only slightly more favorable than tyranny, for the establishment of democracy in the United States was done in true philosophical fashion — refutation of the idea.

Plato’s views were explicitly called out in the Federalist Papers by James Madison. Plato and his contemporaries viewed the populous with skepticism, concerned that the human tendency to react emotively contributed the evolution of an unjust society, whereas Madison and his contemporaries, philosophically fueled by Locke, Kant, and Hume, were more concerned with public rule than a hierarchical system, which they viewed as tyrannical.

Considering the prevailing view that the governed should be the ones governing, a view that is practically the embodiment of Enlightenment era political philosophy, it makes sense that the architects of the infant United States would choose a system like democracy, which imbued in the governed the power to govern. A government by the people, for the people. Every other system violates the “natural rights” of the people within it. Even the United Kingdom, who once ruled with a far-reaching monarchy, has placed nearly all of its legislative authority in Parliament — a bicameral body similar to the one the United States has.

But democracy in the United States appears to have been placed on the back-burner in favor of another system Plato viewed as unjust — the oligarchy. In Republic, the oligarchy precedes the democracy, consisting of class division between the wealthy and the poor, with the former being the nation’s administrators. Money is considered more valuable than virtuousness and justice, prompting the wealthy leaders of the oligarchic state to alter the law, and ultimately the society’s views, to accommodate and endorse the material lust. Reason gives way to emotion and the need to satiate emotion. The emphasis on making and maintaining money in the oligarchic state contributes to the widening of the chasm separating the wealthy and the poor, further filling the coffers of the former while depleting the latter.

The oligarchic state is a government by the wealthy, for the wealthy.

In the United States, the government is largely composed of wealthy administrators, either through personal wealth or campaign wealth or both, who seek to maintain both their positions and their wealth through the manipulation of law. Supreme Court decisions in Citizens United v. FEC (2010) and McCutcheon v. FEC (2014) opened the floodgates for campaign finance, increasing the amount of money flowing into political coffers and influencing the outcome of elections. Income inequality is the highest it has been since just before the Great Depression, with the top 1 percent of Americans having more than 20 percent of the overall wealth in the nation and the middle class suffering from wage stagnation and union busting. The cost of doing business has been re-branded as the cost of being alive as even basic necessities like shelter, food, communication, and transport becoming more and more expensive while the wealthy administrators work to slash assistance programs for the poorest among us in favor of dropping that money in the military budget.

Reason has been pushed out in favor of emotional responses and opting to legislate devoid of reason is the common thread weaving through the tapestry that is the corruptible, ineffectual United States government. Partisanship produces gridlock and political smearing, while the populous is either too dumb, too lazy, too apathetic, or too gullible to see through it.

Despite assurances from James Madison in the Federalist Papers, and the Enlightenment ideas of Locke, Kant, and Hume about the efficacy of the common man governing himself, it appears that in the United States, at least, Plato’s concerns about democracy in Republic have manifested themselves in the state referred to by many as “the greatest democracy the world has ever seen.”

Classical philosophers would not see the government of the United States as a democracy, but as an oligarchy.

Featured image by NY, via Blue Diamond Gallery, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported  license.

h/t Raw Story

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