In a democracy, there is only one-way for a dictatorship to
happen, and that is for the people to vote a dictator into power. Nevertheless,
the reverse of that is not true. We cannot vote a dictator out of power for the
obvious reason, which is that if we have a dictator, we no longer have a democracy.
Therefore, once we have a dictatorship, the only way to remove the dictator is
through violence of some kind; civil unrest, or even international war to undue
the excesses of the person in power. However, I base this observation on the
formation of dictatorships on a superficial treatment of the their history,
using what seems to be the most egregious dictators: Hitler, Stalin, or Castro.
Lately, advances in communication technology such as the internet and social
media, the availability of more complete and detailed information of current
and past events makes it clear, a dictatorships evolves out of complicated social
events, either fabricated or “normal”. By normal, I mean political unrest arising
out of natural disasters, for example, the so-called dust bowel or the steady
increase in populations. Much more common in modern times is the fabricated political
crisis—lust for power by the group growing out of and archaic system of royalty
or the even more archaic system of religious dominance. Regardless one-person eventually
is identified as leader. A small group of radicals selects the leader to
dominate the disinterested masses: Fidel Castro, Hitler, Stalin, Saddam Husain,
al-Assad, to name a few. The route followed is varied but my major point is
there is a wide spread social movement of some description taken over by narrower
and narrower focused factions or groups and eventually taken over by one individual
or small groups of individuals.
We saw massive numbers of down trodden farmer-laborers take
over Russia and then went through individuals in the leadership-group struggling
for power with ultimately have one man dominating; I know of now female
dictator. We saw the German people, suffering from post war economic strife, struggling
between two polar opposite political faction; they chose a political philosophy
that “supposedly” represented the people, only to realize that party was under
the iron fist of one man. We saw poor people in Cuba disgusted by excesses of
the rich living in a glitzy style fall behind Castro, supposedly a man of the
people, but in reality, he formed a one-man dictatorship. Numerous examples of countries,
especially in the Middle East that were torn apart by sectarian religious strife
and end up the dominated by a robed cleric—a religious dictator—representing
only one of the sects. This pattern was repeated; a popular political party headed
by one small sub faction, that claimed to stand behind “all” the people but
really represented a minority, claimed the support of all the people and that
faction was dominated by one person. In addition to this pattern, there was another
common factor; they were truly minority leaders’ thus, found it necessary to
rule by terror.
The point is, in each case, the people who freely chose to
give up their “democracy” by complacency. Rule by terror did not happen until
they had lost their democracy; as I keep saying once you vote you cannot get it
back. They let it happen until it was too late to change it. We have a democracy
of which we are proud—can we keep it. We have two political parties: Democrats
and Republicans representing the majority of people in the United States who want
to have a mixture of socialism one side and laissez-faire capitalism on the
other, which is the principle on which our founding fathers built our country. However,
we have individuals within the Democratic Party who are radical and want to
move toward a more socialistic government thus move away from laissez-faire
capitalism. These people want the
government in their lives and are willing to pay for it. We also have radical
individuals in the Republican Party who want to move away from socialism and more
toward to laissez-faire capitalism; they
do not want to have government in their lives and are only willing to pay taxes
for what is for them. For two hundred fifty years, “we the people” have
been switching back and forth with the result that we are in the middle road,
which is the envy of the world.
I think I see something happening in America that has not
happened before. We have radical group tipping the scale to one side beyond
recovery. It is easy to point an accusing finger at the Tea Party, a vocal and
radical faction within the Republican Party. It is small in number but is
powerful, which is true but the Tea Party is only a small step in this wrong
direction. They have gained much popular acceptance by catering to the universals
desire of people not to pay taxes. The second, more dangerous step in the
tilting, in my eyes, is this radical faction’s manipulation of the constitutional
power of “advice and consent” given to congress. They have used their minority power
to take control of the federal court system including the Supreme Court. As loyal,
law abiding Americans we willing bow to the will of the Supreme Court, which
creates a non-reversible step in the tilting process. The third and most dangerous step in what is happening in our country
is that we have an extra governmental force, meaning a non-elected body, taking
control of that faction of the Republican Party. That faction is the plutocrats
in the United States. To date, they have manipulated the congress and courts
with impunity. They, as a group, ignore government attempts to regulate them by
defunding such agencies as EPA and SEC with the snap of a finger. They do not
pay taxes, they give themselves subsidies, and they create a climate of competition
among the states for the lowest tax rates, are destroying labors unions, and
destroying public schools as well. The list nefarious activity is endless; it
is like a snowball rolling down hill so large we will not be able to roll it
ups hill. We all know who the puppets are but no one outside their inner circle
knows for sure but it appears they have a leader, the Koch Brothers.
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