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Mock the Vote October 31, 2008 Jesse
Ventura, when he’s not talking about 9-11, makes a lot of sense. Describing
the two party system to Larry King, he said: “[W]hat you have today is
like walking into the grocery store and you go to the soft drink
department, and there is only Pepsi and Coke. Those are the two you get to
choose from. There is no Mountain Dew, no Root Beer, no In
an interview with Newsmax, he described politicians in the two party
system as pro wrestlers. “In pro wrestling, out in front of the people,
we make it look like we all hate each other and want to beat the crap out
of each other, and that’s how we get your money, [and get you to] come
down and buy tickets. They’re the same thing. Out in front of the public
and the cameras, they hate each other, are going to beat the crap out of
each other, but behind the scenes they’re all going to dinner, cutting
deals. And [they’re] doing what we did, too — laughing all the way to
the bank. And that to me is what you have today, in today’s political
world, with these two parties.” Jesse’s
right. Our political system is a farce. This year, we have running for
president a warmonger who’s a reluctant socialist versus a socialist
who’s a reluctant warmonger. We have two parties that claim they’re
different, but when the Establishment, the Complex, our shadowy overlords,
whatever you want to call them, really want something, they get it. When
the Establishment wanted the Bailout in the face of almost universal
grassroots opposition, they got it. When the Complex wanted immunity to
the telecoms who knowingly spied on Americans, they got it. When our
shadowy overlords wanted stormtroopers to brutally stifle protesters
during the party conventions, they got it. But
even if voters had a real choice, and even if the politicians followed the
majority will on issues that matter, the system would still, most likely,
be a farce. As Augustine observed, without justice, a government is
nothing but a band of thieves. Augustine was writing about kingdoms, but
his insight applies to democracy as well. Without justice, the ability of
the subjects of a government to vote on the laws and rulers that govern
them doesn’t make a government any more legitimate than an unjust
monarchy. And the founders of this country did not believe democracies
were likely to be just. As
Walter Williams points out, “We often hear the claim that our nation is
a democracy. That wasn't the vision of the founders. They saw democracy as
another form of tyranny.” In Democracy: The God That Failed,
Hans-Hermann Hoppe notes “It is difficult to find many proponents of
democracy in the history of political theory. Almost all major thinkers
had nothing but contempt for democracy. Even the Founding Fathers of the In
order to create a just government, the founders established a
constitutionally limited republic, in which the popular vote was to be
just one check among many. Notably, the word democracy does not appear
anywhere in the Constitution. Yet
today, the word democracy is sacred. As Election Day approaches, Americans
dutifully watch inane debates, respectfully watch commercials in which
celebrities harangue them to “rock the vote” or other such nonsense,
and compulsively ask each other who they’re going to vote for. On
Election Day, they go to the polls as if they were receiving Holy
Communion and then go through the rest of the day wearing “I Voted”
stickers as if these stickers were ashes on Ash Wednesday. Pat
Buchanan calls the blind reverence to and awe of the seemingly divine
force of democracy “democracy worship.” He notes it was the prospect
of spreading democracy to the So
how did we get from the founder’s deep suspicion of majority rule to the
deification of democracy? Once,
humans lived in small bands and were free. True, life was dangerous, but
no one told you what to do. As Philip Jackson explains, “Men might hunt
individually or in groups. But when they cooperated, leadership was not
based on official rank, but rather on one hunter proposing a group hunt
and recruiting others to follow him. None were compelled to follow,
however, and different hunts might have different leaders based on the
relative charisma of different individuals at different times. Women
needed even less coordination. With them leadership would be more a matter
of the wiser or more skilled giving advice as the need arose.” Then
came the great collusion, followed by the long oppression. As humans
increased in number and food became harder to come by, bands became tribes
and tribes became chiefdoms. Big Chief, hungry for power, convinced the
high priest to delude the people to his consent. Big Chief was divinely
appointed, they were told, and maybe even divine himself. Therefore, the
people must do what he says. Murray
Rothbard (1926 to 1995), economist, historian, and political theorist, was
one of the greatest minds of the 20th century. Perhaps Rothbard’s
greatest achievement was his identification of the Court Intellectual. In
contrast to the masses, who “do not create their own ideas, or indeed
think through these ideas independently,” intellectuals are society’s
opinion shapers. The Court Intellectual is the intellectual who, “in
return for a share of, a junior partnership in, the power and pelf offered
by the rest of the ruling class, spins the apologias for state rule with
which to convince a misguided public.” Until
recently, the propaganda put out by the court intellectuals was linked to
traditional religion. To quote Rothbard again, “Particularly potent
among the intellectual handmaidens of the State was the priestly caste,
cementing the powerful and terrible alliance of warrior chief and medicine
man, of Throne and Altar. The State ‘established’ the Church and
conferred upon it power, prestige, and wealth extracted from its subjects.
In return, the Church anointed the State with divine sanction and
inculcated this sanction into the populace.” In the West, the myth of
the divine right of kings held sway until the Enlightenment. According
to Keith Preston, “A principal achievement of the Enlightenment of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was the demolition of the notion of
the divine right of kings.” The word enlightenment may conjure up images
of a man sitting in the lotus position on a mountaintop, at one with the
universe, but in regards to the time period, enlightenment refers not to
mystical insight but to the realization that much of the received wisdom,
including the myth of the divine right of kings, was a pack of lies. With
the courage to question the lies and disseminate their conclusions, the
writers of the Enlightenment began a revolution in thought that culminated
in the Declaration of Independence. Unfortunately,
at the same time they were knocking down one pillar of the Old Order,
another writer, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, was planting the seeds of democracy
worship. In Rousseau’s mystical vision of a society governed by what he
called the “general will,” each of us would put “his person and all
his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will, and,
in our corporate capacity, we [would] receive each member as an
indivisible part of the whole.” The resulting sovereign, “being formed
wholly of the individuals who compose it, neither [would have] … nor …
[could] have any interest contrary to theirs; and consequently the
sovereign power [would] need give no guarantee to its subjects.
In his imagined world, “[t]he Sovereign, merely by virtue of what
it is, [would] … always [be] what it should be.” According to James
Bovard, who calls Rousseau the “modern state’s evil prophet,”
contends that in promoting his concept of the “general will,” Rousseau
“unleashed the genie of absolute power in the name of popular
sovereignty, which had hitherto been unknown.” Rousseau’s
concept of the general will proved irresistible to future court
intellectuals, as it perfectly conflated society and state, as useful
trick indeed. “With the [subsequent] rise of democracy,” Rothbard
wrote, “it is common to hear sentiments expressed which violate
virtually every tenet of reason and common sense: such as ‘we are the
government.’ The useful collective term ‘we’ has enabled an
ideological camouflage to be thrown over the reality of political life. If
‘we are the government,’ then anything a government does to an
individual is not only just and tyrannical; it is also ‘voluntary’ on
the part of the individual concerned. If the government has incurred a
huge public debt which must be paid by taxing one group for the benefit of
another, this reality of burden is obscured by saying that ‘we owe it to
ourselves’; if the government conscripts a man, or throws him into jail
for dissident opinion, then he is ‘doing it to himself’ and therefore
nothing untoward has occurred.” Observing
the power of “the myth that says we are governing ourselves,” Lew
Rockwell notes that whereas “[k]ings of old would have been overthrown
in short order if they had tried to grab 40 percent of people's earnings,
or told them how big to make their toilet tanks, or determined how schools
taught every subject,” modern Americans “turn a blind eye to petty
tyrannies in our midst.” As Bovard comments, it is as if “[b]eing
permitted to vote for politicians who enact unjust, oppressive new laws
magically converts the stripes on prison shirts into emblems of
freedom.” Wise
up, Voltaire,
the undisputed leader of the Enlightenment, used humor and wit as two of
his primary weapons, and, as Robert Ingersoll remarked, “In the presence
of absurdity he laughed…” It
was largely by making the divine right of kings a laughing stock that the
Enlightenment writers destroyed it. It is time for us to do the same thing
to the divine right of the majority. This year, vote laughing or stay home. David Heleniak
is a
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