cnelsen
Gold Member
- Banned
- #1
The daily release of thousands of hacked emails from an account owned by Democratic heavy John Podesta combined with a surreptitiously taped conversation in which a Democratic operative details the deliberate use of violence to help the Clinton campaign and its media allies build a case against Donald Trump should convince even the most resolute believer in the old American democracy that that America is gone.
Like the synthetic replica of Mao Tse Tung lying in state in Tiananmen Sq, the show of democracy we are presently enduring is only the outward form of what once was. Our democracy has been eviscerated by the usurpation of our free press. Americans can no longer regard the "watchdogs of democracy" as allies of the people.
And that changes everything.
How changed is our country? Consider, for example, the sanctity of the vote. Imagine what a system would be like if everyone believed his or her vote had no impact whatsoever, that the vote totals were worked out long before the election. In the absence of some coercive force or incentive, would anyone even bother to go vote? And even if they did, would the outcome of such an election grant any sort of real legitimacy to a government purporting to govern by the consent of the governed?
Hardly.
So what gives the vote legitimacy now? It has to be, at bottom, the widespread belief that our vote matters, that the votes will be counted somewhere and the count will reflect the actual results of the election to a reasonable degree. And that belief is widespread to the extent we trust the institutions that underpin our form of government: an independent judiciary subordinate to the rule of law, and a free press. In other words we have to trust the sources of our information, and, in the event that information calls for remedy, that we have recourse to it.
The Wikileaks dump and the O'Keefe videos together render that condition impossible.
