Democracy

2 June 2025, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

doesn’t and never has existed, but political theorists ignore the empirical evidence on this (which is, for example, overwhelming that America is NOT a democracy of the people, but is instead an aristocracy of the extremely wealthiest few), and they falsify by saying that America is a democracy because it has elections — but so too did Germany have elections when it elected Hitler in 1933. Elections don’t necessarily produce democracy — rule by the public instead of rule by only the wealthest. Political theorists don’t know anything, but merely pretend to, because their theories are based on philosophers’ opinions, instead of upon the relevant empirical data (evidences such as were just linked-to above) — political ‘science’ isn’t yet actually a field of science, but of the humanities, which includes philosophers but no scientists. (The empirical works in political science — such as I linked-to there — ARE scientific, but the theoretical works aren’t based upon them, so the field isn’t yet a field in the sciences.)

The BBC respondent who tried to correct the almost universal misconception that Hitler was not a product of democracy that comes from elections was correct when saying:

“The plain fact is that Hitler was elected in 1933 on a popular vote and from then on went from strength to strength with the full backing of a clear majority of the German people. He would have undoubtedly won with a massive majority, had he not so despised democracy, even as late as 1943 and was strongly supported by the German people to the end.”

For example, on 20 August 1934 the New York Times headlined its lead story “HITLER ENDORSED BY 9 TO 1 IN POLL” and reported “Eighty-nine and nine-tenths per cent of the German voters endorsed in yesterday's plebiscite Chancellor Hitler's assumption of greater power than has ever been possessed by any other ruler in modern times. Nearly 10 per cent indicated their disapproval.”

Anyone who thinks that democracy can be achieved via elections and political Parties competing (to deceive enough voters so as to win power) is naive if not stupid, because the billionaires end up spending enough money to ensure that their political candidates will win — even if this means pitting many of the billionaires’ candidates against each other. The public are simply deluded by the political theorists and by the propaganda from the billionaires’ ‘news’-media, to think they live under a democracy — a Government whose policy-priorities are the same as the public’s policy-priorities are. In a country where the Government’s policy-priorities are controlled by the billionaires instead of by the public, that is a dictatorship by and for the billionaires, not a democracy by and for the people. Since the policy-priorities are by and for the billionaires, it is a dictatorship BY and FOR the billionaires, and is therefore NOT a democracy by and for the people. The extent to which a Government is a democracy is the extent to which the Government’s policy-priorities are the same as the public’s policy-priorities. The extent to which a Government is a dictatorship, is the extent to which that is not the case.

Back on February 25th, I headlined “It’s time to fire President Trump.”, and documented the following example of this fact in the American case (the fact that America is a dictatorship):

On February 14th, the AP headlined “Where US adults think the government is spending too much, according to AP-NORC polling”, and listed in rank-order according to the opposite (“spending too little”) the following 8 Government functions: 1. Social Security; 2. Medicare; 3. Education; 4. Assistance to the poor; 5. Medicaid; 6. Border security; 7. Federal law enforcement; 8. The Military. That’s right: the American public (and by an overwhelming margin) are THE LEAST SUPPORTIVE of spending more money on the military, and the MOST SUPPORTIVE of spending more money on Social Security, Medicare, Education, Assistance to the poor, and Medicaid (the five functions the Republican Party has always been the most vocal to call “waste, fraud, and abuse” and try to cut). Meanwhile, The Military, which actually receives 53% (and in the latest year far more than that) of the money that the Congress allocates each year and gets signed into law by the President, keeps getting, each year, over 50% of the annually appropriated federal funds.

An important point to be made here is that both #s 4&5, Assistance to the poor, and Medicaid, are “discretionary federal spending” (i.e., controlled by the annual appropriations that get voted into law each year), whereas #s 1&2 (Social Security and Medicare) are “mandatory federal spending” (i.e., NOT controlled by Congress and the President). So, Trump and the Republicans are going after the poor because they CAN; they can’t (at least as-of YET) reduce or eliminate Social Security and Medicare. However, by now, it is crystal clear that Trump’s Presidency will be an enormous boon to America’s billionaires, and an enormous bane to the nation’s poor. The aristocratic ideology has always been: to get rid of poverty, we must get rid of the poor — work them so hard they will go away (let them seek ‘refugee’ status SOMEWHERE ELSE).

Trump is increasing the military and border security, and decreasing education, assistance to the poor, Medicaid, federal law enforcement, and even Social Security and Medicare (the latter two by laying off many of the people who staff those bureaucracies). This Government’s policy-priorities are like the public’s turned upside-down — in other words: are the REVERSE of the public’s — and therefore the U.S. Government right now is a perfect example of a dictatorship. One might say that this is so in only the Executive branch, but it’s not necessarily true: As always when one political faction (regardless whether it it is one Party or a coalition of Parties) has control over both the Executive and the Legislative branches of the Government — as now the case in the U.S. — these two branches function as one, and there then will even be a totalitarian dictatorship if they can get the Judicial branch or Supreme Court to call it “Constitutional.” Currently, the U.S. is slipping from a dictatorship towards a totalitarian dictatorship; but America has been a dictatorship ever since at least 1980.

As the liberal (Democratic Party) wing of America’s aristocracy said, in the person of its Warren Buffett, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” (He told this to the conservative Ben Stein reporting in the aristocracy’s New York Times, under the headline “In Class Warfare, Guess Which Class Is Winning”, on 26 November 2006, but that newspaper won’t let readers access the article online, and instead prefer to charge anyone who seeks to see whether or not the quotation is authentic — it is. And the statement is true. But the 31 March 2019 issue of Forbes headlined “Reimagining Capitalism: How The Greatest System Ever Conceived (And Its Billionaires) Need To Change”, and reported: “‘America works, and it works now better than it ever worked,’ Buffett says.” Better for himself and other billionaires, that is. But not for the bottom 90%, and it worked lousy for the bottom 50%, and still worse — economic decline — for the bottom 25%. But to the liberal Buffett, that’s still “better than it ever worked.”

Liberal versus conservative makes little real difference nowadays, but is more of a difference in style, so as to distract the public from the REAL conflict. They do it all the time.

And, as I have documented previously, and in a number of different ways, this deceit about democracy is the norm throughout the nations that call themselves “a democracy”. Political theorists ignore it because they ignore the empirical data, but democracy doesn’t exist and probably never has existed. (Of course, for the billionaires, it is very convenient that political theorists ignore the empirical data and build their theories on philosophers’ opinions instead.)

Nor can one rely upon some alleged means of policing the truthfulness of the news media, because those media are themselves controlled by billionaires — not only by owning them but by having the other corporations that they control advertise in them, and thus funding the media in both ways.

The basic problem is that elected Governmental officials have actually been s‘elected’ by the billionaires who had funded their political careers by being the mega-donors to, and the controllers of the corporations that advertise in, the ‘news’-media so as to control what the voters will know, and thus how they will vote in those ‘democratic’ ‘elections’ (that are actually billionaires’ s‘elections’). I have further documented this problem here. At the end of that article, its last link is to my proposed solution to the problem.

To merely continue on the path toward which we are heading is unacceptable. The billionaires, left to their own devices, will not change their ways. An off-ramp from the present system must be taken now; and the only real question is: which one, and where to? Those are the two questions addressed in these two articles (each one of which contradicts the virtually universally-believed myths about what the term “democracy” fundamentally MEANS: re-DEFINING that term is crucial in order in order to get out of this rut.

The basic “rut” is that elections by the public in political campaigns that inevitably are contests by billionaires-selected nominees who are competing against each other to deceive voters the most, cannot produce a democracy: only a political system in which the Legislature and the Executive (head-of-state) are ordinary people — NOT EVEN POSSIBLY selected by some aristocracy or by any theocracy — can it be even POSSIBLE for an actual democracy to exist. Democracy is impossible on any other basis. Anyone who doesn’t want that basis, doesn’t want democracy. Perhaps they want rule by some sort of ‘God’s People,’ or else rule by supposed geniuses (such as the first fascist, Plato, advocated), but aristocracies have ruled for thousands of years very comfortably with both sorts of excuses to ‘justify’ their tyrannies. Both sorts of excuses are supported by aristocrats in order to deceive fools to accept their rule, or the rule by their chosen agents. And that’s not, and never was, the path toward democracy. It is the path toward tolerating and ‘justifying’ continued tyranny.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.