The public lack the intellectual ability that’s needed in order for an electoral democracy to work.

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

This headline will be widely misunderstood to mean that I am some type of elitist and hostile towards democracy, but I am neither, and my fundamental political belief is, instead, that democracy MUST be achieved. However, I am also a realist. Furthermore, elections aren’t the ONLY means by which a democracy might be able to be achieved, as I shall explain in this article. But first of all: I need to document what the headline here DOES assert:

An electoral democracy is necessarily subject to the public’s consent, but that consent is shaped by the news-media and the academic institutions and all the rest that have informed and misinformed the public about the news and about history; and, so, it is, as Walter Lippmann put it in his 1922 book (page 248) Public Opinion, a “manufactured consent”; and the “manufacturers” of that public consent — the few individuals who possess the actual control of the Government in an electoral democracy and thus determine the purposes that shape, mold, and ultimately create, its Government — are the billionaires who are the major owners of, and donors to, those corporations. These few, furthermore, are also the controlling owners of the political Parties, so that only the candidates whom they approve of — and therefore become the mega-donors to — can have any realistic chance to end up winning their Party’s nomination, and thus ultimately of becoming elected by the voters to federal offices. This is NOT a democracy; it is an aristocracy of wealth, which actually controls the Government — it is a Government of the public, by the billionaires, and for the billionaires; NOT “government of the people, by the people, and for the people.” It is a mere mockery of ‘democracy’ — NOT the real thing.

On 31 October 2018, three political scientists documented that the wealthiest 1% of the wealthiest 1% of Americans — the wealthiest ten-thousandth of Americans — donate 57.16% of all the money that funds U.S. political campaigns. The “Top 400 Donors” (all of whom are multi-billionaires, not merely billionaires) donate 29.86%, or virtually 30%, of all political money, in the U.S. But, actually: only billionaires (and an occasional mere centi-millionaire) who are among the ten largest donors to U.S. politics in a Presidential-election year, have any real impact in determining whom America’s next President will be. Only those ten ultra-rich Americans do. And, from one Presidential ‘election’ to the next, many of those ten people will be the same both times. All of the other 332 million Americans are their subjects, not any country’s “citizens” (except, perhaps, on passports, etc.). But America isn’t a kingdom; it’s an aristocracy. (Of course, some kingdoms are representing their aristocracy and/or their theocracy, but, in any case, America is an aristocracy.)

Two prior studies, one in 2016, and the first one in 2014, had already demonstrated that, as I headlined about both of them in 2018, “America Is One-Dollar-One-Vote, Not Really One-Person-One Vote.” The breakthrough first study, in 2014, was brilliantly summarized and explained in a 6-minute video here. So: anyone who says that America’s Government is better than other Governments because it is a democracy is either a fool or else a liar. This myth has, by now, become buried so deep that only a second American revolution might be able to resurrect it to some sort of reality again.

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. And the statement is true.) However, 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 — clear economic decline — for the bottom 25%. But to the liberal Buffett, that’s still “better than it ever worked” (even though it was lousy for the bottom 50%).

Trump (like Biden and Obama and Bush before him) fulfills ONLY the secret private promises he made to his billionaires — NOT the promises he publicly made to his voters; and this has been normal for U.S. Presidents ever since AT LEAST 1980, according to the empirical scientific studies that have been done about the matter.

Liberal versus conservative makes little real difference nowadays — it’s just liberal billionaires versus conservative billionaires, and NOT reflecting the priorities of the public — it is more of a difference in style, so as to distract the public from the REAL conflict, which is between the billionaires versus the public. They do it all the time: divide and rule.

On February 14th, the AP had 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.

On March 5th, the Jeff-Bezos-owned Washington Post headlined “GOP must cut Medicaid or Medicare to achieve budget goals, CBO finds: The nonpartisan bookkeeper said there’s no other way to cut $1.5 trillion from the budget over the next decade.” Though the CBO is ‘nonpartisan’ as between the Democratic and Republican Parties, it is (since both are) entirely beholden to America’s billionaires; and, so, that term there is deceptive. What that ‘news’-report is reporting is that the sense of Congress (even including Democrats there) is that a way needs to be found to cut $1.5T from ‘Medicare or Medicaid” (which, since only Medicaid, health care to the poor, is ‘discretionary’, Medicare is not) means cutting Medicaid over the next ten years.

On March 8th, ABC News and Yahoo News headlined “DOGE is searching through Social Security payments looking for fraud”. They’re not looking for fraud by the billionaires — including tax-fraud (which might be costing the Government hundreds of billions per year). And they are not looking for it in the only federal Department that has never been audited: the ‘Defense’ Department.

So, it is blatantly obvious that America’s ‘electoral democracy’ doesn’t represent the American people; it represents ONLY America’s billionaires. It’s no democracy. It’s an aristocracy

On April 8th, I headlined “Does every democracy corruptly degenerate into control by the richest?”, and I concluded that the answer is definitely yes. Electoral means will reliably degenerate into aristocracy, NOT be a democracy — not be a Government that serves the interests and priorities of the public. I recommended there the alternative means to achieve a democracy — a democracy that will STAY a democracy (WITHOUT any elections by the public — there would be no more political campaigns).

This is not to say that billionaires are more intelligent than the general public are (though that could possibly be the case), but it IS to say that political questions require in order for a person to understand them in a scientific way, far too much intelligence for the public to be able to understand them (and maybe also far too much for billionaires to understand) — but the public DOES need an authentic democracy — NO dictatorship by anybody.

Right now in America, we are heading even further towards dictatorship than we previously were.

On April 16th, Yahoo News and NBC News headlined, regarding a matter of central importance to all of the American people, “What happens if a president and the federal government fail to follow a judge's orders?”, and presented an article about what the legal procedures are in the U.S. if a President insists upon breaking a U.S. law, and what the relevant court precedents — court rulings — are in regard to this (“contempt of court” by a U.S. President). At the very end, it says that only one decision by the U.S. Supreme Court is directly relevant to it (and, so, this is the article’s “where the rubber hits the road” statement); and the authority that the article cites and relies on is “Nicholas Parillo, a professor at Yale Law School who reviewed data on thousands of court filings in an extensive 2018 article on contempt”; and here is that closing statement from the NBC News article:

“There are no opinions of the Supreme Court on the subject," he wrote. "When the courts of appeals hear a potentially relevant case, they usually dispose of it on narrow, case-specific grounds in a deliberate attempt to avoid the bigger and more portentous issues about whether and when judges can use contempt sanctions against the federal government."

In a 1911 ruling, in Gompers v. Buck’s Stove & Range Co., the Supreme Court described the need for courts to be able to enforce their orders through contempt but do so sparingly.

“The power of courts to punish for contempts is a necessary and integral part of the independence of the judiciary, and is absolutely essential to the performance of the duties imposed on them by law,” the opinion says. “Without it, they are mere boards of arbitration, whose judgments and decrees would only be advisory.

The justices warned that without the power of contempt, the authority of the court would be derided.

"If a party can make himself a judge of the validity of orders which have been issued, and by his own disobedience set them aside," the opinion warns, "then are the courts impotent, and what the Constitution now fittingly calls the ‘judicial power of the United States’ would be a mere mockery.”Though that NBC article failed to link to the Supreme Court’s case, Gompers v. Buck’s, that case DID, in fact, deal wth ALL cases of contempt of court in the United States, and so would likewise apply to cases against the President. Therefore, if a future Supreme Court were to carve out an exception for the President, then an explanation of what is false in it would be expected; and, if none came forth, then America’s ‘news’-media wouldn’t be able to hide the fact that its Government is a dictatorship; so, the Supreme Court would probably have to rule against the President, simply in order to uphold the myth that America is a democracy.

To provide here a summary of what Parillo’s article said about the matter, here is from Parillo’s summary of it on the first page of his 110-page article:

The Article makes four conclusions. First, the federal judiciary is willing to issue contempt findings against agencies and officials. Second, while several federal judges believe they can (and have tried to) attach sanctions (fines and imprisonment) to these findings, the higher courts have exhibited a virtually complete unwillingness to allow sanctions, at times swooping down at the eleventh hour to rescue an agency from incurring a budget-straining fine or its top official from being thrown in jail. Third, the higher courts, even as they unfailingly thwart sanctions in all but a few minor instances, have bent over backward to avoid making pronouncements that sanctions are categorically unavailable, deliberately keeping the sanctions issue in a state of low salience and at least nominal legal uncertainty. Fourth, even though contempt findings are practically devoid of sanctions, they have a shaming effect that gives them substantial if imperfect deterrent power.

In other words: the NBC News article has actually presented a strong case that at some point, Trump will have to bend to the will of the Judiciary power (the Supreme Court) — simply in order to keep up the myth that America is a democracy. Though there has never been a case in which the President himself has been held by the Supreme Court to have been in contempt of court, the only relevant case (Gompers v. Bucks) stated its conclusion in terms that applies to ANYONE, which INCLUDES the Executive Power (the President) itself.

Here is the most-popular — the most “liked” — of all of the 9K+ reader-comments at Yahoo to that NBC News article:

THE MOST-POPULAR READER-COMMENT:

Andrew

"What happens if a president and the federal government fail to follow a judge's orders?"... ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!! There will be a lot of wrangling and talks, but nothing will happen. Neither the courts nor congress have any way to enforce an order against the president since he controls all the levers of law enforcement. And, it may end up that the SCOTUS becomes so ticked off by the president's intransigence that they find ways to rule against him in case after case, but to what end if he ignores them? This is the problem the Supreme Court created in their immunity ruling: an omnipotent president with no way to restrain him, and, of course, congress has abdicated their duty to act as a check against the president, since the president now controls congress. Absolutely nothing will happen. The president wins.

LATER IN THE SAME DAY, IT WAS:

Ace

There is legal ambiguity in the SCOTUS ruling of "facilitate" a return. The lower court would be hard pressed to hold contempt off of that language. The SCOTUS did the administration a huge favor. The lower courts have no teeth on this issue and any action they try to enforce will be automatically overruled by higher courts.

Both reader-comments ignored the central relevant fact that the U.S. Supreme Court’s ONLY relevant decision on this matter was clearly favoring an enforced ban on contempt-of-court by ANYBODY.

These results are typical. Looking at reader-comments to thousands of online serious news-articles, I find that the vast majority of commenters misunderstand what they have read and are often even irrelevant to the article they think they’re responding to.

Furthermore: the same is true throughout the U.S. empire, such as in Germany.

Unlike many people, I believe that a person’s rights ought never to be dependent upon how intelligent the person is. I am committed to DEMOCRACY. I advocate it even if no one else does. And I have concluded, in my article “Does every democracy corruptly degenerate into control by the richest?”, that ONLY by eliminating elections and political campaigns can it actually be achieved. ANY Government that comes to power by means of elections by the public, degenerates into aristocracy (a dictatorship by the super-rich), as I explained in that article. The problem cannot be solved by improving the country’s elections.

Nor can it be solved — as libertarians or anarcho-capitalists propose — by “shrinking the size of government.” Those people don’t understand that capitalism itself is an economic system, NOT a political system, and that every economy presumes laws and thus government in order for it to exist at all. The libertarian view — that politics is based on the economy instead of vice-versa — is a big lie that is constantly spread by billionaires. ANY economy is based upon politics; a body-politic isn’t based upon an economy. Libertarians have it upside-down.

I haven’t here described what I propose to replace elections, but you can see that by clicking onto my “Does every democracy corruptly degenerate into control by the richest?”. If you wish to respond in the reader-comments, below, to that proposal (or else by email to me as is indicated there), I shall welcome your input.

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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.