"The various forms of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the People as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; by the magistrate as equally useful..." -- Edward Gibbon, "Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire"
Author's Note: There's something up with Blogger today, and edits to this piece were not immediately saved and published. It has been re-edited, and hopefully, the changes stick. Apologies for misspellings, grammatical errors and missing context.Exhibit C - Shooting the Horse
The American two-party system was infected with it's fatal disease when a certain man named Franklin Delano Roosevelt appeared on the scene. There are some who would argue that the infection began with his other brain-damaged and arrogant predecessors, Cousin Theodore and Woodrow Wilson, but Wilson's brand of "Progressivism" was little more than the malicious scheming of a very small and petty man, and Teddy's was something of an affectation.
As an aside, it is not surprising that "Progressivism" has come to mean it's exact opposite -- either the arrest or denial of Progress. Particularly if it is not politically or personally useful to the Progressive. You can tell by the way they talk. Every Progressive seems to have been programmed to utter an endless stream of word vomit that denies Progress, so that racism is still alive, slavery is about to return every 15 minutes, Jim Crow is still the law of the land, that abortions will be performed in back alleys, and all the evidence to the contrary that stares you straight in the face is dismissed as casually as one would swat at a fly.
Certainly, the American Republic could have survived the machinations of Wilson or Teddy.
But then came The Great Depression, or as I like to refer to it, The Day America Died.
I believe that Rahm Emmanuel, himself a vicious little prick, has been credited with coining the phrase "never let a good crisis go to waste", but it was FDR that originated the methods by which crises are utilized.
The People screamed "Do Something!" and so FDR did. But since his instrument was government, the results left much to be desired.
It has been said that when FDR collected his "Brains Trust" of lackeys, lickspittles and social climbers to implement the New Deal, that "they came to Washington to do good...but stayed to do well". Because there's always spoils in "doing something".
Take, for instance, the American Welfare State.
Far from being a program to "eliminate Poverty in America", it has become a huge public boondoggle that employs hundreds of thousands of slack-jawed, mouth-breathing, drooling, knuckle-dragging, unionized idiots selected through a "competitive exam" deliberately designed to be passed by a barely-literate monkey with Downs Syndrome and blindness in one eye. The mistake of adhering to this qualification is then compounded, because "fair", so the first hires come from the bottom tier of barely-passers and those who are given special privilege because their particular disability -- the wrong color, the wrong gender, or what have you, who are then rewarded with a Job for Life where skill, competence and intelligence don't mean anything.
In other words, people who would have otherwise starved to death by stupid or be the first to have been eaten by wolves if left to fend for themselves in a natural habitat run your country.
They are overseen by a variety of political appointees whose primary job is to collect a bigger paycheck, acquire more-prestigious titles, and then turn their government service into a personal goldmine in the private sector when they've finally sucked all the juice out of the taxpayer fruit.
There's good money, in poverty, you see...just not for the people who are supposed to be the beneficiaries.
In fact, I think it was Charles Krauthammer who said this, but if you want something to continue forever in America, just have the US government declare war on it (see: Poverty, Drugs, Terror). It's all a racket.
Take for another example one of FDR's crown jewels in the New Deal, the Centers for Disease Control.
The CDC began life as a government effort to eradicate malaria in the American South. It did this by spraying DDT everywhere, killing off malarial mosquitos. Nearly a century later, the CDC is still here, funding research in foreign nations in contravention of American Law, creating viruses that no one needed or wanted, which have killed millions with both infection and cure, and then engaging in a massive cover-up that has distorted the purpose and public view of Science, spread massive mistrust of the medical community, and damaged the sacred bond between citizen and government almost beyond repair.
And Anthony Fauci, the asshole at the center of it all, is beatified, turned into a hero and allowed to retire with a pension that would cause an Arab prince to thumb's up in approval.
Just take a look at all the FDR-era bureaucratic entities that still exist, even after having succeeded or failed in their primary tasks. The TVA was supposed to bring electricity to the masses; now it overseas dams made of coal ash; Social Security remains to ensure not that people are looked after in their old age, but rather as a means of controlling a vital voting bloc (much like Welfare, Food Stamps, and Affirmative Action do); FERA (Federal Emergency Relief Administration) morphed into FEMA, which exists to ensure that your relief will arrive long after its needed and never in the quantity required; the FHA (Federal Housing Administration) which doesn't house anyone and which runs a Ponzi-style mortgage scheme that profits government.
I could go on, but the FDR Presidency spawned, initially, 14 new federal agencies tasked with "doing something" that morphed into the conglomerate of fucktard we have today. And, naturally, those agencies all have their counterparts at the State, County and Municipal levels, as well, because if there's anything more-effective than a half-assed government program, it's a half-assed government program that washes money through four levels of bureaucracy before doling it out to those in need by the thimbleful.
That is an explanation, of sorts, for the structure of the dysfunction, but it is the effect of all this dysfunction that is the important part.
Because in relying on bureaucracy to solve problems there was a certain tendency to forget that this is a constitutional republic, where elected leaders who represent the will of the people are supposed to hold sway. The reliance upon bureaucracy and "programs" undercut the value and effectiveness of direct representation, so that Congress has become little more than a rubber stamp operation. When the government is prodded to "do something" it is not Senators and Congressmen who hash out the details. That means work -- this is left to the bureaucrats, who in turn present a list of alternatives and actions that are then cobbled together into bills that no one bothers to read. The bills are beneficial to the bureaucracy ALWAYS because, in the end, it is the bureaucracy that has decided what gets done, how much will be spent, where the resources are allocated, and who gets to do it all.
Naturally, the bureaucracy will.
And then they will create a slew of new problems for bureaucracy "to solve"
And this is the biggest issue with the modern political system. The people who we are accustomed to believing are the ones in charge are no such thing.
Presidents, Senators, Congressmen, even Supreme Court judges, are all temporary. The Bureaucracy is forever. And since Congress and even presidents have, over the intervening decades, delegated their authority and responsibilities to the Bureaucratic Behemoth, we should not be surprised when agencies that are allowed to write and enforce their own regulations on the fly, who fail to comply with Congressional Oversight, who will flagrantly flaunt the laws, come to control the government.
The Bureaucrats have become what the Commissars wanted to be: they effectively control not only the means of production (by regulation: what you can produce, how you must produce it, what you must pay your workers, and in some cases, what you can get for it), but certainly in the distribution, that is to say, how the output (represented in taxes and fees, tithes and tariffs, and so forth) is to be divvied up.
The American political system, then, is no longer about representation: it is a fight between two parties for the control of the levers of bureaucracy. To nudge the bureaucracy one way or another, if only temporarily, in order to influence the distribution.
If you see yourself living in a nation where the rich and connected get richer, the poor get richer, but your pockets are continually being picked, this is why. The rich and connected and the "poor" (I'll get to this in a moment) are rewarded for their fealty to a particular party, and in essence, to the Bureaucracy that party represents, that feeds and protects them.
You are either a client of government or you are on the menu.
As to "the poor": we don't have poor people in America. They have poor people in India, China, South America, the Middle East. No, we have a collection of captive voting blocs that has been steadily made dependent upon government for everything from food to shelter to medical care, and in return for this largess, there is absolutely nothing required of them...except that they perpetuate the system by continuing to live a lifestyle of sloth, criminality and bastardy, and then vote D.
Welfare Queens, Retirees, "oppressed" groups (new ones are invented every week), all yoked like oxen to pull the cart of Bureaucracy, all seeking sustenance and special privilege from Government. The idea of Natural Rights is now being replaced by a system of Entitlements and Grants of Privilege based on status and "identity".
See what the "Progressives" did there? They replaced the Plantation with a patchwork of "Programs" and then expanded the Slave Pool.
Knowing this, I say the American Two Party System, in its present incarnation, is dead. The horse went lame some time ago and is now writhing on the ground, waiting for someone to put it out of its misery.
The main problems in correcting this nonsense lie in the fact that the Average American is a fucktard, and a lazy one, at that. They don't realize that they don't get better because they don't demand better, or further still, go out and MAKE better. The citizen long ago abrogated his power, too.
The secondary problem is that any of the current "secondary" parties now in existence hardly qualify as such, and often what they advocate for is a more-dystopian future than the one we're presently staring at. There is no pitch that a libertarian (who only wants to get high without a hassle) or a Socialist (who only wants to get rich without having to work), or an Independent (someone who is only holding out for the better bribe) can make that either promises to fix this mess or which even appeals.
But even more-appalling than the system, itself, is the type of politician this system throws up; it is the sort whose actions are geared towards clients of government, and therefore, maintaining and nurturing the bureaucracy.
If one can first stomach the thought of the age of the hierarchy -- for every McConnel there's a Schumer, for every Grassley there's a Pelosi, for every vacant Feinstein there's a vacant Fetterman, for every dementia-stricken Biden there's a Trump that's not too far behind him (don't fool yourself: Trump played this system to get where he is) -- one has to consider how it is that such relics managed to survive, in the first place.
Then it gets worse, because one has to consider what comes after them. For the current crop of "youngins" in American Government leaves much to be desired, as well. While Laruen Boebert sluts it up in public, while Josh Hawley is busy making soundbites for YouTube, Ben Crenshaw is moving merch on Hannity, MTG grandstands as if she's actually done something, and the insufferably smarmy Matt Gaetz roleplays Cassandra with a string of ethics charges behind him, one look at the Other Side kills any hope that a solution lay there, either.
AOC is so insanely stupid that one wonders just when it was they gave scholarships to BU to piles of dog shit. Anyone associated with the "Congressional Black Caucus" is a living example of Darwinism in action. "The Squad" (or, as I refer to them, "The Squat") is reminiscent of Mean Girls. The Left's collection of douchebags from the robotically-fucktarded Ted Lieu to the shape-and-race changing Liz Warren to the phony baloney socialism of Bernie Sanders, all leaves much to be desired.
All of them, too, regardless of party affiliation or professed ideology, are products of the system as it currently stands -- each is a spokesdouche for a certain, often specific, segment of the massive government clientele.
This is where the Citizen is most-vitally needed. The System will not correct itself. Term Limits will not sort it all out (that's one of the dumbest ideas, ever, as I have explained multiple times here), the disease can only be cured by an informed citizen, who takes his role and his rights seriously, who is willing to do the hard work necessary to throw the bums out, and then to be hyper-vigilant for the next set of bums.
This doesn't change unless YOU are willing to make it happen. Get off your couch and go out and knock on doors; don't like the guy on the ballot, find someone else and do the work necessary to get him on it; don't like the policy, make your displeasure known (see what is happening with school boards all over the country). Don't rely on the crooks, the incompetent, to correct systemic defects that directly benefit themselves. Take back your power as a citizen of this nation. It will not be easy and there will be setbacks, but there is no other way out of this $30 trillion -- and counting -- hole with all the hot-and-cold running 3rd-grade-level discord you can take.
That may be the far tougher nut to crack.
Stay tuned.
You can read Part One here.
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