Give Us Liberty

The 2016 election for dummies

by LAWRENCE SELLIN, PHD August 6, 2015

The two most important issues of the 2016 election are non-partisan.

(1) The federal government and the media are, as institutions, hopelessly corrupt.

(2) The United States has elections, but we no longer have representative government.

None of the problems facing the country can be solved effectively without first confronting those two issues. Without doing so, we are just kicking the can down the road toward national collapse and fragmentation.

Americans are no longer citizens of a republic, but subjects of a reigning oligarchy composed of a self-absorbed permanent political class, which services the interests of wealthy financiers at the expense of the wider population. They maintain their authority by an ever-expanding and increasingly intrusive government and using a compliant media to manipulate public perception and opinion in order to maintain the illusion of democracy.

The federal government is now an industry competing with the private sector, but unconstrained by regulation and the rule of law, which has inevitably led to massive and wide-spread corruption.

From the perspective of the oligarchy, elections are nothing more than an opportunity to redistribute power among select Democrat and Republican elites, who use the legislative process and tax revenues to increase the personal wealth of the ruling class.

There is no clearer example of the absence of representative government than the actions of the Republican Party after the November 2014 election. Despite the fact that the Republicans sailed to victory in one of the biggest election routs of the past century and grew to historic levels in the U.S. House, they never intended to honor their pledges to the voters, caving to Barack Obama and the Democrats on every major issue.

They do so to preserve their fragment of the political landscape as junior partners in a corrupt status quo; eunuchs and bold-faced liars, who represent only themselves and their major donors.

To maintain control of a timid citizenry that they wish to nurture, both Democrats and Republicans foster a culture of dependency. Democrats create dependency by expanding federal mandates and increasing entitlements. Republicans promote dependency by limiting voter choice and co-opting or crushing independent thinkers and grass roots movements like the Tea Party.

The policies of Democrats and Republicans are hardly distinguishable, both offering little more than sclerotic big government solutions designed more to limit, rather than expand, liberty.

Alexis de Tocqueville, author of "Democracy in America" (1835), predicted our current state of affairs:

"After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the government then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence: it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd."

Dominated by crony capitalism and political correctness and unaccountable to the American people, our political-media system is now characterized by executive over-reach, legislative complicity, judicial partisanship and journalistic decadence, where truth is treated like a tin foil hat and the Constitution is replaced by the conventional wisdom.

There is now a sharp division between the bipartisan ruling class and the rest of Americans; a separation between the rulers and the ruled that bears comparison to the conditions leading up to the American Revolution.

We are sleeping on a volcano... A wind of revolution blows, the storm is on the horizon. - Alexis de Tocqueville

Lawrence Sellin, Ph.D. is a retired colonel with 29 years of service in the US Army Reserve and a veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq. Colonel Sellin is the author of "Restoring the Republic: Arguments for a Second American Revolution ". He receives email at lawrence.sellin@gmail.com.