Hopeless Hopeless Hopeless

The myth of President as God King

The contemporary world of governance is badly fractured. We have the child version of civics and the actuality. We the People are the Sovereign but like a witless Lear are filled with sound and fury and permit liberties by hirelings to suborn our rule. So great is this abdication into our discourse creeps in a defeated bankrupt cynicism absolving We of responsibility. We are proffered words like Consider the President of the United States. Even though he regularly breaks every known check on his power, no one can stop him. He goes ahead and does whatever we want him to do anyway. The Congress has no power to stop him. '

After the Trump Presidency only a moron could assert or defend this thesis of the God President. Good scholarship secured earlier dates using family names, kinship groups, Capital, connections, all proving no Presidents are "Islands unto themselves. Each IS A PART of the MAIN.”

Governance is not by one man, one group, one idea. The governance is collective. A mind meld within the bureaucracy nurtured through time. Laws changed in a given Administration. If there is a through line then it begins at the beginning. As Jefferson wrote “A nation that wants to be Ignorant and free wants what never was and never will be.”. And Tocqueville thought that in democratic societies, where no one had a position secured by birth or aristocratic title, there was a strong tendency for people to become totally absorbed in the search for material possessions.

“Unfortunately, people who cared only about such things were apt to sacrifice their political freedom if it seemed like it might interfere with making a living, or at least to become apathetic towards their communities, concerned only with the needs of themselves and their own families. Tocqueville called this attitude “individualism”, and he thought that one of the best ways to fight it was through religion. Religion taught people that there were things in the universe more important than money, and encouraged them to lift their eyes beyond the petty concerns of daily life and concentrate on higher and more distant goals.

Organized religion could also help defuse the threat of religious fanaticism. Tocqueville was afraid that in a materialistic society, a minority of human beings, reacting in disgust against what they saw around them, would become religious fanatics and adopt extreme views. Rather than attempting to persuade their fellow citizens to look up to the heavens, they might attempt to force them to do so.”https://www.facinghistory.org/nobigotry/readings/alexis-de-tocqueville-democracy-and-religion

America is headed towards catastrophe and the absence of the alternatives to collapse by public policy are few. Government is unified by greed and power over others and the people seem divided on which hand holding the whip and ordering war on the installment plan is better.

Camus wrote: When a war breaks out, people say: "It's too stupid; it can't last long." But though a war may well be "too stupid," that doesn't prevent its lasting. Stupidity has a knack of getting its way; as we should see if we were not always so much wrapped up in ourselves