The United States wants to liberate the world from tyranny whether the world likes it or not. The current United States government, a neoconservative government sometimes loosely referred to as a fascist-style government (OED: right-wing authoritarian government) would destroy all those sovereign nations that are “on the wrong side of freedom,” thus freeing the world for exploitation of the “free” market dominated by the United States and its allies. All that would be accomplished in the holy name of democracy.

Of course religious democracy has never been adequately defined to everyone's satisfaction, although it has been claimed by almost everyone modern to be the best form of government.

“Chaos,” stated the historian Guizot in La Democratie en France, is now hiding under one word – democracy. This is now the ultimate and universal word all seek to appropriate as a talisman.” Furthermore, “Such is the power of the word democracy that no government or party dates to exists or believe it can exist without inscribing that word upon its banner.”

Still today we find the word democracy mouthed by some of the most repressive regimes known to humankind, if not actually emblazoned on the titular banners of their states. On the left, the Marxist-Leninist conception of the elite dictatorship of the proletariat was democratic inasmuch as it was a prelude to the abolition of class rule and the realization of a utopia of democratic freedom. On the right, even Hitler played the democratic game, especially just prior to the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch – both German Nazis and Italian fascists presented their movements as higher forms of democracy when the cooperation of industrial labor was wanted. More towards the center, we recall the German democratic socialists who forfeited their internationalism. Even Muslim theocracies have been called democratic.

The most liberal definition of democracy has not been fully realized anywhere in the world, including in the United States of America, where paranoid enthusiasts sincerely believe their country to be the very apotheosis of democracy and hence the highest civilization in the world. Effective political democracy in the United States is impeded by the absence of social-economic democracy, which is anathema to the plutocratic power elite. Universal suffrage, the essence of political democracy, obtains in the United States; yet the comfortable majority of voters, not the adult majority of voters, maintain the democracy for the wealthy. Relatively contented voters are more than adequately represented by the affluent class who preside over business and its federal, state and local governments, and the mainstream media, while the underclass is underrepresented and considers voting an act of futility. Hence U.S. democracy sanctions poverty, homelessness, hunger, illness, bad education, drug addiction, crime, and so on.

Another hindrance to effective political democracy in the United States is the political ignorance cultivated by its pragmatic schools, not only the ignorance of the general population but also the ignorance of the dumbed-up or stultified power elite, who are resting on their molding laurels, so to speak, believing that classical liberal education, whose object is liberty, is inutile, not only for the people at large but for themselves as well. After all, who needs a liberal education now that we have been liberated by our democracy and by our high technology? And who needs history now that we are the living-end of history, capable of solving everything social by divine intuition if not by scientific thinking?

Another hindrance to democracy in the United States is its traditional imperial aims, its urge to conquest. The North American War for Independence was in fact a civil war fomented by traitors and supported by a small minority of the population: less than ten-percent, including those who bore arms. If the question of independence had been democratically voted up or down by all adult residents, there would be no United States as we know it today. Studies have shown that the cause for treason was predominantly economic and not political. The objectives were seizure of sacred private property, repudiation of debt, and the abolishment of British taxation for the protection of the life and property in the colonies.

If the truth were to be told, even if it seems to insult human nature, we might say that the expansion and settlement of the United States was led by a violent minority of ruthless criminals organized for the purpose, criminals whose crimes included theft of lands and mass murder. That is, the American set of Chosen People, frustrated Old Testament Jews, in possession of gunpowder and the manifesto of Moses’ guilty conscience – the Ten Commandments – seized yet another land promised to them by their instinctive greed.

However that might be, students of history almost unanimously agree that war and democracy are antithetical. War is international anarchy. Victory in war relies on brute force, secrecy, deceit, abuse of human rights, and dictatorial leadership. Revolutionary democracies have proven to be tenuous at best, and are soon overthrown by a Napoleon, a Hitler, a Putin. But the United States, in accord with its grand delusion of grandeur, would free the world for its brand of democracy, and it would do so by using its powerful military machine to reduce tyrannical orders to chaos. But prolonged dictatorships would be required to achieve any sort of democracy where it is not wanted; and such a democracy would be one in name only. This is not simply the liberal or left perspective: it is a conclusion shared by the conservative right.

For instance, Carl Schmitt, a German father of American neoconservatism, believed that English-style, constitutional liberalism was corrupting the world and would have to be set aside by a militant German dictatorship. Schmitt, a German New Conservative, was the German doctor of jurisprudence who provided the Nazis with legal justification for Hitler's suspension of constitutional law under his dictatorship.

While English liberalism would strike a balance between individual liberty and the state order, thus protecting people - first of all the capitalists - against state encroachment, German "liberalism", following Hegel and Napoleon along neo-Roman lines, held that individual freedom is only found within the state order. Therefore it follows that the state should be magnified as an imperium or reich presided over by a succession of Kaisers (Caesars or Tsars), who would conquer and incorporate the world, thus liberating the barbarians for the New World Order. That sort of "liberalism", sometimes associated with "Caesaristic" or "popular democracy," is anathema to the liberal philosophy of the English Whigs, John Locke, Alexander Hamilton, Louis-Phillipe of France, and others, whose liberalism constituted government without democracy, or freedom without democracy - the United States was not founded as a democracy nor is it yet fully a democracy, hence the ongoing "revolution with the revolution." A government so constituted that it guarantees certain civil rights is not necessarily democratic.

Early Roman dictatorships were legally established to meet emergencies; the powers of dictators were strictly limited and they served for a brief period of time. However, as warfare become more constant, Roman dictators, backed by their armies, cast off their limitations, including the Senate, until the dictatorial power was virtually absolute. True conservatives have struggled to conserve the principles of liberty against the encroachment of dictators since those Roman times; Cato the Younger, the ascetic Stoic, being the model for true conservatism. Today's neoconservatives are called "so-called" conservatives, or "pseudo-conservatives" because, despite their pretention to higher moral ground, to democracy and liberty, and to limitation of government, they tend to exercise their power arbitrarily, immorally or amorally, all to the expansion of government, particularly militant government, while consolidating power among the modern, almost invisible aristocracy - the power elite. A real sort of democracy only exists among the power elite, who control the general populace - the range of goods consumed, the politicians voted for, the designation of enemies, et cetera.

The politico-religious, either/or fundamentalism and right-wing authoritarianism intimated by the U.S. neoconservative administration, the members of which preach an intolerance for ambiguity attributed to the F-type or fascist personality, reminds us of Schmitt's modern elaboration of the ancient notion that, in times of crisis, constitutional law must be superseded by the arbitrary law of a supreme dictator.

The German New Conservatives, whom American neoconservatives study but rarely mention by name since fascism became politically incorrect, were moved to respond to a crisis which they attributed to liberalism and its despised Weimar democracy. The L-word, and not "democracy", was the key dirty word, associated not only with English capitalism but with communism - both were supposedly Jewish conspiracies. Hitler, claiming he was doing the general will of the German folk, espoused popular democracy in opposition to constitutional democracy, as if he were yet another Kaiser (Caesar) or Caesaristic dictator. Hitler's admirer, Mussolini, who switched from socialism to fascism, also saw himself as the people's tribune, and roundly denounced Liberalism in several speeches – nevertheless, a British intellectual said that Mussolini was one of the most "liberal" leaders in world history.

The fact that many Nazis were atheists or pagans was inconsequential as far as Schmitt was concerned. He believed political thought evolved from religious thought, therefore there exists a natural identity of religious and political thinking. In other words, ideologies are political theologies. Neoconservative politicians, for example, who speak of "one nation under God" cannot call God for a witness, and are in effect deifying the state. Modern ideologies are in large part perverted religions combined with perverted politics. The purpose of politics, as Schmitt saw it, was to distinguish friend from foe and to kill the foes.

The fascist ideology of might-makes-right sets action above and before thought, which is a reflex justifying the action taken in the name of God or State or Folk and the like abstractions for doing whatever one wants to do in the first place. Fascism was, and still is, anti-ideological and anti-intellectual. Today's neoconservatives prefer the term "pragmatism," adopted from the "consensus politics" of the Sixties. Pragmatism was an quasi-social-scientific effort to transcend partisan, right-or-left politics, but what it really amounted to was an unprincipled (non-ideological) or unconscious movement of liberals and conservatives alike toward the right, an excuse for having no principles except one's prejudices, with which one could live irrationally, "in the Now." Pragmatism was adopted by neoconservatives with a vengence. They may, to justify their worship and seizure of Power, profess intellectualism, but a close examination of their Ivy League rhetoric exposes its fundamental irrationality and anti-intellectual prejudice. All the better if neoconservatives may rely on "God's mysteries" or "God's will" to justify their self-contradictions and explain away their arbitrary judgments. That is not to say that the neoconservatives are stupid; they are not stupid: they are cynical and Machiavellian in their resort to seemingly rational yet absurd pretexts.

"You are either for us or 'agin us, I mean U.S, the Leader of World Civilization, against Whom an attack is an attack on civilization itself, and if you are 'agin us, you are Evil, for this is a war between Good and Evil. My Political Hero is Jesus Christ, whose Father is God of the Old Testament, the Terrorist Almighty. It is up to me, the Supreme Elected Leader, to decide what is good for the world, even over its dead body, whether the world likes it or not, because I am on the Right Side of Freedom, and the buck stops with me. I am the Supreme Warlord and Prince of Peace, the Final Arbiter of God's Law." (Ivy League graduate)

In his discussion of the nineteenth-century German attempt to personalize the state, in opposition to the personality of the absolute prince, Carl Schmitt noted: "The juridic formulas of the omnipotence of the state are, in fact, only superficial secularizations of theological formulas of the omnipotence of God." As early as 1922, Schmitt said that "all significant concepts of the theory of the modern state are secularized theological concepts." (The Concept of the Political)

Germany failed to make a personality of the Reich under the Kaiser Wilhelm II, then found a charismatic personal leader among the dregs of society, Adolph Hitler, who was glad to save his people from the crisis of liberalism by creating a world war on liberalism. Today the United States in its liberal crisis has regressed, from government by an abstract state, to government by a personal leader, who is charismatic to those who love him, and who is obliged to keep the United States in a state of permanent crisis. The double-standard of President Bush Jr. is obvious, at least to those who are not subject to his charisma, as he ignores the most basic democratic and libertarian principles abroad during his violent campaign to make the world free for the imposition of his democracy; a general pretext for war when other pretexts are found wanting.

Whatever the form of democracy may be, if it is to be realized it must be imposed, ideally by persuasion instead of violence, on competing interests. Or so it seems. We fall into certain logical contradictions with this sort of thinking, but the absurd can be rationalized away by those who want to have their way. Schmitt (The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy) states:

"It belongs to the essence of democracy that every and all decisions which are taken are only valid for those who themselves decide. That the outvoted minority must be ignored in this only causes theoretical and superficial difficulties. In reality even this rests on the identity that constantly recurs in democratic logic and on the essential democratic argument... that the will of the outvoted minority is in truth identical with the will of the minority."

With that in mind, be prepared for the contradiction that will render the proposition and the logic of democracy as absurd and ambiguous as any perfected religious dogma:

"The minority might express the true will of the people; the people can be deceived, and one has long been familiar with the techniques of propaganda and the manipulation of public opinion.... Even at the beginning of modern democracy one comes across then remarkable contradiction that the radical democrats understood their democratic radicalism as a selection criterion that distinguished them from others as the true representatives of the people's will. From this there arose in practice an extremely undemocratic exclusivity, because only the representatives of true democracy were granted political rights."

How are we to reconcile the apparent contradiction - if there be a general will - between minority and majority rule? That much is easy for an experienced dialectician. The contradictions are the opposing moments of the same general will, which, of course, already latently exists, but needs to be revealed by voting for the limited choices put before him by the leadership.





"In democracy the citizen even agrees to the law that is against his own will, for the law is the General Will and, in turn, the will of the free citizen. Thus a citizen never really gives his consent to a specific content but rather in abstracto to the result that evolves out of the general will, and he votes only so that the votes out of which anyone can know this general will can be calculated."

We have not yet defined democracy except to say its essence is universal suffrage. Democracy certainly resembles religion thus far. We think contemporary 'democracy' has something to do with the political economy of the United States, which is apparently to be imposed at gunpoint, for example, on the Iraqi people, now that their constitution and state has been pre-emptively destroyed and their country devastated. Truly free elections must not be a key term for their democracy, since the election of spiritual government, or Muslim theocracy, is not to be permitted for fear of fanaticism, no matter how democratic the Muslim assemblies might be – a Christian theocracy would suit the U.S. administration better.

We who claim that our own government is not theocratic have good cause to doubt that claim now. Schmitt said of Western democracy: "What counts as democracy in Western European states today is for them only the trickery of capital's economic dominance over press and parties, that is, the lie of a falsely educated popular will. Communism would be the first true democracy."

Whatever democracy is, people must be educated to it or it will not work. Schmitt points out that democracy assumes a series of identities, such as between the governed and governing, the subject and sovereign, the people and their representatives, the state and the electorate, and so on, So the people must be brought to the right state of mind, the one consistent with democracy, the one that expresses the general will. Incidentally, Schmitt expounded at length on the new 'Total' concept of the time - Totalitarianism.

"The people's education unfolds: The people can be brought to recognize and express their own will correctly through the right education....The consequences of this educational theory is a dictatorship that suspends democracy in the name of a true democracy that is still to be created.... During a transitional period dominated by the dictator, a democratic identity can still exist and the will of the people can still be the exclusive criterion."

But they cannot put aside the dictator and elect a tyrant, nor can they, as far as the U.S. is concerned, set up a communist government or primitive form of democracy, and so on.

Tyranny is the key to understanding "democracy," writes Schmitt, but once the monarchies fell, the noun became increasingly difficult to define, for it was in effect dynamically defined by its struggle against the monarchic principle. Indeed, that seems to be its fundamental value: its opposition to the tyranny of one over many, or opposition to a few over the many. Well, then, this might seem absurd, but a government does not have to be democratic to be democratic, providing that it prohibits tyranny: it can fight fire with fire, tyranny with tyranny, in order to obtain the true democracy of the future, a state governed by the general will of the people who survive.

All power to the people!

"The belief that all power comes from the people takes on a meaning similar to the belief that all authoritative power comes from God. Both maxims permit various governmental forms and juristic consequences in political reality," writes Schmitt.

We have encountered some awful dictators in our time, and we have had difficulty distinguishing their tyranny from that of a despotic monarch. And we recall again that true conservatives feared that Caesar - who wanted to bring Rome into good order - would become a dynastic King of kings. Well, Caesar, to end civil war, waged civil war. The sensationalist poet Lucan said that only Cato, the old-fashioned, true conservative whom he idolized, stood for Liberty; that Cato alone stood as the last man between Caesar and tyranny.

Today, in view of the terrible damage an elected dictator or 'mon-arche' can do by political and divine right in the names of democracy and god, in his first two years in office, we might see little difference in effect between U.S. presidents, temporary kings or dictators, and hereditary kings - except more of the hereditary kings may be morons by virtue of incest.

However that may be, we learn from Schmitt that Democracy is the modern orthodox political religion even when led by a dictator. A dictatorship by a violent minority may be required to oppose tyrants. It is always democratic to overthrow tyranny, wherever it may be found. Only a democratic constitution may be legitimately imposed; that is, a constitution that does not contradict the will of the people, which a minority of informed men will be glad to define for everyone else. If an illegitimate or undemocratic constitution is imposed somewhere, the people's right to self-determination must be restored by direct intervention. Otherwise the "democratic principle of nonintervention" applies. Of course the liberation of peoples of the world from tyrants does not violate the democratic principle of nonintervention, it simply creates the environment for the principle of nonintervention.

From this absurd ideological morass we might conclude as we began, by saying that a dictatorship may be needed to establish true democracy in Iraq, and in any other country the United States would free for democracy. Indeed, it may be time for conservative and liberal people of the United States to suspend their democratic principle of nonintervention against their own government that their state might be saved from its decline and fall. Of course such pessimism might be premature. John Quincy Adams shared the imperial aspirations of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Clay, Lincoln and other founding fathers, who reasoned that security is in greatness of size and strength: the bigger the nation, the better, for trouble in one part is less likely to disturb the whole. It follows that nobody is really safe until brought under one, global government. Of course John Taylor eloquently disagreed, and advocated pluralism; that is, alternatives. Well, on July 4, 1821, John Quincy Adams stated his reservations about the quest for American Empire:

“America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy…. She might become the dictatress of the world; she would no longer be the ruler of her own spirit.”

No, she would not be self-governed. God only knows how long the militant delusion of grandeur will last. The president of the United States takes vain pride in being a “war president” and does so by vulgar reliance on spurious divine right, to make war in his personal god’s name. Because he prays, war must be called for, war must be all right, for he is his god’s high priest on that subject.

Militarism has been the death of great regimes and empires. Militarism is in fact the nemesis of the innovation and creativity that can win lasting peace. When will enough be enough? Even many generals doubt the sort of militarism engaged in by the U.S. Commander-in-Chief. Good generals, after all, do not want wars per se: they want victory. Much could have been made of the victory in Afghanistan, yet resources were diverted to Iraq on flimsy pretexts.

Will the United States, like Tamerlane, squander its resources on diversions, attack Iran and Syria, and ignore the real threat to democracy, in Russia? Will President Bush Jr. be remembered by the world many centuries hence as some sort of self-idolizing monster? Yes, Tamerlane dissipated his forces in aimless expeditions into Iran, Iraq, Syria, Turkey, and India, instead of consolidating his gains in Eurasia and succeeding to the empire of Genghis Khan. After doing his proper business for 19 years, he digressed. Staying on track would have been enough to make Samarkand the power center of Eurasia instead of Moscow. But no, Tamerlane wanted to wage war in a vicious circle.

Arnold Toynbee remarked that Tamerlane’s “self-stultification is a supreme example of the suicidalness of militarism.” We should consider well the apparently suicidal tendency of the neoconservative U.S. government, which finds its anti-democratic unity in war abroad, in patriotic religion and bigotry, in war against the poor at home.

Quoted Sources:

Schmitt, Carl, THE CRISIS OF PARLIAMENTARY DEMOCRACY, Transl. Ellen Kennedy, Cambridge: MIT

Schmitt, Carl, THE CONCEPT OF THE POLITICAL, Transl. George Schwab, New Brunswick: Rutgers