Tuesday 9th of July 2024

democracy alla hypocrisy....

Trump and ‘our democracy’: What happens when a political system becomes a meme?
It is a sign of deep crisis that the concept of democracy has devolved into an ideologically tinged narrative that is defended with empty and exaggerated rhetoric

The verdict in Donald Trump’s hush money trial has bestirred the usual characters in all the predictable ways. And never far from anybody's lips is the word ‘democracy’.

 

By Henry Johnston

 

Donald Trump is threatening our democracy," President Joe Biden himself opined, calling the ex-president's questioning of the verdict "dangerous.“ The editorial board of the New York Times lauded the “remarkable display of the democratic principles” on display in convicting a former president, arguing that this proves that even men as powerful as Trump are not above the law. 

The word democracy is everywhere in the Western world these days. Hardly a day goes by without pleas to defend it, protect it, fight against its sworn enemies, or celebrate its virtues with pompous clichés. Precise and neutral usage has given way to an ideological tinge that is as electrified as it is vague.  

One senses the word is invoked in defense of a certain decaying America-led order and the elite institutions that uphold it – and yet, like its cousin the ‘rules-based-order’, it is never quite defined. In the 2024 US presidential election, we are told, democracy itself is on the ballot. Whatever that means. If Trump is the archetypal demonic figure in the eyes of polite society, democracy is the bulwark against him. 

Democracy has been imbued with a primitive metaphysical potency that almost seems a stand-in for religious faith.

Biden’s 2023 State of the Union address contained an exhortation to cure cancer once and for all, followed immediately by a grand summation of what has underpinned all American successes for all time – and, implicitly, will underpin futures ones, such as curing cancer.

Folks, there’s one reason why we’ve been able to do all of these things: our democracy itself.”

Biden concluded: “With democracy, everything is possible. Without it, nothing is.”

Turn back the clock a century or so, replace the word ‘democracy’ with ‘the grace of God’ and give the same speech and nobody would bat an eye.

Democracy is a shield against accusations of wrongdoing. The defense being mounted against the war crimes charges facing the Israeli leadership is that the country is a democracy. As if how a government elects its leaders somehow changes the laws of war.  

But what is curious is that this nauseating ubiquity of the word democracy has coincided with a period of deep dysfunction in actual self-proclaimed democracies. The more it is talked about, the less it seems to work and the larger the chasm between what is proclaimed and what is practiced. Many of the countries most vocally proclaiming democracy are the ones at the forefront of implementing highly undemocratic policies.

It would be easy to become carried away pointing out the blatant hypocrisy in the Western embrace of all things democratic while at the same time leaning hard into authoritarian tendencies. Take your pick of stories: Earlier this month, for example, a German court rejected an AfD complaint about the classification of its youth organization as an extremist movement, meaning Germany’s domestic intelligence service can continue to monitor the activities and communications of the party itself. This was hailed as a victory by the government. “Today’s ruling shows that we are a democracy that can be defended,” Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said.

Clearly, for the current Western elites, democracy has come to mean a system not intended to be run democratically in response to the will of the people, but run by self-proclaimed democrats. 

But more interesting than simply laying out further instances of double standards and hypocrisy is to seek to grasp what explains the proliferation of democracy as a meme in exact proportion to the decline of the real thing. After all, the word democracy wasn’t always on the tip of every politician’s lips.

Even Woodrow Wilson, the consummate evangelist of the American political order, whose “make the world safe for democracy” quote is now indelibly associated with his name, did not play loose with facile references to the political system through which everything is apparently possible. At the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 upon the conclusion of World War I, Wilson’s opening speech contained only one passing and modest reference to democracy.

And yet at that time, America could much more reasonably than now lay claim to being the world’s preeminent democracy. What to make of this paradox?

Offering a framework to think about this phenomenon is the South Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han in his most recent book, called ‘Crisis of Narration’. “A paradigm becomes a topic… only when there is a deep-seated alienation from it,” Han argues. “All the talk about narratives suggests their dysfunctionality,” he says. In other words, the fact that democracy has become a hot topic and that a narrative is being projected about it are themselves signs that something is amiss.

Han continues by explaining that as long as a narrative serves as an “anchor in being” – an organic part of the fabric of life that provides meaning and orientation – there is no need for such exaggerated talk about narratives. But, Han explains, the “inflation in the use of such concepts begins precisely when narratives lose their original power, their gravitational force, their secret and magic.” He concludes by saying that “once they are seen as something constructed, they lose their moment of inner truth.”

Whether American democracy – or any other Western democracy – ever truly possessed any “inner truth” is a matter for historians to decide, but there undoubtedly was a time when a democratic political culture was simply ‘lived’ rather than constantly defended, attacked, or invoked. What was on the ballot was not democracy itself but simply whatever batch of politicians had emerged from the democratic process.

Prior to our contentious era, Western democracy was lived with the sort of assumed assurance that comes from a worldview that has not yet been shattered. That does not mean that politics didn’t have its fair share of all the usual bickering, backstabbing, sophistry, chicanery, and even outright dysfunction. Read any account of the presidency of Warren Harding to be disabused of that illusion – the term ‘smoke-filled room’ derives from that era. But what is important is not the relative merits of the politicians of one era or another but rather the fact that political life took place within a system that itself was seen as secure and to whose defense society wasn’t perpetually being exhorted to rush.

History offers other examples of a once vital political theory being reduced to an obsessed-over narrative in its moment of terminal crisis. Most medieval monarchs believed that they derived their authority directly from God and were not accountable to earthly authorities. The strong ecclesiastical element in ancient coronation ceremonies attests to the intermeshing of the divine and earthly kingdoms. But in medieval Europe, this was never defined with any rigor, nor had it taken on the contours of a political system that would then need to be defended, justified, or really even explained. Kings did not offer daily reminders of their communion with God.

It only congealed into a succinct political doctrine – called the ‘divine right of kings’ – quite late in the game, when any real conviction that kings were truly God’s emissaries on Earth had all but disappeared. The theory was most comprehensively developed by King James VI of Scotland (later James I of England) – he is even credited with coming up with the expression ‘divine right of kings’. To use Han’s language, something that had at one time been an “anchor in being” had been turned into a narrative – even a meme, we could say. When King James stood up in front of Parliament in 1610, (it was not exactly a State of the Union address) and declared “the state of monarchy is the supremest thing upon earth,” little did he suspect that the doctrine he was espousing so vigorously was mere decades away from disappearing forever – at least from Europe.

His reactionary and hopelessly out-of-touch son, Charles I, continuing in his father’s tradition of believing he answered only to God, ended up being shortened by a head over the matter. Elsewhere in Europe, similar processes were playing out. In France, Louis XIV saw himself as God’s representative on Earth, endowed with a divine right to wield absolute power. He spent much of his time quashing brewing rebellions and establishing his legitimacy by the sweat of his brow. But his preposterous, primitive, and overwrought claims – the type that would fit nicely into Biden’s State of the Union address – can only be seen as a telltale sign of crisis. 

For many hundreds of years, Europe produced good kings and bad kings, but even the reign of a terrible king did not undermine belief in monarchy as an institution or in the implicit connection between the divine and earthly kingdoms. Monarchy itself was not ‘on the ballot’ every time a new king took the throne. But when the magic disappeared and kings found themselves on the defensive is exactly when they began to invoke the importance of their office with exaggerated effect. It is not hard to see the insecurity lying just beneath the surface. 

The cartoonishly inflated reaction to the threats supposedly emanating from Trump and others menacing the temple of democracy is merely a small part of a much larger drama – and no less a manifestation of insecurity. What this signifies is that the magic has drained out of the current iteration of Western liberal democracy. It will be defended, attacked, idealized, invoked all the same – until it simply disappears and is replaced with something else.

 

https://www.rt.com/news/598598-trump-us-democracy/

 

 

aussie support....

Almost one in three Australians want Donald Trump to win November’s US presidential elections, a significant increase from when the businessman and former reality television star first ran for office eight years ago, according to a major survey of Australians’ views on global affairs.

The latest annual Lowy Institute poll also found that “warm” feelings towards the United States fell to their lowest levels in the survey’s 20-year history, underscoring a growing lack of faith in Australia’s most important security partner.

The vast majority of Australians want US President Joe Biden to remain in the White House, but Trump is easily the most popular Republican candidate among Australians for at least the past 16 years.

The rise in support for Trump has come despite his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, a campaign that led to the storming of the US Capitol, a second impeachment and charges being laid against him for conspiracy to defraud the US.

The 29 per cent of Australians who say they support Trump’s candidacy is more than when he previously ran for office (23 per cent in 2020, and 11 per cent in 2016). Just 9 per cent of Australians backed Republican candidate Mitt Romney when he ran against Barack Obama in 2008, while 16 per cent backed John McCain in 2008.

Forty-six per cent of Coalition voters backed Trump’s candidacy, compared with 14 per cent of Labor/Greens voters, according to the national survey of 2028 Australians conducted in March.

Australians’ faith in Biden to do the right thing for the world fell 13 percentage points in the past year, with faith in Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak also falling by substantial levels.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is the most trusted world leader among Australians, with 65 per cent saying they trust him to do the right thing for world affairs, followed by Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and French President Emmanuel Macron on 61 per cent respectively.

Just 12 per cent of Australians trust Chinese President Xi Jinping to do the right thing for the world, ahead of Russian President Vladimir Putin on 7 per cent and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un on 4 per cent.

Most Australians – 53 per cent – see China as more of a security threat than an economic partner, a turnaround from 2020 when this result was reversed.

Seven in 10 Australians believe it is “somewhat likely” or “very likely” that China will become a military threat over the next 20 years.

“Many Australians remain wary towards China, despite re-engagement at the political level,” said Ryan Neelam, the Lowy Institute’s director of public opinion.

 

“Overall, trust in China remains low, and threat perceptions remain high. The public is roughly divided on whether Australia should prioritise maintaining stability or deterring China.”

Underlining Australians’ complicated views about the US, strong majorities said the US alliance made it more likely Australia would be dragged into a war with China but also that the alliance made Australia safer from an attack or pressure by China.

Forty-two per cent of Australians believe Japan is Australia’s best friend in Asia, well ahead of Singapore and Indonesia on 16 and 15 per cent, respectively.

Amid a growing debate about the cost of the plan to acquire nuclear-powered submarines, 65 per cent of Australians said they supported the plan, down slightly from 70 per cent two years ago.

 

The survey found 74 per cent of Australians favoured providing military aid to Ukraine, steady from last year but down from 83 per cent in 2022, when Vladimir Putin’s forces invaded the Eastern European country.

Seventy-six per cent of Australians supported reopening the Australian embassy in Kyiv, which the Department of Foreign Affairs has refused to do since most comparable countries returned their diplomatic missions to the Ukrainian capital long ago.

Fifty-six per cent of Australians said they believed the Albanese government was doing a good job on foreign policy, compared with 41 per cent who thought it was performing poorly.

https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/australia-is-losing-faith-in-america-but-support-for-trump-s-higher-than-ever-20240530-p5jhyx.html

 

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truth?....

Presentence report will cover Trump’s:

Lack of remorse – Threats against jurors, witness and the judge, his history as a sexual predator and civil conviction as such, his NDA’s hiding child sex acts, history of financial frauds, his association with prison gangs, his call for violence….and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on…all of which make his ‘first offender status’ irrelevant (Truth Bomb)Statements planted in the press saying a ‘prison sentence unlikely’ were paid for by a Trump gangster friend who had them planted across dozens of articles in every American newspaper after the conviction (Truth Bomb)Presumptive Republican nominee pointed to the 11 July sentence hearing, scheduled four days before the GOP national convention

Robert TaitMon 3 Jun 2024 11.17 EDTShare

Guardian: Donald Trump has called on the US supreme court to step in and annul his guilty verdict in a hush-money trial that left him with the unwanted distinction of being the first former US president to be a convicted felon.

Listed by Snopes as ‘not proven’ because of NDA’s now public after his trial. Why are these not reported?

https://www.theinteldrop.org/2024/06/03/trump-calls-on-supreme-court-to-annul-his-guilty-verdict-in-hush-money-case-and-very-likely-4-year-sentence/

 

 

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immunity....

https://rumble.com/v55d0d5-system-update-show-292.html

Presidential Immunity's Long History; Hysteria Radically Distorts SCOTUS Ruling; Dem Oligarchs Forcing Biden Out of 2024 Race | SYSTEM UPDATE #292

 

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