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by Joel Bowman
August 26, 2026
from
JoelBowman Website
"We
are ruled by a King
just as
other absolute monarchies are.
His name
is The Majority."
Mark Twain
from his notebooks, 1904
What is the "post political era"... and are we on the cusp of
a 'New Dawn'...?
We left you with this delectable morsel last week, at the conclusion
of our little Future Uncertain series. (Read
Parts I,
II and
III.)
Let us ponder for a moment the full and glowing
present, pregnant as it is with tomorrow...
Perusing the papers of record, what do we find?
An on again/off again
war with Iran... from a
president
who promised 'no more costly conflagrations in the
Middle East'...
A $40T Jenga tower of national debt... listing and leaning in
the wind... (The government ran a $432.3 billion deficit in
July, the single largest monthly shortfall since March, 2021.)
The rise of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)...
a rabble band of soap-dodging midwits who appear to be
positively allergic to the lessons of history...
And that's just in
the American Empire... which is
arguably fairing better than large swathes of the anglophone
world...
All the King's Mayhem
Take, for example,
the (Dis)United Kingdom...
Currently trialing its 6th Prime
Minister this decade, the politically promiscuous kingdom is
increasingly presenting itself as borderline ungovernable. (For
comparison, the UK had only 16 PMs in the entire 20th
century.)
Immigration... anemic wage growth...
rising cost of living... the housing crisis... rampant
crime... a dopey king who seems chosen by providence to test
the ruin in a realm... many are the woes that plague Ol'
Albion.
Or how about Canada, a nation that
almost reached economic parity with its brash southern neighbor
back in the 2010s... the Dominion suffered a decade of wage and
productivity stagnation, such that it now ranks somewhere
between Oklahoma and Arkansas in terms of per capita GDP.
Or Australia, a land which so "abounds in nature's gifts,
of beauty, rich and rare," that it takes a parliament of
uncommon ignorance and ineptitude to ensure the relatively tiny
population does not live in the lap of luxury.
Instead, the Lucky Country suffers one of
the highest household debt-to-GDP loads in the world (114%) and one
of the largest household debt to disposable income figures (195%),
key contributing factors in its own, self-inflicted cost of living
crisis.
Indeed, looking around him today, the honest voter might well be
horrified... mortified... petrified... but should he really be
mystefied?
After all,
what has modern democracy
delivered us, really?
Herewith, a quick reminder...
The House that Democracy Built
In July of 1932, the National Socialists Party (aka, the
Nazi party) was the largest democratically elected party
in Germany.
From its fetid depths emerged a man, the likes of
whom the world had probably not seen for centuries.
You know the guy...
Toothbrush mustache.
So-so artist.
Not a big fan of the Jews.
The embers of that global conflict had barely
cooled when, in 1946, Juan Perón won 52% of the popular vote
here in Argentina.
Upon taking office, the demagogue promptly
seized control of the media, harassed, jailed and tortured his
political opposition, spent down the country's foreign-exchange
reserves, and consolidated power unto the executive branch.
In 1951, modern democracy spoke in his favor, when a marching
majority returned him to office with 62% of the vote.
Next, through the 1960s and ‘70s, the world's
largest democracy saw fit to elect Indira Gandhi,
a beastly woman who instituted brutal
authoritarian rule, oversaw mass political imprisonment and
conducted a vast eugenics program of coercive sterilization for
millions of her country's poorest people.
It is sometimes considered a "triumph of democracy" that she was
eventually voted out of office... which is a bit like feting
one's kidnapper for eventually being let out of the basement
after 15 years solitary confinement and abuse.
"But without my kidnapper, how would I
ever be free?"
Call it "Political Stockholm Syndrome" at its
most depraved.
Then, in the 1980s, modern democracy gifted
Africa's "bread basket" nation, Zimbabwe, the human parasite that
was Robert Mugabe,
a ghastly specimen who was elected on a
familiar "land redistribution" platform, only to spend the
better part of the next four decades compulsorily expropriating
the ground beneath the farmer's feet, then redistributing the
nation's riches unto himself and his gun-toting cronies... all
while his people starved en masse in the streets.
Ah, but modern democracy was not done with the
weary 20th Century just yet...
The 1990s saw the "free and fair" election of
Hugo Chavez who, according to
the international election watchdog The Carter Center,
received 56% of the popular vote.
As many as 2 million political refugees fled
Venezuela during Chavez's iron-fisted regime.
He remained until 2013, when he passed into
the shades not a moment too soon... reportedly with billions in
ill-gotten loot to his name.
Apologists for modern democracy are quick to
denounce those who abuse it... but loathe to ask whence the rogue's
gallery of villains and tyrants drew their power.
Choose a side, they implore, and choose a
bogeyman.
Just don't look under the covers.
...all 'democratically' elected.
Insanity Defined
In the Land of the Free, too, voters toss around such
venomous pejoratives as would make most hiphop artists blush,
accusing their political opponents of being the devil incarnate...
and worse.
...all were burned in effigy... denounced in
public... cursed to Hades... and elected by earnest voters.
***
Disgusted with what they see from their leaders,
good citizens weep for their nation, their future, their children's
future.
And so, determined not to allow tomorrow to
unfold in the image of yesterday, they take a good look in the
mirror, roll up their sleeves, spit on their hands, and boldly
declare:
"By Jove, next time I shall vote even
harder...!"
But after a quarter-millennium doing the same
thing over and over... and expecting different results... surely
there is a "less insane" way to achieve the desired outcome, no...?
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