Monday, May 6, 2024

Personalism and the Destruction of Democracy


 This video is a production of the Center for a New American Security, a D.C. think tank with a close relationship with the Democrat wing of the US government. 

The substance of the argument put forth in this video is that nasty people in less-enlightened parts of the world use the democratic process, whatever that is, to gain control of governments and further their power. Some even go to the trouble of creating their own political parties to achieve this. The CNAS deplores such behavior. 

The history of the world is littered with the bodies of personalities that used their own attributes to take power over their countrymen through a democratic process or otherwise. Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Augustus, Napoleon, Simon Bolivar, Abraham Lincoln, Bismarck, Hitler, and many others followed this very path. Naturally, the video commentators are comparing those travesties to the superior results of the US paradigm.

They seem to favor a government composed of party apparatchiks, faithful technocrats, selflessly following a script. The reality is that in the somewhat unique US two party system there are situations where neither address the issues most important to the populace. Maybe both parties consider those issues to be less important than the most pressing ones, continuing profits for the financial sector, construction of a huge and expensive military, interference in the domestic politics of foreign countries, fighting ephemeral climate change and so on. That is how personalist figures come to power. By addressing the ignored needs of the general public. It doesn't usually work. See William Jennings Bryan.       


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