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Men Of The People

Roger Simon reminds us that empty, faux populist gestures are what running for President is “all about.”  Indeed they are, and this ought to be a cause for despair for everyone who is actually interested in decentralising power away from Washington and having a government that represents the citizens.  Simon also reminds us of the […]

Roger Simon reminds us that empty, faux populist gestures are what running for President is “all about.”  Indeed they are, and this ought to be a cause for despair for everyone who is actually interested in decentralising power away from Washington and having a government that represents the citizens.  Simon also reminds us of the fundamentally fraudulent nature of the entire process, in which we pretend that the oligarchs that vie for preeminence at our expense have something in common with us, so that we can reconcile ourselves to investing an incalculable amount of power in the hands of some mediocre politician by maintaining the fiction that he works for us and is really just like us.  Joe Sobran observed years ago something to the effect that the grandest monarchs of the past had to make tremendous efforts to engage in pomp and propaganda to build up the grandeur of their relatively very weak position, while modern democratically elected leaders have to pretend to be an ordinary schlub to obscure the fact that they possess more power than demigods.  Meanwhile, as second-rate lawyers compete to rule the world, we pretend that we have become more free in the modern era.

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