Eric Zuesse -- America’s Political Crisis

America’s Political Crisis

Eric Zuesse

America’s two political Parties have produced Donald Trump as the Republican nominee, and Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee — the voters are offered by the American system only those two as the possible next President and Commander-in-Chief.

Here is some of the verbal evidence against each, indicating rather clearly his psychopathy; and the crisis is that both are clearly psychopaths:

TRUMP:

"People said to me, 'Why are you staying in Syria,'" Trump said Tuesday. "Because I kept the oil, which frankly we should have done in Iraq," he added, to cheers and applause from the audience.

“We’re keeping the oil. We have the oil. The oil is secure. We left troops behind only for the oil."

Feb. 24: “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA.” 

March 11: “I think we’re going to get through it very well.”

May 5: “I’m viewing our great citizens of this country to a certain extent and to a large extent as warriors. They’re warriors. We can’t keep our country closed. We have to open our country.”

May 13 (about Trump, from a close acquaintance): “Says George Conway, a Republican lawyer who is married to Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s senior counsellor: ‘In my view he is a sociopath and a malignant narcissist.’”

BIDEN:

Feb. 9: Audience member at a Biden rally asks him a question, “How do you explain the voters in Iowa, and why should voters believe that you can win the national election?” He answers: “That’s a good question. Number one: Iowa was a Democratic caucus. Remember caucus? No you haven’t. You’re a lying dog-faced pony-soldier." 

Feb. 28: “I’m looking forward to appointing the first African American woman to the United States Senate.”

27 November 2007, Iowa Town Hall: “People who accept money [from lobbyists] aren't bad people. But it's human nature. You go out and bundle $250,000 for me, all legal, and then you call me after I am elected, and say ‘I would like to come and talk about something.’ You didn't buy me, but it's human nature, you helped me. I’m going to say, ‘Sure, come right on in.’”

BOTH NOMINEES:

Whereas Trump is famously and even proudly corrupt, Biden is just as corrupt but more hypocritical about it (which makes it even worse), and both of them continue this corruption into their current actions, though at least Biden has routinely promised that it’s all behind him. Both of these politicians have lied to and cheated their respective voters for their votes, and won their Party’s nomination on the basis of pandering to the very worst in them, and especially to their racial and other prejudices (each appealing to his own consituency’s respective bigotries, because there are different types of bigotries and each Party caters to different ones), so as to be able to win their Party’s nomination (as Trump did in 2016 and as Biden did in 2020). They will now be doing this against each other. The general-election contest will therefore be between two pandering liars, and the only real motivation that a member of the public has to vote for either of them will be the intense contempt that the given voter feels for the other candidate — the “opponent” or (in today’s U.S. politics) the “enemy.” This hatred, by the adherents to each of the Parties, against the opposing Party, results from the billionaire-owned ‘news’-media, where each Party’s billionaires (their agents and employees) are filtering out the disgusting truths about their own candidates and publicizing only whatever disgusting truths about the opposing Party’s candidates don’t reveal the entire aristocracy’s rottenness and psychopathy. For example: the fact that the United States Government perpetrated a coup in February 2014 against Ukraine, which wrecked Ukraine’s economy and destroyed that country, remains hidden by both Parties’ billionaires, and by their ‘news’-media. (Even though that was Obama’s crime, it continues under Trump, instead of being exposed to the public by Trump. Similarly, Obama hid, instead of having exposed, G.W. Bush’s lies that had been behind America’s rape of Iraq.) So: the most important truths will continue to be hidden, instead of to become exposed to the public, in this ‘democracy’. At the present stage, voting for President in America is selecting which of two contending monsters will impose the aristocracy’s rule for another four years. That’s what it’s all about, really.

CONCLUSION:

I have previously documented that today's U.S. is an aristocracy (a rule by the richest) instead of a democracy (a rule by the public or the poorer 99+% of the nation’s population). Since every aristocracy in history has been profoundly corrupt, America is normal for aristocracies.

However, America pretends to be a democracy. Not all aristocracies have done that. How are voters supposed to behave when they are being offered such corrupt and incompetent individuals to choose between, to become their next nominal ruler? 

Of course, America’s President is no totalitarian ruler, because he rules in conjunction with a legislature, and with a judiciary, which likewise are selected by the nation’s billionaires (actually by their agents). So, all of the negotiations are between agents for various aristocrats. The public are ruled over, but have no real role in ruling. Their voting — at least for national, that is federal, office — is restricted only to corrupt nominees, who are acceptable either to the Republican Party’s billionaires or to the Democratic Party’s billionaires.

“Political mainstream” in such a nation excludes democracy, and accepts only one or another faction of the aristocracy, as prospects to choose between on election day.

isn’t it obvious, therefore, that, in the final election, in such a country as this, neither of the major-Party nominees (i.e., the nominees who actually have a chance of winning) is acceptable to vote for? The entire political mainstream is rotten to the core. When offered two cups of poison, does that “choice” make any real difference, since both are deadly?

Furthermore, any country that’s allied with a Government such as this, is in desperate need of reconsidering its answer to the question: Is America actually an ally, or instead our chief fascist enemy?

I have therefore proposed a U.S. Constitutional Amendment that would solve this problem as regards specifically the office of the U.S. Presidency, which is the most important elective office in America. The proposed Amendment was submitted to all mainstream U.S. national news-media and published by none of them, but it can be seen here. Public responses to it are welcomed, in order to get the public discussion going (if that’s even possible, in such a dictatorship).

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.