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| Go ahread, clink image to enlarge. It took me awhile to put it together. |
By Hal Brown
How can a story like this published in The Philadelphia Inquirer and summarized in Raw Story (above link) not get the attention of anyone who cares about American democracy? This is from Raw Story:
Right-wing billionaires are investing in a conspiracy cooked up by obscure professors at conservative colleges to end American democracy and install an authoritarian dictator.
Conservatives are pining for a "Red Caesar" to suspend democracy in 2025 and wrest power back from the "cosmopolitan class" of unelected elites they believe are ruling America, and they see congressional dysfunction as a symptom of the institutional rot they believe a dictator could cure, wrote Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch.
Here's The Phildelphia Inquirer column:
From the Inquirer, consider the last part of the following which I put in bold:
In War on the American Republic: How Liberalism Became Despotism, in which he rails against the “cosmopolitan class” of unelected elites he claims is running America, Slack writes that the “New Right now often discusses a Red Caesar, by which it means a leader whose post-Constitutional rule will restore the strength of his people.” In a recent Guardian article, writer Jason Wilson — who deserves enormous credit for tying together these threads — finds anti-democracy arguments like Slack’s are gaining traction in the small but influential world of far-right think tanks like Hillsdale and the Claremont Institute. That’s been tracked here in Philadelphia by another writer, the centrist liberal Damon Linkerat UPenn, who sees a dangerous conspiracy theory taking root not just with obscure professors but with the iconoclastic billionaires who back the right.
What obscure professors profess to believe perhaps in an attempt to rise from obscurity or because they really think this is best for the country is important because the likes of Steve Bannon can glom onto the ideas and magnify them. The so-called intellectuals may be less important and dangerous than the billionaires who can fund the campaigns of far-right candidates.
Let's consider the defintion of the an iconoclast as a person who attacks cherished beliefs or institutions. While these billionaires may be attacking the cherished American belief in democracy they are also promoting the very oposite of democracy, that is dictatorship and tyranny.
Whether or not this could happen is one issue, and whether if it did how long such a change would last is another matter. We know what happened to Hitler and the NAZI regime but then again so far Russia, China, and North Korea, while certainly not florishing economically, are still dictatorships with nuclear weapons.
In Russia at least the billionaire class of oligarchs is doing quite well and unless they cross Putin like Wagner mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin did they will continue to enjoy their Black Sea dachas.
My question is what the hell is in the mind of the people who want to end American democracy?
Are they all like Harlan Crow who collects NAZI memorabilia and I can only speculate admires Hitler. He may hope that a new dictatorial regime will get him invited to the home of the President for Life, presumably Trump, as an honored guest. It may or may not be called The White House if it ends up being painted with 18KT metallic gold. This isn't an original thought:
THE GOLD HOUSE: Does President Donald Trump plan to re-paint the White House?
The unfortunate fact of human nature and any of society is that there will always be people who not only hold in high esteem but also are enamored with auhtoriatian leaders and some of them, perhaps in part because they have sociopathic personalities, have become billionaires.
Combine their money with the influence of far-right talking heads like Bannon you have a deadly combination.
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