The idea of operating within the law has been the hallmark of civilized societies for some time and has certainly been the hallmark of what modern democracy has come to mean. The idea is to build societies based on laws and not the personal whims of leaders. We have always been told to look down on societies based on the cult of personality as less civilized.
In modern day America, we find ourselves confronted with a dual conundrum. One presidential candidate who thumbs his nose at all social mores and domestic laws and another who flaunts international law (and some would say, domestic laws) in what appears to be a single-minded mission to support an ally, Israel, regardless of international law or humanitarian consequences.
Law
It is hard to comprehend a definition of law that has morphed into something that can be applied only to those who are out of favor with those in power, or those who have limited power, or those with no power at all, while those in powers see themselves as above those laws, as exceptional. If that is the case, then we ordinary people who clearly have either limited power or no power of any consequence are the only ones who must remain law abiding while those in power continue to make the rules and laws to favor themselves while using law to provide a way of justifying their control of everyone else.
And what is that power? In our modern world power often, ultimately translates into wealth, although social, political or military status often enters into the equation.
In the face of such power, the pretense of a modern civilization based on any real concern for human rights or even democracy is exposed. In the US such abuses of power make it abundantly clear that the supposed power and responsibility of citizenship is only an illusion.
And just as Donald Trump has pretty much ignored the law for much of his life, including his presidency, with very little accountability or consequence, in fact, perhaps reshaping the laws to his desires, we now find Joe Biden currently operating in a similar fashion in regard to international law, in his support and protection of Benjamin Netanyahu and what Netanyahu is doing to an entrapped Palestinian population in Gaza.
Political Risks
At risk is the future of this nation as a democracy. For any system of governance to work effectively, it must have the willing support of the dominant economic system. If the economic system begins to take priority, the system of governance becomes a device to support that economic system, and the governance becomes subservient as a tool to be used by the economic system. In the US, democracy is the system of governance, to be supported by the economic system, currently, capitalism. In such a system, capitalism must be secondary to a robust democracy. But in reality, capitalism, in this nation, has taken precedence over democracy over the last several decades to the point that now the politics of our so-called democracy is dominated by money and has been corrupted by that money, with true democracy struggling to survive. The best example of this is the current extreme income inequality.
I might add that of the three modern economic systems, communism, socialism and capitalism, all but capitalism are premised on democracy as a form of governance. I might also add that any system can devolve into a dictatorship if not carefully protected and preserved.
In current times, we as a nation, have taken this skewed definition of democracy into the world. We have conflated democracy and capitalism as though they are synonymous, so that when we say it is our desire to spread democracy in the world, we are really supporting the spread of free market capitalism, which supports the economically powerful of the world and holds little promise for the ordinary people.
The 2024 Presidential Election
Joe Biden is willingly risking losing the 2024 Presidential Election in service to Benjamin Netanyahu. The strange consequence of such a loss is that the winner would be Donald Trump, the preferred US president for Netanyahu. That is the Donald Trump who has clearly stated that he would dismantle much of the structure of what remains of US democracy should he win the election.
This is an echo of the 2016 Presidential Election in which Hilary Clinton and the Democrats bet the farm on stopping the popular candidacy of Bernie Sanders who might have begun to put some controls on the primacy of free market capitalism, to make it more supportive of the goals of a democracy again. With this shift the election became a choice between two candidates, both of whom support the dominant structure of governance by free-market capitalism. The Democratic Party and Hilary Clinton chose the flag of the corporate democrats and in the process lost, not only the support of many former democrats, but also the presidency to Donald Trump. Furthermore, that fateful choice meant that she did not even have any coattails, losing the entire nation to what had been a nearly defunct Republican Party.
Thus, the slide toward running the nation as a corporation began with Trump as the CEO and profit and power being the goal, free market capitalism on steroids.
With the 2020 election, the rush by the Democrats to, again, stop the candidacy of Bernie Sanders, resulted in another lukewarm corporate democrat, Joe Biden. The election was close leading to extralegal challenges and an insurrection at the Capital, not unlike a “knock-down drag out”, “bare-knuckles brawl” for control of the Corporation known as the US government, an attempt at a hostile takeover. It continues with no clear winners and with the legal system looking more and more impotent.
Shift toward War
Apparently, as a last stop measure of a presidency losing power and momentum, Biden seems to have turned to foreign affairs, and especially wars and confrontations with other world powers, almost a renewed Cold War. We have the fully funded confrontation with Russia in Ukraine which will only be resolved with negotiations, and which is pushing us closer to nuclear confrontation then we have ever been before.
There is also our increasingly militarized confrontation with China, supposedly to support Taiwan, which will likely only heat up that confrontation. Do we really want to instigate a war with China?
And then there is Israel, which has been supported by Western Europe and the US since its inception as the Israelis have expropriated more and more of the land belonging to the indigenous Palestinian population, using force, violence and even massacres. The first version of this violence is known as the Nakba in 1948 and has continued in many forms since then until a large part of the existing Palestinian population was herded into a virtual concentration camp in what was formerly Gaza, a walled in compound under the full control of the Israeli government and the military.
Meanwhile Israel has moved further and further to the right, toward a fulfillment of the dreams of radical Zionism and supporting continuing expansion into the West Bank and Jerusalem, walling off and isolating the few remaining pockets of Palestinians. All of this has been against international law and the many UN resolutions which have been consistently ignored by Israel with the US providing cover for their distain of the international rule of law.
Middle East Context
All of this was apparently under a US policy of wanting a controlling interest in the Middle East not only with its oil but also with its strategic geopolitical position. The US holds sway over many of the other Arab leaders who are often hardly democratic leaders and with a continuing eye on Iran as an adversary.
Iran became an adversary because of US meddling. Iran had been a democracy with a democratically elected leader, Mohammad Mosaddegh, in the early 1950s. Mosaddegh wanted to nationalize their oil reserves to serve the people of the nation, only to find that the West, especially the US, who, with the help of the CIA, created a coup installing a puppet government, calling him the Shah of Iran. Under the Shah, Iran was ruled with an iron fist with his secret police, the Savak. The Shah was overthrown with an Islamic leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, taking over and proclaiming the US as an enemy. Since then, Iran has been a major regional influence, often in opposition to Israel and the US, with the US being the major non-regional player. Israel has wanted a war with Iran for years to complete its dominance of the Middle East.
October 7th
When, on October 7th, 2023, the rising frustration of the Palestinians in Gaza resulted in a raid on Israel with numerous Israeli deaths and many hostages taken, that raid was used as a pretext to begin a systematic extermination of the Palestinian population in the Gaza virtual concentration camp. The result has been the nearly total destruction of the social structure of the Palestinians in Gaza, including churches, mosques, schools, and medical facilities. It has included the systematic killing of aid workers, doctors, health workers, leaders and spokespeople and their families. It has killed over 35,000 Palestinians, at least 17,000 of them children. Israel has limited the access of Gaza to fuel, food, humanitarian aid, and medical supplies, reducing the population to near starvation. It has herded people into “safe areas” only to attack and bomb them there. And now it is planning a final push against the one remaining area where the population is congregated.
This is being labeled genocide and is certainly a Palestinian Holocaust at the hands of a Jewish state, formed in part as a place for the refuges of the Jewish Holocaust in Germany during the Second World War. What a dark, dark irony.
And all of this, what would be labeled the actions of a rogue state in any other context, is being encouraged, supported and protected from international action by the US.
The US has nearly destroyed its international standing as a fair and impartial supporter of international law and the drive toward human rights and humanitarian actions. Within the US there are huge portions of the population who cannot believe the unblinking support of such outrageous actions by a nation, ostensibly our ally, who could not continue their actions without our continuing military, intelligence and economic support, not to mention our willingness to block any international interference.
Damaged Democracy
There are many US citizens who are outraged and angry about the US being presented to the world with this face. And many of them are saying, “Not in my name and on my dime”. And then to find that if they voice opposition to the Biden policies toward Israel, they run the real risk of losing their positions and status, their opportunities to speak out and even their educational opportunities. To most of those people this is the loss of their rights and even their obligations as citizens to oppose an unwise direction by government. All of this takes on the look of repression and begins to look more like a fascist state than an American democracy.
How then, are people supposed to vote for a leader who is willing to destroy the international standing of this nation in service to a clearly out-of-control right wing leader bent on ethnic cleansing, if not genocide. This looks like some kind of Frankenstein we have created and continue to protect and have set loose upon an unsuspecting world,
This is not the version of the nation we want to support and continue, nor is it the kind of democracy we thought we had. These are not trends we can support, nor care to continue.
What a conundrum! Without a regard for the law, whether the domestic laws of our democracy or the international laws of a civilized globe, what is possibly worth saving. It is cynically then, left to raw power and money, the rule of economic Darwinism. May the richest win. Goodbye to democracy and the rule of law.
We have one candidate who represents the desire for "Pax Americana" on the world, whether the world wants it or not, and another candidate who represents a "Pox Americana" - the imposition of America's worst pathological ethnocentric impulses on the rest of the world.
Scares me! You’d think that we could find more appropriate candidates for presidency In this country!