The imbalance between the demands of democratic societies and leaders who tend to dictatorial power has been growing for decades.
Who could forget Rodney Dangerfield’s character in Back to School? In one of the most memorable scenes in the movie, Dangerfield and a business professor have an interesting back and forth. The professor describes in ideal conditions how a company is set up and run. Dangerfield, an expert businessman in practice, cannot stop himself from correcting the professor and saying that running a real business means paying off people, taking care of the union guys and the like. The banter is quite funny, but the story could describe the difference between what democracy is supposed to be and what it has become in the early 21st century.
In a truly democratic system, the people choose those who will represent them in government. Those elected are generally similar in background to those who put them in office. The government officials are supposed to act in the best interests of the voters. The reality is that those elected often become obsessed with staying in power and act to preserve their position. Those who elected them are forgotten or ignored until another election is in order. The democratic system should ideally be transparent. In reality, democratic systems throughout the West are opaque. It’s one thing to classify the specifications of a naval nuclear reactor. It’s quite something else to hide facts related to the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. The former is prudent as it keeps America safe; the latter is wrong as it is based on embarrassment and not national security.
That which is amazing is how people like Barack Obama or Bill Clinton who did not come from great wealth or power become overlords who destroy democratic norms to protect themselves and their power. Many of the millions of documents marked “Secret” or the like are recorded as such not due to any great security need. They are kept away from the people so as to avoid embarrassment or prevent the little people from understanding how things really work in Washington. Materials about John F. Kennedy’s assassination are still held secret. There can be no state security threat, but only uncomfortable facts about what transpired in Dallas on that day, as well as before and after.
When someone like Tucker Carlson claims from a source that the CIA ordered Kennedy’s assassination, he is immediately labeled a conspiracy theorist. But when the government hides so much, people have little choice but to use their imagination and snippets of information from here and there to come to their own conclusions. If they want to get rid of conspiracy theories for once and for all, then they should free up all non-security-related information. Tell us how Kennedy died, prove to us that there are aliens as you claim, let us look at the Epstein flight logs, etc. If the truth is out there, people have no need to concoct theories that are treated as crazy.
Similarly, as long as officials do their best to reduce the number of candidates that the people are allowed to choose, then they will go for the more extreme candidates. I was amazed when Donald Trump won in 2016. Much earlier, Gary Hart had to drop his presidential ambitions for the sin of being photographed with a woman not his wife on a boat, The Monkey Business. That singular photo was enough to sink the senator’s career. Fast-forward to 2016 when all of the dirt in the world was not enough to stop Donald Trump. The people had had enough of the self-dealing Clintons and the aloof Obamas and ignored all of Donald Trump’s scandals and improprieties. They wanted change and they got it. So official Washington did everything to destroy him: the Russia investigation, the J6 inquisition, two impeachments, and when none of that worked, multiple lawsuits based on legal theories never before proposed. But Trump is leading in the polls. The people are not buying the attacks on the former president, and his near assassination has only made him more appealing.
The driving force for this piece was from something that happened here in Israel. My son told me of a former soldier who by means unknown found himself in the most sensitive locations during 10/7 and immediately afterwards. Nobody seems to know how he got there or to whom he was reporting, though he is said to be close to some leftwing Israeli organizations. It is said that the IDF’s response in Gaza was delayed several days due to his seeing operational plans and nobody being able to figure out what he did with the information. Everything had to be planned from scratch. Interviews of the person in question found on the internet show a well-spoken young man who had several start-ups to his name. His official condition is that he is in an insane asylum, a la the Soviet method of making dissidents disappear. Whatever he knows or for whomever he is working is such dynamite that the government and the army want him someplace that no one can speak with him or let the world know what he knows or did.
But in a perfectly democratic system, we should know everything. We should know who got him into the most sensitive meetings, with one picture showing him standing behind Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on 10/7. We should know who his contacts are and what he did with the operational information to which he was exposed. But we’ll never know a thing. Just as with Trump’s near assassin: what are those foreign accounts often mentioned but never explained? He had a phone: with whom was he in communication? Why was he allowed to shoot before being taken out, if he had been known as a person of interest more than an hour before the shooting? As I wrote above and others like Mark Steyn have stated often: when you withhold information from the legal owners of the information—namely, We The People—they will simply invent their own explanations of events. Conspiracy theories grow when the government hides more and more of its malfeasance, waste, ineptitude, and failure. Fauci and company used personal email or intentionally misspelled words in official communications so as to avoid FOIA searches. These government officials worked for the American people but treated them like garbage, not worthy of respect or responsiveness as demanded by law. Instead of the people being the boss and deserving respect, they are seen as a nuisance to be dealt with dishonestly.
Secrecy should be reserved for truly sensitive material, not for governmental or personal failures. Democracy does not die in darkness. Rather, it dies from our elected officials and their appointed underlings forgetting that their paycheck comes from the people’s taxes. Democracy demands transparency, however embarrassing it might be for the elected and appointed poohbahs in the halls of power.