No Choice

by Brian Dunaway
by Brian Dunaway

The Super Tuesday election returns provided all the anticipation and excitement of last week’s Academy Awards.

As a matter of fact, it was quite similar to the Academy Awards – a rigged election process with no critical thought, just different Orcs.

So here we are, more than eight months away from the presidential election, and it has already been decided by our apparatchiks which two plutocrats will represent the political monopoly this coming November. The suspense is killing me.

But can a case be made for discernment? If you’re not one of the cult members who enthusiastically casts votes for their respective parties, it’s difficult even to imagine.

Tsunami-like issues, still far offshore, but whose arrival and destructive power are certain, are not even openly discussed. For example, the insidiousness of our immigration policy, or lack thereof, is the issue that dare not speak its name. As the saying goes, demography is destiny, and we will simply wake up one day to find ourselves in a nation not our own.

But because foreign interventionism and its resultant blowback seem the most immediate threat, that one aspect of national security is on everyone's radar screen. In fact, even some conservatives and libertarians are climbing on board the "anyone-but-Bush" bandwagon. I deeply sympathize with them.

However, a frightening case against the idea of significant foreign policy differences between Bush and Kerry administrations was made this last week by Mark Hand (and expounded by John Pilger). It appears that the Democrats have their own radical leftist democracy-worshipping interventionists, and Senator John Kerry is front-and-center.

In what Hand calls a choice between "Coke and Pepsi," he presents the New Democrats’ Progressive Policy Institute as an analogue to the neocons’ Project for a New American Century. The PPI’s "progressive internationalism" sounds an awful lot like the neocons’ Global Democratic Hegemony. The PPI’s manifesto calls for "the bold exercise of American power, not to dominate but to shape alliances and international institutions that share a common commitment to liberal values."

They claim that their foreign policy strategy relies upon the Democratic Party’s tradition of "muscular internationalism" and aims to "rebuild the moral foundation of U.S. global leadership by harnessing America’s awesome power to universal values of liberal democracy."

Apparently the Democrats have become weary of the Republicans trying to take all the credit for Wilson, Roosevelt, and Truman.

Surely the two parties are the same in kind, even in their penchant for foreign interventionism, but what of degrees? There may be a discernable difference there.

Who wields the most power over the current president’s foreign policy? Unquestionably, the neoconservatives and dispensationalists. The former want to usher in The End of History, while the latter want to usher in The End of The World.

The interests and political connections of both intersect in Israel, which make it one spectacularly dangerous axis of evil. But as ubiquitous and powerful as these two interest groups are, neither of them would hold nearly as much sway in any Democratic administration.

Yes, the Democrats may have their repellant PPI manifesto, but can they be compared to the neocons, the intellectual inheritors of Albert Wohlstetter, one of the inspirations for Dr. Strangelove, and father of the current policy of tactical nuclear weapons and preemptive invasion?

Also, don’t the neocons and dispensationalists strongly depend upon one another for political power? Can their chariot thunder across the Fertile Crescent with one wheel missing?

But unlike Charley Reese, I’m not going to tell anyone for whom they should or should not vote. Voting for whomever our overlords tell us is a self-fulfilling prophecy of defeatism.

And I would think that Mr. Reese, whom I greatly admire, would take down the shingle of his voter consulting service after his "anyone-but-Gore" 2000 election strategy, the irony of which was that casting a vote for Buchanan might get Gore elected.

But I’m no better – in my first and final ballot for president I cast my vote for Pat Buchanan. I’m proud of my vote, and never held any illusions about Bush’s fondness for interventionism (despite his weasel-words to the contrary), open immigration, big government, etc., but I never imagined the difference in degrees between Bush and Gore, which I’m now convinced are quite significant.

Knowing all that, I’m still not certain that voting accomplishes anything other than legitimizing an abject plutocracy whose goals are almost exactly the opposite of the vast majority. Voting is a designed distraction for the "vulgar masses" while those who would rule over us do what is in their own best interests.

Do we not judge a tree by its fruit?

Year after year, decade after decade, regardless of whom we elect, who can deny the trends of action: hindering trade, stifling speech, abolishing liberties, being bought off by foreign interests, expanding intrusive government, annihilating the law and reading into the law that which isn’t there, practicing unnecessary war with increasing frequency, inflating the currency, indoctrinating the young toward unquestionable obedience and banality, creating enemies who have never offended us and alienating allies, bankrupting the nation, allowing aliens to pour over our border and sap our resources, and obfuscating every conceivable historical and spiritual truth.

This voting season, will you legitimize the criminal gang running the country?

As Dr. Phil would say, "How’s that workin’ for ya?"

March 6, 2004

Brian Dunaway [send him mail] is a chemical engineer and a native Texan.

Copyright © 2004 LewRockwell.com

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