AMERICAN DEMOCRACY—WHAT HAS GONE WRONG?

 DO WE LIVE IN A FOTISMENOCRACY?

What is wrong with American “Democracy”?

It is clear to any observer of the American scene that a good part of the US electorate has no respect for the political preferences of those (75 million) in the other strata of society. 

The intellectual elites are advocates of the idea that our “democracy” is some sort of oligarchic system. 

An oligarchy is a government by the “oligos”  the “few”.  But I propose here a new more valid term: I call it the fotismenocratic  system or government by the (“fotismenos”  the enlightened).    In a fotismenocracy the elite, the academics, the “enlightened” and the politically connected govern the regular folks.  

These fotismenocrats love to pepper their speeches with the term “democracy”, they even call themselves “democrats”, but they never knew or now have forgotten what the word “democracy” means! 

The  prefix “demos” of that Greek-coined concept means- “people”—all the people. The  ancient Hellenes held that the “demos” held the source of power to govern.   The basis of this concept of Hellenes is that we are all politically equal—those with college degrees and those who work on the farm, in a small business, in a garage, or a factory.  All of us have our own political, familial, economic and social preferences about governing.  In our democracy all these individuals deserve respect and the right to express their political will.  The elites must be reminded that democracies take the power to govern from all the people…not only those from one class or one intellectual or educational stratum.  

This concept of a “fotismenos-ocracy” is a pernicious one. It leads its misguided adherents to  hubris and ultimately to evil deeds such as stuffing ballot boxes, or dumping  voting evidences of certain voting groups into a nearby creek, or miscounting votes, or editors shelving stories or government judicial agencies ignoring their oaths of office to act impartially,  etcetera, etcetera.  They feel no guilt  about these un-democratic acts of bias, since the fostismenocrats fully believe that they are “saving the nation” from the ignorant, “deplorables”, “semi-fascists” —the  unenlightened. They are wiser, they follow “the science” (their interpretation of it) , they are educated, he  enlightened, and as such they are self-righteously convinced they have the right to ignore their oaths of office or professional ethics, or the law to save” the nation from the unenlightened. 

It is now apparent that they must we be reminded that in a democracy—the people rule—all the people!  Those in the majority—they  get the opportunity to make the rules—not necessarily those who claim to be “enlightened”. 

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