Photo by Mike Maguire | CC BY 2.0
“The populace may hiss me, but when I go home and think of my money, I applaud myself.”
—Horace, Epistles
It’s been a month since the election, and in the mirrored halls of the news and social media the contributors of uplifting opinion have been telling themselves that no matter what else might be said about the campaigns and the vote, it was a great day for Democracy. Rough and tumble democracy in the raw, free-range, artisanal and organic, the will of the people trampling out the vintage of political correctness, emerging from the ash heap of vicious cant, texting “yes” to the Declaration of Independence, “no” to an uncivil transfer of power. Cue the music, roll the camera and the flag. The people have spoken. Our democracy lives. Government of the people, by the people and for the people is not perished from the earth.
Which might have been the case had Bernie Sanders been on the ballot. He wasn’t, and neither was democracy. What was on the ballot was plutocracy, complacently stupefied and transparently corrupt at the top of the Republican and the Democratic ticket. Two gold-plated names on the same boardroom door, both candidates representative of and privileged by a government of the rich, by the rich and for the rich that for the last thirty years has been arranging the country’s political and socioeconomic affairs. The election campaign was the struggle for control of corporate management,…