The Next Election May Signal the End of Democracy in America

I look at Fidel Castro with long-petrified disdain. The odium does not boil anymore, or even bubble at the surface. Every last drop of bile has calcified and now it is the solidity of my hate that I feel when I see or hear him. It is otherwise with Barack Obama. My disdain for him is always simmering and sometimes raging. It is not solid but porous and yet hot enough to melt rocks. And, yes, if all these analogies reek of the sulphur of hell, it is no coincidence; for I believe that both Fidel Castro and Barack Obama are agents of dark forces whose mission it is to sow death and desolation upon the earth. Both are princes of lies and possess the ability to benumb the minds of men and make them embrace with open eyes the void.

For once in my life I do not fear for my country only but also for the sometime generous land which welcomed us many years ago and which once seemed invulnerable and now merely lucky to have avoided the fate which may await her. German democracy died through the agency of German democracy, and now it seems that the American Republic, as strong as the Weimar Republic was weak, may also be buried in a ballot box. The implosion of democracy in South America in recent years should have sounded the warning. But Americans regard Hispanics with such condescension that they consider our experiences to hold no lessons for them. The flowering of Latin American democracy was of short growth and indistinct memory. Anti-democratic forces, under the cover of democracy, assumed absolute power and then gutted all constitutional rights and civil institutions while allowing the edifice of democracy, compromised to its very foundations and in ruins, to shelter in its shadow crimes that would have been denounced from the beginning had they not been committed under its auspices.

The installation of a Marxist in the White House is not something that could have been accomplished without a compliant and complicit media paving the way for him by wilfully concealing his past, and acting, in effect, as his publicist. The MSM, which were never co-opted but always cooperative, have already made the transition from an independent to a state media in expectation of Obama's election. The return of the so-called "Fairness Doctrine" will silence the few dissenting voices in the media and the impending regulation (actually, regimentation) of the blogosphere will bring all media under government control. In Cuba as in Venezuela, it was necessary for the state to wrest control of the media from its owners. Here it will be a lot easier because no coercion will be necessary: the organs of opinion are already "official" in all but name. This seamless transition from private to official media will go unnoticed by most Americans. The personalities will remain the same; the content will remain the same; the slant will remain the same: nothing will change, but, of course, everything will change, because the media will no longer derive its authority (or the capacity to abuse it) from the Constitution but at the pleasure of the state and subject to its directives.

Those of us who have seen this before will only be surprised that it could happen here. Yet why shouldn't it happen here? The United States has never been immune to political upheavals or economic catastrophes (e.g. the Civil War and the Great Depression). Its capacity to overcome them was never a guarantee against their recurrence much less a guarantee that it would always prevail against them. All democracies in immemorial history have perished by their own excesses.

On November 4th we will see if the United States is really the exception to the rule.