Editorial: The horrifying attack on Paul Pelosi is an attack on democracy, and America
Here is a short and pointed piece I wrote about what happened on June 12, 2004. From the point of view of the Democrats I am talking to you now. I’m not talking about the Republicans in the United States. The Democrats have been the party of government for the past fifty years. The Republicans have always been the party of the voters. I am talking about our government, which operates like the Soviet “dictator” of old.
The U.S. has a system of government that is essentially the same one in many Western European countries. The people elect a government. The government chooses its cabinet. Then it votes. In this system, the voters have nothing to say about the cabinet. The cabinet picks the cabinet. The cabinet makes the appointments. The cabinet hires the police and the army, and the politicians that make the appointments. Then the government, with a majority or a plurality of the seats, either puts on a new budget or votes to override the voters’ veto. The cabinet and the government, the legislators and the politicians, the people and the electors, the voters and the cabinet, all have identical rights and privileges. The governments of the United States and the British Empire both have only one important privilege: the right to arrest and, sometimes, kill. When the government does that there is no freedom, because everything has been taken away. There is no private life, because there is no private citizen anymore.
In the United States, what happens in the cabinet, is not the government’s business. What happens in the cabinet is the business of bureaucrats. They make the laws, and the rules. The bureaucrats have the power to arrest anyone they want, and they can kill, because they have the police and the power of the state behind them.
In Britain, the elected politicians, the cabinet members, make the laws, and the rules. What happens in the cabinet, is the business of the cabinet, of its members, and of the government. There was no power of arrest in our government, and that has been replaced by executive power in Britain: the cabinet, the prime
