Democrats have won the national vote in six of the last seven presidential elections, which, with the retirement of Anthony Kennedy, will have resulted in the appointment of eight of the Supreme Court’s nine justices. And yet four of those justices will have been appointed by presidents who took office despite having fewer votes than their opponent. Republicans will have increasingly solid control of the court’s majority, with the chance to replace the sometimes-wavering Kennedy with a never-wavering conservative movement stalwart.

Over the last generation, the Republican Party has moved rapidly rightward, while the center of public opinion has not. It is almost impossible to find a substantive basis in public opinion for Republican government. On health care, taxes, immigration, guns, the GOP has left America behind in its race to the far right. But the Supreme Court underscores its ability to counteract the undertow of its deepening, unpopular extremism by marshaling countermajoritiarian power.

This is the way that the neocon (Hillary Clinton wing) Democrat Jonathan Chait, writing at the Democratic Party propaganda-organ New York magazine, got something correct, for a change. That quotation opened Chait’s June 27th commentary, which was ominously titled “The Republican Court and the Era of Minority Rule”. However, the prospects for democracy in America are actually even worse than that. This problem is bipartisan, and Chait himself has been part of it. Neoconservatives (otherwise called “America’s imperialists” but they’re basically no different from imperialists in other countries) run both of America’s political Parties — not only the Republican Party — regardless of what voters might happen to think of the neoconservative philosophy. This disparity between the non-ideological public and the virtually 100% neoconservative rulers, is due to the fact that voters have no real power in America (something that Chait noted in that excerpt, but only within a partisan Democratic-Party-versus-Republican-Party context, not any broader or more encompassing context, one that questions the political and economic system itself — at a deeper level than merely “Democratic” versus “Republican”). By contrast against that powerless public, America’s aristocrats possess all of the real power, in both Parties, and they’re virtually 100% imperialists (“neocons”) because they want their private international corporate empires to dominate over the entire world — at the public’s expense, with a huge, globe-spanning, military.

This insightful (though too narrowly focused) opening from Chait shows that even neoconservatives (such as he) aren’t always wrong about everything. In fact, this opening, from a Democratic Party neoconservative, about America’s increasing conservative (Republican) dictatorship, was entirely truthful within its partisan narrow scope, and therefore (to that extent) it was more like an exemplification of the proverbial “infinite monkey theorem” — that “a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare.” That opening was a random masterpiece.

However, Chait’s ‘Shakespearean’ string ended precisely there, when he immediately followed it by saying, “The story really begins in December 2000,” and he proceeded then to blame everything on Bush-v.-Gore, and on the way that the Republican operatives raped the American nation on 9 December 2000. But to allege that the problem started in 2000 is false ‘history’. This problem started much earlier (as will now be documented).

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The only comprehensive and scientific study which has ever been done of whether the U.S. is a democracy or instead a dictatorship, was published in 2014. It studied the period during 1981 through 2002, and it found that, “In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes.”

Consequently, for example, prior to our invasion of Iraq in 2003, our opinions of “Saddam’s WMD” were simply being manipulated by the controlling owners of U.S.-based international corporations (including their ‘news’media, which they advertise in and/or also own), just as those same super-rich individuals (most of whom are Americans) have controlled whom the nine people will be who rule from the Supreme Court, about what the U.S. Constitution means, and doesn’t mean (and this judicial panel, of course, also decided Bush-v.-Gore, to which Chait blames America’s dictatorship).

So: the U.S. Constitution has become increasingly twisted (by such jurists) to ‘mean’ things (such as aristocratic dictatorship) that were actually loathed by America’s Founders, who even went to war against Britain’s aristocracy — this anti-aristocratic Constitution has become increasingly twisted by the aristocracy’s court-picks, to ‘mean’ things such as creating and expanding an international empire, and as allowing U.S. taxpayers to be forced to subsidize the political speech of some religions and not of other religions, nor of seculars (rejectors of all religions). Especially the Republican Party benefits enormously from empowering evangelical pastors to preach Republican propaganda to their congregations. Religion becomes a political football.

According to that scientific study, the United States, during the period that was studied, 1981 through to 2002, which was virtually the entire twenty years PRIOR to Bush-.v.-Gore — and this is quoting now directly from the study itself: “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.” So: it didn’t start in 2000.

A study published two years later (in 2016) reviewed the entire relevant literature and found “that responsiveness [to the American public’s preferences] seems to have declined during the late twentieth century” and might be getting worse yet than that: “The picture appears to be even more ominous — that is, opinion and policy are negatively related — on highly salient issues that attract media attention.” (Consequently: the more media-attention, the less that the Government’s policy will reflect the public’s preferences on the given issue.) This report states, in its “Conclusions,” that, “the trends seem to be moving in the wrong direction from the standpoint of democratic theory — that is, people seem less and less likely to get what they say they want from government.”

The basic problem in America, therefore, isn’t Democratic versus Republican; it is instead democracy versus dictatorship. And this problem exists within each Party: each Party is controlled by its billionaires, not by its voting-public.

So: how does this — the aristocracy’s dictatorial grip on America’s Government — actually function? Not only the 2000 U.S. Presidential ‘election’ was stolen from the American electorate, but so too are almost all U.S. national elections stolen, especially the crucial ones, such as the political primary elections to Congress and the Presidency, for candidates to become the selected nominees of each of the two political Parties and thus to become offered to the public as the final contestants who might actually win those offices in the U.S. national Government. Just as Bernie Sanders was the most-preferred of all candidates in 2016 to become the U.S. President but the nomination was stolen from him by the Democratic National Committee for Hillary Clinton, it’s the same in most ‘elections’ to American national offices. And this dictatorship by the super-rich didn’t start with Bush.-v.-Gore, such as Chait alleges.

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Here’s a current example of how this dictatorship functions: Right now, the U.S. aristocracy, who control all of the large U.S. corporations — including all of the major news-media — are pushing very hard to impose a kind of lock-down against the few media that they don’t control: against the media whose only presence is online, because these small media lack the funding to have either a print-and-paper presence, or else network broadcast and telecast facilities or a cable network. The way that the ‘news’-giants propagandize for this lockdown against unwanted truths, is by calling those small media sites (especially the half-dozen or so which do publish the elsewhere prohibited truths) ‘fake news’ media, and by alleging that only the print-broadcast-cable ‘news’ media (the very same ‘news’media which had deceived the public in 2002 to fear “Saddam’s WMD,” and which subsequently also ‘justified’, in 2011, Obama’s destruction of Libya, and then his subsequent invasion of Syria) ought to be trusted by the American people. Obviously, trusting those media is crazy, but America’s aristocrats want the public to believe this false way — trusting the billionaire-controlled ‘news’media.

Thus, on June 27th, Gallup reported:

Gallup and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation conducted a web-based experiment to assess the effectiveness of a news source rating tool designed to help online news consumers discriminate between real news and misinformation. The tool identifies news organizations as reliable (using a green cue) or unreliable (using a red cue) based on evaluations of their work, funding and other factors by experienced journalists.

The Gallup news-report closed: “Gallup and Knight Foundation acknowledge support for this research provided by the Ford Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Open Society Foundations.” All of them are neoconservative organizations, which represent the interests of America’s billionaires — not of the public anywhere.

The technical report of this experiment concluded that mainstream news-media can increase the public’s prejudice against non-mainstream news-media, by having their own hired “experienced journalists” label those small competing news-media as providers of ‘misinformation’ instead of ‘news’:

This survey experiment evaluated the effect of a specific source rating tool — cues about news organization trustworthiness based on evaluations from experienced journalists. The findings suggest that using this approach may help combat online misinformation and restore confidence in obtaining quality news.

Of course, this finding is very good news for America’s billionaires, because further suppressing what the aristocrats are calling ‘misinformation’ (such as this, from one of the sites on the aristocracy’s banned list) will enable them to increase their dictatorship, even more. (Incidentally, both the bipartisan aristocratic control, and the truth-suppression, are similar in UK to what they are in U.S., and with similar results.)

As time goes by, the means of deceiving the public, become even cagier than they were before. The way that the dictatorship in America functions is by deceiving the public; and perhaps this Gallup-Knight-Ford-Gates-Soros study has helped them to develop a more effective “tool” to do that.

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Maybe the next big invasion will be of Iran. American-and-allied media seem to be focusing increasingly on this particular target. Perhaps “experienced journalists” are being promoted right now, for that very purpose. With Donald Trump in power, Iran is systematically becoming the main next target. It was his top target even before he became elected; and one can even say that he was selected by the U.S. aristocracy, and by Israel’s aristocracy, and by the Saud family who own Saudi Arabia, and by the leader of UAE’s royal families, mainly for this reason, to be installed to run the U.S. regime. But, of course, they would also have done very well if Hillary Clinton had been ‘elected’. That’s the way things are: politics in America, especially at the national level, is now merely a puppet-show. And, apparently, many if not most of the people who are pulling the strings in it don’t so much as live here — they are foreigners, though of the types that Trump (as now is obvious), relies upon, instead of persecutes (such as ‘wetbacks’). The American people are merely the audience. We didn’t even buy this puppet-show. Those billionaires did. (The American ones also buy the puppet-theater which presents Russia — not Israel or Saudi Arabia — as being the foreign power that controls the U.S. Government and that ‘endangers democracy’ everywhere. During the communist era, that story-line was believable by even intelligent people, but after 24 February 1990, it no longer is: the U.S.’s own aristocracy clearly is that “foreign power.”)

NOTE: The way that the present writer tries to facilitate readers’ checking-out the trustworthiness of the allegations in my own news-reports, isn’t based on sites (like the aristocracy want it to be, so that the news that they don’t want the public to know — and that their own ‘news’-sites won’t publish — won’t be able to have an impact) but instead is based on individual news-reports, by means of providing links to that specific source whenever a given allegation is of such nature that a significant percentage of readers might think it to be false. I am selective of each and every individual article or video that I cite (link to) as being evidence; I never select and link to sources on the basis of the news-medium that published them, because I sometimes find falsehoods published on even the best media, and sometimes find thoroughly accurate articles or videos to be published on even the worst media.

Selecting on the basis of media, instead of specific evidence, is for fools. Every news-consumer should know what the prejudices of any given ‘news’medium are — its main propagandistic orientations. But to evaluate any given allegation on that type of basis, is foolish. It is an ad-hominem, not ad-rem, evaluation regarding that given allegation. It welcomes prejudices, instead of facts — it repels truths. And that is why the aristocracy encourages and promotes it, as the Gallup-Knight-Ford-Gates-Soros study does. (In fact, I’ve seen evidence that the Washington Post uses software that automatically rejects any submission which links to a website that isn’t on the Post’s management-approved list of sites to link to. And, of course, this management-policy encourages the ‘news’paper to accept submissions that have no links in them at all — precisely the least-trustworthy type of submissions.)

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.