This post is not about our recent election, nor the last or the one before that, and before that, and before that and so on.
And it is not about whatever passes for ‘news’ because ‘news’ moves so quickly that no argument is ever won on a factual basis Rather, putting together a coherent argument is an inefficient strategy when a calculatedly lurid non sequitur will serve just as well. Factual truth is essential to politics for a number of reasons, not least of which is that “facts inform opinions,” which means that…
“Freedom of opinion is a farce unless factual information is guaranteed and the facts themselves are not in dispute – Arendt
The problem is that the technocratic fetishization of truth can have antidemocratic effects. Truth has, in Arendt’s words, a “despotic character” By contrast, on…
matters of opinion…validity depends upon free agreement and consent; they are arrived at by discursive, representative thinking; and they are communicated by means of persuasion and dissuasion – Arendt
It is about restoring equilibrium to our fragile and unstable systems. We are 20trillion dollars in debt, we haven’t had a Federal budget in 8 years, we are engaged in 5 wars, pension plans are underfunded and underperforming, a burden that will be shifted to the taxpayer and more debt.
All of this could be remedied with a determined populace. We’ve endured a war on drugs, crime, hunger, poverty, a war on this and that, and yet those conditions only worsened. In each instance the other side won.
There has been a transformation, I’ve written about it from all the different vantages I could muster, this is how to find our way back, a probability extraordinarily against our favor.
Perhaps a start of the turning was in the 60’s and early 70’s.  The people who were altruistic and not too concerned about finances and fiscalization lost power relative to those people who were more concerned about finances and fiscalization. Certain behaviours were disincentivized and others were potentiated. Technology enables fiscalization of a system, what was a political society becomes a fiscalized one. Fast bank transfers, IRS being able to account for all its subjects sucked people into a very rigid fiscalized structure.
Political change, changes nothing. Does it change contracts? Will it void contracts that already exist? And contracts on contracts, and contracts on contracts on contracts?
And what of free speech? It doesn’t matter what you say, like, share, selfie with a sign, because the dominant elite doesn’t have to be scared of what people think, because a change in political view is not going to change whether they own their company or not. Fiscalized societies don;t have to care what their subjects think because real change in its structure cannot happen, In a politicized system, such as China rulers do need to be fearful of public opinion, fortunes will change. In China they have coerced censorship, the type of kind of them all, self censorship, because the elites are afraid of opinion. Here we do not have censorship (although we do have self censorship and economic coercion) because nothing can substantively change. *
Now then, if we got here how can we get back? Without a studied history it can’t. Creating complex people and business operating systems isn’t done intuitively or stumbled unto, nor can it be trial and error without a high probability of devastating disruption, wars and assorted bad things.
I have to collapse political history by thousands of years and this post will forever be incomplete. I picked a beginning, a middle and an end.
There is a compelling argument for not bothering with the ancients except for its splendid rhetoric. There is a difference between then and now: greater numbers of people, powerful forms of mass communication, higher levels of education and different conceptions of freedom, rights, law, and the ‘self’.
The past should not be appropriated, it is never a precise fit. There is a tendency to
conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrow from them names, battle cries and costumes” to present their own times and actions in “time-honored clothing and borrowed language – Karl Marx
There were great minds that architected the United States and thousands of years of great minds from which our founders built upon. There was a birth of critical historiography, skepticism both rationalizing, impartial. Nothing is to be taken at face value but as citizen we must become the elite that look for parallels between past events and present circumstances.
The past is difficult and complex. Nothing is new.
The past is a repository for whatever intellectual values disciplines hold. Different interpretations will take its students down different, informed, paths.
The founders of our country could read Latin and Greek and had studied the immense histories. The Roman systems became our model for a political system.
They believed that only a republican model would be acceptable to the American people because only it operated without all the burdens and instability of tyranny, oligarchy and mob rule. Instead it drew in those refined forms: Aristocracy, representative Democracy. There was no precise definition of “republic” and it was reduced to two principles that competed: Puritan and Agrarian. 
Both systems they thought might ease the likelihood of decay,  the mortality of republics. The puritan view of the north, was architected on apolitical theory that the longevity needed to be based on morality, good citizens will create a better government. Men should adhere to a public virtue encompassing firmness, endurance, industry, and dedication to the public good like the Greeks.
The agrarian view of the south was constructed for a prosperous socio-economic system, if a man owned land, he would be free from the trials of life which could cause him to be impoverished.
Now we come to an end, when the system has decayed into a contemptible wreckage. It can be restored but, it has to start with the deepest understandings of everything that preceded, what worked, what didn’t, what patterns have been recorded, what were the issues that need to be resolved and how did they do it and once something sufficient has been formed, how can it be preserved.
The End?
h/t to Assange from this remarkable interview