With Or Without a SCOTUS-Authorized President-King, the United States Government is an ILLEGITIMATE Dictatorship of the Rich

Don't let the brouhaha about the recent Supreme Court's decision making the president a king-above-the-law deflect from the fundamental illegitimacy of the U.S. government

Jul 06, 2024

The Founding Fathers were enemies of We the People

The United States Founding Fathers were the Bill Gateses and Jeff Bezoses of the world at that time. They used the rhetoric of equality and democracy to shape society by exactly the opposite of these values, and when the have-nots rose up against them these Founding Fathers attacked them violently. Please read about this here.

The Founding Fathers created the United States Constitution to give them the kind of strong government they needed to suppress the rebellions of the have-nots and to protect the great wealth and privilege and power of the haves. Read here how the U.S. Constitution is designed to keep the rich in power over the have-nots.

How did the Founding Fathers get away with it?

The Founding Fathers got away with their imposition of what was in fact a dictatorship of the rich by taking advantage of the fact that at that time (and still today, alas) most people thought that the basis of legitimacy of a government was that it was elected. People did not understand that just because a government was elected did not mean that it was of, by and for ordinary people instead of the few rich people.

Many national governments that primarily enable the haves to dominate and oppress the have-nots are governments based on more or less fair elections. This demonstrates that it is a mistake to believe that holding fair elections--a.k.a. "consent of the governed"--makes a government legitimate. The specific problem with the "consent of the governed" principle is the focus of the sub-section below with that sub-title. What truly is the fundamental basis of a government's legitimacy is the first topic of this article.

A government is not legitimate unless it is TRULY of, by and for ordinary people. Let’s see how we can make such a truly legitimate government.

We need LEGITIMATE government, what I call voluntary federation of local assemblies egalitarians.

In voluntary federation of local assemblies of egalitarians the basis of legitimacy of a government is two-fold:

1) The lawmakers are people, and ONLY people, who support the good principles (discussed here) of no-rich-and-no-poor equality (abbreviated “equality” henceforth below) and mutual aid and fairness (let's call such people "egalitarians," and call those who oppose these principles "anti-egalitarians");

and

2) All adults who will be obliged to obey the laws AND who support the principles of equality and mutual aid and fairness, and agree that egalitarians have a legitimate right to democratically make and enforce laws, have a right to participate, as full equals of all the other lawmakers, in the meetings of the Local1 Assembly of Egalitarians, which is the sovereign law-making governmental body that rules over all the people in the local community, both egalitarians and non-egalitarians. The sovereignty of the Local Assembly of Egalitarians means that no other governmental body, in particular no higher governmental body such as a national central government, has the right to make a law that people must obey.

Everybody is presumed to support the principles of equality and mutual aid and fairness unless they make it abundantly clear that they don't, in which case those who do support these principles are within their rights to remove the ones who don't from any role as a lawmaker. Elections no longer play any role in determining the legitimacy of a government; the lawmakers are no longer elected.

This two-fold basis of legitimacy is very different from the current "elected by a majority" basis. It implies that only governments that are local can make laws, because it is not realistically possible for the second condition of legitimacy (that all who must obey the laws and who support the egalitarian principles of equality and mutual aid and fairness may participate equally in making the laws) to work except on a local scale. Because only local governments can make and enforce laws, it follows that individuals in Washington D.C. (or any nation's capital) can make proposals that local governments may accept (by making appropriate laws) or reject as they wish, but they cannot make laws that everybody is morally obliged to obey.

Social order on a larger than local scale is achieved by the voluntary federation principle: local governments (i.e., local assemblies of egalitarians) send delegates to meet with delegates from other local governments for the purpose of crafting proposals (as opposed to laws) for the local assemblies of egalitarians to implement jointly if they wish (meaning that back and forth negotiating takes place to try to reach a sufficiently widely shared agreement among local assemblies of egalitarians.) Regional bodies of delegates in turn send delegates to meet with delegates from other regions, etc., up to even bodies consisting of delegates from all over the planet, in order to craft proposals for cooperation and coordination on as large a scale as people wish.

Voluntary Federation of Egalitarians Does What We Want Governments to Do, Better

Voluntary federation of local assemblies of egalitarians is more capable of preventing bad people from doing bad things than any Federal government in Washington D.C. (or any other nation's capital) ruling with the invalid authoritarian principle, and at the same time it is far less prone to making people obey bad laws.

Firstly, the voluntary federation of local assemblies of egalitarians is far less likely than today's Federal government in Washington D.C. to be controlled by bad people (anti-egalitarians) making bad anti-egalitarian laws (such control or influence by anti-egalitarians is the main reason today's Federal government doesn't prevent bad people from doing bad things in the first place). Why? Because the very legitimacy of the voluntary federation government requires all lawmakers to support the egalitarian principles of equality and mutual aid and fairness. In contrast, the legitimacy of today's Federal government has nothing to do with support for these principles, the very principles that distinguish good from bad laws.

Secondly, when laws are made by meetings open to full and equal participation by all the egalitarians a) who agree that egalitarians have the right to democratically make and enforce laws and b) who will have to obey those laws, then it is far less likely that laws will be passed that the egalitarians who have to obey them will consider to be bad laws.

Today's politicians, in contrast, make laws in virtual secrecy behind closed doors, under the influence of lobbyists for Big Money who use all sorts of methods to bribe politicians to do their bidding. Ordinary people have to obey these laws but they are excluded from the actual process of writing them. No wonder so many bad laws are now the law of the land!

With voluntary federation of local assemblies of egalitarians the people who are left out of the process but who must nonetheless obey the laws are the anti-egalitarians who want society to be unequal and who disagree with the principle of mutual aid--people like our current wealthy, privileged and powerful billionaire elite. These people may not approve of the laws and yet will be made to obey them, which is right and proper, just as it was right and proper to force the slave owners in the American South to have to obey the law against slavery, and it was right and proper for the state of Missouri after the Civil War to bar pro-slavery people from voting or holding any government office, as you can read about here.

Thirdly, voluntary federation of egalitarians enables the local governments to act in unison, even, when necessary, to organize military forces to enforce egalitarian laws against the wishes of anti-egalitarians who don't like those laws. There is nothing weak about voluntary federation. In fact, voluntary federation is particularly strong because it unifies only people who support the principles of equality and mutual aid and fairness, and is not weakened by internal disagreement over whether or not to support these principles.

Slave owners in the 19th century United States would have had a much harder time remaining slave owners if there had been voluntary federation of egalitarians as described here! Wealthy and privileged elites, when there is voluntary federation of egalitarians, will no longer be able to persuade working class people that they have to obey anti-working class laws by claiming the Federal government has a legitimate right to rule because it was elected.

Voluntary federation of local assemblies of egalitarians is the way for good people to unite and thereby prevail over bad people. It's that simple.

Consent of the Governed?

Most oppressive governments in the world today--governments that are actually instruments of a privileged and oppressive upper class--hold elections in order to be able to claim that they have the "consent of the governed" and hence exercise legitimate authority. Here is why this is a bogus claim.

First, it is obvious that the people who did not vote for the winners of the election (and this is commonly nearly 50% of the voters!) did not give their consent to the winner to rule over them.

Second, the constitution that determines how the government operates and holds elections is a document that typically was written and made the law of the land long before the people who must live under it were even born, and so they never gave their consent to it. And even if the document was ratified in the lifetime of the people who must live under it, the ones who voted "no" did not give their consent to it.

Third, informed consent--true informed consent!--is a wonderful concept, but it means something very different from what people point to when they argue that a government has "informed consent." Here's what true informed consent means. True informed consent is what is required (in most nations today) from a person before he or she can be enrolled in a medical research clinical trial. To give true informed consent the person must, under no compulsion, sign an "informed consent" document that must be written in language the person (or adult guardian in the case of a child) can understand; often the person must sign each paragraph in the consent document to make sure he or she fully understands and consents to it.

Beware of those praising the U.S. Constitution who say our problems today stem from not honoring it in practice

There are people today who, to their credit, don’t like the fact that we live under a dictatorship of the rich. These people, however, are wrong in saying that the United States was once a good democracy (or republic) but now it is no more, and that the solution is to “go back” to honoring in practice the U.S. Constitution and to make our nation “a republic, not an empire” and so forth.

No! This is most definitely NOT the solution. Some people who say this is the solution are ignorant and naive. But others who say it is the solution are unprincipled people trying to gain popularity by relying on deceit instead of truth. They are opportunistically catering to the misunderstanding that elections make a government legitimate—the same misunderstanding people had back when the Founding Fathers used it to get away with imposing a dictatorship of the rich over the have-nots.

If we are ever to have government of, by and for We the People, then we need to re-think what that actually requires. It is something very different from what the U.S. Constitution imposes on us. The sooner we re-think this, the better.

JOHN SPRITZLER'S Substack

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