{"id":20381,"date":"2024-09-04T08:31:50","date_gmt":"2024-09-04T12:31:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=20381"},"modified":"2024-09-04T08:35:01","modified_gmt":"2024-09-04T12:35:01","slug":"democracys-damndest-defamation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2024\/09\/04\/democracys-damndest-defamation\/","title":{"rendered":"Democracy\u2019s Damndest Defamation"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/h1>\n

Democracy\u2019s Damndest Defamation<\/a><\/h1>\n

by James Bovard \"\", September 4, 2024<\/a><\/p>\n

In a democracy, people automatically become liable for whatever the government inflicts upon them.<\/strong> Many of the most deadly errors of contemporary political thinking stem from the notion that in a democracy the government is the people and vice versa, so there is scant reason to distinguish between the two\u2014or to worry about protecting citizens from the government.<\/p>\n

In 1798, President John Adams pushed through Congress the Alien and Sedition Acts, which empowered Adams to suppress free speech and imprison without trial any critic of the federal government. When the citizens of Westmoreland County, Virginia petitioned Adams with complaints<\/span>, he responded by denouncing the citizens: \u201cThe declaration that Our People are hostile to a government made by themselves, for themselves, and conducted by themselves, is an insult.\u201d Adams\u2019 response to the people of Westmoreland County\u2014few of whom had voted for him\u2014was the classic trick of a would-be democratic tyrant. He declaimed that people were obliged to submit to oppression because the chief executive had been duly elected by other voters.<\/p>\n

On September 4, 1919, President Woodrow Wilson declared, \u201cIn the last analysis, my fellow countrymen, as we in America would be the first to claim, a people are responsible for the acts of their government.\u201d Wilson had campaigned for reelection three years earlier bragging that he had kept the country out of World War I. But shortly after he started his second term, he submitted to Congress a declaration of war against Germany. Were the people responsible for President Wilson\u2019s 1916 peace promises or his 1917 declaration of war? How can they be responsible for both? Wilson campaigned for the presidency in 1912 as a progressive. Shortly after he took office, mass firings of black federal employees occurred. The chief federal revenue collector in Georgia announced, \u201cThere are no Government positions for Negroes in the South. A Negro\u2019s place is in the cornfield.\u201d How were voters who opposed Jim Crow laws responsible for Wilson\u2019s racist purge?<\/p>\n

On July 8, 1938, President Franklin Roosevelt declared, \u201cLet us never forget that government is ourselves<\/i> and not an alien power over us. The ultimate rulers of our democracy are not a president and senators and congressmen and government officials, but the voters of this country.\u201d When Roosevelt ran for reelection in 1936, he never mentioned his plan (revealed in early 1937) to pack the nation\u2019s highest court with new appointees to rubber-stamp his decrees. Yet, because he won in 1936, he effectively implied that the citizenry were somehow bound to accept all of his power grabs as if they themselves had willed them.<\/p>\n

On October 28, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson declared, \u201cGovernment is not an enemy of the people. Government is the people themselves.\u201d But it wasn\u2019t \u201cthe people\u201d who deceived themselves regarding the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. It wasn\u2019t \u201cthe people\u201d who went to the voting booths the following week based on Johnson\u2019s signals to keep the United States out of another land war in Asia\u2014even though Johnson was already preparing to massively escalate the conflict.<\/p>\n

On October 7, 1996, President Bill Clinton declared, \u201cThe Government is just the people, acting together\u2014just the people acting together.\u201d But, was it \u201cthe people\u201d who invited wealthy businessmen to give $50,000 to the Democratic National Committee to come to White House coffee klatches? Was it \u201cthe people\u201d who approved a plan to rent out the Lincoln bedroom for $100,000 a night? Was it \u201cthe people\u201d who approved sending FBI tanks to spray toxic and flammable gas leading to the fiery Waco finale that left eighty civilians dead?<\/p>\n

On April 3, 2013, President Barack Obama, championing new bans on gun ownership, declared that since America is a democracy, people had no reason to fear \u201cthe government is going to come take my guns. The government is us. These officials are elected by you. I am elected by you. I am constrained, as they are constrained, by a system that our Founders put in place.\u201d But Obama scorned the Constitution to create a new presidential prerogative to assassinate (without trial) any American who the U.S. government secretly labels a terrorist suspect. Obama ravaged the Fourth Amendment by vastly expanding illegal federal surveillance of private citizens. And he sought to dismiss the uproar from Edward Snowden\u2019s revelations by ludicrously claiming that \u201cthere is no spying\u201d on Americans.<\/p>\n

On October 23, 2015, Obama hit the same \u201cus\u201d theme at a Democratic fundraiser: \u201cOur system only works when we realize that government is not some alien thing; government is not some conspiracy or plot; it\u2019s not something to oppress you. Government is us in a democracy.\u201d But it was not private citizens who, during Obama\u2019s reign, issued more than half a million pages of proposed and final regulations and notices in the Federal Register; made more than ten million administrative rulings; tacitly took control of more than five hundred million acres by designating them \u201cnational monuments\u201d; and bombed seven foreign nations.<\/p>\n

On March 11, 2021, President Joe Biden proclaimed, \u201cWe need to remember, the government isn\u2019t some foreign force in a distant capital. No, it\u2019s us. All of us. We the people.\u201d Biden spoken in a Capitol building that was surrounded by high barbed wire and thousands of National Guard soldiers. Average citizens had long since been banished from the so-called Temple of Democracy. Six months later, Biden decreed that eighty-four million American adults working for private companies must get COVID vaccines even though the White House knew the shots failed to prevent infections or transmission. The president derided vaccine skeptics as murderers who only wanted \u201cthe freedom to kill you with my COVID.\u201d The Supreme Court struck down that policy and many other Biden decrees as illegal or unconstitutional.<\/p>\n

The \u201cpeople = government\u201d doctrine is political infantilism, a ploy to shift the guilt for every federal crime onto every victim of the government. This is the political version of the doctrine of original sin; it assumes that a person is born politically damned with the weight of all of the past and future sins of his government upon his head.<\/strong> This doctrine makes sense only if we assume citizens are masochists who secretly wish to have their lives blighted. Do citizens\u2019 unspoken wishes animate each restriction inflicted upon them? But drivers who exceed speed limits are not \u201cself-ticketed\u201d and travelers who get accosted by Transportation Security Administration agents at airports are not self-molested.<\/p>\n

The notion that \u201cthe people are the government\u201d is one of the biggest slanders that the average citizen will endure in his lifetime. And it is even more ludicrous nowadays after Washington dropped an Iron Curtain around itself.<\/strong> Every year, the federal government slaps a \u201csecret\u201d label on trillions of pages of information\u2014enough to fill twenty million filing cabinets. Federal classification regimes permit only 1% of the populace to learn some of the endlessly multiplying government secrets. But the other 99% can be \u201ctrusted\u201d to pay off the federal government\u2019s $35 trillion debt.<\/p>\n

To confuse the government with the people razes barriers against political invasions of private lives. The further government power extends, the broader swath more of people\u2019s lives fall under bureaucratic thumbs. Yet politicians talk as if citizens are as free when they email Congress pleading for relief as when they use their own property.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cGovernment is us\u201d exemplifies how all of the prevailing illusions on democracy are biased in favor of blind submission. That doctrine is simply another dose of campaign snake oil to keep rubes paying and obeying. Democracy will perish unless citizens speedily get better political bullshit radars.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Democracy\u2019s Damndest Defamation by James Bovard , September 4, 2024 In a democracy, people automatically become liable for whatever the government inflicts upon them. Many of the most deadly errors of contemporary political thinking stem from the notion that in a democracy the government is the people and vice versa, so there is scant reason […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20384,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2612,426,2653,4308,52,504,4305,428,1165,473,4306,55,24,4307,102,1040,479],"class_list":["post-20381","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-alien-and-sedition-acts","tag-bill-clinton","tag-capitol","tag-covid-vaccine-mandate","tag-democracy","tag-franklin-roosevelt","tag-jim-crow-laws","tag-joe-biden","tag-john-adams","tag-lyndon-johnson","tag-racial-bias","tag-secrecy","tag-supreme-court","tag-temple-of-demmocracy","tag-waco","tag-woodrow-wilson","tag-world-war-one"],"yoast_head":"\nDemocracy\u2019s Damndest Defamation - James Bovard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The notion that \u201cthe people are the government\u201d is one of the biggest slanders that the average citizen will endure in his lifetime.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2024\/09\/04\/democracys-damndest-defamation\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Democracy\u2019s Damndest Defamation - 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The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \"the roving inspector general of the modern state\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \"one-man truth squad.\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism & Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. Bovard\u2019s writings have been publicly denounced by FBI director Louis Freeh, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the Postmaster General, and the chiefs of the U.S. International Trade Commission, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as well as by many congressmen and other malcontents.","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.jimbovard.com","https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/jim.bovard","https:\/\/x.com\/jimbovard"],"url":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/author\/admin\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20381","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20381"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20381\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20385,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20381\/revisions\/20385"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20384"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}