Brownstone Institute
Government by the People: Is It Possible?
The Gettysburg Address celebrated “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” echoing the ideals of the Enlightenment: equality for all, and liberation from the yoke of tyrannical rulers.
Since 1863 when Abraham Lincoln made his iconic speech, the “government of the people” bit has just purred along without a glitch. There has been no dearth of individuals wanting to rule others, whether by election or by birthright. The people have been thoroughly governed, and governed more still.
The “government for the people” bit has had its ups and downs. Every government claims it rules for the people – it would be political suicide not to make that claim in a developed Western society – but humans have a tendency to look after Number 1 before they help others. When placed in positions of authority, individuals have usually used those positions to amass more power and wealth for themselves.
As a slogan though, “government for the people” has been a roaring success. Even the swastika of the Nazis symbolised prosperity and happiness (being derived from the Sanskrit svastika, meaning ‘good to exist’). The reality in recent times, as in many historical ones, is that government has been for the people only in name.
It’s the “government by the people” bit that has been the most problematic.
But we have elections!
Elections of politicians may be heralded as the pinnacle of democracy, but elections embody neither the Athenian idea of democracy nor, in the modern media age especially, the idea of “government by the people.” On the contrary, elections are an elitist system through which “men and women of high standing” achieve power over others — for their own good, of course! Modern representative democracy is akin to an aristocratic marketing exercise, wherein clubs of important people specialise in how to get others to give them more power. Political dynasties and training trajectories have emerged to buttress and strengthen this exercise.
Politicians today go to great lengths to forge coalitions with the media and with wealthy individuals who can buy them airtime there. A class of elite professional persuaders has risen to the top of our “democratic” systems. The system does not reward the ability to lead or to put the needs of the people first, but the ability to persuade others. This is merely yet more “government of the people.”
Hence with a hand wave to the existence of “free and fair elections,” and apart from a few odd places like Switzerland, the “by the people” bit of Lincoln’s vision is being roundly ignored in modern democratic countries. The elites in charge like to think that populations cannot be trusted to make good decisions and are in need of their guidance. The political elites denigrate movements oriented towards giving a greater say in national affairs to the population by using the term “populism,” and their negative use of that term perfectly sums up what the elected class and their mates think about ordinary people.
The lack of government “by the people” has been a key problem in our societies for the past 30 years or more, particularly in the US where obscene amounts of money have blatantly entered the elite election game. There has been too much government of the people rather than by it, leading to widespread apathy among populations that then become more susceptible to abuse. Abuse is what happens when one does not stand up for one’s rights. Perennial vigilance and standing up for yourself when you are pushed around is the only way to deal with those who face a perennial temptation to push you around.
We have seen decay in spades over the past two to three years, but in Anglo-Saxon countries the downward slide in the living standards of the bottom 50% has been accelerating since about the 1980s. The year 2020 ushered in a fresh phase of decay in living standards. Only the very top of society is now prospering, while the rest suffers a diminution in every way: their health, wealth, education, prospects of owning a home, ability to travel, self-respect, myriad freedoms, and access to reliable information are all under unprecedented assault. A new medieval society has emerged with a few chiefs and a lot of abused Indians.
Power (back) to the People!
To escape this trap, populations need hope. To have hope, one needs a plan and a slogan. The slogan of the Gettysburg Address is still a good one. Let’s take it truly seriously.
What would “government by the people” look like, and what core changes should a reform movement champion to make Lincoln’s vision a reality? We propose a set of two complementary reforms, both of which aim to reintegrate the presently governed masses into the business of power. The first reform would assign to the masses the role of appointing public-service leaders, and the second would involve the masses in the presently dysfunctional production of information (i.e., the media sector). Let’s get into the first one now, and we’ll cover the second one in a forthcoming piece.
The most important duty that the public must reclaim is that of appointing its leaders. Elections of politicians are not enough when the modern state apparatus contains hundreds of top bureaucratic posts associated with significant authority to wield the power of the people via large-scale resource allocation decisions.
Neither is it only in the government bureaucracy that the “power of the people” – the power represented by the nation state – resides. State-funded universities, schools, hospitals, libraries, statistical agencies, and other institutions also benefit from the state “brand” and hence draw on the power whose ultimate source is the population making up that state. The leaders of such organisations, and of the various silos of the state bureaucracy, should in fairness be led by individuals chosen by that same population, not just “of” it.
Our proposal is that the appointments to all leadership roles in hospitals, universities, national media companies, government departments, scientific and statistical agencies, courts, police forces, and so on — in short, the leadership of what has come to be called the ‘administrative state’ or the ‘deep state’ — should be made directly by the people.
One might even argue that strategic roles in large public-service-oriented entities, even if technically part of the private sector, should be included too because they also have major effects on captive national populations. This would mean adding to the above list the top roles within entities like water suppliers, electricity generators, large charities, and big media companies, hospitals, and universities, regardless of sector.
How to make this happen? We propose adopting a method of mobilising and organising the population to judge others that worked reasonably well in Ancient Rome and Greece, worked again more recently in Italian city-states, and is ubiquitous today in courts of law: juries of citizens. The many benefits of giving citizens a strong and direct voice in the selection of leaders through citizen juries include fostering diversity of thought and breaking down the monocultures that have coiled their tendrils through and around our public institutions. At the same time, they can act as a bulwark against the power of the new private-sector barons whose wishes have come to dominate policy in many aspects of our economy and culture.
In a jury, unlike in an election, people pay attention and really talk to each other, particularly if they feel they truly are the ones deciding something important. They will be more likely to feel a weight of responsibility and to take their task seriously as members of a jury than when casting a vote together with millions of others once every couple of years.
We suggest juries of, say, 20 randomly chosen citizens apiece, of which each jury makes one appointment and is then disbanded. Expertise in specific disciplines is not required for jurors, just as jurors deciding the verdict in a money-laundering case do not need degrees in finance or accounting. Juries that do desire some expert guidance when making a decision can obtain this guidance easily.
As a practical matter, a sophisticated apparatus would be required to support the juries administratively. This would consist partly of a combination of jury alumni — citizens who have been part of juries before — and a purely administrative organisation that coordinates the jurors and the jury appointments. Jurors should not be told who to look for, what the selection criteria are, or any other such “guidance” that boils down to telling them what the existing power-holders want them to do. Via this system, trust is placed in the population, just as trust in the developed West is placed in markets rather than in central planning.
Involving the population directly in the appointment of thousands of leaders in the country every year is a step towards government by the people. Breaking the stranglehold of money and the professional persuaders over society in this way creates a new set of civic institutions that is independent of media-led elections and state and business elites, dragging the top of the public sector into the dominion of the citizens they are supposed to serve.
You can bet that this real transfer of power to the people will be strongly resisted by most elite individuals and institutions. They will loudly proclaim every single reason they can think of for why it is a crazy, impossible idea, and get “experts” from their networks to loudly profess the silliness of even proposing the notion. This vitriolic denigration is exactly the measure of how badly we need to loosen their grip on power and change the system they have entrenched for their own benefit.
Like Lincoln’s, our era calls out again for a “new birth of freedom,” not only for the United States but for all of the Western world, so that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Authors
From the Brownstone Institute
We all have a different starting place and journey but each of us has the following in common. We’ve realized that official sources, the ones we’ve trusted in the past, are not going to make any sense of the above for us. We have to seek out alternatives and put the story together ourselves. And this we must do because the only other choice is to accept that all of the above consists of a random series of disconnected and pointless events, which is surely not true.
The last few years can be tracked at two levels: the physical reality around us and the realm of the intellectual, mental, and psychological.
The first level has presented a chaotic narrative of the previously unthinkable. A killer virus that turned out to be what many people said it was in February 2020: a bad flu with a known demographic risk best treated with known therapeutics. But that template and the ensuing campaign of fear and emergency rule gave rise to astonishing changes in our lives.
Social functioning was wholly upended as schools, businesses, churches, and travel were ended by force. The entire population of the world was told to mask up, despite vast evidence that doing so achieved nothing in terms of stopping a respiratory virus.
That was followed by a breathtaking propaganda campaign for a shot that failed to live up to its promise. The cure for the disease itself caused tremendous damage to health including death, a subject about which everyone cared intensely before the shot and then strangely forgot about after.
Protests against the goings-on were met with media smears, shutdowns, and even the cancellation of bank accounts. However, and simultaneously, other forms of protest were encouraged, insofar as they were motivated by a more proper political agenda against structural injustices in the old system of law and order. That was a strange confluence of events, to say the least.
In the midst of this, which was wild enough, came new forms of surveillance, censorship, corporate consolidation, an explosion of government spending and power, rampant and global inflation, and hot wars from long-running border conflicts in two crucial regions.
The old Declarations of rules on the Internet put free speech as a first principle. Today, the hosting website of the most famous one, signed by Amnesty International and the ACLU, is gone, almost as if it never existed. In 2022, it came to be replaced by a White House Declaration on the Future of the Internet, that extols stakeholder control as the central principle.
All the while, once-trusted sources of information – media, academia, think tanks – have steadfastly refused to report and respond in truthful ways, leading to a further loss of public trust not just in government and politics but also in everything else, including corporate tech and all the higher order sectors of the culture.
Also part of this has been a political crisis in many nations, including the use of sketchy election strategies justified by epidemiologic emergency: the only safe way to vote (said the CDC) is absentee via the mails. Here we find one of many overlapping parallels to a scenario hardly ever imagined: infectious disease deployed as a cover for political manipulation.
Crucially and ominously, all of these mind-blowing developments took place in roughly similar ways the world over, and with the same language and model. Everywhere people were told “We are all in this together,” and that social distancing, masking, and vaxxing was the correct way out. Media was also censored everywhere, while anti-lockdown protestors (or even those who simply wanted to worship together in peace) were treated not as dissidents to be tolerated but irresponsible spreaders of disease.
Can we really pretend that all of this is normal, much less justified? The exhortation we receive daily is that we can and must.
Really? At what point did you realize that you had to start thinking for yourself?
We all have a different starting place and journey but each of us has the following in common. We’ve realized that official sources, the ones we’ve trusted in the past, are not going to make any sense of the above for us. We have to seek out alternatives and put the story together ourselves. And this we must do because the only other choice is to accept that all of the above consists of a random series of disconnected and pointless events, which is surely not true.
That leads to the second layer of comprehension; the intellectual, mental, and psychological. Here is where we find the real drama and incalculable difficulties.
At the dawn of lockdowns, what appeared to be a primitive public health error seemed to be taking place. It seemed like some scientists at the top, who gained an implausible amount of influence over government policy, had forgotten about natural immunity and were under the impression that it was good for health to stay home, be personally isolated, avoid exercise, and eat only takeout food. Surely such preposterous advice would be revealed soon as the nonsense it was.
How in the world could they be so stupid? How did they gain so much influence, not just nationally but all over the world? Did the whole of humanity suddenly forget about all known science in every field from virology to economics to psychology?
As time went on, more and more anomalies appeared that made that judgment seem naïve. As it turns out, what was actually taking place had something to do with a move on the part of security and intelligence services. It was they who were given rule-making authority on March 13, 2020, and that’s why so much of what we needed to know was and is considered classified.
There were early initial reports that the virus itself might have been leaked from a US-backed lab in Wuhan, which introduces the entire subject of the US bioweapons program. This is a very deep rabbit hole itself, thoroughly exposed in Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s The Wuhan Cover-Up. There was a reason that topic was censored: it was all true. And as it turns out, the vaccine itself was able to bypass the normal approval process by slipping through under the cover of emergency. In effect, it came pre-approved by the military.
As the evidence continues to roll in, more and more rabbit holes appear, thousands of them. Each has a name: Pharma, CCP, WHO, Big Tech, Big Media, CBDCs, WEF, Deep State, Great Reset, Censorship, FTX, CISA, EVs, Climate Change, DEI, BlackRock, and many more besides. Each of these subject areas has threads or thousands of them, each connecting to more and to each other. At this point, it is simply not possible for a single person to follow it all.
To those of us who have been steeped in following the revelations day by day, and trying to keep up with putting them together into a coherent model of what happened to us, and what is still going on, the ominous reality is that the traditional understanding of rights, liberties, law, business, media, and science were dramatically overthrown in the course of just a few months and years.
Nothing operates today as it did in 2019. It’s not just that functioning broke. It was broken and then replaced. And the surreptitious coup d’état with no shots fired is still ongoing, even if that is not the headline.
Of this fact, many of us today are certain. But how common is this knowledge? Is it a vague intuition held by many members of the public or is it known in more detail? There are no reliable polls. We are left to guess. If any of us in 2019 believed we had our finger on the pulse of the national mood or public opinion generally, we certainly do not anymore.
Nor do we have access to the inner workings of government at the highest levels, much less the conversations going on among the winners of our age, the well-connected ruling elites who seemed to have gamed the entire system for their own benefit.
It’s so much easier to regard the whole thing as a giant confusion or accident on grounds that only cranks and crazies believe in conspiracy theories. The trouble with that outlook is that it posits something even more implausible; that something this gigantic, far-reaching, and dramatic could have happened with no real intentionality or purpose or that it all fell together as a huge accident.
Brownstone Institute has published more than 2,000 articles and 10 books exploring all over the above topics. Other venues and friends are out there helping us with this research and discovery, issue by issue. Even so, a great deal of responsibility falls on this one institution, the main work of which is providing support for dissident and displaced voices, which is implausible since it was only founded three years ago. We are deeply grateful for our supporters and would welcome you to join them.
As for the intellectuals we once revered for their curiosity and wisdom, most seem to have gone into hiding, either unable to adapt to the new realities or just unwilling to risk their careers by exploring hard topics. It’s understandable but still tragic. Most are happy to pretend like nothing happened or celebrate the change as nothing but progress. As for journalists, the New York Times publishes daily commentaries dismissing the Constitution as a dated anachronism that has to go and no one thinks much about it.
There is a lot to sort out. So much has changed so quickly. No sooner than the dust seems to be settling from one upheaval, there is another and then another. Keeping up with it all causes a level of psychological brain scramble on a scale we’ve never previously experienced.
It’s easier to wait for the historians to tell the next generation what happened. But maybe, just maybe, by stepping up and telling the story as we see it in real time, we can make a difference in stopping this madness and restoring some sane and normal freedom back to the world.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
According to Birx, she intentionally buried the more draconian elements of the lockdowns in text at the end of long documents, theorizing (correctly apparently) that most reporters or readers would just “skim” the document and would not focus on how extreme and unprecedented these mandates actually were.
Most Americans will remember Dr. Deborah Birx as the “scarf lady” who served on the White House’s Covid Response Team beginning in February 2020.
According to a recently-released (but little-seen) 24-minute mini-documentary, it was Birx – even more so than Anthony Fauci – who was responsible for government “guidelines,” almost all of which proved to be unnecessary and disastrous for the country.
According to the documentary, the guidelines ran counter to President Trump’s initial comments on Covid, but ultimately “toppled the White House (and Trump) without a shot being fired.”
The mini-documentary (“It Wasn’t Fauci: How the Deep State Really Played Trump”) was produced by Good Kid Productions. Not surprisingly, the scathing 24-minute video has received relatively few views on YouTube (only 46,500 since it was published 40 days ago on Feb. 26).
I learned of the documentary from a colleague at Brownstone Institute, who added his opinion that “Birx (is) far more culpable than Fauci in the Covid disaster…Well worth the time to see the damage an utter non-scientist, CIA-connected, bureaucrat can do to make sure things are maximally bad.”
I agree; the significant role played by Birx in the catastrophic national response to Covid has not received nearly enough attention.
Brought in from out of Nowhere…
From the video presentation, viewers learn that Birx was added to the White House’s Coronavirus Task Force as its coordinator in latter February 2020.
Birx worked closely with Task Force chairman Vice President Mike Pence, a man one suspects will not be treated well by future historians.
According to the documentary, “career bureaucrats” like Birx somehow seized control of the executive branch of government and were able to issue orders to mayors and governors which effectively “shut down the country.”
These bureaucrats were often incompetent in their prior jobs as was Birx, who’d previously served as a scientist (ha!) in the Army before leading the government’s effort to “fight AIDS in Africa” (via the PEPFAR Program).
When Birx was installed as coordinator of Covid Response she simply rehashed her own playbook for fighting AIDS in Africa, say the filmmakers.
The three tenets of this response were:
- “Treat every case of this virus as a killer.”
- “Focus on children,” who, the public was told, were being infected and hospitalized in large numbers and were a main conduit for spreading the virus.
- “Get to zero cases as soon as possible.” (The “Zero Covid” goal).
The documentary primarily uses quotes from Scott Atlas, the White House Task Force’s one skeptic, to show that all three tenets were false.
Argued Atlas: Covid was not a killer – or a genuine mortality risk – to “99.95 percent” of the population. Children had virtually zero risk of death or hospitalization from Covid. And there was no way to get to “zero cases.”
Atlas Didn’t Shrug, but was Ignored…
Furthermore, the documentary convincingly illustrates how the views of Atlas were ignored and how, at some point, his ability to speak to the press was curtailed or eliminated.
For example, when Atlas organized a meeting for President Trump with Covid-response skeptics (including the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration) this meeting was schedule to last only five minutes.
The documentary also presents a report from the inspector general of the Department of State that was highly critical of Birx’s management style with the African “AIDS relief” program she headed.
Among other claims, the report said she was “dictatorial” in her dealings with subordinates and often “issued threats” to those who disagreed with her approach.
Shockingly, this highly-critical report was published just a month before she was appointed medical coordinator of the Coronavirus Task Force.
A particularly distressing sound bite from Birx lets viewers hear her opinion on how controversial “guidance” might be implemented with little pushback.
According to Birx, she intentionally buried the more draconian elements of the lockdowns in text at the end of long documents, theorizing (correctly apparently) that most reporters or readers would just “skim” the document and would not focus on how extreme and unprecedented these mandates actually were.
The documentary points out that Birx’s prescriptions and those of President Trump were often in complete conflict.
Birx, according to the documentary, once pointed this out to Vice President Pence, who told her to keep doing what she believed.
Indeed, the Vice President gave Birx full use of Air Force 2 so she could more easily travel across the country, spreading her lockdown message to governors, mayors, and other influencers.
Several Covid skeptic writers, including Jeffrey Tucker of Brownstone Institute, have noted that President Trump himself went from an opponent of draconian lockdowns to an avid supporter of these responses in a period of just one or two days (the pivotal change happened on or around March 10th, 2020, according to Tucker).
Whoever or whatever caused this change in position, it does not seem to be a coincidence that this about-face happened shortly after Birx – a former military officer – was named to an important position on the Task Force.
(Personally, I don’t give Anthony Fauci a pass as I’ve always figured he’s a “dark master” at manipulating members of the science/medical/government complex to achieve his own desired results.)
This documentary highlights the crucial role played by Deborah Birx and, more generally, how unknown bureaucrats can make decisions that turn the world upside-down.
That is, most Americans probably think presidents are in charge, but, often, they’re really not. These real rulers of society, one suspects, would include members of the so-called Deep State, who have no doubt installed sycophants like Fauci and Birx in positions of power.
I definitely recommend this 24-minute video.
A Sample of Reader Comments…
I also enjoyed the Reader Comments that followed this video. The first comment is from my Brownstone colleague who brought this documentary to my attention:
“… As I said, things can change over the period of 20 years but in the case of Birx/Fauci, I do not believe so. I have never seen people entrenched in the bureaucracy change.”
Other comments from the people who have viewed the mini-documentary on YouTube:
“Pence needs to be held accountable.”
“What does Debbie’s bank account look like?”
“(The) final assessment of President Trump at the 23:30 mark is, while painful, accurate. He got rolled.”
“This is very hard to find on YouTube. You can literally search the title and it doesn’t come up.”
“Excellent summary, hope this goes viral. Lots of lessons to learn for future generations.”
“Eye opening. Great reporting.”
Post from One Month Ago…
“37 likes after 3 years of the most controversial and divisive action in recent history. How can this be?”
“Oh never mind. YouTube hid it from the public for years.”
“Probably hasn’t been taken down yet for that reason, relatively low views.”
“Thanks for this! Sounds like everyone below President Trump was on a power trip and I didn’t think it was possible to despise Pence more than I already do.”
“…the backing of CDC, legacy media, WHO and government schools, business folding in fear are ALL responsible. Accountability for every person and agency is paramount!”
“Should be noted that her work on AIDS in Africa was just as useless and damaging.”
“First, any mature, adult woman who speaks with that much vocal fry should be immediately suspect. And the glee with which she recounts her role at undermining POTUS is remarkable and repulsive. This woman should NEVER be allowed to operate the levers of power again.”
Republished from the author’s Substack
Author
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