Shia Islam

This is what the American democracy means. It is clear as day and has been the system since day one when the founding fathers invented it saying that the normal citizen does not have the ability to choose a competent leader. I dont know when my fellow Americans will wake up and understand the hypocrisy  - that we go to war to spread democracy when we do not even have it ourselves.

Noam Chomsky : “Good News,” Iraq & Beyond:

Not long ago, it was taken for granted that the Iraq war would be the central issue in the presidential campaign, as it was in the mid-term election of 2006. But it has virtually disappeared, eliciting some
puzzlement. There should be none.

Iraq remains a significant concern for the population, but that is a matter of little moment in a modern democracy. The important work of the world is the domain of the “responsible men,” who must “live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd,” the general public, “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders” whose “function” is to be “spectators,” not “participants.” And spectators are not supposed to bother their heads with issues. The Wall Street Journal came close to the point in a major front-page article on Super Tuesday, under the heading “Issues Recede in ‘08 Contest As Voters Focus on Character.” To put it more accurately, issues recede as candidates, party managers, and their PR agencies focus on character (qualities, etc.). As usual. And for sound reasons. Apart from the irrelevance of the population to them, they can also be dangerous. The participants in action are surely aware that on a host of major issues, both political
parties are well to the right of the general population and that their positions are quite consistent over time, a matter reviewed in a useful study by Benjamin Page and Marshall Bouton, The Foreign Policy Disconnect; the same is true on domestic policy (see my Failed States, on both domains). It is important, then, for the attention of the herd to be diverted elsewhere.

The quoted admonitions, taken from highly regarded essays by the leading public intellectual of the 20th century, Walter Lippmann, capture well the perceptions of progressive intellectual opinion, shared across the narrow elite spectrum. The common understanding is revealed more in practice than in words, though some, like Lippmann, do articulate it: President Wilson, for example, who held that an elite of gentlemen with “elevated ideals” must be empowered to preserve “stability and righteousness,” essentially the perspective of
the Founding Fathers. In more recent years the “gentlemen” are transmuted into the “technocratic elite” and “action intellectuals” of Camelot, “Straussian” neocons, or other configurations.

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