Things are going in the right direction due to the presidency of mr. Obama. Do you remember the feeling of empeeding danger that was prevalent before mr. Obama took the helm?
He took over a state that was totally dependent on foreign oil, had done two wars on the credit card (that is borrowing money from China to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan), and seemed to be loosing the war of civilisation with most other systems. Russia was on the rise, and so was China.
Today, seven/eight years after. The US is in a rebound, China is in deep trouble, Russia is still strong but has not overtaken the US, the US economy is not talking about the impeding danger, but on how to do things in a right way.
All in all a come back absolutely none had foreseen. Talk about a turn around.
But at the basis none has really realised what the problem was, and how we went about to solve the crisis. Because even though I have been lecturing about these issues for a long time, bloggers are not in such a high esteem culturally and intellectually so it has never really been discussed much.
But let us have a look at it again, and let us do it in the light of the prominent academic ever; Plato.
According to Plato, the problem of the democratic system is the lack of moral. That is, freedom, that is the main virtue of the democratic ideology, has a tendency to push other virtues aside, and make a political environment that is too free.
This was what let to the downfall of Athens, according to Plato.
Now Plato was an ambiguous figure in the sense, that even though he was leading as a philosopher, still is, he was never really that keen on democracy. He was leaning towards Sparta, that was a communist state.
So even though he is good, we still need to understand that he is very critical of Democracy.
So where does that leave us? Well, there is another voice I think is good to listen to, or rather two other voices, first of all the contemporary philosopher Isokrates and off cause Aristotle. Isokrates is a long forgotten philosopher, but he was extremely influential in his time. He was the engineer behind the hellenic take over of the then known world through the son of Philip the Macedonian; Alexander the great. According to Isokrates what happens at the end of democracy is the fall of law. Nobody respects the law anymore.
Aristotle that came after Isokrates and was the pupil of Plato believes that democracy should rightfully defend itself against the moral corruption.
Now according to Plato the fall of democracy is heralded by the coming of the strong man. Usually a man that promises to “clean up all the mess”, does that ring a bell, mr. Trump?
Now, mr. Trump is basically a bit opportunistic using street level fighting methods to get going, but he is the archetype of a tyrant. That is why he is so immensely dangerous.
Now, usually I do not like to put down political opponents, I still feel sorry for mr. Romney that Barack and I fought down. As a person I believe that mr. Trump can be a good person. But as a symptom of the system he is a problem. Because people vote for him, because they are sick and tired of the system. That is the true problem of mr. Trumps candidacy. The people are telling the political elite, that they are sick and tired of all the lack of moral they feel is prevalent.
So that is why the best strategy against mr. Trump is not fighting him, it is to get cleaned up ourselves. This tells the voters, that we are hearing them, and are ready to act on their angst and disgust. That is why ms. Clinton is winning. It is because she is showing the voters that she is hearing their criticism, and tries to act on it. See the convoluted strategy? Instead of throwing mud, we are meeting the demands of the voters, and they give us the benefit of the doubt.
Now, we have been working on the flagging out of the industrial part of the US. We are slowly turning this around. But we need to discuss the problem of crime in the southern states. Crime due to drug trafficking, unemployment of migrants and so on.
We need to solve this problem with strong but humane methods. Because this problem is another problem the voters are telling us to work on.
We need to work on it, otherwise next time there is a presidential election, another tyrant might just win.
The way we do it, is through a number of means. First of all, we need a better control of the border. It can be done in many ways. But in these days of internet surveillance it should not be so difficult to set up a border patrol that works in tandem with a surveillance system that is satellite run. It is a matter of priority.
Then we need to tackle the migration problem in the South. Some we need, others, like the criminal, are honestly not our problem. If they come from Mexico, they must return to Mexico.
I know that this is a difficult problem to tackle within humanistic values, but we need to do it, otherwise we end up loosing to Trump 2.0.
G-d bless the United States of America.