Jeffersonian Democracy versus Empire

As the election season rolls on, Donald Trump is pulling far ahead in the republican primary race. The reactions to Trump and his supporters are visceral and consistently laced with fear and paranoia. The media attempts to paint him and his supporters, at best, as stupid and at worst as Nazis. They roll out his ancestral last name, Drumpf or Trumpf to stir up associations with Germany (never mind people of German ancestry are the single largest ethnic bloc in the USA), and repeatedly cite "1933" and the rise of Hitler to sound erudite.

The media reaction shows that in the USA, there is an us and a them rather than a unified country. The "mainstream us", that is, the people who are able to publish opinions through corporate media, feels threatened by Trump, or maybe more by his supporters, who are people who have been on the losing end of almost every action the US has taken for decades as the country became a full blown Empire. Conversely, the average mainstreamer is a direct beneficiary and servant of the Empire.

Finally, after being shafted for decades, the average citizen is at or past their breaking point. They realize something is wrong with the United States, but don't know any alternative to the imperial status quo. Donald Trump serves as a lightning rod or a focal point for their discontent, but it's unlikely they'll find satisfaction through the US electoral process.

I think the United States has come full circle. The American Counterrevolution ran its course. It's stale. In its infancy, the US was a distinct, opposing force to the corrupt cesspool of European great game politics and its parasitic courtiers. Now the imperial US, specifically DC and the financial center of NYC, are in the center of that cesspool and the average American is just fuel for the creeps who fight in that muck, or is a source to fund the idiot schemes of grifting parasites like the neocons.

Empire's Creepy Children

Jeffersonian Democracy serves as a counterpoint to the age old, endlessly blood hungry hag Empire and her creepy children. The idea of Jeffersonian Democracy is a free yeomanry will not be pawns for Empire, and in fact, will actively oppose it or snuff it out with force, not only because Empire is evil, but it's inimical to their simple self interest. The revolutionary spirit still burns in the heart of America, but it's uninformed.

The American revolution was kindled by Enlightenment thinkers. The best known provided moral and mechanical arguments to launch a revolution and to structure a nation. I see it as part of an age old task: recovering what was lost. The task as outlined in literature, movies, TV series, is to help lead people out of the labyrinth, out of the underworld, and to help reconnect with the Sun, and with the wilds of their imagination.