Chosen Leaders, Proven Failures and Political Debacles

With a few notable exceptions, political leaders are chosen by political leaders, and not by electorates or community-based organizations or popular assemblies.  Popular media figures and the so-called ‘pundits’, including academics and self-declared experts and ‘think-tank’ analysts reinforce and propagate these choices.

A collection of terms and pseudo concepts are essential in validating what is really an oligarchical process.  These concepts are tagged onto whoever is chosen by the elite for electoral candidates or for the seizure of political power.  With this framework in mind, we have to critically analyze the symbols and signs used by popular opinion-makers as they promote political elites.  We will conclude by posing an alternative to the ‘propaganda of choice’, which has so far resulted in broken pre-election promises and political debacles.

Language and Pseudo-Concepts:  Subterfuges for Manipulated Choices

The usual suspects in the business of mass-manipulation describe their political leaders in the same folksy or pseudo-serious terms that they attribute to themselves:  Experts/ intuitive improvisers/ trial and error ‘muddlers’.  The ‘experts’ often mean wrong-headed policymakers and advisers whose decisions usually reflect the demands of their current paymasters.  Their stated or unstated assumptions are rarely questioned and almost never placed in the context of the contemporary power structures.  The experts determine the future trajectory for their political choices.  In this way, the views expressed by ‘experts’ are primarily ideological and not some disembodied scholarly entity floating in an indeterminate space and time.

Pundits often promote ‘experience’ in describing the ‘experienced’ leader, adviser or cabinet member. They denigrate the opposition candidate adversary as ‘lacking experience’.  The obvious questions to this platitude should be: ‘What kind of experience?  What were the political results of this experience?  Who did this experience serve?

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America’s Imperial Empire: The Sun Never Sets but the Mote remains in the Emperor’s Eye

Post-colonial empires are complex organizations.  They are organized on a multi-tiered basis, ranging from relative autonomous national and regional allies to subservient vassal states, with variations in between.

In the contemporary period, the idea of empire does not operate as a stable global structure, though it may aspire and strive for such.  While the US is the major imperial power, it does not dominate some leading global political-economic and military powers, like Russia and China.

Imperial powers, like the US, have well-established regional satellites but have also suffered setbacks and retreats from independent local economic and political challengers.

Empire is not a fixed structure rigidly embedded in military or economic institutions.  It contains sets of competing forces and relations, which can change over time and circumstances.  Moreover, imperial allies and clients do not operate through fixed patterns of submission.  While there is submission to general agreements on ideology, military doctrine and economic policy identified with imperial rulers, there are cases of vassal states pursuing their own links with non-imperial markets, investors and exporters.

If the global world of imperial power is complex and indeterminate to some degree, so is the internal political, economic, administrative and military structure of the imperial state. The imperial political apparatus has become more heavily weighted on the side of security institutions, than diplomatic and representative bodies.  Economic institutions are organized for overseas markets dominated by multi-national corporations against local markets and producers.  ‘Market economy’ is a misnomer.

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