[Originally Posted on the old Fluid Imagination site]

The American people are too busy for politics today. They are not too lazy or too stupid or too brainwashed by the media. They are simply too busy, too busy putting food on their plates, clothes on their children, and roofs over their heads.

Can anyone blame them for wanting to zone out in front of Desperate Housewives and Major League Baseball for a few hours? Or for using all the energy they can spare to follow the myths of Brad Pitt, Jessica Simpson, and all of their other gods? They can’t possibly be expected to follow the long, drawn out processes of lawmaking and policy.

This is no insult. Anyone who had the time or the inclination can understand what happens in Washington D.C. It takes no more intelligence to follow and understand the significance of a senator’s career than it does to understand a football player’s. The level of passion needed to sustain the concentration on a Democrats/Republican rivalry is equal to the level required to follow the Red Sox/Yankees rivalry. Anyone who is capable of one is capable of the other.

The only things the American people don’t have is the time or the inclination. So let’s stop pretending that they do and move on. We don’t need them to be more liberal. We just need to remind them that they are. Once they remember what it means to be liberal, they’ll be there when we need them. And the best part is, there are more liberals than we think.

And there always will be. Because nice people get together more than mean people do. And liberals, real liberals, are nice.

If you look at the current state of the world, it is easy to see that liberalism has won the war against totalitarianism. Wherever totalitarianism has raised its head, it has come under siege. Hitler and Mussolini are gone. The powerful Union of Soviet Socialist Republics has become the weak (but dangerous) country of Russia. China is becoming more liberal with every transmission of digital information across its borders. Cuba is a dying dictator away from turning onto the road to democracy. North Korea, Iran, Syria: just dangerous children doing nothing but screaming before the spanking comes.

The idea of democracy that was born into the world in 1776 has grown up and become the biggest man on the block. And nothing is going to get in his way. Sure, it will be challenged once in a while. But for democracy, winning doesn’t mean destroying totalitarianism. It means being stronger than it. Democracy will always have to fight against totalitarianism. But it will always win.

And that is the sign of our victory. Not our domination, but our unbeatable strength.

Now, will someone please fly to the nearest aircraft carrier and raise a “Mission Accomplished” sign? Thank you.

With the symbolism of our victory accomplished, recorded, and the credits rolled (Produced by Benjamin Franklin, Written By Thomas Jefferson, and Directed By George Washington), we have some choices to make. Do we leave the channel on to see what comes next? Do we call our friends to talk about how great this week’s episode of Ideological Survivor was? Or do we use the TiVo and experience it all over again?

My vote is for the latter option. Because maybe if we had to experience the burden of creating a democracy from scratch one more time, we might remember what it is like to live under the influence of one, single irrational human being who happens to have all the power only because he has a powerful title.

Because maybe if we remembered, we’d start to recognize how much power the President of the United States has over the rest of the world.

When the framers of our constitution wrote up the President’s commander-in-chief powers, they could not possibly imagine the physical power this office would one day wield. Within one single individual lies the possibility to destroy the planet.

That is not hyperbole.

But for those who think it might be, let’s tone it down a notch. Without question, the President of the United States holds the lives of thousands of individuals in his or her hand. The Office of the President can send missiles into an area of the world without requesting a permission slip from Congress.

I’m not talking about asking the United Nations. I’m talking about Congress. I’m talking about the President of the United States, the person we elect to stand in our name, having the ability to kill thousands of human beings without first asking permission of the branch of government that can even deign to claim to know us, the people, best.

John Hancock and his colleagues could not have imagined a military mission that takes less than 8 minutes to plan and accomplish. The power they gave to the President was to send men marching and boats sailing without asking Congress for permission. In 1789, if the President sent an army against some other country, the lack of technology alone gave time enough for a public debate.

But with today’s military hardware, the President can give an order at breakfast and kill thousands of people before the first cup of coffee is empty. Public debate becomes public rationalization.

This is too much power for one individual to hold.

And that is what is wrong with the liberalism that was created by Thomas Jefferson and his American compatriots. The liberalism they created cannot account for the power of the President of the United States.

Let us imagine, just for a few moments, that totalitarianism was to snooker its way into the office of the Presidency, that totalitarianism was to become the commander-in-chief of the army of liberalism. It is not a difficult thing to imagine. All we have to do is think like a losing commander-in-chief. When a losing power is in the middle of a war, it doesn’t have the luxury of meeting its enemy head on. It has to flank it, attack where it is least expected. It has to strike terror into the heart of its enemy. It can’t actually kill the stronger side, but it can scare it. When all your strength is gone, the only way to survive is through cunning.

What would you do if your army was losing a long, drawn out fight to the death? You’d create an aggressive intelligence agency. It makes the most sense, because if you can’t blow up their communication channels, the only way to win is infiltrate them. You have to have a spy, or better yet, a network of spies. Train them to start working for, and eventually take over, your enemy’s media networks. Radio, TV, Newspaper. Everything.

But if you’re controlling the losing army of totalitarianism, you don’t stop there. In fact, you have other spies doing other things at the same time you’re taking over their media. You put spies in their houses of religion. With its us/them mentality, religion is fertile ground for totalitarianism. While most religious people are anti-totalitarian intellectually, the discipline of religion can overcome those intellectual hurdles.

Between the media and houses of worship, you’ve got full control of your enemy’s people. The media can sway them in any direction. Any working democracy demands the political involvement of its populace, but if the totalitarian-controlled media can turn the focus from politics to something else (ideally, to something that makes any human being actually request less freedoms in the name of protection), then totalitarianism can waltz through the doors of the White House.

Once totalitarianism gets the liberal people demanding total security, they’ve changed the liberal people into totalitarians. But the people won’t even know it. The won’t know because the totalitarians will have changed the meaning of the liberal words. Freedom stops meaning freedom and becomes something else, perhaps security. If you have people clamoring for what they call freedom, but what they mean is security, then freedom becomes the ability to drive to the office without worrying about being blown up.

And even better, the totalitarian who waltzes into Presidential office no longer has to call itself totalitarianism. Because that’s when it was different from liberalism. But now liberalism is totalitarianism. Which makes totalitarianism‚ liberalism. And the minute totalitarianism become liberalism, we have won the war.

The only problem with that is that the history reveals that the totalitarians are not liberals. Instead, liberals have become totalitarians. Which means they have won the war.

The moment it gets itself democratically elected to be the commander-of-chief of the most powerful democracy on the planet, totalitarianism can fly over to that aircraft carrier and raise a banner that reads, “Mission Accomplished.”

And with the amount of physical power in the hands of the President of the United States, what are the real liberals left to do?

But this is all in the imagination. This couldn’t happen in the United States of America. We never have to worry about our freedom. The fight against totalitarianism takes place over there, wherever “there” is this year. The liberal U.S.A has won the final World War, remember?

Anyway, now that we’ve won, we’ve got figure out what to do next.

Perhaps the answer is to remember that our democracy is founded on the idea that one person should not hold too much power over his or her fellow citizens.

Is there anyone who would question the statement that the President of the United States of America is the most powerful person on the planet? There is no longer a Soviet Union to keep the President in check. The global balance of power is gone. The President’s power to take thousands of lives of his or her global citizens is unchecked by any other power on the planet.

That is too much power for one person to hold. It is too much power for one office to hold.

And it defines the reality of liberalism today. Today’s United States of America is an incomplete manifestation of the idea that put a gun in George Washington’s hand.

The next stage of liberalism is not to go to war against today’s versions of totalitarianism, as the editors of The New Republic would have it. The idea of totalitarianism is too ugly and it will be rejected wherever it shows its face. No, the next stage of liberalism is to protect itself against totalitarian terrorist tactics.

Liberals must remember that liberalism is now the dominant power and the only way to fight a dominant power is through subversive techniques.

In order to live up to its ideals, the people of United States of America must turn the larger portion of its attention away from the external enemy and to take a good look at itself. To look again at the systems it created under pressure from an overwhelming force of totalitarianism, at the basic system it created when it didn’t have the full luxury of time. We should look again at the Constitution created at a time when the United States had to worry about Britain’s navy landing on Boston’s shores.

And when we look, we’ll find that the office of the President has too much power for liberalism to survive. By putting all that power in one individual’s hands, we give totalitarianism a way to defeat our liberal system.

The only way they can win is if they play our game. So it’s time to change the rules.

Therefore, in the name of this country’s founding fathers, I call for the United States Congress to begin proceedings to rescind the power of the military from the office of the President of the United States of America.

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