See this is exactly what I mean. It was instated in 1976, by Nixon’s successor, obviously as a result of Watergate.
Look at what happened to Caesar was assassinated. “Away with the tyrant” was the idea, but what sprouted from it was a lineage of tyrants.
What’s the lesson to be drawn? The government is here to stay, in some form or another, and it must have security that it is carried by the majority of the people. That is always a prerequisite to stability.
The government is stupid, so it is not going to stop until it has the power that it feels it needs. It is going to increase its hold over public opinion if this opinion is radicalizing toward dissent. It is going to chill out somewhat if people get involved in constructive government work.
But the flaws in the system right now (from a perspective of human self valuing) can not be repaired without really stitching some issues back together to form a rational constitution. I’m a retro-constitutionalist, If the New Deal was a Constitution 2.0, I want a 3.0 that is more like the template of the first one. But it has to evidently include racial equality of rights and rights for women and all that. Gay marriage and stuff like that should be left up to the city or parish or whatever where they want to get married. All non-basic moralities should be left up to the region in which they’re practiced - for the single reason that if not, there will necessarily be a dissent in many many many parts of the empire. Dissent dies when the state is totally invisible except in the correction of three types of crimes - inflicting bodily harm, theft and lying in the courtroom. These are the only three of the ten commandments that make sense from the perspective of a state authority.
I think we can basically re-write the state like that. We can’t fight what it does now but we can fight why and how it will do in the future what it says that it does now. Its prerogative is to exist as justifying its own power. For that it requires justifying values, a constituency, a reflection in the form of a mandate. It will always value its citizens in terms of its prerogative.
The prerogative of the state is to have the permission to exist. Whether it does this by appealing to the values it was at its foundation meant to represent, or by simply forcing people to comply, is of course of grave importance to us humans, but not ultimately to the states logic. We, or our ancestors rather, have created this logic again and again. The logic has now acquired nuclear weapons so we are basically stuck with it. There has to be a state, and ideally, this state has the perfect mandate.
We are never getting rid of the state. If we try to get rid of it, it will try to get rid of us.