I recently had a little spat with some people on Facebook who claimed that Poland was "democratic" despite its banning the Communist Party. Their proposal, here, appears to be that banning parties is totally democratic because we don't like them. My response:

Some possible interpretations:
1) Poland, like the rest of the West, is not a democracy, but rather it has rule by a political class. "Communism" collapsed because its political class screwed up at some point in the Eighties and its public was nicely allowed to elect a different one.

Let's stop with this one, because this one is the biggie for the "anticommunists" of Eastern Europe. There is, of course, no sense in persuading anyone on Facebook that the "Communism" they hate is the only possible type of communism that could exist in the world. Although it isn't, of course. And the other thing they can't do is recognize that I am not defending their hated "Communism" when I tell them they don't live under a democracy, though I am telling them that rule by a political class is not "democratic."

Here we are going by the classical Greek origins of the word "democracy," wherein the people rule. If a political class rules, the people don't rule. If these people had bothered to check out what communism really was, moreover, they might have discovered that the dictatorship of the proletariat wasn't supposed to be the dictatorship of a political party, nor was it supposed to be the dictatorship of a few bureaucrats at the top. But don't worry, they won't, because Poland, like most everywhere else, is not a democracy.

In Poland's case, the obvious servitude is to the EU, NATO, and the bankers, the people the Greeks tried to defy awhile back. And, no, the Communists of today would not reinstate the old regime even if they were to attain "power." Ask SYRIZA about "power."

At any rate, here in the US we have a permanent political class. They have a sharing arrangement -- alternating Democrats and Republicans -- and both of the parties are on the payrolls of the same billionaire class, cemented by the Citizens United notion that buying politicians is Constitutionally-protected free speech. They attend the same "leadership organizations" -- Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg, CFR, WEF. We pay our bills to them. We vote for their servants. This is what we have instead of democracy.

There is, however, an illusion of democracy. The illusion of democracy is promoted by all sorts of people persuading you that you can do things that you in fact can't do. There are of course things you can do, and important books have been written about those things. Perhaps the most important of those books are James C. Scott's Weapons of the Weak and Elizabeth Janeway's Powers of the Weak. There is also stuff like Andrew Boyd's Beautiful Trouble. I could write a long post about those things. But that's not the topic here. The topic here is democracy, that we might actually demand some real democracy if, among other things, we might recognize that we don't have real democracy just yet. There are of course people out there spreading the illusion that we have real democracy. They must be opposed.

In that spirit, here are some things you probably think you can do which you probably can't do.

1) elect the President, unless of course you are a swing voter in a swing state. I have to explain this time and time again: "We live in a safe Democratic state, so our state's electoral votes go to the Democrat. Most of the states which actually elect our Presidents are in the Midwest." I don't live in the Midwest.

2) choose which policies your government will pursue. Since if you are an American you are always voting for one party to avoid electing the other, you don't get to choose. They do.

3) oppose the bad guys internationally. Putin may be bad; I don't know. But the people who have telling you for years on end that Putin is bad are probably just being disingenuous. Why, do you think, did they pursue such a "dreadful" strategy in opposing Putin, a strategy which succeeded only in strengthening Putin while weakening everyone else? A logical observer might conclude that that was their intention in the first place, i.e. since 2022, and that they don't really oppose Putin in any serious way. Thus I'd like to be able to tell Solidarity, in their lovely socialist-feminism, that they have nothing to worry about with Trump's surrender plan for Ukraine, because the issue will be decided on the battlefield anyway.

You also cannot oppose genocide in Gaza in any effective way, much as you might like to do so. Don't get me wrong -- it's still important to oppose genocide in Gaza. Otherwise why would the Zionists be out there trying to destroy you -- physically -- for saying that genocide, and by extension Zionism, is bad? You must keep the memory alive of a time when the general public once respected the First Amendment of the US Constitution. Your resistance is that of the memorizers of Ray Bradbury's novel Fahrenheit 451. But, as for the genocide itself, the fact of the matter is that those who would otherwise oppose it are either ineffective in doing so (Hamas, the Houthis), or are too preoccupied with their own battles against the US (Russia, China, Iran) to be able to intervene.

The main problem is that the important powers, the ones that constitute the actual power structure in the US and most elsewhere, are bought off. The police train with the IDF, the important powers in west Asia are client dictatorships whose puppet-masters are continually being bought off, and the US continually prints or encodes globally-respected money to buy unlimited opportunities for the Zionist entity to kill whomever it pleases with no repercussions whatsoever. Oh, and you're next.

The point of all this is that you should begin your adventures in politics with realistic notions of what it is you can and can't do. And you should avoid confusing the current exercises in sadomasochism with democracy. Democracy is something you organize and demand, probably through a popular front, and when you don't get it, you escalate further.