The Western World Has Abandoned Democracy
Paul Craig Roberts

Once upon a time political establishments would focus on defeating their opponent/challenger in elections.  Now they imprison them or stop them from running, as the Democrats tried to do to trump with four criminal indictments.  In Brazil Jair Bolsonaro faces alleged coup charges. In Romania, a host country for a US missile base on Russia’s border, Calin Georgecu has been falsely charged with “incitement to actions against the institutional order,” which in translation means running for president against Washington’s puppet government, which he is now barred from doing.  In France Marine Le Pen has been sentenced to two years in a jail cell and a five year ban on running for president of France.

Le Pen’s party holds the largest nmber of seats in the French legislature or National Assembly. Recent polls show her with a 10 point lead over the establishment candidate, so the establishment protected itself by putting her in prison.  Understand what this means, the French people are being denied by the French government the political representation that they want.

In Ukraine the “democracy” the West is so concerned to protect has been ruled for some time by a dictator whose term of office has expired.  I am beginning to have some concern that Trump himself could become part of the dissolution of Western democracy.  Why has Trump jumped all over Russian President Putin, who has kept Trump’s agreement, while protecting Zelensky, who has not kept the agreement, from Putin’s criticism?  Is it because Trump is studying Zelensky’s ability to rule beyond his term in office?  Other developments indicate weakening American democracy.  Trump’s kowtowing to Israel has destroyed the First Amendment, which is the foundation of American democracy, and Democrat judges are destroying confidence in judicial rulings by their interference with President Trump’s powers.  These are not healthy developments.  A judiciary that has discredited itself cannot rein in an ambitious leader.

I have written a lot about the collapse of the belief system in the West, such as yesterday’s article.  This is an immensely serious problem, and I have been unable to get any attention given to it.  

Throughout the Western World the main focus of the educational system is to undermine the belief system that maintains accountable government, which means a government accountable to the people and not to an establishment of vested interests.  The erosion of the belief system is far advanced.  President Trump is certainly not helping when he sacrifices the Constitution of the United States to protecting Israel from criticism.  

Ideas have consequences, and the consequence of the destruction of our ideas that uphold liberty is tyranny, which has raised its ugly head in France, Romania, and Brazil, and perhaps in America.

Hon. Paul Craig Roberts is the John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy, Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. A former editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal and columnist for Business Week and the Scripps Howard News Service, he is a nationally syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate in Los Angeles and a columnist for Investor's Business Daily. In 1992 he received the Warren Brookes Award for Excellence in Journalism. In 1993 the Forbes Media Guide ranked him as one of the top seven journalists.

He was Distinguished Fellow at the Cato Institute from 1993 to 1996. From 1982 through 1993, he held the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. During 1981-82 he served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy. President Reagan and Treasury Secretary Regan credited him with a major role in the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, and he was awarded the Treasury Department's Meritorious Service Award for "his outstanding contributions to the formulation of United States economic policy." From 1975 to 1978, Dr. Roberts served on the congressional staff where he drafted the Kemp-Roth bill and played a leading role in developing bipartisan support for a supply-side economic policy.

In 1987 the French government recognized him as "the artisan of a renewal in economic science and policy after half a century of state interventionism" and inducted him into the Legion of Honor.

Dr. Roberts' latest books are The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with IPE Fellow Lawrence Stratton, and published by Prima Publishing in May 2000, and Chile: Two Visions - The Allende-Pinochet Era, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen Araujo, and published in Spanish by Universidad Nacional Andres Bello in Santiago, Chile, in November 2000. The Capitalist Revolution in Latin America, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen LaFollette Araujo, was published by Oxford University Press in 1997. A Spanish language edition was published by Oxford in 1999. The New Colorline: How Quotas and Privilege Destroy Democracy, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, was published by Regnery in 1995. A paperback edition was published in 1997. Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, co-authored with Karen LaFollette, was published by the Cato Institute in 1990. Harvard University Press published his book, The Supply-Side Revolution, in 1984. Widely reviewed and favorably received, the book was praised by Forbes as "a timely masterpiece that will have real impact on economic thinking in the years ahead." Dr. Roberts is the author of Alienation and the Soviet Economy, published in 1971 and republished in 1990. He is the author of Marx's Theory of Exchange, Alienation and Crisis, published in 1973 and republished in 1983. A Spanish language edition was published in 1974.

Dr. Roberts has held numerous academic appointments. He has contributed chapters to numerous books and has published many articles in journals of scholarship, including the Journal of Political Economy, Oxford Economic Papers, Journal of Law and Economics, Studies in Banking and Finance, Journal of Monetary Economics, Public Finance Quarterly, Public Choice, Classica et Mediaevalia, Ethics, Slavic Review, Soviet Studies, Rivista de Political Economica, and Zeitschrift fur Wirtschafspolitik. He has entries in the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Economics and the New Palgrave Dictionary of Money and Finance. He has contributed to Commentary, The Public Interest, The National Interest, Harper's, the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Fortune, London Times, The Financial Times, TLS, The Spectator, Il Sole 24 Ore, Le Figaro, Liberation, and the Nihon Keizai Shimbun. He has testified before committees of Congress on 30 occasions.

Dr. Roberts was educated at the Georgia Institute of Technology (B.S.), the University of Virginia (Ph.D.), the University of California at Berkeley and Oxford University where he was a member of Merton College.

He is listed in Who's Who in America, Who's Who in the World, The Dictionary of International Biography, Outstanding People of the Twentieth Century, and 1000 Leaders of World Influence. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: [email protected]

Please Donate

I listen to my readers. In March 2010, I terminated my syndicated column. Thousands of you protested. So persuasive were your emails asking me to reconsider and to continue writing that, two months later, I began writing again.

In order to create a coherent uncensored and unedited archive of my writings, The Institute For Political Economy, a non-profit organization that supports research, writing and books, has established this site, thus gratifying readers' demands that I continue to provide analyses of events in our time.

In order to stay up, this site needs to pay for itself.

www.paulcraigroberts.org