By Oğuzhan Bilgin
In the first and most tense years of the Cold War, the famous sociologist C. Wright Mills received a lot of reaction in the USA with his book ‘The Ruling Elite’. C. Wright Mills questioned how democratic the USA was, which had defined itself in the Cold War as a country of democracy and freedom and built its legitimacy in its struggle against the Soviets on the basis of these concepts.
Mills explains that in the USA, which has ideologically and discursively legitimised itself as ‘the land of freedom and democracy’, in fact the ‘people’ have been reduced to an insignificant object, and that the real power is concentrated in the political elites, in the bureaucracy, especially the security bureaucracy, in the bureaucracy, and in large capitalist companies and finance, mainly military capitalism.
According to Mills, the public and the public opinion are excluded from all these power relations and the struggle between elites, and their agendas, preferences and roles in the theatre of democracy are manipulated through mass media.
The internal fights within this power, which is shared between the Capitol – the Pentagon – Wall Street, have led to the emergence of a two-party system that functions to maintain the same established order. Despite all the harsh polemics and differences of opinion, this political structure, which has not been able to dislodge the ruling order and the ruling classes, has been going on for a long time.
When we think about what happened to Kennedy, who tried to dislodge the established order built on the grounds of the Cold War during the Kennedy era and intended to détente with the Soviets, and what kind of a fiction the assassin’s story was, and what happened to him afterwards, we also see how the established order, which plays the theatre of democracy in the USA, actually resorts to all kinds of dirty ways for the continuation of its own power.
Well, the Cold War ended, the Soviets were defeated and the ‘democracy and freedom front’ prevailed. Many years have passed and democracy has made significant progress not only in the West but also in the East. But have these tutelage structures disappeared in the USA? How democratized has the USA become?
From this perspective, it is necessary to read well what happened to Trump, who was repeatedly obstructed during his presidency, whose written decision to withdraw troops from Syria was not implemented by his own officials, who was deprived of his presidency through a bizarre election process, whose judicial organs were mobilised to prevent him from running again, and who finally miraculously survived an assassination by an organised intelligence operation.
Trump has already shown that he is not a president that the establishment wants and can direct. In fact, when he was first elected, he was not expected to be elected as president, and the whole system was preparing for Hillary Clinton’s presidency. When Trump was elected as president as a surprise, he spent his presidential term under the tutelage of the Pentagon and the CIA and under the onslaught of the media and Hollywood. In such a difficult pressure environment, he was not only the leader chosen by the people against the establishment, but also had a difficult presidential term with his individual anomalies and inexperience. Coinciding with the pandemic period brought with it a huge economic bill.
As a result, Trump has become the current target of the tutelage structures over the national will and democracy in the USA, which is known as one of the centres of democracy.
As a result, it seems that no one will be able to stop Trump if he is not assassinated again.
On the other hand, we should not be surprised by the massacres committed by the American system in the rest of the world, nor by the terrorist organizations it supports, nor by the military coups that it has commissioned, as it has repeatedly killed or risked killing the president of its own states.
Source: https://www.aksam.com.tr/yazarlar/oguzhan-bilgin/abdde-demokrasi-tiyatrosu/haber-1490387
