by Kit Knightly, Off Guardian:
Five tips for the ambitious autocrat just starting out.
Are you an aspiring oligarch, dictator or autocrat? Do you want to wield power whilst maintaining a façade of popular support and democratic mandate? Do you want to make your proles believe they have a choice?
Well then, welcome to the first of our “How to…” series. A selection of articles dedicated to teaching aspiring authoritarians how to hide tyranny behind a reassuring mask of freedom.
Here we’ll go into the finer points of how it’s possible to have “elections” that mean almost nothing.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
What we talk about when we talk about rigging an election
First things first, we need to establish what we mean when we talk about “election rigging”.
Controlling the outcome of an election is a comparatively simple, even vulgar, process. All you need to do is manipulate the count and/or simply lie about the result.
However doing this efficiently – rigging an election with as little effort as possible and disguising that fact is more difficult.
In short, if your rigged election is entirely reliant on simply forging ballots you have done something wrong. If you want to reliably and consistently control the results of your “elections” you need to be more creative than that.
The vast majority of your work pre-election will be dedicated to laying the groundwork, building infrastructure, and lubricating the public.
The vote itself is the final destination in a long journey that starts with…
1. The System
The CIA is a perfect example of the kind of institution which is not answerable to the electorate. You’ll need to create your own version of this.
“If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.”
Your first priority when constructing your system should be establishing an infrastructure that is not significantly impacted by elections.
Unelected civil servants, intelligence agencies, military officers, judges, NGOs, corporate interests and lobby groups should form the permanent foundations of the power structure, while “elected officials” should ideally be mere window dressing and wall-paper, with zero opportunity to act independently.
Having by this means established a covert power structure that effectively guarantees an election will never be able to change anything meaningful – what we can call your “Deep State” – you need to set about creating a “democracy” that camouflages this fact.
The design of your “democracy” can make or break an efficiently controlled election. Following our advice on the voting system you employ can make controlling the outcome of your “elections” relatively hassle-free.
For starters, you should be aiming to make as little work for your Deep State as possible. A country is a big and complex entity, and effectively micro-managing millions upon millions of individual votes is demanding of man-hours and man-power.
That’s where your “voting system” comes into play, and it should work, not by falsifying and manipulating every single vote, but by making the vast majority of those votes mutually-canceling.
Using your fully controlled “two-party system” (point 2), you should try to achieve a status quo in which the voting intentions of the majority will always split fairly evenly between two meaningless “choices”.
You can do this with class or race or gender messaging, it doesn’t matter, just so long as their minds are made up at an early stage and tend to stay that way.
Essentially you need a situation in which roughly 49% of your populace will vote for Team Red and 49% will vote for Team Blue.
This then creates your mythical “election deciders” – the remaining 2% of the electorate whose votes you will need to care about. You can call them “swing states” or “floating voters” or some terminology of your own.
What you’re aiming for by this means is an “election” that is decided by as few votes as possible.
Once you have the system in place you need to start thinking about your political parties.
2. The Parties
“There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties.”
An essential part of your control mechanism is, as referenced above, the “Two-Party System”. Ideally this would be a perfect but meaningless binary, but this method can absorb a few token “third party” options provided they remain purely minority choices.
In fact permitting a few “independents” or “wild cards” to proliferate can even be beneficial for a few reasons –
a) it reinforces your appearance of genuine democracy, while remaining largely meaningless since the aforementioned entrenchment means they will never gain any serious traction.
b) because sandwiching your Big Two parties between the “kill the rich and eat their babies” party on the Left and the “set fire to everyone darker than taupe on the Dulux paint scale” party on the Right only makes your two “REAL” parties look more sensible and “safe”.
c) Hopeless minority third parties can act as good anger-sponges and safety-valves for people who may be beginning to see through your rigged system.
Of course, if you are doing this thoroughly you will probably be controlling the third parties as well. But that isn’t essential and in the main, you’ll want to focus on The Big Two.
Establishing your Big Two is relatively easy, after all, you have money and power and (thanks to your candidate filtering processes, point 3) you have an entire political class dedicated to the pursuit of those things.
Bringing both Big Two parties under your banner is easy. The hard part is refining the skill of taking two near-identical things and somehow making them appear not just different but diametrically opposed.
