Leaders who cannot summon or earn a majority of voters rule without consent, as defined in the Declaration of Independence, our founding Document. If we look back through the rearview mirror, we see examples like Hitler and Mussolini who could not win elections but grabbed power and then purged any opposition and banned real elections.
Bush II is another example of a leader who ruled after losing the popular election and therefore, by definition, lacked "consent of the governed." The minority can never represent the majority, and so the Electoral College, which will again reverse the election results, to choose the loser as winner, is a form of an institutional coup.
Overturning an election is a coup d'etat. It allows a minority to grab power from the majority, whether done through force or legally. "Everything Hitler did was legal." MLK. Slavery was legal, child labor was legal, and reversing the will of the People, which in the Declaration is the sole basis of legitimacy, has been legal since the slave masters (95%) who wrote the Constitution betrayed the founding principles of equality and consent.
Coup d'etat Saigon
Now, our next unelected (but rather selected by the misrepresentative Electoral College, where Montana has 3 1/3 times more voting power, per voter, than California..for example) ruler will take power without majority consent (and no other is possible) or a mandate, since over the RealClearPolitics average of polls show that Trump has approval of 40%, the lowest of any incoming President in our history.
Those who rule unjustly, ie without consent, must resort to force, intimidation, and propaganda lies to rule. We can recall Hitler's false flag operations burning down the Reichstag, staging a fake Polish attack on Germans, to justify started a war that killed 70 million.
We may recall the lies of Bush in justifying the destruction of Iraq, killing over half a million, mostly civilians. We may recall the long tradition of unpopular leaders starting wars "to rally the troops" and unify a nation their illegitimate rul s divided. And we may highlight that Trump, who ran partially as a neo-fascist, with racism and scapegoating and Big Lies about immigrants and Muslims, also ran as a partial "peace candidate."
The purpose of war, we have learned, is profits.
This fantasy of peace, ending all crime in our cities, and friendship with Russia is of course belied by his choice of radical neo-cons with the stated goal of bombing Iran and thus engaging its military allies, Russia and China (not to mention Iraq). Orwell had it right: War is Peace.
Randolf Bourne died before finishing his classic essay on The State, in which he says "War is the health of the State." This often misunderstood assertion deserves a closer look. Bourne distinguished the government (usually involved in in inter-party bickering) and the State, which stands with and against other States. He writes:
" What it(the State) has are of military origin, and in an unmilitary era such as we have passed through (this was 1918) since the Civil War, even military trappings have been scarcely seen. In such an era the sense of the State almost fades out of the consciousness of men.
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