Gore Vidal sought for decades to tell Americans that a democratic society was never truly envisaged by our aristocratic founders. Vidal was forever ignored regarding this claim. Ferdinand Lundgren's brilliant “Cracks in the Constitution” came along to expose the vast mythology regarding the Constitution and the founding fathers. Gore tried to convince his fellow Americans to read this book (a volume that was a near Bible for Gore). Nobody listened, and very few Americans bothered to read Lundgren's awesome book.

Gore tried to sneak his understanding of American history into a series of historical novels dating from the founding fathers to WWII. People read his novels, but Americans failed to realize these books were mostly works of nonfiction disguised as fiction. Once again, he was stymied.

He has always understood better than almost any thinker exactly what America was and where it has always been headed. He is elderly now, and his intellectual powers have clearly diminished; yet he still writes pieces for the British newspapers (they usually refuse to publish them in America). He even was forced to publish his last couple of books in England.

He has often been characterized as America's 'greatest man of letters' (nobody ever seems to mention America's greatest woman of letters!). We don't hear this man being thusly categorized nowadays. His belief that 9/11 was a false flag operation brought about his nearly complete isolation from political discourse in America. He was overnight dubbed a 'conspiracy nut' and banished from the American media

He spent a lifetime trying to teach Americans how badly they had been hoodwinked by a cleverly faked “democratic” constitution. He has now become a complete political pariah as payment for his love of country and his efforts to help steer it down another path toward a true democracy.

He and a few other thinkers always understood that the founding fathers never really embraced the theories of democracy that emerged in Europe and America during the Enlightenment. The theoretical democratic social contract was only examined in private by our founders. Today, no high school student even knows what that theory is; yet it is supposed to underlie our sacred Constitution.

If Americans understood it, they might wince at the ongoing arrant challenges to basic democratic social contract theory (SCT). One tenet of SCT is a universally accepted belief that no rational human being would ever sign on to a contract that awarded to the state the power to kill its own citizens. The founders were aware of this tenet in democratic SCT, but chose to ignore it. They were not, after all, interested in creating a true democracy.

How far have we come in democratic theory? Not one inch. Democratic social contract theory was allowed to quietly die a long time ago. Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas have only recently declared that the holy obligation of the state to kill its own citizens has been too far circumscribed. We need to greatly expand the killing of our fellow American citizens.

We have drifted so far from democratic theory that both of the main candidates for the presidency agree we need to kill more people. Obama runs as a liberal, but a liberal who agrees with Scalia and Thomas regarding the need for expanding state killings. These two justices are at bottom neofascist in their world views. Shame on Obama.

I argued for years that as many as one third of prisoners executed in America may have been innocent. I based this on comments by polled former judges and other data. I was invariably treated as quite mad when I made such claims, but I was finally freed from a charge of complete madness. Illinois recently boasted having 25 men on death row, 13 of whom were proved at the last minute to be innocent through the efforts not of attorneys, but through the hard work of a group of college students.

Maybe I exaggerated, but if I did, it was not by much. My claim of 33% was dwarfed by Illinois where more than 50% of those destined to be killed were innocent. Nobody has done such a study on Texas executions, but I'm convinced the percentage of innocents who have been killed in Texas is greater than the the percentage of innocents discovered on death row in Illinois.

Let me repeat: it is a fundamental part of democratic theory as it evolved during and since the Enlightenment that a democratic state does not have the right to kill its own citizens. No human in a state of nature would ever sign onto such a social contract.

Closely linked to this issue is that of the so-called tyranny of the majority. Since the deliberations of the ancient Greek philosophers, it has been held that democracies are doomed to failure due to their inevitable tendency toward a tyranny of the majority. In this case, a majority of Americans favor the death penalty, and they also have tended to impose it unequally according to one’s economic status and/or race. OJ Simpson’s economic status, for example, trumped his race.

Obama is the current beacon of Democratic hopes in America. He also wants to expand the death penalty, even though we now know beyond a shadow of a doubt that many innocent people have been executed in America. Obama's desire for power has led him to act as just one more player in the long feared tyranny of the majority.

It will be said that this move is no more than “good politics”. My problem is this: if it is seen as “good politics” and being in conformity with democratic theory, how is it that our political bosses have managed to so twist and undermine basic democratic thought to come up with such utter nonsense?

One day in the future, I will also want to get into democratic theory's embrace of the separation of church and state. Obama wants to increase the amount of federal dollars now being illegally shuttled by Bush into the treasuries of fundamentalist, bigoted, homophobic, anti-rational embracers of the Rapture and the absolute need to conquer and obliterate Muslim civilization to insure the fulfillment of biblical prophecies. Bankrolling fundies is one more profound violation of democratic theory, which is anti-imperialist, while they are violently imperialistic. Washington told his fellow Americans to beware of foreign entanglements precisely because they lead to wars. Wise counsel, but the wiser the counsel, the more likely it will be ignored in a nation that has never had much patience with rationality.

Is Obama a small “d” democrat? No way. Is McCain? Are you kidding? I find myself being driven back to repeat a dictum I formulated many years ago.

To wit:

Power should never be given to those members of society who gravitate toward the centers of power.

These power seekers almost always suffer to one degree or another from obsessive megalomania. The nation will always be on the edge of war or immersed in war when these people are given power. In my lifetime, the only president not afflicted by the imperialism disease was Jimmy Carter, who therefore was seen as weak and unpatriotic for not wanting to promote global American militarism. It's no surprise that his presidency has been characterized as a complete failure by the corporate media, which has always doted on seeing the Marines invade tiny countries to protect American corporate interests.

The current enormous saber rattling by the US and Israel is contrary to democratic peaceful, non-imperialist principles of diplomacy. It also is contrary to the JudeoChristian belief that ‘a soft answer turneth away wrath’. And it also heretically violates a warning by the much worshipped “father” of our country. Finally, it violates the democratic social contract, which eschews both militarism and imperialism for the gains of the few and suffering of the many.

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July 10, 2008 Richard Franklin is the Publisher-author of Franklin's Focus, a daily opinion piece and the author of 'The Mythology of Self Worth; Using Reason to Dispel the Fallacies that Trigger Needless Anxiety, Depression, and Anger'