The times are too difficult and the crisis too severe to indulge in schadenfreude. Looking at it in perspective, the fact that there would be a financial crisis was perfectly predictable: its general nature, if not its magnitude. Markets are always inefficient.

Sometimes the former forces are in the ascendance, and "democratic governance" is eroded, though anyone familiar with intellectual history would expect that the slogans will be passionately proclaimed as they are drained of substantive content. We happen to be living in such an era, but as often before, there is no reason to suppose that the process is irreversible.

Since the civil war in Laos was resumed in earnest in 1963, American participation has been veiled in secrecy.

What was the invasion of South Vietnam, for example, in 1962, when Kennedy sent the Air Force to bomb South Vietnam and start chemical warfare? That's aggression.

It is only in folk tales, children's stories, and the journals of intellectual opinion that power is used wisely and well to destroy evil. The real world teaches very different lessons, and it takes willful and dedicated ignorance to fail to perceive them.

Responsibility, I believe, accrues through privilege.

So yes in theory there is a kind of a formal democracy and in many ways these were achievements and an improvement over the feudal system and more advanced than anything else in the world, but nothing that we ought to call democracy.