Has there ever been an era in the history of U.S. politics when people did not associate the words “politician” and “political candidate” with the likelihood of lying and deception? That’s why the legendary pundit Will Rogers expected a wry smile from readers of his syndicated column when he wrote: “If you ever injected truth into politics you’d have no politics.” And why he thought it plausible to conclude that the U.S. “has gotten where it is in spite of politics, not by the aid of it. That we have carried as much political bunk as we have and still survived shows we are a super nation.”

Though founded on premises of self-evident truth, the business of being an American voter has always required sifting through a tanker of slick lies. These days, the lying goes beyond words. It involves the fabrication of a false persona, designed on the basis of opinion research intended to make sure what’s offered to voters appears to be just what they’ve been looking for.

Judging by the success of vehicle information services like CARFAX®, Americans have better sense than to buy a used car based on what they’re told by the car dealer’s sales’ rep. Instead, they look for objective, certified information about the car’s actual history, to get an idea of the potential problems that may be hiding under its shiny, refurbished exterior. Sadly, one sign of the declining political character of the American people these days is that, as voters, people seem quite willing to dispense with that kind of “due diligence.”

So Donald Trump comes along projecting the image of someone who resents the way elitist faction leaders in both parties have betrayed the nation when it comes to border security and illegal immigration. Prodded by his rhetorical punchlines, people angered by that betrayal stampede in his direction. If they bothered to check his record, they’d find that a lot of the elitist faction leaders he’s rhetorically jabbing were elected with financial help from him and the people with whom he has worked and socialized on his way to becoming a multi-billionaire.

If they checked a bit more, they would find that only months, or sometime even weeks, before assuming the position they like he was supporting the people and positions he now expediently opposes. That should lead them to suspect that his position is in fact a pose. It should lead them to consider the likelihood that what he says to get the votes he needs from them today he’ll betray to get the support he needs from somebody else tomorrow.

But Alan, you may ask, isn’t that to be expected in a world where power is all that matters, and everyone does whatever is necessary to get ahead? Of course it is. But the world where power is all that matters is a world in which people who have little more than the power of their vote cannot expect that vote to matter very much. In such a world, elections become a sham, with no purpose but to increase the likelihood people will passively accept decisions that are actually being imposed against their will.

Every day new evidence suggests that all the institutions ordained by the U.S. Constitution to reflect and establish the sovereignty of the people are being transformed into that kind of a sham. For example, 34 senators are now saying that they will support Barack Obama if and when he vetoes legislation rejecting the treaty with Iran. The GOP’s elitist faction leaders and candidates are making a big show of their opposition to the Iran treaty. But the fact that Obama only needs 34 votes in the U.S. Senate for the treaty to go into effect is the result of an anti-constitutional procedure the GOP leaders put in place. In doing so, they literally reversed the provision of the Constitution that would set the bar for approval of the treaty at 67 votes, not 34.

By thus violating the letter and spirit of the Constitution, they have pulled the teeth out of the GOP’s U.S. Senate majority. This allows them to bark loudly against the treaty, for political effect, and even vote as a bloc to reject it, knowing all the while that their votes will be of no effect. Their opposition to the treaty is a politically motivated pantomime. The irony is that the whole sham allows them to come off looking like staunch defenders of the United States, while in fact establishing a precedent that eviscerates the constitutional provision intended to defend the constitutional sovereignty of the American people from subversion by a domestic elitist faction minority, working in concert with foreign powers hostile to their self-government.

The whole process constitutes a failure of national security more devastating and complete even than it appears to be on account of the preposterously treacherous terms of the Iran agreement itself. But just as many people today accept what fabricated politicians say before being elected – without bothering to check their history – so there are many who look at how politicians cast an apparently important vote without checking into what has been done to engineer it so that the outcome destroys the sovereignty, liberty and safety of the nation they now only pretend to serve.

Remember, as you ponder this, that what is happening with the Iran agreement is just one illustration of the purpose and effect of the political and institutional con the elitist faction is now running against the America people. There is no aspect of politics, policy or government action that can be taken at face value by people still loyal to the republican form of government. The most comfortably rewarded elite in the history of mankind is now well advanced toward the goal of murdering the liberty and well-being of the free people that made them so. In the poetical words of that other would-be tyrant, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, thanks to the elitist faction’s treasons our every political function “is smothered in surmise, and nothing is but what is not.”

The elitist faction’s sham political process is like one of the small-pox infected blankets wickedly distributed as a weapon against Native Americans. However much it is made to appear to comfort, cater to or protect us, in effect it is intended to do us harm. We must cast it aside. That is the only choice consistent with our survival as a people – decent, just and therefore rightly free. With the Constitution as our guide, we must reclaim the truly republican “scheme of representation” our Founders rightly identified as the political key to the security of our God-endowed rights, including liberty.