Per the Law of Correspondences, Uranus was officially recognized as a planet during the period between the American and French revolutions. It is said to govern all independence

movements, wherein one (usually newer) group rebels from another (usually older) group.  On a philosophical level, Uranian ideas are those which champion the rights of the individual over those of the state. Thus Uranus is traditionally linked with democracy and capitalism, while Neptune, the planet of unified, undifferentiated masses, is linked with communism and socialism.

Democracy

Uranus is the first of three planets that orbit beyond Saturn, whose dark side is expressed by enslavement to form and tradition. Thus Uranus signifies the will to break through bondage and to repudiate antededents.

Historically, when the time had come for this radical new concept to dawn in the collective consciousness, along came a bright new idea in government: one that championed the right of individuals to overthrow tyrants and think for themselves.  Defiance and dissent are at the Uranian core of true democracies (in this context we are excepting the ancient Greek and Roman models, which could be classified as proto-democratic).

Does today’s USA meet the Uranian standard for democracy?

Certainly the word is a current favorite in the mainstream American media, who take their cue from White House language-spinners. But beneath the veneer of verbiage, American political realities are becoming more and more estranged from Uranian impulses.  So removed, in spirit and practice, has American democracy become from its key tenets that its most heated proponents seem to be deriving their inspiration more from vague and distant references in their grammar school textbooks than from direct experience of the society in which they live.

Uranus: a mental planet

Democracy, like other Uranian constructs, depends upon a high-level use of the mind. Uranian thinking is independent, crisp and explicit.  Unlike Neptune, which is associated with water, Uranus is associated with air at its most stubbornly abstract. Uranus represents intellect without the baggage of subjectivity. This is why it governs science, whose classical goal is knowledge stripped of prejudice and illusion.

In the opinion of the 18th-century radicals who drafted the U.S. Constitution, emotion was not an ally of clear thinking. Democracy was to be protected at all costs from the caprices of charismatic leaders and the vagaries of mass mood. When constructing their elegant theoretical arguments, Jefferson and Adams were not after pulse-quickening rhetoric; they felt it detracted from sound reason. They avoided appealing to deities. They were against regalia. They were not into brass bands.

What would these sober gentlemen make of the hyperbolic bombast that saturates every reference to democracy in America these days?

Exploited idealism

In the America of today, “democracy” is less a description of government than a mind-control technique. When Bush uses the word in one of his speeches, the public seems to take leave of its senses. Eyes moisten en masse, Pavlov’s- dog-style, and amidst all the snuffling and flag-saluting, woe betide any citizen who dares to insist upon what democracy really means.

From its beginnings as a Uranian challenge intended to empower the individual, democracy is now a buzzword used to disempower the individual.  Pimped by America’s current leaders for its nationalistic charge, democracy is being pressed into service as a foreign policy ruse. With their initial arguments for invading Iraq universally discredited, the cartel in power has seized upon “democracy” as the new rationale. 

First the “mushroom cloud” scenario was used to appeal to the American public’s fear; now the “democracy” scenario is being used to appeal to its idealism. 

Democracy as sacred myth

The peculiar cynicism behind this tactic puts it in a special category all its own. Democracy is a quasi-religious concept in the American mass mind; the U.S. Constitution comes as close as this secular society gets to holy writ. When politicians invoke this iconography, they are reaching up into a potent and rarified zone of the American imagination.

The Bush camp is now bolstering its original tactic -- appealing to our fear of danger (Saturn in Cancer on the USA Sun cluster) -- with a ruse qualitatively more manipulative, and sad. When the president’s scriptwriters invoke the American Revolution, they are exploiting America’s desperate yearning to believe in itself (Pluto in Sagittarius in the USA first house).

Democracy and imperialism

In these days of desolate cynicism, the government’s appeals find fertile ground. Amazingly, democracy is now being touted as a rationale for imperialistic assault.  The neo-con doctrine ominously entitled “The New American Century” tells us that Washington intends to install, one by one in various hand-picked countries (they’ve gone so far as to publish a list of them),  a series of militarily-imposed “democracies”. This is certainly a new take on the word. In this context it is meant to signify the kind of government America thinks it has. But it actually means the kind of government our leaders want these countries to have; which is to say, not democracy at all. 

This campaign of take-it-or-leave-it "democracy" is an idea that could only fly in a country where most of the citizenry has no sense of world history, ancient or modern. Perhaps the only thing more absurd than the claim that a government of the people, for the people and by the people could be established right now in Iraq -- a state that was starved to attrition for thirteen years of sanctions and is now being destroyed with guns and bombs -- is the notion that a U.S.-style government should be imposed upon a civilization whose ancestors came up with the Code of Hammarabi thousands of years before America’s Founding Fathers were born.

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