How do you tell if you're living in Al Capone's Chicago?  Or in Stalin's Moscow?  The great Argentinean conservative writer Jorge Luis Borges once asked, "How can you tell if you're living in a Dark Age?"  The answer is you can't.  Nobody dares to whisper the truth.  That's the essence of a Dark Age.

The Demagogue Media are now making it a moral crime to be a Republican or join the Tea Party.  The vice president of the United States, Joe Biden, has called the Moms and Pops of the Tea Party "terrorists."  Which tells you all you need to know about Veep Joe.  John Kerry has denounced sinister Tea Partiers who might not want to be tax slaves for the Democrat Machine.  When the whole chorus speaks with one voice, you know the White House is pulling the strings.  Little baby Trig Palin is a open target for these low-lifes.  They cannot handle dissent.  They are One-Party appartchiks.  As for Obama, he's always been a One-Party guy.  (His.)

The yes-men of the media won't tell you about the Democrat Machine.  All the JourNOlists coordinate their daily Hallelujah Chorus for Comrade Stalin and Da Mare.  They all march in lockstep for Barry da Boss in his sinister black bus.

In a One-Party system, Pravda and Isztvestiya sing from the same hymn sheet, like the New York Times and the Washington Post.  Your schoolteachers won't tell you the truth because they are afraid.  In Stalin's time scientists had to follow the Party Line about phony genetics and education.  Today they kowtow to Nobel Prize-winner Algore -- just threw a majestic public tantrum because too many people are deviating from the Global Warming Line.  He can't understand it.  Hasn't he told us The Truth over and over again?

But it's not just Stalin and Al Capone.  George Orwell satirized the BBC as The Ministry of Truth -- meaning Lies.  Listen to the Beeb today and you can hear the Islamo-leftist line.  According to the Beeb, Karl Marx is "the most admired philosopher" in Britain today -- but the Beeb could switch  to the Prophet Mohammed any day.  That's all you need to know about Europe, where dissidents like Geert Wilders and Ayaan Hirsi Ali are persecuted for telling the truth.

George Bernard Shaw wrote that "Englishmen never shall be slaves; they are free to do whatever Government and public opinion allow them to do." But in Europe, Government and public opinion are one and the same.  People censor themselves and talk in whispers. They rehearse media lies, and squeal on each other as "racists."  Dissenters are denounced, ruined,  isolated, fired.

Meanwhile, the Other Political Party is trashed and scapegoated 24/7, relentlessly, indecently, without mercy.  Chris Matthews runs his own Vatican Inquisition at MSNBC, a self-appointed Holy Crusader Knight against deviant thought.  Republican RINOs are coopted for a piece of the pie.

Behold, America in 2011.

This is not what the American Founders had in mind.

The Founders were a great debating society.  They knew about One-Party Machines, because the Old World was rife with them.

One-Party Machines are the oldest trick pony on record.  They are not new or "progressive."  They are ancient, ancient, and go back to the mob killings of chimp clans.  Chimps will surround, taunt, mob, and kill wounded clan members when they look wounded and weak.  In a mob atmosphere human beings turn into chimps.

One-Party Machines are the norm in human history.  If you read the Book of Kings you see one after the next.  Saddam Hussein and Bashir Assad ran them for decades.

Multiple-Party governments are a historical novelty.  The Founders wrote the Constitution to secure free speech and free debate.  But they were realists.  They understood that it took moral courage for free citizens to speak out.  That is why Ben Franklin said, walking out of the Constitutional Convention on the last day, "A Republic --- if you can keep it."

The coming election will show if America can become a Republic again.  Right now the Founders would be horrified to look at us, just as they would have been horrified by the Dixiecrats and the Carpetbaggers.  You will know the outcome when free speech comes out looking robust and healthy.  Maybe, maybe -- even in our schools and universities.