America No Longer a Democracy Say Scientists

A team of political scientists at Stanford University announced today that according to their calculations the long hypothesized shift in America toward a new form of government is not only very real but is also now complete.

“Say goodbye to Democracy,” said lead investigator Dr. Henry Bates. “We’re now officially living in a Dimocracy.”

According to Professor Bates, a Dimocracy is formed when the electorate in a Democracy becomes too dumb to engage in the free and equal practice of political self-determination.

“I suppose you could think of it as a Dumbocracy,” said Dr. Bates, “though it’s very difficult for most Americans to pick up the difference between ‘Democracy’ and ‘Dumbocracy’, auditorily speaking. The same goes for ‘Duhmocracy’”.

“In the vernacular of the times,” explained Dr. Peter Cummings from a rival research team in the Harvard University Department of Government, “you can think of the system we now find ourselves in as a D’ohmocracy, as in ‘D’oh, I just voted against my own self-interest again’”.

“And speaking of ‘d’oh’,” added Dr. Cummings’ colleague at Harvard Dr. Timothy Adams, “we really have to tip our hats to the Stanford team for avoiding our blunder of assuming too singlemindedly that the emergent form of government we were looking at was a Doughmocracy if you will.”

“In our defense,” said Dr. Cummings, “all the data was pointing to an entity that was quacking and walking and smelling exactly like the duck of Plutocracy. But as the Stanford team so elegantly point out, a Plutocracy isn’t even possible if a populace is not so dim it can’t figure out that floods of money tend to wash the popular sovereignty right out of a democratic system.”

Said Dr. Bates from the Stanford team, “The breakthrough for us came when we plugged Mr. Romney’s polling numbers and all his earnings from Bain Capital into our equations. It became quite clear that something under the surface was driving the Plutocratic duck we all thought we were looking at.”

Explained Dr. Elizabeth May from Stanford, “When an electorate mired in a long heart-breaking recession caused by a band of sociopathically self-interested moneybags can’t see unanimously that a filthy rich vulture capitalist and a lying Ayn Rand acolyte might not have everybody’s best interest in mind, you know you’ve got more than a garden variety Plutocracy on your hands.”

Added Dr. Bates, “Our findings only became more robust when we plugged in President Obama’s polling numbers and the number of neoliberals in his circle of economic advisors plus the zero representing the number of Wall Street and other high rollers who have been indicted for their crimes.”

When asked about the common perception in many quarters that America’s shifting governmental landscape has been toward a Theocracy, Dr. Bates, speaking for both research teams, said, “A Deomacracy, so to speak, was ruled out very early on.

“There is not one single shred of real evidence that God is anywhere to be found in our current form of government.”