Permission to reprint by author Dmitry Orlov to TPH Feb 23, 2009
Ed - - - added highlighted areas and underlined most significant.

The American model of supposedly unadulterated capitalism is producing steadily sinking fortunes for the vast majority, but is propped up by the fact that it allows a small minority to become fabulously rich, coupled with the notion that you (or any random person) could somehow miraculously become one of them.  There is also a pathological fiction known as the “American Dream,” which is aggressively promoted by the media and finds most of its victims among the working class.  It consists of the notion that diligent work and playing by the rules will make you successful.  Masquerading as hope, it gains its effectiveness from a perversion of pride, a psychological trick people choose to play on themselves to obscure their powerlessness.  They can sense that they are oppressed, and they can see that rebelling against this oppression would be futile, and so their last prideful stand is to pretend that their failures are of their own making, even if they have been most conveniently arranged for them by their oppressors.

Both the Soviet Union and the Untied States devoted a great deal of fanfare to publicizing their democratic institutions - - - much more than these institutions deserved.  Far more democratic countries make far less noise about their democratic institutions  - - - they simply take them for granted because they work.  The Soviet election system was a system of coerced consent: the Communist party selected candidates and the voters were compelled to either vote for them, by depositing  an unmarked ballot in an urn, or to vote against them, by crossing out the ballot under the watchful eyes of election officials.  Needless to say, most candidates sailed into office with astronomically high poll numbers.  The American election system is one of optional false choice: the one uniquely meaningful choice that is perennially missing is “none of the above.”