Presidents are just civilians

Presidents are just civilians, armies can be mustered only by those who govern with our democratic consent, and government itself serves at the pleasure of the people and does so only for the people, not for the glory of our leaders.

This is, however, liberalism versus conservatism in the larger, historical sense, in which conservatism means an empire that exists by crushing most of its own people into fodder for the military under the heel of a powerful oligarchy with a monarch at its head, not first among equals but gods over men. And "liberalism" means the United States of America - a nation "conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal" in which we all have inalienable rights that make each of us the equal of any president, and of any king.

i have no clue on punctuation or if avedon wrote any of this piece. i just like the sounds of it