AMERICAN ELECTIONEERING
(Originally written as a result of the Bush election debacle of 2000, and updated for the Obama era.)
We have made voting in this great republic of ours a child’s game. The paraphernalia of entertainment and hoopla that surrounds our elections provides proof of it.
Various interests always attempt to whip up a vote for the presidential election. (They will have a temporary and superficial success. People are suggestible.) I will explain their motivation, and show you the futility of voting.
The former Soviet Union was a political system (communism); its economics were secondary and superficial. Therefore, it used to be said of the Soviet Union that the people (the workers) pretended to work and the government (the communists) pretended to pay them. The United States is an economic system (capitalism); its politics are secondary and superficial. Therefore, I say of the United States that the people (the citizens) pretend to vote and the government (the capitalists) pretends to allow them to participate in it.
The people do not have a meaningful participation in the decision-making that affects their lives. This is the reason persons do not vote. It is not a secret, nor a subtlety of mass psychology.
The Communists intimidated their people into voting for pre-approved candidates. Those candidates normally received 99% of the vote. We bore our citizens to tears into not voting for pre-approved candidates. Neither method has much validity. The electors are just pulling levers. Our voting turnout is slowly approaching zero. Our electees win not by a majority of those eligible to vote, not by a majority of those who register to vote, but by a slim plurality of those who actually voted. This is abysmally to the point. Soon, the psephologists will have no pebbles left to count. (To them, of course, the media-pundits and all, elections are superbly important. It is their livelihood.)
The Soviet political system collapsed in its economics. The American economic system is collapsing in its politics. (It was the politics of deregulation that made possible the financial bubble and the subsequent meltdown.)
First of all, there is no difference in the main parties. They constitute the single Party of Business, part D and part R. The candidates are even clones of each other, down to details of dress. (They are two white, affluent males in blue suits with red ties. Our vaunted diversity went into the waste bin of sociological-fairy-tales-with-which-to-snooker-the-public. Nor is it different with Barack Obama. While he may be merely 50% white in race – if there is a reality to race, which there is not - , he is 99% white in mindset and consciousness, and even in dress. He is as Anglo as any President ever. Further to the point, his mother was a white Anglo.) And they all will do exactly what they want to do regardless of promises or programs or platforms, while seeking to disguise their intent with fine print in legislation and with the glitter of charisma. (Charisma came into political use just when it no longer exists in candidates.)
Has it never occurred to you that those who do not have very much in life outnumber those who have a great deal by hundreds and hundreds of thousands of persons? But somehow or other, in a supposedly democratic majoritarian republic, the programs advocated by the many are never passed into law. (The rule of one-man-one-vote is fatally flawed by the fact that the wealthy can buy access to the media and thus influence many votes. This is proved by the phenomenon of H. Ross Perot, who had nothing to contribute to the political process except his money, ---and that got him a slew of votes. He might consider, even now, using the real muscle of his money and buying the country outright to his viewpoint. It would be an interesting spectacle. Berlusconi did it in Italy, another supposed capitalistic democracy.)
The people have long voted for those who promised to press for their heartfelt interests, but it never has happened. The reason is that the will of the people is frustrated. Once a politician is elected, he is co-opted into the elite, and his interests become those of the elite and not of the people. (That is, if he is not already part of the elite. It takes money to run a campaign. The Congress is a millionaires’ club. And where does that leave you?) His fortunes lie with the elite. Politicians are careerists, and estate builders. They represent themselves.
Politics is never about fairness; it is always about power. Furthermore, these parasites cruelly seek to deceive the people in their voting. They always blame the failure for legislation that favors the people on other members of Congress, other interests or lobbyists. They have forgotten the root meaning of the word Congress, which is that of an assembly, a meeting, a coming together of persons to resolve issues. When such an assemblage, a Congress, fails to solve problems, then all of the members of it have failed as a group. (Rationally, they should all resign; or, they should be voted out of office. The debate on term limits, in this context, which may be making a come-back, is emblematic of the dumbing-down of political discourse.) Instead, our political representatives bask in the weak aura of having voted correctly in the view of their immediate dependents and sycophants in their home districts or states, a thoroughly contemptible act. This is the modus operandi of American politicians. They betray the American people routinely and without qualms. They do it with semantics, in legislation that defeats its ostensible intent, and by access to the media to spread dissension and distortion in disingenuous propaganda.
(I once went into a topless dancing bar and saw a young woman with the dollar sign tattooed onto the left cheek of her butt. That is exactly what the topless dancing bar game is about, nothing more. It’s your money for the false promise of sex. If you would disrobe the politicians out of their expensive chalk stripe suits, you would find the same symbol in the same place: It’s your vote for the false promise of justice.)
After so much of this, the people, in their wisdom (because repeating the same procedure over and over again with the same negative result is insanity), simply abandon the voting process as useless.
I raised the specter of class, and now I will embody it. We claim not to have a class structure in America. Well, rather, what we have is a congeries of old-boy networks, snob social clubs, pecking orders of colleges with cliques within them for elite socialization, associations by occupations and income, race and ethnicity-based groups entrenched in certain cities and in institutions and corporations, blue-blood organizations, university clubs, state lobbying and lawyerly interests, etc., etc. that accomplish the same purpose as class: To preserve their benefits and keep you out.
I am not anti-capitalist. Capitalism is a wonderful engine for the creation of wealth. (Those who condemn capitalism have no historical memory of the misery of economic life prior to industrialism and the rise of finance capitalism.) Capitalism is a way to freedom. The flaw is that certain individual capitalists have captured the American political system and have distorted the law for their personal monetary advantage. They exclude others. They operate on a totally unequal playing field, as is openly displayed at this moment in the health insurance debate. This is what is termed corporate welfare. (The recipients of corporate welfare could bury so-called welfare queens in ten thousand dollar bills.) If the system of capitalism is not remedied, there will be a tide of distress that will overwhelm everything. (A rising tide may lift all boats, but a flood tide will inundate all shores. It will be a tsunami.) The distress is already in existence: note the bankruptcy rate, the burdens on the populace of the credit card scam, the increasing percentage of persons without health insurance, the amazing crudity of social acts and language, the recent meltdown with increased disparity in incomes because of the unemployed.
The distress of the population is contained by the intensity of the vigilance of the elite of the U.S. It will allow nothing to assert a separate power within our society: not communists, not radical racists or environmentalists, not survivalists white or black, not Free Leonard Peltier groups, not nativist communitarians, not separatist religions (as the Branch Davidians), possibly not even aroused aromatherapists. We see its analogue in China, and specifically with the Falun Gong. (In both cases, it is inflated egos like mountains afraid of mice.)
There is a problem with trivializing the political process. The more the will of the people is frustrated, the fewer citizens who vote, the less the mandate of the elected officials. The mandate of the people is the source of power, at least in a system that can claim to be democratic. Thus with a diminishing mandate the less relevance the solutions have to the actual conditions of the people. (The Seattle riots are a prelude of protests to come. The trade politics of the WTO are counterproductive for ordinary persons.) The gap will widen ineluctably until catastrophe strikes. (It even surprised me to discover as per official government census data that despite the hoopla surrounding the candidacy of Obama in the election of 2008, fewer people as a percentage of the population voted than in 2004 – 63.6 % as compared to 63.8%. This statistic makes my point perfectly.) We already speak of the Beltway mentality. There is noted a discrepancy among ordinary society and the military way of thinking. While our armed forces may not be mercenaries, they are equally not citizen-soldiers. These are indicators of disaster.
So you are urged to vote as a patriotic duty, like eating turkey on Thanksgiving Day. But the elite do not want your policies or ideas. They want merely your mechanical mandate for what they will go ahead and do anyway. Then, you see, if you vote and your legislator does not do what he promised to do, they say: “Well, you voted for him.” Or, if the legislation you want does not pass, they say: “Well, that’s the democratic process.” So they have you playing their game: Republicans you lose, Democrats they win. American political campaigns are exactly like elections held in secondary school for class officers: They are popularity contests strictly controlled by the school administration. It is the model of American politics. It is Lippmannite democracy, one guided by one’s betters in life, so-called.
(There is another reason why voting increasingly does not matter. Any president has to solve the problems of a mass population, however he obtains office, or he will be reviled, possibly forced out of office, and his presidency deemed a failure. Or, there are problems that have to be resolved in the U.S., and any president, however he obtains office, legitimately or not, or with a mandate or not, must solve them, whatever his ideology or personal beliefs. Ronald Reagan oversaw the reform of Social Security to keep it solvent, though the reform has flaws. George W. Bush legislated into law a partial resolution of the prescription drug problem, and equally with flaws. Barack Obama continues the wars in Central Asia to save our oil and dominance, a flawed policy. His health insurance reform bill may not give much health care nor reform anything. This is decision-making as in the age of the Caesars.)
Abraham Lincoln said: “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all the time.” Well, maybe, but consider what I say: You can fool enough of the people enough of the time to remain in power indefinitely, ---or until society collapses from its own internal contradictions. This is the fate of America, and it is ugly.
The intellectuals know all of what I write, but they do nothing. They have been co-opted into the elite. An intellectual ensconced into the academy or into the political magazine or pundit milieu has a nice life with lots of perks. Nor could it be stopped. It is a railway track to destruction.
A favorite professor in a course on American Intellectual History used to say, at one or another of the many political scandals in our history: “And we’re bound for hell on a handcar!” Indeed, we are. If I’m lucky, it will not be in my lifetime. I might just die after a life of some decent length, before the crunch comes. (I doubt if anyone much knows what a handcar is.)
The truth of American electioneering is seen in nursery rhymes and in children’s verses. I like the one:
A-Tisket A-Tasket
A-tisket a-tasket
A green and yellow basket
I wrote a letter to my love
And on the way I dropped it.
My essay is my letter to my love, and with my basket not green and yellow, but red, white and blue. (I call my love my sweetheart, and reveal to you in abashment her lovely names: justice, equity, mercy, fairness, forgiveness, sweet brother-and-sister-hood, and love of country.) But I lost my letter that contained my vote in proxy. (It might be interesting to note that in the children’s verse the letter was found and taken to market.)
My vote was cast into the Never-Never Land of juvenile fantasy, which is exactly where your vote will go.
The collapsed American political system may be foretold in the nursery rhyme, Ring-a-Ring o’ Roses. (This juvenile verse is supposed to encapsulate a human catastrophe in the past, and perhaps a plague.) If you remember that nursery rhyme, at the end THEY ALL FELL DOWN!
(TRC 11-08-00 & Revised 09-20-09)
