[Peace-discuss] Chomsky on the 2004 elections

[Morton K.Brussel]

[FYI: Long, not untypical of Chomsky's awkward style.
In the worst of times, Chomsky sees hope, says things were worse in the 
past. He says that most folks out there have basically progressive 
ideas (including the fundamentalist evangelicals?), but insofar as 
election choices, either they've been turned off or were misinformed. 
Not his best, but always interesting. mkb]

ZNet | Electoral Politics

2004 Elections

by Noam Chomsky; November 29, 2004

The elections of November 2004 have received a great deal of 
discussion, with exultation in some quarters, despair in others, and 
general lamentation about a "divided nation." They are likely to have 
policy consequences, particularly harmful to the public in the domestic 
arena, and to the world with regard to the "transformation of the 
military," which has led some prominent strategic analysts to warn of 
"ultimate doom" and to hope that US militarism and aggressiveness will 
be countered by a coalition of peace-loving states, led by – China! 
(John Steinbruner and Nancy Gallagher, Daedalus). We have come to a 
pretty pass when such words are expressed in the most respectable and 
sober journals. It is also worth noting how deep is the despair of the 
authors over the state of American democracy. Whether or not the 
assessment is merited is for activists to determine.

  Though significant in their consequences, the elections tell us very 
little about the state of the country, or the popular mood. There are, 
however, other sources from which we can learn a great deal that 
carries important lessons. Public opinion in the US is intensively 
monitored, and while caution and care in interpretation are always 
necessary, these studies are valuable resources. We can also see why 
the results, though public, are kept under wraps by the doctrinal 
institutions. That is true of major and highly informative studies of 
public opinion released right before the election, notably by the 
Chicago Council on Foreign Relations (CCFR) and the Program on 
International Policy Attitudes at the U. of Maryland (PIPA), to which I 
will return.

  One conclusion is that the elections conferred no mandate for 
anything, in fact, barely took place, in any serious sense of the term 
"election." That is by no means a novel conclusion. Reagan's victory in 
1980 reflected "the decay of organized party structures, and the vast 
mobilization of God and cash in the successful candidacy of a figure 
once marginal to the `vital center' of American political life," 
representing "the continued disintegration of those political 
coalitions and economic structures that have given party politics some 
stability and definition during the past generation" (Thomas Ferguson 
and Joel Rogers, Hidden Election, 1981). In the same valuable 
collection of essays, Walter Dean Burnham described the election as 
further evidence of a "crucial comparative peculiarity of the American 
political system: the total absence of a socialist or laborite mass 
party as an organized competitor in the electoral market," accounting 
for much of the "class-skewed abstention rates" and the minimal 
significance of issues. Thus of the 28% of the electorate who voted for 
Reagan, 11% gave as their primary reason "he's a real conservative." In 
Reagan's "landslide victory" of 1984, with just under 30% of the 
electorate, the percentage dropped to 4% and a majority of voters hoped 
that his legislative program would not be enacted.

  What these prominent political scientists describe is part of the 
powerful backlash against the terrifying "crisis of democracy" of the 
1960s, which threatened to democratize the society, and, despite 
enormous efforts to crush this threat to order and discipline, has had 
far-reaching effects on consciousness and social practices. The 
post-1960s era has been marked by substantial growth of popular 
movements dedicated to greater justice and freedom, and unwillingness 
to tolerate the brutal aggression and violence that had previously been 
granted free rein. The Vietnam war is a dramatic illustration, 
naturally suppressed because of the lessons it teaches about the 
civilizing impact of popular mobilization. The war against South 
Vietnam launched by JFK in 1962, after years of US-backed state terror 
that had killed tens of thousands of people, was brutal and barbaric 
from the outset: bombing, chemical warfare to destroy food crops so as 
to starve out the civilian support for the indigenous resistance, 
programs to drive millions of people to virtual concentration camps or 
urban slums to eliminate its popular base. By the time protests reached 
a substantial scale, the highly respected and quite hawkish Vietnam 
specialist and military historian Bernard Fall wondered whether 
"Viet-Nam as a cultural and historic entity" would escape "extinction" 
as "the countryside literally dies under the blows of the largest 
military machine ever unleashed on an area of this size" – particularly 
South Vietnam, always the main target of the US assault. And when 
protest did finally develop, many years too late, it was mostly 
directed against the peripheral crimes: the extension of the war 
against the South to the rest ofIndochina – terrible crimes, but 
secondary ones.

  * State managers are well aware that they no longer have that freedom. 
Wars against "much weaker enemies" – the only acceptable targets -- 
must be won "decisively and rapidly," Bush I's intelligence services 
advised. Delay might "undercut political support," recognized to be 
thin, a great change since the Kennedy-Johnson period when the attack 
on Indochina, while never popular, aroused little reaction for many 
years. Those conclusions hold despite the hideous war crimes in 
Falluja, replicating the Russian destruction of Grozny ten years 
earlier, including crimes displayed on the front pages for which the 
civilian leadership is subject to the death penalty under the War 
Crimes Act passed by the Republican Congress in 1996 – and also one of 
the more disgraceful episodes in the annals of American journalism.

  The world is pretty awful today, but it is far better than yesterday, 
not only with regard to unwillingness to tolerate aggression, but also 
in many other ways, which we now tend to take for granted. There are 
very important lessons here, which should always be uppermost in our 
minds – for the same reason they are suppressed in the elite culture. 
Returning to the elections, in 2004 Bush received the votes of just 
over 30% of the electorate, Kerry a bit less. Voting patterns resembled 
2000, with virtually the same pattern of "red" and "blue" states 
(whatever significance that may have). A small change in voter 
preference would have put Kerry in the White House, also telling us 
very little about the country and public concerns.

  As usual, the electoral campaigns were run by the PR industry, which 
in its regular vocation sells toothpaste, life-style drugs, 
automobiles, and other commodities. Its guiding principle is deceit. 
Its task is to undermine the "free markets" we are taught to revere: 
mythical entities in which informed consumers make rational choices. In 
such scarcely imaginable systems, businesses would provide information 
about their products: cheap, easy, simple. But it is hardly a secret 
that they do nothing of the sort. Rather, they seek to delude consumers 
to choose their product over some virtually identical one. GM does not 
simply make public the characteristics of next year's models. Rather, 
it devotes huge sums to creating images to deceive consumers, featuring 
sports stars, sexy models, cars climbing sheer cliffs to a heavenly 
future, and so on. The business world does not spend hundreds of 
billions of dollars a year to provide information. The famed 
"entrepreneurial initiative" and "free trade" are about as realistic as 
informed consumer choice. The last thing those who dominate the society 
want is the fanciful market of doctrine and economic theory. All of 
this should be too familiar to merit much discussion.

  Sometimes the commitment to deceit is quite overt. The recent 
US-Australia negotiations on a "free trade agreement" were held up by 
Washington's concern over Australia's health care system, perhaps the 
most efficient in the world. In particular, drug prices are a fraction 
of those in the US: the same drugs, produced by the same companies, 
earning substantial profits in Australia though nothing like those they 
are granted in the US – often on the pretext that they are needed for 
R&D, another exercise in deceit. Part of the reason for the efficiency 
of the Australian system is that, like other countries, Australia 
relies on the practices that the Pentagon employs when it buys paper 
clips: government purchasing power is used to negotiate prices, illegal 
in the US. Another reason is that Australia has kept to 
"evidence-based" procedures for marketing pharmaceuticals. US 
negotiators denounced these as market interference: pharmaceutical 
corporations are deprived of their legitimate rights if they are 
required to produce evidence when they claim that their latest product 
is better than some cheaper alternative, or run TV ads in which some 
sports hero or model tells the audience to ask their doctor whether 
this drug is "right for you (it's right for me)," sometimes not even 
revealing what it is supposed to be for. The right of deceit must be 
guaranteed to the immensely powerful and pathological immortal persons 
created by radical judicial activism to run the society. When assigned 
the task of selling candidates, the PR industry naturally resorts to 
the same fundamental techniques, so as to ensure that politics remains 
"the shadow cast by big business over society," as America's leading 
social philosopher, John Dewey, described the results of "industrial 
feudalism" long ago. Deceit is employed to undermine democracy, just as 
it is the natural device to undermine markets. And voters appear to be 
aware of it.

  On the eve of the 2000 elections, about 75% of the electorate regarded 
it as a game played by rich contributors, party managers, and the PR 
industry, which trains candidates to project images and produce 
meaningless phrases that might win some votes. Very likely, that is why 
the population paid little attention to the "stolen election" that 
greatly exercised educated sectors. And it is why they are likely to 
pay little attention to campaigns about alleged fraud in 2004. If one 
is flipping a coin to pick the King, it is of no great concern if the 
coin is biased.

  In 2000, "issue awareness" – knowledge of the stands of the 
candidate-producing organizations on issues – reached an all-time low. 
Currently available evidence suggests it may have been even lower in 
2004. About 10% of voters said their choice would be based on the 
candidate's "agendas/ideas/platforms/goals"; 6% for Bush voters, 13% 
for Kerry voters (Gallup). The rest would vote for what the industry 
calls "qualities" or "values," which are the political counterpart to 
toothpaste ads. The most careful studies (PIPA) found that voters had 
little idea of the stand of the candidates on matters that concerned 
them. Bush voters tended to believe that he shared their beliefs, even 
though the Republican Party rejected them, often explicitly. 
Investigating the sources used in the studies, we find that the same 
was largely true of Kerry voters, unless we give highly sympathetic 
interpretations to vague statements that most voters had probably never 
heard.

  Exit polls found that Bush won large majorities of those concerned 
with the threat of terror and "moral values," and Kerry won majorities 
among those concerned with the economy, health care, and other such 
issues. Those results tell us very little.

  It is easy to demonstrate that for Bush planners, the threat of terror 
is a low priority. The invasion of Iraq is only one of many 
illustrations. Even their own intelligence agencies agreed with the 
consensus among other agencies, and independent specialists, that the 
invasion was likely to increase the threat of terror, as it did; 
probably nuclear proliferation as well, as also predicted. Such threats 
are simply not high priorities as compared with the opportunity to 
establish the first secure military bases in a dependent client state 
at the heart of the world's major energy reserves, a region understood 
since World War II to be the "most strategically important area of the 
world," "a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the 
greatest material prizes in world history." Apart from what one 
historian of the industry calls "profits beyond the dreams of avarice," 
which must flow in the right direction, control over two-thirds of the 
world's estimated hydrocarbon reserves – uniquely cheap and easy to 
exploit – provides what Zbigniew Brzezinski recently called "critical 
leverage" over European and Asian rivals, what George Kennan many years 
earlier had called "veto power" over them. These have been crucial 
policy concerns throughout the post-World War II period, even more so 
in today's evolving tripolar world, with its threat that Europe and 
Asia might move towards greater independence, and worse, might be 
united: China and the EU became each other's major trading partners in 
2004, joined by the world's second largest economy (Japan), and those 
tendencies are likely to increase. A firm hand on the spigot reduces 
these dangers.

  Note that the critical issue is control, not access. US policies 
towards the Middle East were the same when it was a net exporter of 
oil, and remain the same today when US intelligence projects that the 
US itself will rely on more stable Atlantic Basin resources. Policies 
would be likely to be about the same if the US were to switch to 
renewable energy. The need to control the "stupendous source of 
strategic power" and to gain "profits beyond the dreams of avarice" 
would remain. Jockeying over Central Asia and pipeline routes reflects 
similar concerns.

  There are many other illustrations of the same lack of concern of 
planners about terror. Bush voters, whether they knew it or not, were 
voting for a likely increase in the threat of terror, which could be 
awesome: it was understood well before 9-11 that sooner or later the 
Jihadists organized by the CIA and its associates in the 1980s are 
likely to gain access to WMDs, with horrendous consequences. And even 
these frightening prospects are being consciously extended by the 
transformation of the military, which, apart from increasing the threat 
of "ultimate doom" by accidental nuclear war, is compelling Russia to 
move nuclear missiles over its huge and mostly unprotected territory to 
counter US military threats – including the threat of instant 
annihilation that is a core part of the "ownership of space" for 
offensive military purposes announced by the Bush administration along 
with its National Security Strategy in late 2002, significantly 
extending Clinton programs that were more than hazardous enough, and 
had already immobilized the UN Disarmament Committee.

  As for "moral values," we learn what we need to know about them from 
the business press the day after the election, reporting the "euphoria" 
in board rooms – not because CEOs oppose gay marriage. And from the 
unconcealed efforts to transfer to future generations the costs of the 
dedicated service of Bush planners to privilege and wealth: fiscal and 
environmental costs, among others, not to speak of the threat of 
"ultimate doom." That aside, it means little to say that people vote on 
the basis of "moral values." The question is what they mean by the 
phrase. The limited indications are of some interest. In some polls, 
"when the voters were asked to choose the most urgent moral crisis 
facing the country, 33 percent cited `greed and materialism,' 31 
percent selected `poverty and economic justice,' 16 percent named 
abortion, and 12 percent selected gay marriage" (Pax Christi). In 
others, "when surveyed voters were asked to list the moral issue that 
most affected their vote, the Iraq war placed first at 42 percent, 
while 13 percent named abortion and 9 percent named gay marriage" 
(Zogby). Whatever voters meant, it could hardly have been the operative 
moral values of the administration, celebrated by the business press.

  I won't go through the details here, but a careful look indicates that 
much the same appears to be true for Kerry voters who thought they were 
calling for serious attention to the economy, health, and their other 
concerns. As in the fake markets constructed by the PR industry, so 
also in the fake democracy they run, the public is hardly more than an 
irrelevant onlooker, apart from the appeal of carefully constructed 
images that have only the vaguest resemblance to reality.

  Let's turn to more serious evidence about public opinion: the studies 
I mentioned earlier that were released shortly before the elections by 
some of the most respected and reliable institutions that regularly 
monitor public opinion. Here are a few of the results (CCFR):

  A large majority of the public believe that the US should accept the 
jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court and the World Court, 
sign the Kyoto protocols, allow the UN to take the lead in 
international crises, and rely on diplomatic and economic measures more 
than military ones in the "war on terror." Similar majorities believe 
the US should resort to force only if there is "strong evidence that 
the country is in imminent danger of being attacked," thus rejecting 
the bipartisan consensus on "pre-emptive war" and adopting a rather 
conventional interpretation of the UN Charter. A majority even favor 
giving up the Security Council veto, hence following the UN lead even 
if it is not the preference of US state managers. When official 
administration moderate Colin Powell is quoted in the press as saying 
that Bush "has won a mandate from the American people to continue 
pursuing his `aggressive' foreign policy," he is relying on the 
conventional assumption that popular opinion is irrelevant to policy 
choices by those in charge.

  It is instructive to look more closely into popular attitudes on the 
war in Iraq, in the light of the general opposition to the "pre-emptive 
war" doctrines of the bipartisan consensus. On the eve of the 2004 
elections, "three quarters of Americans say that the US should not have 
gone to war if Iraq did not have WMD or was not providing support to al 
Qaeda, while nearly half still say the war was the right decision" 
(Stephen Kull, reporting the PIPA study he directs). But this is not a 
contradiction, Kull points out. Despite the quasi-official Kay and 
Duelfer reports undermining the claims, the decision to go to war "is 
sustained by persisting beliefs among half of Americans that Iraq 
provided substantial support to al Qaeda, and had WMD, or at least a 
major WMD program," and thus see the invasion as defense against an 
imminent severe threat. Much earlier PIPA studies had shown that a 
large majority believe that the UN, not the US, should take the lead in 
matters of security, reconstruction, and political transition in Iraq. 
Last March, Spanish voters were bitterly condemned for appeasing terror 
when they voted out of office the government that had gone to war over 
the objections of about 90% of the population, taking its orders from 
Crawford Texas, and winning plaudits for its leadership in the "New 
Europe" that is the hope of democracy. Few if any commentators noted 
that Spanish voters last March were taking about the same position as 
the large majority of Americans: voting for removing Spanish troops 
unless they were under UN direction. The major differences between the 
two countries are that in Spain, public opinion was known, while here 
it takes an individual research project to discover it; and in Spain 
the issue came to a vote, almost unimaginable in the deteriorating 
formal democracy here.

  These results indicate that activists have not done their job 
effectively.

  Turning to other areas, overwhelming majorities of the public favor 
expansion of domestic programs: primarily health care (80%), but also 
aid to education and Social Security. Similar results have long been 
found in these studies (CCFR). Other mainstream polls report that 80% 
favor guaranteed health care even if it would raise taxes – in reality, 
a national health care system would probably reduce expenses 
considerably, avoiding the heavy costs of bureaucracy, supervision, 
paperwork, and so on, some of the factors that render the US privatized 
system the most inefficient in the industrial world. Public opinion has 
been similar for a long time, with numbers varying depending on how 
questions are asked. The facts are sometimes discussed in the press, 
with public preferences noted but dismissed as "politically 
impossible." That happened again on the eve of the 2004 elections. A 
few days before (Oct. 31), the NY Times reported that "there is so 
little political support for government intervention in the health care 
market in the United States that Senator John Kerry took pains in a 
recent presidential debate to say that his plan for expanding access to 
health insurance would not create a new government program" – what the 
majority want, so it appears. But it is "politically impossible" and 
has "[too] little political support," meaning that the insurance 
companies, HMOs, pharmaceutical industries, Wall Street, etc. , are 
opposed.

  It is notable that such views are held by people in virtual isolation. 
They rarely hear them, and it is not unlikely that respondents regard 
their own views as idiosyncratic. Their preferences do not enter into 
the political campaigns, and only marginally receive some reinforcement 
in articulate opinion in media and journals. The same extends to other 
domains.

  What would the results of the election have been if the parties, 
either of them, had been willing to articulate people's concerns on the 
issues they regard as vitally important?Or if these issues could enter 
into public discussion within the mainstream?We can only speculate 
about that, but we do know that it does not happen, and that the facts 
are scarcely even reported. It does not seem difficult to imagine what 
the reasons might be.

  I brief, we learn very little of any significance from the elections, 
but we can learn a lot from the studies of public attitudes that are 
kept in the shadows. Though it is natural for doctrinal systems to try 
to induce pessimism, hopelessness and despair, the real lessons are 
quite different. They are encouraging and hopeful. They show that there 
are substantial opportunities for education and organizing, including 
the development of potential electoral alternatives. As in the past, 
rights will not be granted by benevolent authorities, or won by 
intermittent actions – a few large demonstrations after which one goes 
home, or pushing a lever in the personalized quadrennial extravaganzas 
that are depicted as "democratic politics." As always in the past, the 
tasks require day-to-day engagement to create – in part re-create – the 
basis for a functioning democratic culture in which the public plays 
some role in determining policies, not only in the political arena from 
which it is largely excluded, but also in the crucial economic arena, 
from which it is excluded in principle.

  Noam Chomsky is the author of Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest 
for Global Dominance (now out in paperback from Owl/Metropolitan Books)

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