[Peace-discuss] "...popular attitudes and beliefs [are] far to the left of either political party... "

[C. G. Estabrook]

	[The following is excerpted from an interview with Noam Chomsky
	just after the 2004 US presidential election.  --CGE]

INTERVIEWER: Many people in this country became politically active,
some of them for the first time, during this year’s presidential campaign.
A lot of them are now expressing despair and disappointment about the
election results. What are your thoughts about the recent election?

CHOMSKY: Well, such despair is common, but it is the result of a
misunderstanding. For one thing, elections tell us virtually nothing about the
country. George W. Bush got about 31 percent of the electorate. John Kerry got
about 29 percent. That leaves 40 percent of Americans who didn’t vote. The
voting patterns were almost the same as in 2000: same “red” states, same “blue”
states. There was only a slight shift that tipped the election in Bush’s favor.
Apparently the wealthier part of the population — which tends to vote more in
line with its class interests — came out in somewhat greater numbers this time.
If the voting patterns had shifted slightly in the opposite direction and Kerry
were in the White House, it would also tell us nothing about the country.

Right before the election there were extensive studies released about voters’
attitudes and intent. It turns out that only about 10 percent of them were
voting for what the studies’ designers called “agenda, policies, programs, and
ideas.” The rest were voting for imagery.

U.S. elections are run by marketing professionals, the same people who sell
toothpaste and cars. They don’t believe in actual free markets or the nonsense
taught in school about informed consumer choice. If they did, GM ads would say,
“Here are the models we are putting out next year. Here are their
characteristics.” But they don’t do that, because their model is the same as the
next company’s model. So what they do is show you an actress or a football
player or a car going up a sheer cliff. They try to create an image that will
trick you into buying their product.

These marketers also construct imagery to try to influence elections. They train
Bush to project a certain image: An average guy just like you. A guy you’d like
to meet in a bar. Someone who has your interests at heart, who’ll protect you
from danger. Kerry is trained to project a different image: someone who cares
about the economy and about people’s health, a war hero, and so on. Most people
vote for an image, but the image typically has almost no resemblance to reality.
People tend to vote for the candidate they believe shares their values. They are
almost always wrong. Working-class Bush voters believed that Bush supported
their interests, when the Republican Party platform was mostly about redirecting
wealth to the top.

If you ask people why they don’t vote based on issues, they’ll say, “I don’t
know where the candidates stand on the issues.” Which is the truth. The election
is designed to keep you from understanding the candidates’ positions on the
issues. To figure out, say, what their healthcare proposals are would require a
major research project. You aren’t supposed to know. The advertising industry
wants you to focus on what they call “qualities.” And when you do discover the
candidates’ positions on the issues, you understand why.

Right before the [2004] election, two of the best public-opinion organizations
in the world came out with major studies of popular attitudes and beliefs. The
results are so far to the left of either political party that the press can’t
even report it. Huge majorities think that their tax dollars ought to go first
for healthcare, education, and Social Security — not the military. An
overwhelming majority oppose the use of military force unless we are under
attack or under imminent threat of attack. A majority of Americans are in favor
of signing the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change and subjecting the U.S. to the
International Criminal Court. The large majority think that the UN, not the
United States, ought to take the lead on international crises. In fact, the
majority even support giving up the U.S.’s veto power in the UN Security
Council, so that the U.S. will have to go along with the opinions of the majority.

I could go on, but these positions are so far off the left end of the political
spectrum that you can understand why the advertising industry has to keep
issues out of the election and focus on imagery.

The way to overcome this situation is to create real political parties. To have
real political parties, the people must participate and make decisions, not just
come together once every four years to pull a lever. That is not politics. It is
the opposite of politics. If you have mass popular organizations that are
functioning all the time — at local, regional, and international levels — then
you have at least the basis for a democracy. Such organizations existed here in
the past. The unions were one example. And they exist right now in other
countries. Take Brazil, the second-largest country in the hemisphere. They
actually have a real democratic system. Voters aren’t forced to choose between
two rich businessmen who went to the same elite university and are members of
the same secret society and are funded by the same corporations. Brazilians can
vote for somebody like themselves, some impressive figure who maybe doesn’t have
a higher education—a peasant or a steelworker perhaps. I mean, that is
inconceivable in the United States.

The reason they can do it in Brazil is that they have mass popular
organizations. The Brazilian Landless Workers Movement is probably the most
important popular organization in the world, and it’s functioning all the time,
not just in an election year. Then there’s the Brazilian Worker’s Party, which
has all kinds of serious flaws, but nevertheless is a mass popular organization
working at every level. There are professional associations in Brazil that are
politically active. There are areas in which the budget is popularly decided: in
Pôrto Alegre, for example. That is the basis of a democratic culture. If you
don’t have that, you can still have formal elections, but they’re not meaningful.

And meaningless formal elections are indeed what the elite want us to have in
this country. It goes back to the Constitutional Convention of 1787, where James
Madison laid it out: the power has to be in the hands of the wealth of the
nation, he said, people who understand the needs of property owners and
recognize that the first priority of government is to protect the wealthy
minority from the unwashed majority. To do this, the elite must fragment the
majority in some fashion. We have had two-hundred-plus years of struggle about
this because the people don’t accept it, and they have gained many rights as a
result of that struggle. In fact, we have a legacy of freedom that is in many
ways unique. But it wasn’t granted from above. It was won from below. And the
battle continues.

The wealthy and privileged are always fighting a bitter, unremitting class war.
They never stop for a minute. If one tactic doesn’t work, they shift to another.
And if the general population lets itself become pessimistic and gives up —
which is what the elite want — then the upper class will be even more free to do
whatever is in its own best interest.

[More excerpts at <www.chomsky.info/interviews/200504--.pdf>.]