[Peace-discuss] The Presidential Election Did Not Take Place (comments welcome)

[David Green]

Biden was amazingly bold in his anti-democratic rhetoric this evening when he reprimanded Bush for his support of elections in Palestine, which Biden proudly claimed to have correctly predicted would be won by Hamas, and therefore unacceptable. With Arafat dead, there's no Boss Tweed to control the nominations.
   
  DG

"C. G. Estabrook" <galliher at uiuc.edu> wrote:
  "The people can vote for whoever they want.
I control the nominations."
--Boss Tweed of Tammany Hall, ca. 1870


The presidential election campaign was primarily a distraction. There were 
serious issues presumably at stake, notably the war and the economy, and the 
campaign not only ignored them but purposely obscured them.

The reason's not far to seek. As the late Australian social scientist Alex 
Carey wrote, "The 20th century was characterized by three developments of great 
political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, 
and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power 
against democracy." A trillion dollars spent every year on marketing in the US 
-- where political candidates are sold like cars or coffee -- has some effect.

The issues were important, and for that very reason could not be submitted to 
the voters for their consideration. The dirtiest secret of American politics -- 
or at least the most important one -- may not be the government's torture 
policy, filthy as that is, but rather the contradiction between the interests of 
the tiny elite of possessors (perhaps less than 1% of the US population) and 
those of the large majority of the population. But of course it's not *very* 
secret: as Noam Chomsky points out,

"This is a business-run society: you market commodities, you market 
candidates. The public are the victims and they know it, and that’s why 80% 
think, more or less accurately, that the country is run by a few big interests 
looking after themselves. So people are not deluded, they just don’t really see 
any choices..."

--and, as a result, many ignore the distraction thrown up for them by the 
advertising/propaganda industry, the "campaign" (particularly protracted in a 
year when the two major parties are noticeably promoting unpopular policies on 
the war and the economy: there's a lot of distraction to be done). About half 
of the electorate doesn't vote, in part because they think not unreasonably that 
the outcome of the election will make little difference to them and polices 
won't change much. Even in the most recent presidential election "landslides" 
-- 1972 and 1984 -- three out of four of the eligible voters did *not* vote for 
the winning candidate (Nixon and Reagan, respectively).

Most of the media propaganda that passes for politics in the US is directed to 
what Gore Vidal calls the "chattering classes" -- about a quarter of the total 
US population that makes up what some have called the "tertiary bourgeoisie" 
(cf. "*secondary* school"), i.e., most of those with a traditional college 
education. Given that the actual ruling class in America is that 1% (perhaps a 
million people), that leaves three quarters of the US population generally 
ignored in the "manufacture of consent" -- and they return the favor, as they 
are meant to.

It has not escaped the attention of our rulers in general that people who work 
long hours and are anxious about their circumstances can spend less time finding 
out how those circumstances are determined, talking to other people about it, 
and doing something about it -- i.e., practicing democracy. The US anti-war 
movement of the 1960s arose in part from the greater prosperity and relative 
economic equality of that decade in comparison with this one. Americans had the 
leisure to do politics, as the Trilateral Commission described in dismay in "The 
Crisis of Democracy: On the Governability of Democracies" (1976). The crisis was 
that there was too much democracy: that had to be stopped, by the 
counter-policies of neoliberalism. American politics in the last thirty years 
shows that it was.

Of course that 25% of the population who are the especial concern of the 
propaganda system show the effects as well. It is a surprising fact that, 
throughout the Vietnam War, support for the US government's position was 
directly (not inversely) proportional to years of formal education; that is, in 
spite of the myth that the anti-war movement of those days was confined to the 
colleges, in fact the college-educated were more likely to support 
administration policy than those without a bachelor's degree. The ideological 
institutions -- the universities and the media -- were doing their job, even 
though by the end of the 1960s, 70% of Americans came to say that the Vietnam 
War was "fundamentally wrong and immoral," not "a mistake," according to 
longitudinal studies by the Chicago Council of Foreign Relations.

It is quite remarkable that, prescinding from the enthusiasms of the moment 
(Obama v. McCain et al.), polls show that Americans hold political opinions of a 
general social-democratic/New Deal sort -- opinions, it need hardly be said, 
that they do not hear in the media or from Obama, McCain et al. The result is 
that the two business parties, for all their struggle at 
product-differentiation, like Coke and Pepsi, support largely similar policies 
that are generally to the Right of those favored by a majority of the 
population. Medical care is just the most obvious example, and is has been for 
decades.

In an important article ("If Obama Loses," August 18, 2008), Paul Street writes 
about "Thomas Frank's widely mentioned but commonly misunderstood book on why so 
many white working class Americans vote for regressive Republicans instead of 
following their supposed natural 'pocketbook' interests by backing Democrats. 
Released just before Bush defeated Kerry with no small help from working class 
whites, Frank's 'What's the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart 
of America' (New York: 2004) has generally been taken to have argued that the 
GOP distracts stupid 'heartland' (white working-class) voters away from their 
real economic interests with diversionary issues like abortion, guns, and gay 
rights. Insofar as Democrats bear responsibility for the loss of their former 
working class constituency, Frank is often said to have argued that this was due 
to their excessive liberalism on these and other 'cultural issues'.

"But Frank's argument was more complex or perhaps more simple. At the end of his 
book, in a passage that very few leading commentators seem to have read (a 
shining exception is New York Times columnist Paul Krugman), Frank clearly and 
(in my opinion) correctly blamed the long corporatist shift of the Democratic 
Party to the business-friendly right and away from honest discussion of -- and 
opposition to -- economic and class inequality for much of whatever success the 
GOP achieved in winning over working-class whites."

Street quotes Larry M. Bartels, director of the Center for the Study of 
Democratic Politics at Princeton: "Frank exaggerated white working-class voters' 
susceptibility to cultural diversion: 'In recent presidential elections,' 
[Bartels] notes, 'affluent voters, who tend to be liberal on cultural matters, 
are about twice as likely as middle-class and poor voters to make their 
decisions on the basis of their cultural concerns.' In other words, working 
class white voters don't especially privilege 'cultural issues' (God, guns, 
gays, gender, and abortion) over pocketbook concerns and actually do that less 
than wealthier voters."

Bartels summarizes an effect of the propaganda system. "Small-town people of 
modest means and limited education are not fixated on cultural issues. Rather, 
it is affluent, college-educated people living in cities and suburbs who are 
most exercised by guns and religion. In contemporary American politics, social 
issues are the opiate of the elites." It's the tertiary bourgeoisie who are 
(taught to be) distracted by these issues.

Like the presidential election in which they figure, these issues are meant to 
be a distraction -- and they are safe issues from our rulers' point of view, 
because decisions on them do not much affect central governmental 
responsibilities like war and the economy. In our America, policy is 
well-insulated from politics: we have at best a simulacrum of democracy. 
Passionately preferring a candidate who's within the allowable limits of debate 
is a recipe for irrelevance, as it's meant to be. The show must go on; ignore 
the little man (many men, actually) behind the curtain.


THE WAR WAS NOT A PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN ISSUE

With two-thirds of Americans saying since the beginning of the campaign that the 
war in Iraq was a mistake, one might ask why it was removed as an issue. Why 
didn't one candidate put himself in opposition to the war and promise a real 
withdrawal from Iraq (which Obama didn't promise)? That one could even have 
been McCain, once Obama's scenery-chewing over Afghanistan and Pakistan 
("AfPak," in DC-speak) made it clear to all (except those liberals who assumed 
that he would change in office) that he was not an anti-war candidate. McCain 
could have protected himself from the charge of flip-flopping by off-loading the 
responsibility to the "commanders on the ground' (as they both did anyway) and 
claim that conditions had changed (either for the better or the worse -- it 
wouldn't matter).

The answer reveals the nature of the presidential candidacy. Far from being 
driven by the polls, presidential candidates are auditioning for a role 
essentially in the gift of the elite. (The media, owned almost entirely by the 
largest corporations -- there are brave exceptions like *CommonSense* -- are the 
necessary enforcers.) When the contrast between the views of the elite and those 
of the majority becomes clear, the candidates know to take up those of the 
elite. (In 1992 Clinton was barely elected with a vague promise of providing 
health care as all other industrialized states do. But when it became clear 
that Americans favored that plan -- "single-payer health care" -- when it was 
explained to them -- the Clinton administration replied that it "was not 
politically possible": i.e., the elite did not support it.)

Obama was never for the ending of the war and the withdrawal of the U.S. from 
Iraq. He was never opposed to the war in principle, just tactically: it was 
"the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time," he said. But "removing 
the troops now," he said three years ago, "would result in a massive bloodbath 
for both countries," and so couldn't be done. He criticized the hash the Bush 
administration had made of the war, and well-funded Democratic party front 
groups like MoveOn and Americans Against Escalation in Iraq [sic] worked to 
co-opt the antiwar movement for he Democratic party, but Obama could not adopt a 
principled opposition to the war.

The reason was that, for all the effort to use the war against the Republicans, 
the Democrats like the Republicans support the general US government policy of 
which the war in Iraq is a part. With Israel as its "local cop on the beat," as 
the Nixon administration put it, the US has conducted a generation-long war for 
the control of energy resources in a 1500-mile radius around the Persian Gulf -- 
from the Mediterranean to the Indus valley, from the Horn of Africa to Central 
Asia. That war will continue in the coming administration. And not because the 
US is dependent on Middle East oil: less than 10% of the oil the US imports for 
domestic consumption comes for the Middle East.

Rather, the US goal in every administration for half a century has been to 
secure by means of the control of Middle East oil and gas what Obama foreign 
policy advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski calls "indirect but politically critical 
leverage on the European and Asian economies that are also dependent on energy 
exports from the region." Those economies in Europe and northeast Asia (China, 
Japan and South Korea) are the real rivals to US economic hegemony, and the 
control of energy resources gives the US the whip-hand. We will not give it up 
in the new administration, so the war was not an issue.

And it should by now be clear that, whether we call them al-Qaida, Taliban, 
insurgents, terrorists or militants, the people whom we're trying to kill in the 
Middle East are those who want us out of their countries and off of their 
resources. In order to convince Americans to kill and die and suffer in this 
cause, the Bush administration has repeatedly lied about the situation, from 
trumpeting the non-existent weapons of mass destruction to, apparently, forging 
incriminating letters. But the new administration will continue with the 
biggest lie, that the US is fighting a "war on terror" -- as they expand the war 
to Pakistan, which the Realists believe is the center of armed opposition to US 
control of he Middle East.

There are in fact presidential candidates who -- unlike McCain and Obama -- have 
serious things to say about the US government's war policy. The following is 
from a statement presented to the media on September 10 by Rep. Ron Paul, former 
Republican presidential candidate, joined by Cynthia McKinney, Green Party 
presidential candidate, Chuck Baldwin, Constitution Party presidential 
candidate, and Ralph Nader, independent presidential candidate; former Rep. Bob 
Barr, the Libertarian Party presidential candidate, said he also agreed with the 
statement:

"The Iraq War must end as quickly as possible with removal of all our 
soldiers from the region. We must initiate the return of our soldiers from 
around the world, including Korea, Japan, Europe and the entire Middle East. We 
must cease the war propaganda, threats of a blockade and plans for attacks on 
Iran, nor should we reignite the cold war with Russia over Georgia. We must be 
willing to talk to all countries and offer friendship and trade and travel to 
all who are willing. We must take off the table the threat of a nuclear first 
strike against all nations.

"We must protect the privacy and civil liberties of all persons under US 
jurisdiction. We must repeal or radically change the Patriot Act, the Military 
Commissions Act, and the FISA legislation. We must reject the notion and 
practice of torture, eliminations of habeas corpus, secret tribunals, and secret 
prisons. We must deny immunity for corporations that spy willingly on the people 
for the benefit of the government. We must reject the unitary presidency, the 
illegal use of signing statements and excessive use of executive orders."


THE ECONOMY WAS NOT A PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN ISSUE

Similarly, the other great issue of the day, represented in the Wall Street 
bailout, saw no real difference between the candidates. On the economy, as on 
the war, McCain could have employed a rhetorical flanking maneuver and taken the 
popular position in opposition to the bailout, along with the House Republicans, 
painting Obama as a tool of Wall Street (which he clearly was: the Obama 
campaign even received more contributions from Wall Street than McCain's did). 
It would however have taken more guts than McCain had to attack Obama on the 
bailout, as on the war. More importantly, the elite position favored the 
bailout, despite the fact that constituents' calls to congressional 
representatives were overwhelmingly in opposition.

The joint statement of the third-party candidates did however depart form elite 
demands on economic issues:

"We believe that there should be no increase in the national debt. The 
burden of debt placed on the next generation is unjust and already threatening 
our economy and the value of our dollar. We must pay our bills as we go along 
and not unfairly place this burden on a future generation.

"We seek a thorough investigation, evaluation and audit of the Federal 
Reserve System and its cozy relationships with the banking, corporate, and other 
financial institutions. The arbitrary power to create money and credit out of 
thin air behind closed doors for the benefit of commercial interests must be 
ended. There should be no taxpayer bailouts of corporations and no corporate 
subsidies. Corporations should be aggressively prosecuted for their crimes and 
frauds."


POLICY IS INSULATED FROM POLITICS

In the last days of the lesser Bush, it seems that US government policy is being 
made almost entirely within the executive branch, in the clash of two factions 
-- the Neocons, who gained control after the 9/11/01 attacks and produced the 
invasion of Iraq, and the "Realists" (for lack of a better name), the 
foreign-policy establishment that continues as administrations come and go. 
There's no real opposition to the policies that issue from their rivalry. Both 
the legislative and judicial branches are irrelevant. Congress has resigned to 
the administration its authority to make war, to make appropriations (in the 
bailout of Wall Street) -- and even to make criminal law (in the PATRIOT Act, 
FISA, and MCA); the Supreme Court has made decisions on torture and false 
imprisonment, but ineffectually: the torture regime and the secret prisons still 
exist, and the courts have not released prisoners from Guantanamo, originally 
and openly designed designed to be outside the scope of the US courts.

Nothing characterizes the last year of the Bush administration more than the 
break with the Neocon dominance and the reassertion of control by the Realists. 
The result of incapacity? (Was Bush in fact publicly drunk at the Olympics, as 
rumored on the net?) Or pique? (The split between the White House and the 
Neocons in the office of the Vice-President may already be in place at the time 
of the Libby affair.)

In any case, Cheney's easy use of Bush as an instrument (seen in the 
investigation the Washington Post had done but wouldn't publish before the 2006 
election) is no more. That means that the US government is largely back in the 
hands of a foreign policy establishment that brought us wars from Kennedy to 
Clinton. And their drive for "full spectrum dominance" -- hegemony, not 
survival -- may finally make them more dangerous than the murderous Neocons. 
What some psychologists call splitting should be avoided ("Since the Neocons are 
bad, the foreign policy establishment must be good") -- noticeable as it may be 
in the presidential campaign...

There seems to have been a debate within the Bush administration on how best to 
construct the enemy that justifies the continuing US military presence in the 
Middle East: the Neocons wanted to make a bete noire out of a pacific and indeed 
helpful (to US regional interests) Iran, while the Realists wanted to do the 
same with terrorists in Pakistan -- and they seem to have the upper hand in both 
the old and new administration.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was perhaps the senior member of the foreign 
policy establishment in the Bush administration, and it seemed clear that his 
people would have charge of the ongoing Middle East War, regardless of who the 
new president was. Obama even suggested that he would like Gates to remain at 
the Pentagon (and Paulson at the Treasury). In 2004, Gates co-chaired, along 
with Obama advisor Brzezinski, a Council on Foreign Relations task force report 
entitled, "Iran: Time for a New Approach," the main point of which was to 
advocate a policy of "limited or selective engagement with the current Iranian 
government."

Military action against Pakistan -- which Obama called for more urgently than 
McCain -- was already underway, and Obama's intention was to improve upon the 
"baby steps" (as his adviser said) already taken by the Realists in the Bush 
administration in killing Pakistanis (many of them apparently Pushtun babies who 
would take no more steps). But it was also clear that McCain in office would 
give way to the Realist consensus in the Pentagon and State Department. (Both 
McCain and Obama said that they will be guided by the "commanders on the 
ground"). The Neocons -- holed up in the OVP and concentrating on avoiding 
prosecution (that's what the Military Commissions Act was about) -- have been 
largely brushed aside.

If one means the consideration of possible policy changes, the presidential 
election did not take place, and the new administration will present a strategic 
continuity with the old, both domestically and in the matter of killing 
foreigners. God help us.

###

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