[Peace-discuss] How The US Elections Manipulate Voters, Prevent Progress

[David Johnson]

How The US Elections Manipulate Voters, Prevent Progress

 


By Byron Williams,
<http://www.contracostatimes.com/ci_28719012/byron-williams-rhetorical-misdi
rection-is-used-maintain-status> www.contracostatimes.com
September 1st, 2015

Rhetorical misdirection is used to maintain status quo that benefits a few

If the 2016 presidential race stays true to form, it will be dominated by
preliminary bouts, otherwise known as primaries, followed by the main event,
the General Election.

The primaries will be a competition to see who is more in touch with the
respective party's base. This means Democrat and Republican candidates will
appeal more to their parties more ideological sectors, only to make a mad
dash to the center after the nomination process is complete.

With some exceptions, this has been the basic formula that both parties have
employed for the last four decades. It depends on a linear left/right axis.

What's great about this approach is its neatness, or at a minimum the
appearance thereof. For the portion of the electorate that participates in
the political process, it is a call to arms - to hunker down in the
predictable silos of orthodoxy, questioning the sanity of those who possess
the unmitigated gall to see the world differently.

But it is a shell game. It is no different from those great magicians who
effectively use misdirection to have the audience focus on something, which
is often insignificant to the illusion.

While the nation over this 40-year period has focused on so-called hot
button issues such as affirmative action, illegal immigration,
tough-on-crime polices and gay rights, the sleight-of-hand misdirection has
effectively changed the American landscape.

Titillated by the emotion those issues as well as others provoke, there was
no time to see how both parties have become addicted to the opiate of
corporate campaign contributions. Dominated by narrowly defined corporate
interests, the electorate, largely frustrated and fearful, must take small
solace in supporting the candidates whose rhetoric is most in line with
their thinking.

In his two campaigns for president, Barack Obama spent in excess of $1.8
billion. How many still believe that amount was the result of average
Americans sending $50 checks?

According to Politico, Charles and David Koch (aka the Koch brothers) have
an operation that plans to spend $889 million to elect someone to a job that
pays $400,000 annually.

While some are still whipped into a frenzy about the Supreme Court's
decision to legalize gay marriage in all 50 states, we can't forget
corporations have gained First Amendment privileges. Which is really more
harmful to our nation's future?

It's time for the largest and most diverse segment of Americans to change
the axis on which America currently operates. Instead of operating on a
left/right axis, why not go in a bottom/up direction?

This is the only way to combat the unhealthy methodical direction that
America has been on since the end of the civil rights movement. That
majestic movement forced America to come closer to values that it committed
to paper in 1787.

It was the decade of the '60s when the civil rights movement begat the free
speech movement, which begat the Vietnam protest, which begat environmental
legislation. Each movement began at the bottom treading the arduous path
upward.

The Occupy Wall Street and tea party efforts offered glimpses of this
bottom-up effort but ultimately fell short. The occupy movement didn't have
the messaging to hold the nation's attention; and the tea party has been
coopted by moneyed interests and now sits comfortably on the left/right
alignment.

A bottom-up trajectory can create new alliances.

Income inequality, in my view, is the holding company for the myriad
subsidiaries that are void of a moral order. The current left/right axis
possesses no moral direction - that is invariably created from a bottom-up
ethos.

While much of America is moving at the frantic pace of a hamster on a
treadmill, they are being encouraged by a bipartisan coalition of left/right
advocates.

But this is merely the misdirection to maintain a maladjusted status quo
that benefits only a few.

It effectively keeps the nation on a left/right axis because it knows once
the trajectory becomes bottom-up substantive change is around the corner.

 

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