I have always been interested in politics and still am but as time goes by my focus has shifted from electoral politics to mass movement politics. I simply cannot get too interested in the 2012 presidential and congressional elections, except insofar as they shed some light on the state of the nation. I still follow the process, but cursorily and with detachment and amusement, the way that I follow sports. I will check the results and the standings but the outcomes do not stir in me the passions they once did. It is mass movement politics on which I pin my hopes of creating a more just society.
Matt Taibbi captures my feelings almost exactly in this article, saying many of the things I have been saying, but more interestingly. In a single essay he lays bare the corrupt reality that elections in the US have become. He notes that in 94% of the races, the candidate who raises the most money wins. And then he shows that the same groups of investment banks and legal firms that serve those banks, basically the one-percenters, contribute heavily to both presidential candidates.
The article is excellent, if depressing. I started to excerpt some key passages but they got so long that it is best if you read the article for yourself. I will restrict myself to just one quote.
The 1% donors are remarkably tolerant. They’ll give to just about anyone who polls well, provided they fall within certain parameters. What they won’t do is give to anyone who is even a remote threat to make significant structural changes, i.e. a Dennis Kucinich, an Elizabeth Warren, or a Ron Paul (hell will freeze over before Wall Street gives heavily to a candidate in favor of abolishing their piggy bank, the Fed). So basically what that means is that voters are free to choose anyone they want, provided it isn’t Dennis Kucinich, or Ron Paul, or some other such unacceptable personage.
If the voters insist on supporting such a person in defiance of these donors – this might even happen tonight, with a Paul win in Iowa – what you inevitably end up seeing is a monstrous amount of money quickly dumped into the cause of derailing that candidate. This takes overt forms, like giving heavily to his primary opponents, and more covert forms, like manufacturing opinions through donor-subsidized think tanks and the heavy use of lapdog media figures to push establishment complaints.
And what ends up happening there is that the candidate with the big stack of donor money always somehow manages to survive the inevitable scandals and tawdry revelations, while the one who’s depending on checks from grandma and $25 internet donations from college students always winds up mysteriously wiped out.
Meanwhile, Glenn Greenwald gives his take on the US elections in the pages of The Guardian, explaining why the Republican race has become so bizarre. Because Barack Obama is governing as a centrist Republican, he has forced the Republican candidates to take extreme right-wing positions, merely to contrast themselves to him.
The Republican presidential primaries – shortly to determine who will be the finalist to face off, and likely lose, against Barack Obama next November – has been a particularly base spectacle. That the contest has devolved into an embarrassing clown show has many causes, beginning with the fact that GOP voters loathe Mitt Romney, their belief-free, anointed-by-Wall-Street frontrunner who clearly has the best chance of defeating the president.
In a desperate attempt to find someone less slithery and soulless (not to mention less Mormon), party members have lurched manically from one ludicrous candidate to the next, only to watch in horror as each wilted the moment they were subjected to scrutiny. Incessant pleas to the party’s ostensibly more respectable conservatives to enter the race have been repeatedly rebuffed. Now, only Romney remains viable. Republican voters are thus slowly resigning themselves to marching behind a vacant, supremely malleable technocrat whom they plainly detest.
In fairness to the much-maligned GOP field, they face a formidable hurdle: how to credibly attack Obama when he has adopted so many of their party’s defining beliefs. Depicting the other party’s president as a radical menace is one of the chief requirements for a candidate seeking to convince his party to crown him as the chosen challenger. Because Obama has governed as a centrist Republican, these GOP candidates are able to attack him as a leftist radical only by moving so far to the right in their rhetoric and policy prescriptions that they fall over the cliff of mainstream acceptability, or even basic sanity.
US elections have two stages. In the first, known as the primaries, any candidate who threatens the status quo of rule by oligarchy is ruthlessly weeded out by a coalition of oligarchy, party leadership, and their allies in the major media. This ensures that some major issues will never be discussed seriously in the second stage of the general election.
But in this second stage, the two pro-oligarchy party candidates will be portrayed as radically different in order to give voters the illusion that we really have a choice and that democracy is thriving. It is not that there is no difference at all between the two candidates but that the differences involve largely social issues that I call GRAGGS issues (god, race, abortion, guns, gays, sex) that the oligarchy does not much care about either way. This is why I think that real challenges to oligarchic control will only come about because of real anger in the streets, similar to that spawned by the Occupy Wall Street movement, at the way that the country is run.
I think that this is why it is important for people to realize that they should never give their total allegiance to candidates. Support them on those issues you agree with but be willing to also harshly criticize them on those that you don’t.
Welcome to FTB!
At the meta-level I agree with your analysis and those of Taibbi and Greenwald. There are two points that I would offer.
First, movement politics is important for changing the ‘national conversation’ (often shorthand for the opinions of the ruling elite but not always). Recent examples of this include the tea party and #occupy. #Occupy changed the debate from the national debt to the unfairness of the system and its control by the 1%. This lays the groundwork for challenging both the democrats and republicans on a quintessential American issue…i.e. “fairness”. But, as ‘they’ say, elections have consequences. Some of which are appointments to the Supreme Court, decisions about war, environmental regulation, union and worker rights, the role of religion in government, and so on. So personally, I differ from you in that I have very strong feelings about the actual outcomes of elections. All-in-all, I think it is much better for democrats to win. So I would advocate that all of the #occupy folks vote, as part of their civic duty and as part of their movement. It’s a fairly simple thing really. And just because we vote for the dems, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t hold their collective feet to the fire about the issues of power, money, and control. In fact, an argument can easily be made that you can have a great deal of influence working from within and outside of the system at the same time. The same type of argument, in other words, that us gnu atheists have been making about religions pernicious effects on our personal and collective lives.
Second, I think Taibbi often describes the large scale control of our politics by the moneyed few as if there is a meeting where they all get together and strategically make these decisions. They really aren’t that good. I think most of us would agree that it is the rigging of the system, along with advances in scientifically valid political marketing techniques, lobbying, etc., that allow the conservative forces of the status quo to maintain power. I don’t think Taibbi and Greenwald would disagree with this, but the language often personalizes the complex issues which has led, at least it has sometimes led me, to take my attention off the fact that we must look at the changes, one-by-one, that can be achieved at any given time, to make our country more progressive, human centered, and democratic.
Sorry for so many words to describe such small differences (I have been reading a lot of Hitchens lately and I seem to have learned the wrong lesson from his writing style ;^)
@1…the primary problem I have with the “occupy movement” is that it is so wide of the mark in terms of being able to actually effect change.
Why was the “Tea Party” able to install their rabidly anti-government, anti-tax, anti-humanist candidates in a wide range of offices within a single election cycle?
Because instead of sitting outside the halls of power and talking about “occupying” them, they actually went inside the halls of power (ie, the Republican Party) and really and truly occupied it.
The “occupy movement” is nothing of the sort. It’s ineffectual gasbaggery unless and until it actually starts occupying places that matter. If you think that’s the Democratic Party … well, go right ahead.
Frankly, I think there’s more room to move the Overton window back to the left by engaging in politics as an anti-Tea Party wing of the Republican Party.
But I suspect you’ll not want to do that — because it’ll be all icky and effective and shit.
You could be right. I don’t think we will have any other data points until the national election heats-up further. And then, after that, how does occupy react to the outcome of the election.
It is certainly one of the reasons. Others include the devastating war and economic legacy that the so-called ‘big government republicans’ left the elites of the republican party. This reduced their power and influence, not only in the country as a whole, but within the party itself, allowing an opening for the so-called ‘small government republicans’.
The democrats are not in that position. The mainstream of the party is adopting some of the successful occupy rhetoric and there is no serious challenge to the center of the party so far.
Exactly my point about the importance of at least voting. Occupy the voting booth if not the party itself.
You want to move the Overton window by emphasizing the center of the existing political spectrum?
Also, see my point above about the fact that the occupy movement was very successful at moving the national conversation from ginormous debts to ginormous inequality and unfairness. That was a very effective overton mover.
(Fixed to reflect the way I currently feel pending any evidence you may want to offer.)
I think we need to be careful not to overreact to the statistic that the candidate with the most funding wins 94% of the time.
It’s not clear which way the causality runs here. Obviously if most of the money is donated by a handful of special interests, and this money determines the visibility of the candidates and therefore the success of their campaigns, then we have a problem.
But it could be the other way around. The candidate with the largest following will receiving proportionately higher donations than any other candidate because he/she has more private citizens donating to his/her campaign. The statistic of 94% is therefore just what we’d expect: the candidate with the largest following receives both the most donations and the most votes.
Finally, the banks and law firms Taibbi mentions in his article contributed less than 1% of Obama’s total campaign funds in 2008 (about $5 million out of $730 million). Even the total for all financial sector and lawyer and lobbyist donations came to about $88 million, or 12% of the total (see opensecrets.org, the same site Taibbi got his data from). I’m not sure how Taibbi concludes, from these figures, that banks and law firms are controlling elections.
Indeed, individual contributions in the 2008 election made up 88% of Obama’s campaign funding (opensecrets.org once again -- note that this 88% includes some of the money listed under banks and law firms, since this money was made by individuals working for those organizations, not the organizations themselves).