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 significant in their consequences, the elections tell us very littleabout the state of the country, or the popular mood. There are, however, othersources 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 ininterpretation are always necessary, these studies are valuable resources. Wecan also see why the results, though public, are kept under wraps by thedoctrinal institutions. That is true of major and highly informative studies ofpublic opinion released right before the election, notably by the ChicagoCouncil on Foreign Relations (CCFR) and the Program on International PolicyAttitudes at the U. of Maryland (PIPA), to which I will return.
In the same valuable collection of essays, Walter Dean Burnham described theelection as further evidence of a "crucial comparative peculiarity of theAmerican political system: the total absence of a socialist or laborite massparty as an organized competitor in the electoral market," accounting formuch of the "class-skewed abstention rates" and the minimalsignificance of issues. Thus of the 28% of the electorate who voted for Reagan,11% gave as their primary reason "he's a real conservative." InReagan's "landslide victory" of 1984, with just under 30% of theelectorate, the percentage dropped to 4% and a majority of voters hoped that hislegislative program would not be enacted.
What these prominent political scientists describe is part of the powerfulbacklash against the terrifying "crisis of democracy" of the 1960s,which threatened to democratize the society, and, despite enormous efforts tocrush this threat to order and discipline, has had far-reaching effects onconsciousness and social practices. The post-1960s era has been marked bysubstantial growth of popular movements dedicated to greater justice andfreedom, and unwillingness to tolerate the brutal aggression and violence thathad previously been granted free rein.
The Vietnam war is a dramatic illustration, naturally suppressed because ofthe lessons it teaches about the civilizing impact of popular mobilization. Thewar against South Vietnam launched by JFK in 1962, after years of US-backedstate terror that had killed tens of thousands of people, was brutal andbarbaric from the outset: bombing, chemical warfare to destroy food crops so asto starve out the civilian support for the indigenous resistance, programs todrive millions of people to virtual concentration camps or urban slums toeliminate its popular base. By the time protests reached a substantial scale,the highly respected and quite hawkish Vietnam specialist and military historianBernard Fall wondered whether "Viet-Nam as a cultural and historicentity" would escape "extinction" as "the countrysideliterally dies under the blows of the largest military machine ever unleashed onan area of this size" – particularly South Vietnam, always the maintarget of the US assault. And when protest did finally develop, many years toolate, it was mostly directed against the peripheral crimes: the extension of thewar against the South to the rest ofIndochina – terrible crimes, but secondaryones.
The world is pretty awful today, but it is far better than yesterday, notonly with regard to unwillingness to tolerate aggression, but also in many otherways, which we now tend to take for granted. There are very important lessonshere, which should always be uppermost in our minds – for the same reason theyare suppressed in the elite culture. Returning to the elections, in 2004 Bushreceived the votes of just over 30% of the electorate, Kerry a bit less. Votingpatterns resembled 2000, with virtually the same pattern of "red" and"blue" states (whatever significance that may have). A small change invoter preference would have put Kerry in the White House, also telling us verylittle about the country and public concerns.
As usual, the electoral campaigns were run by the PR industry, which in itsregular vocation sells toothpaste, life-style drugs, automobiles, and othercommodities. Its guiding principle is deceit. Its task is to undermine the"free markets" we are taught to revere: mythical entities in whichinformed 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 todelude consumers to choose their product over some virtually identical one. GMdoes not simply make public the characteristics of next year's models. Rather,it devotes huge sums to creating images to deceive consumers, featuring sportsstars, 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 toprovide information. The famed "entrepreneurial initiative" and"free trade" are about as realistic as informed consumer choice. Thelast thing those who dominate the society want is the fanciful market ofdoctrine and economic theory. All of this should be too familiar to merit muchdiscussion.
Another reason is that Australia has kept to "evidence-based"procedures for marketing pharmaceuticals. US negotiators denounced these asmarket interference: pharmaceutical corporations are deprived of theirlegitimate rights if they are required to produce evidence when they claim thattheir latest product is better than some cheaper alternative, or run TV ads inwhich some sports hero or model tells the audience to ask their doctor whetherthis drug is "right for you (it's right for me)," sometimes not evenrevealing what it is supposed to be for.
The right of deceit must be guaranteed to the immensely powerful andpathological immortal persons created by radical judicial activism to run thesociety. When assigned the task of selling candidates, the PR industry naturallyresorts to the same fundamental techniques, so as to ensure that politicsremains "the shadow cast by big business over society," as America'sleading social philosopher, John Dewey, described the results of"industrial feudalism" long ago. Deceit is employed to underminedemocracy, just as it is the natural device to undermine markets. And votersappear to be aware of it.
In 2000, "issue awareness" – knowledge of the stands of thecandidate-producing organizations on issues – reached an all-time low.Currently available evidence suggests it may have been even lower in 2004. About10% of voters said their choice would be based on the candidate's"agendas/ideas/platforms/goals"; 6% for Bush voters, 13% for Kerryvoters (Gallup). The rest would vote for what the industry calls"qualities" or "values," which are the political counterpartto toothpaste ads. The most careful studies (PIPA) found that voters had littleidea of the stand of the candidates on matters that concerned them. Bush voterstended to believe that he shared their beliefs, even though the Republican Partyrejected them, often explicitly. Investigating the sources used in the studies,we find that the same was largely true of Kerry voters, unless we give highlysympathetic interpretations to vague statements that most voters had probablynever heard.
Exit polls found that Bush won large majorities of those concerned with thethreat of terror and "moral values," and Kerry won majorities amongthose concerned with the economy, health care, and other such issues. Thoseresults tell us very little.
Apart from what one historian of the industry calls "profits beyond thedreams of avarice," which must flow in the right direction, control overtwo-thirds of the world's estimated hydrocarbon reserves – uniquely cheap andeasy to exploit – provides what Zbigniew Brzezinski recently called"critical leverage" over European and Asian rivals, what George Kennanmany years earlier had called "veto power" over them. These have beencrucial policy concerns throughout the post-World War II period, even more so intoday's evolving tripolar world, with its threat that Europe and Asia might movetowards greater independence, and worse, might be united: China and the EUbecame each other's major trading partners in 2004, joined by the world's secondlargest economy (Japan), and those tendencies are likely to increase. A firmhand on the spigot reduces these dangers.
Note that the critical issue is control, not access. US policies towards theMiddle East were the same when it was a net exporter of oil, and remain the sametoday when US intelligence projects that the US itself will rely on more stableAtlantic Basin resources. Policies would be likely to be about the same if theUS were to switch to renewable energy. The need to control the "stupendoussource of strategic power" and to gain "profits beyond the dreams ofavarice" would remain. Jockeying over Central Asia and pipeline routesreflects similar concerns.
There are many other illustrations of the same lack of concern of plannersabout terror. Bush voters, whether they knew it or not, were voting for a likelyincrease in the threat of terror, which could be awesome: it was understood wellbefore 9-11 that sooner or later the Jihadists organized by the CIA and itsassociates in the 1980s are likely to gain access to WMDs, with horrendousconsequences. And even these frightening prospects are being consciouslyextended by the transformation of the military, which, apart from increasing thethreat of "ultimate doom" by accidental nuclear war, is compellingRussia to move nuclear missiles over its huge and mostly unprotected territoryto counter US military threats – including the threat of instant annihilationthat is a core part of the "ownership of space" for offensive militarypurposes announced by the Bush administration along with its National SecurityStrategy in late 2002, significantly extending Clinton programs that were morethan hazardous enough, and had already immobilized the UN Disarmament Committee.
I won't go through the details here, but a careful look indicates that muchthe same appears to be true for Kerry voters who thought they were calling forserious attention to the economy, health, and their other concerns. As in thefake markets constructed by the PR industry, so also in the fake democracy theyrun, the public is hardly more than an irrelevant onlooker, apart from theappeal of carefully constructed images that have only the vaguest resemblance toreality.
Let's turn to more serious evidence about public opinion: the studies Imentioned earlier that were released shortly before the elections by some of themost 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 thejurisdiction of the International Criminal Court and the World Court, sign theKyoto protocols, allow the UN to take the lead in international crises, and relyon diplomatic and economic measures more than military ones in the "war onterror." Similar majorities believe the US should resort to force only ifthere is "strong evidence that the country is in imminent danger of beingattacked," thus rejecting the bipartisan consensus on "pre-emptivewar" and adopting a rather conventional interpretation of the UN Charter. Amajority even favor giving up the Security Council veto, hence following the UNlead even if it is not the preference of US state managers. When officialadministration 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 assumptionthat popular opinion is irrelevant to policy choices by those in charge.