Electoral Alternatives

The elections of November 2004 have received a greatdeal of discussion, with exultation in some quarters, despair in others, andgeneral lamentation about a "divided nation." They are likely to havepolicy consequences, particularly harmful to the public in the domestic arena,and to the world with regard to the "transformation of the military,"which has led some prominent strategic analysts to warn of "ultimatedoom" and to hope that US militarism and aggressiveness will be counteredby a coalition of peace-loving states, led by – China! (John Steinbruner andNancy Gallagher, Daedalus). We have come to a pretty pass when such wordsare expressed in the most respectable and sober journals. It is also worthnoting how deep is the despair of the authors over the state of Americandemocracy. Whether or not the assessment is merited is for activists todetermine.

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.

One conclusion is that the elections conferred nomandate for anything, in fact, barely took place, in any serious sense of theterm "election." That is by no means a novel conclusion. Reagan'svictory in 1980 reflected "the decay of organized party structures, and thevast mobilization of God and cash in the successful candidacy of a figure oncemarginal to the `vital center' of American political life," representing"the continued disintegration of those political coalitions and economicstructures that have given party politics some stability and definition duringthe past generation" (Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers, Hidden Election,1981).

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.

State managers are well aware that they no longer havethat freedom. Wars against "much weaker enemies" – the onlyacceptable targets -- must be won "decisively and rapidly," Bush I'sintelligence services advised. Delay might "undercut politicalsupport," recognized to be thin, a great change since the Kennedy-Johnsonperiod when the attack on Indochina, while never popular, aroused littlereaction for many years. Those conclusions hold despite the hideous war crimesin Falluja, replicating the Russian destruction of Grozny ten years earlier,including crimes displayed on the front pages for which the civilian leadershipis subject to the death penalty under the War Crimes Act passed by theRepublican Congress in 1996 – and also one of the more disgraceful episodes inthe annals of American journalism.

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.

Sometimes the commitment to deceit is quite overt. Therecent US-Australia negotiations on a "free trade agreement" were heldup by Washington's concern over Australia's health care system, perhaps the mostefficient in the world. In particular, drug prices are a fraction of those inthe US: the same drugs, produced by the same companies, earning substantialprofits in Australia though nothing like those they are granted in the US –often on the pretext that they are needed for R&D, another exercise indeceit. Part of the reason for the efficiency of the Australian system is that,like other countries, Australia relies on the practices that the Pentagonemploys when it buys paper clips: government purchasing power is used tonegotiate prices, illegal in the US.

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.

On the eve of the 2000 elections, about 75% of theelectorate regarded it as a game played by rich contributors, party managers,and the PR industry, which trains candidates to project images and producemeaningless phrases that might win some votes. Very likely, that is why thepopulation paid little attention to the "stolen election" that greatlyexercised educated sectors. And it is why they are likely to pay littleattention to campaigns about alleged fraud in 2004. If one is flipping a coin topick the King, it is of no great concern if the coin is biased.

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.

It is easy to demonstrate that for Bush planners, thethreat of terror is a low priority. The invasion of Iraq is only one of manyillustrations. Even their own intelligence agencies agreed with the consensusamong other agencies, and independent specialists, that the invasion was likelyto increase the threat of terror, as it did; probably nuclear proliferation aswell, as also predicted. Such threats are simply not high priorities as comparedwith the opportunity to establish the first secure military bases in a dependentclient state at the heart of the world's major energy reserves, a regionunderstood since World War II to be the "most strategically important areaof the world," "a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of thegreatest material prizes in world history."

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.

As for "moral values," we learn what we needto know about them from the business press the day after the election, reportingthe "euphoria" in board rooms – not because CEOs oppose gaymarriage. And from the unconcealed efforts to transfer to future generations thecosts of the dedicated service of Bush planners to privilege and wealth: fiscaland environmental costs, among others, not to speak of the threat of"ultimate doom." That aside, it means little to say that people voteon the basis of "moral values." The question is what they mean by thephrase. The limited indications are of some interest. In some polls, "whenthe voters were asked to choose the most urgent moral crisis facing the country,33 percent cited `greed and materialism,' 31 percent selected `poverty andeconomic justice,' 16 percent named abortion, and 12 percent selected gaymarriage" (Pax Christi). In others, "when surveyed voters were askedto list the moral issue that most affected their vote, the Iraq war placed firstat 42 percent, while 13 percent named abortion and 9 percent named gaymarriage" (Zogby). Whatever voters meant, it could hardly have been theoperative moral values of the administration, celebrated by the business press.

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.

It is instructive to look more closely into popularattitudes on the war in Iraq, in the light of the general opposition to the"pre-emptive war" doctrines of the bipartisan consensus. On the eve ofthe 2004 elections, "three quarters of Americans say that the US should nothave gone to war if Iraq did not have WMD or was not providing support to alQaeda, while nearly half still say the war was the right decision" (StephenKull, reporting the PIPA study he directs). But this is not a contradiction,Kull points out. Despite the quasi-official Kay and Duelfer reports underminingthe claims, the decision to go to war "is sustained by persisting beliefsamong half of Americans that Iraq provided substantial support to al Qaeda, andhad WMD, or at least a major WMD program," and thus see the invasion asdefense against an imminent severe threat.