Remember When We Had Elections?
by Richard Heinberg
Dissident Voice
November 9, 2002
“If this were a dictatorship, it’d be a heck of
a lot easier, just so long as I’m the dictator.”
–
George W. Bush (12/18/2000)
–
November 5, 2002: In a closely watched off-year election, amid near
record-low voter turnout, Republicans gained control of the United States
Senate. Today the party of George W. Bush, the current resident of the White
House, presides over all three branches of the federal government.
Most Americans appear to believe that this
was just another election. But there are reasons to fear that it may actually
represent one of the final nails in the coffin of American democracy.
This extraordinary assertion is not merely
an expression of partisan bitterness over the rightward drift of American politics.
What is happening now is of far more historical and structural significance
than a temporary shift in the relative power of the parties. As I propose to
show, disturbing signs point toward the ongoing emergence of a fascist-style
dictatorship in the US.
Government By the People
Is American democracy really dead, or
merely a little under the weather? In exploring that question, it may be
helpful to start by defining our terms: What, exactly, is democracy?
Conventionally, democracy—from the Greek demokratia,
meaning “rule by the people”— is regarded as an artifact of Greek civilization
and of the Enlightenment. But from a larger historical and anthropological
perspective, it can be seen as the result of an attempt on the part of people
living in modern complex societies to regain some of the autonomy and
egalitarianism that characterized life in the hunter-gatherer bands of our
distant ancestors. Indeed, as many writers have documented, the structure of
the US Federal government, with its elections and separations of powers,
probably owes more to early explorers’ contacts with Native American
tribes—especially the Iroquois Confederacy—than to the ideas of any European or
Euro-American philosopher. (1) True, the Athenians had a form of democracy,
though women and slaves were excluded from the demos—the
enfranchised citizenry—and thus denied participation. For the Athenians and for
later Europeans, the democratic ideal represented a reaction against
concentrations of power that arose in the development of stratified
agricultural states and that burdened successive generations with slavery,
serfdom, colonialism, and every other imaginable form of domination and
exploitation. For people who had come to see the social pyramid as inescapable,
the idea that ordinary people should have a say in making the decisions that
affected their lives was not just attractive, it was positively intoxicating.
In most instances, democracy has been more
an ideal than a realized achievement. Democracy appears to require:
· citizen involvement in every level and
phase of decision making,
· a free flow of accurate information,
· the complete transparency of all decisions
and decision-making processes,
· systems of accountability and citizen
review, and
· mechanisms for representing and
incorporating minority views in
decisions, in proportion to their appearance among the population as a
whole.
In addition, experience has shown that a
healthy democracy requires minimization of wealth inequalities within a
society: if some citizens have vastly greater control over resources than
others, they will inevitably be able to buy political influence in a variety of
ways.
Much progress has been made during the
past two centuries of global democratic revolution, in that many nations now
have democratically elected governments. However, most military, financial,
corporate, and religious organizations are still characterized by the exercise
of authoritarian power. And with the growth in influence over elected
governments of corporations, banks, and armies, democracy is as much threatened
today in actual practice as it is lauded in the self-congratulatory rhetoric of
politicians.
The democratic process is seldom a simple,
transparent affair. It is, after all, a contest for power—a contest not just
between or among competing individuals and groups for control of resources, but
a contest over the breadth of distribution of decision-making power within
society, and over the nature of the process by which power may legitimately be
wielded.
For democracy to exist, mechanisms of
information sharing, negotiation, review, checks, and balances must be built
into the social system. But those mechanisms must themselves routinely be
monitored and periodically reinvented. Wherever a citizenry becomes lulled into
thinking that its institutions perfectly embody the democratic ideal and need
not be reassessed, true democracy will sooner or later become endangered.
Unfortunately, that appears to be precisely
what has happened in the United States of America over the course of the past
few decades.
How Democracy Died in the USA
Today in the US, democracy of a sort still
exists within local communities. Citizens can still elect city council members
or county boards of supervisors and vote on local school-bond initiatives. But
at the higher levels of government—the state and federal levels—democracy has
become little more than a slogan.
For practical purposes, American democracy
was already comatose long before the most recent election. It was an imperfect
project from the outset: many of the “founding fathers” distrusted the
citizenry and believed, as the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John
Jay, once put it, that “the people who own the country should govern it.” Women
were excluded from the electoral process altogether at first, as were African
Americans in the South, and Native Americans and non-landowners everywhere. The
rights guaranteed in the first five amendments to the Constitution—including
freedoms of speech, religion, press, and assembly—were won only as concessions
by the governing class to popular protest. But those rights have periodically
been eroded or suspended. During the Civil War and the two World Wars, the Bill
of Rights was put largely in abeyance and the executive branch of the federal
government assumed almost total power. But these measures were understood to be
temporary.
It could be argued that, in some respects,
American democracy reached its zenith in the late 1960s and early 1970s, after
women had gained voting rights (in 1921) and blacks had overturned the Jim Crow
laws with the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s. But the seeds of
democracy’s undoing were already present.
The two-party system gained a stranglehold
on American politics almost from the beginning and certainly after the Civil
War, and for many decades provided a certain corrupt stability to the political
regime. Each major party had both a liberal wing and a conservative wing,
though over all the Republicans more faithfully represented the wealthy while
the Democrats represented working people. As the parties battled each other for
power, factions within parties fought for ideological control. With periodic
exceptions, most important political decisions came about through backroom
deals; leaders of the two parties, though adversaries, typically related to one
another in a spirit of collegial cordiality.
But with the Nixon Strategy of the early
1970s a fundamental change swept the nation’s political landscape. Nixon
claimed to support equality, but his stated opposition to “big government”
actually translated as a promise to backpedal on the enforcement of civil
rights or integration laws. Nixon also promoted black capitalism in an effort
to drive a wedge between middle-class and poor blacks. Republicans thus tied
their fortunes to an alliance between big business, southern whites, and
Christian fundamentalists. With southern white Democrats fleeing to the GOP,
the Democratic Party had no choice but to rely more on its traditional
liberal-wing base of unions and minorities, meanwhile hoping to lure moderate
Republicans to its side. The Democrats continued to focus on bread-and-butter
issues that working people typically care about—education, Social Security,
health care, and good jobs; while Republicans campaigned for increased military
budgets, and against taxes and government bureaucracy. Nixon’s strategy—which,
at its core, exploited racist sentiments—succeeded, helping the GOP win five of
the past eight presidential elections.
Both parties had long and deep ties to wealthy
individuals and corporations. Though Democrats nourished those ties through
their support for “free trade,” Republicans were able to serve their corporate
benefactors more effectively through the additional advocacy of tax cuts for
the rich and restraint of government regulation; they thus gained the lion’s
share of campaign contributions in election after election.
As politics became more polarized, it
became uglier. Increasingly, Republicans played the elections game not just to
gain the upper hand, but to utterly destroy their adversaries. They seemed to
possess an assurance—perhaps traceable to the increasingly fundamentalist
religious bent of their membership—that theirs was a righteous and patriotic
cause; that they were the only ones fit to assume the nation’s mantle of
leadership; and that their liberal opponents were not only incompetent and
wrongheaded, but morally degenerate. The Democrats were not prepared for this
kind of self-righteous, take-no-prisoners confrontationalism, and typically
ended up looking wimpish and silly, their concerns over environmental, women’s,
and racial issues dismissed by Republicans as “political correctness.” Even
Clinton’s canny co-opting of the conservative agenda in 1992 and 1996 could not
hold the Right at bay. Though a majority of people in the country actually
identified with issues the Democrats historically championed, Republicans often
proved themselves the superior strategists. In 1994 the Southern Strategy
helped the GOP end Democrats’ 40-year rule in Congress; and the ’94 Gingrich
revolution in turn led to the Clinton impeachment hearings. While Democrats
persevered under the old assumption that politics was the art of compromise,
Republicans played hardball, lunging for the jugular, equating even the smallest
concession with total defeat. Increasingly, the Democrats’ strategic response
was simply to ape Republican policies, thus alienating their own traditional
power base.
Part of the Republican strategy centered
on the judiciary. Many civil-rights gains had come about through rulings by
liberal New Deal-era federal judges. The Republicans saw that their long-term
success would require replacing these judges with their own judicial activists
who would roll back affirmative action, environmental and labor protections,
and abortion rights (the last to placate the religious Right). As more
conservatives were appointed to the federal bench during the Reagan-Bush years,
the entire legal system swerved rightward.
Meanwhile, the very machinery of
democracy—in the most literal sense—became increasingly tainted. Increasingly,
voting was being accomplished with machines, and disturbing signs appeared that
the companies that designed, built, and controlled voting machines had
interests at heart other than the determination of the will of the electorate.
As Lynn Landes notes in her article, “Voting Machines: A High Tech Ambush,”
“Voting machine companies [nationwide] are privately held and extremely
secretive. They form a web of overlapping ownership, financing, staff, and
equipment that makes it difficult, if not impossible, to separate one from the
other. ES&S, the largest voting machine company, claims to have counted 56%
of the vote in the last four presidential elections.” The Voting Rights
Division of the Department of Justice is empowered to oversee voting machine
companies, but actually engages in virtually no direct supervision. Landes
concludes that “We have a voting system that appears to be in a constant state
of name change and rotating management, but always under the private control of
the rich and infamous. Meanwhile, Congress has just passed a law that
effectively throws hundreds of millions of dollars at voting machine companies
that have a record that includes partisanship, bribery, secrecy, and rampant
technical ‘malfunctions.’” (2)
The necessary infrastructure of democracy
does not stop with the institutions and technology of governance; a functional
democracy also depends upon free flow of accurate information. Thus in a real
though informal sense, the media could be said constitute a fourth branch of
the US government. Here again, events of the past few decades can be seen to
have cut democracy off at the knees.
Starting in the 1980s, conservatives
adopted the spectacularly effective tactic of accusing the media of liberal
bias. The media’s only defense was to move to the right. But this was not a
difficult or uncomfortable maneuver: the owners of the media were themselves
members of the wealthy ruling class and tended already to be politically conservative.
The rightward drift of the US media has been apparent to those with historical
perspective.
Comparative research by media watch-groups
consistently documents the increasing degree to which television and radio talk
shows are dominated by conservative commentators. (3) Further, a recent study
by Reporters Without Borders on press freedom within nations ranked the US
seventeenth in degree of press freedom, behind Costa Rica and Slovenia. (4) But
this study didn’t tell the whole story: it examined independence of media from
direct government controls, as well as instances of reporters being harassed or
jailed. It did not examine subtler forms of information manipulation, such as
the planting of covert intelligence agents in news organizations. As was documented
by the Church Commission in the 1970s, the CIA has infiltrated virtually every
major news outlet in the US and routinely shapes coverage of the news, plants
false news stories, and tailors the public debate through its links with
prominent commentators.
Once one is alert to these influences on
the media, the daily news reveals itself as often being carefully tailored to
confuse and distort. A recent example: anti-war demonstrations on Saturday,
Oct. 27 drew between 100,000 and 200,000 people to Washington, DC. This was the
largest such rally since the Vietnam War. A similar rally in San Francisco that
day drew roughly 80,000. The next day, in a buried story, the New York
Times reported that “thousands” protested and that organizers were
“disappointed.” In fact, far from being disappointed, march organizers said
they were ecstatic with the turnout. Similarly, on the day of the protests, National
Public Radio noted that “ten thousand” showed up in Washington—one
tenth the number cited by the Washington police, whose crowd estimates are
always low. Apparently it is now possible for hundreds of thousands of citizens
to appear in the streets of US cities in broad daylight, holding signs and
marching, and yet remain invisible to the media. This fact in itself should be
newsworthy.
Politicians, the military, and the
corporations have all learned to use mind-control tactics pioneered throughout
the last century by the advertising and PR industries. Norman Livergood, head
of an artificial intelligence program at the US Army War College between 1993
and 1995, notes in his web-published essay “Brainwashing America” that, in his
former career, he
"conducted studies
on profiling, psychological programming, and brainwashing. I explored and
developed personality simulation systems, an advanced technology used in
military war games, FBI profiling, political campaigning, and advertising. Part
of my discovery was that unenlightened human minds are combinations of
infantile beliefs and emotional patterns; these patterns can be simulated in
profiling systems; and these profiling systems can be used to program and
control people. Personality simulation systems are being used to create
political campaigns that apply voter profiles to control their voting behavior.
TV commercials and programs use personality simulation to profile viewers to
control their purchasing and viewing behaviors." (6)
The Southern Strategy. Corporate
control of both political parties. Collusion between the Military, the CIA, and
rightist political forces. Dubious election procedures. Even with all of these
at work, the American political system managed for decades to maintain a
semblance of fairness and openness. But the groundwork was gradually being laid
for a fundamental reorganization of the US government, foreign policy, and
system of democracy.
Florida, 9/11, and Aftermath
Many of the elements of this groundwork coalesced in the 2000
presidential election. The Democratic candidate, Al Gore, won over a
half-million more votes than his rival, George W. Bush. But, because of
America’s arcane system for electing presidents, this fact alone did not
automatically give Democrats the White House. The decision turned on Florida’s
electoral votes, and in Florida the rolls of eligible voters had been purged—by
Republican officials—of 94,000 names of possible felons (in Florida, felons may
not vote). As it turned out, only 3,000 of these were the names of actual
felons; the rest were mostly of African Americans and others likely to vote
Democratic. Other irregularities abounded, with, for example, many blacks being
harassed or turned away from polling places. With vote tallies for both sides
nearly identical, the process of counting became more contentious. Bush,
temporarily ahead by a scant few hundred votes, petitioned the Supreme Court,
whose five-member Republican majority called a halt to the vote count,
effectively declaring Bush the winner.
The election was stolen, plain and simple, and the theft occurred
in a way such that anyone who was interested could see exactly what was
happening. But the American people, rather than rising up and demanding that
all of the Florida votes be counted, simply went about their business and
forgot the entire episode. If one were to pinpoint the moment of death of
American Democracy, it would likely be at that failure, in December 2000, of
the American citizenry to respond to the most egregious public example of
political larceny in the nation’s history. As long as there are elections,
someone will try to rig them. But when people stop caring if elections are
rigged or stolen, then elections themselves cease to have any meaning.
Afterward the Democrats seemed, if anything, to lose whatever
sense of direction they still retained, participating half-heartedly in the
passage of Bush’s huge tax cut designed overwhelmingly to benefit the
super-rich.
Then came the horrific events of 9/11. Immediately afterward, Bush
declared a war without end on enemies that would include not only the
“terrorists” responsible for the actual hijackings and killings, but any nation
that might be suspected of harboring “evil-doers.” Congress quickly passed the
USA Patriot Act, which set aside numerous civil liberties; meanwhile, executive
orders mandated extra-judicial mass imprisonments and summary executions.
Congress also gave the Executive the power to attack first Afghanistan and then
Iraq.
Disturbing questions soon surfaced about the events of September
11, 2001: several commentators, including respected writer Gore Vidal, noted
suspicious indications of government foreknowledge of, and involvement with the
attacks, and drew parallels with the Reichstag fire incident which, in 1933,
provided a pretext for Hitler to assume dictatorial powers in Germany. (6)
Early in his term, Bush had selected for prominent administration
positions some of the most hawkish members of his father’s entourage—men like
Richard Armitage (the current Deputy Secretary of State), who had been deeply
involved in the Iran-Contra scandal and was more recently alleged to be linked
to “terrorist” and criminal networks in the Middle East and the new independent
states of the former Soviet Union; and John Negroponte (the current Ambassador
to the UN), who played a significant role in the planning and carrying out of
CIA-sponsored war crimes against Hondurans and Nicaraguans—including mass
torture, disappearances, and assassinations—during the 1980s. Many prominent
figures in the administration (including Bush himself) were also implicated in
instances of egregious corporate fraud. Taken together, the Cheneys, Perles,
Rumsfelds, Armitages, and Negropontes of the new administration appeared to
stand for a foreign policy of world domination, and a domestic policy of
embezzlement and political repression.
One gets the impression that these are people who do not care much
about democracy; nor do they have much interest in fair play. Nor are they
likely again to relinquish power peacefully, as they did in 1992.
This perception has led many to speculate about the tragic death
of Democratic Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota just two weeks prior to the
recent mid-term elections. While there is as yet no specific evidence of foul
play, weather does not seem to have been a factor in Wellstone’s plane crash. The
plane itself, a Beech King Air, has an outstanding safety record, was equipped
with de-icers, and had two highly experienced pilots at the controls. Veteran
pilot Everett Long has commented,
"There was one
brief story after the crash of a local pilot at that airport knowing the
senator’s plane didn’t make it—and his question was, “what happened?”
That pilot immediately took off in a small airplane—much like my own—doubtful
it had deicing equipment. The pilot flew outbound on the approach track of the
King Air and found the smoking crash site. Please note: If the
weather was so bad that the senator’s plane was having problems with the
approach—that other pilot in a smaller airplane could not have taken off and
found the crashed King Air!" (7)
In the opinion of Long, other than
inexplicable pilot error only a “catastrophic failure” aboard the plane could
have caused the crash. The death of Wellstone called to mind the oddly similar
plane crash that killed Missouri Democratic senatorial candidate Mel Carnahan
just weeks prior to the 2000 election. Historically, according to investigative
journalist Mike Ruppert, roughly twice as many Democratic politicians have died
in plane crashes as Republicans. (8)
Following the November 5 election the
Republicans were understandably jubilant. Bush read the poll results as a
mandate for war, another round of tax cuts, and the appointment of scores of
rightist federal judges.
And so here we are. Soon the war with Iraq
will commence; and, if all goes as planned, the US will extend its military
empire around the globe, seizing control of the world’s remaining oil resources
while using the well-tested tactics of economic globalization and forced
“structural adjustment” to undermine the economy of one nation after another. As
James K. Galbraith writes in The Unbearable Costs of Empire, “It
will be a policy, in short, of beggar-all-of-our-neighbors while we live alone,
in increasing idleness and inside the dollar bubble.” However it is a policy
that can succeed only in the short run, if at all. In the long run, according
to Galbraith,
"It will make lives
miserable elsewhere, generating ever more resistance, terrorism and military
engagement. Meanwhile, we will not experience even gradual exposure to the
changing energy balance; we will therefore never make the investments required
to adjust, even eventually, to a world of scarce and expensive oil. In the end,
therefore, that world will arrive much more abruptly than it otherwise would,
shaking the fragile edifice of our oil economy to its foundations. And we will
someday face a double explosion: of anger against our arrogance and of actual
shortage and collapsing living standards. . . ." (9)
Domestic resistance to perpetual war must
be expected. What to do about the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, who
will take to the streets?
The Homeland Security Bill has not yet
passed Congress, but it assuredly will in the days to come, creating a vast
executive-branch department for the purpose of policing the citizenry and
stamping out dissent. Again, while much is new here, the groundwork was laid
many years ago: Executive Order 11490, signed by Nixon on Oct. 28, 1969,
outlined emergency functions that are to be performed by some 28 executive
departments and agencies. Under the terms of the order, if the President
declares that a national emergency exists, the executive branch (via the
Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA) can take over all communications
media; seize all sources of power; take charge of all food resources; control
all highways and seaports; seize all railroads, inland waterways, airports, and
storage facilities; commandeer all civilians to work under federal supervision;
control all activities relating to health, education, and welfare; shift any
segment of the population from one locality to another; take over farms and
ranches; and regulate the amount of money citizens may withdraw from banks.
Under later executive orders issued by Reagan and Bush I, provisional
concentration camps were set up in military bases around the country in the
event of domestic disturbances.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon and domestic
law-enforcement agencies are collaborating on the development of a new
generation of non-lethal crowd control weapons, including aerosolized
incapacitating mass drug-delivery systems and microwave “guns” that can heat
the skin of people in large crowds to painful or blistering levels in seconds.
A Post–Democratic Era—or
the Dawn of True Democracy?
Repression will inevitably call forth ever
more resistance. And sooner or later the resistance movement must come to a
fundamental realization: the particular institutional forms of democracy that
Americans have known for over two centuries have finally outlived their
usefulness and can probably never be truly revived, even if some of those
familiar forms (courts, Congress, elections, and parties) persist in some
zombie-like state.
Instead of fighting to hang onto this
ersatz democracy of two-party elections, campaign commercials, and corporate
influence-buying, the resistance must pioneer new forms. Democracy cannot go
back; it must go forward if it is not to perish altogether.
Part of the current political dilemma in
the US is that Americans are taught that they have a democracy; they think of
democracy not as an evolving process, but as an automatic birthright. They are
not motivated to imagine and experiment.
Many countries, including most in Europe,
have incorporated proportional representation and instant run-off voting into
their electoral procedures. These simple mechanisms make it far easier for
third and fourth parties to succeed. They are not foolproof mechanisms, but do
ensure representation of minority views far better than does the
winner-take-all system of American politics.
Much more radically democratic reforms are
possible. Since the 1980s, many grassroots social movements have adopted
decision-making strategies based on achieving consensus within small,
face-to-face affinity groups, which then choose delegates to represent their consensus
decisions within larger regional, national, or global meetings. This is a model
that has long been advocated by anarchist philosophers; it is also set forth in
Muammar Gaddhafi’s Green Book—a quirky piece of radical
literature widely distributed among resistance movements globally, though it is
virtually unknown in the US. This model differs fundamentally from standard
parliamentary or US congressional models in that, in the latter, once
representatives are elected, they may vote or set policy as they like (or as
they are threatened or bribed to do). In the anarchist model, delegates may
only convey the will of the people on any given issue as determined in a
face-to-face process of mutual education, discussion, and negotiation. It has
been said that the difference between American democracy and overt dictatorship
is that, in America, we elect our rulers. In the anarchist model, there are no
rulers other than the people themselves. Political power remains grounded at
the local level and at the human scale, even if broader levels of
organization—regional, continental, or even global—are deemed useful.
True democracy takes time and effort and
requires the learning of communication and negotiation skills. The alternative,
however, is authoritarianism in its myriad forms. In our lives, all of
us—Americans included—have to decide whether we prefer the convenience of
leaving the decisions that affect us to others, or the bother of responsibility
and involvement. Democracy does not ensure that the right decisions will always
be made, but it does enlist the diverse perceptions and skills of the entire
populace in solving the endless variety of problems with which every society is
eventually confronted.
When and how will the American resistance
movement coalesce? What will be the degree of state repression of political
dissent in the new monolithic American Republican Antiterrorist regime? Will
resistance eventually overcome repression? Stay tuned: it’s going to be a long
election night.
Richard Heinberg is a
journalist and educator. He has lectured widely, appearing on national radio
and television in five countries, and is the author of the forthcoming book, The
Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies (New Society,
March 2003). Heinberg is a member of the Core Faculty of New College of
California in Santa Rosa, where he teaches courses on “Energy and Society” and
“Culture, Ecology, and Sustainable Community.” Heinberg writes and publishes
The MuseLetter, “a monthly exploration of cultural renewal,” where this
essay first appeared. Dissident Voice very highly recommends and encourages
folks to check out and support The MuseLetter. Email: heinberg@museletter.com
Notes
1. See, for example, Jack Weatherford’s classic
book Indian Givers (Ballantine, 1988)
2. http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Articles/Landes_Ambush.htm
3. See www.makethemaccountable.com/misc/MythMedia/htm
4. See www.rsf.fr/content.php3
5. www.hermes-press.com/brainwash1.htm
6. See http://la.indymedia.org/news/2002/10/20990_comment.php
7. www.cobrasoverthetundra.com
9. www.prospect.org/print/V13/21/galbraith-j.html