http://www.zmag.org
29 Nov 2004
Elections/Public 2004
Noam Chomsky
The elections of November 2004 have received a great deal of
discussion, with exultation in some quarters, despair in others, and
general lamentation about a "divided nation." They are likely to have
policy 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 "ultimate doom" and to hope that US militarism and
aggressiveness will be countered by a coalition of peace-loving
states, led by - China! (John Steinbruner and Nancy Gallagher,
Daedalus). We have come to a pretty pass when such words are
expressed in the most respectable and sober journals. It is also
worth noting how deep is the despair of the authors over the state of
American democracy. Whether or not the assessment is merited is for
activists to determine.
Though significant in their consequences, the elections tell us very
little about the state of the country, or the popular mood. There
are, however, other sources 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 in interpretation are always
necessary, these studies are valuable resources. We can also see why
the results, though public, are kept under wraps by the doctrinal
institutions. That is true of major and highly informative studies of
public opinion released right before the election, notably by the
Chicago Council on Foreign Relations (CCFR) and the Program on
International Policy Attitudes at the U. of Maryland (PIPA), to which
I will return.
One conclusion is that the elections conferred no mandate for
anything, in fact, barely took place, in any serious sense of the
term "election." That is by no means a novel conclusion. Reagan's
victory in 1980 reflected "the decay of organized party structures,
and the vast mobilization of God and cash in the successful candidacy
of a figure once marginal to the `vital center' of American political
life," representing "the continued disintegration of those political
coalitions and economic structures that have given party politics
some stability and definition during the past generation" (Thomas
Ferguson and Joel Rogers, Hidden Election, 1981). In the same
valuable collection of essays, Walter Dean Burnham described the
election as further evidence of a "crucial comparative peculiarity of
the American political system: the total absence of a socialist or
laborite mass party as an organized competitor in the electoral
market," accounting for much of the "class-skewed abstention rates"
and the minimal significance of issues. Thus of the 28% of the
electorate who voted for Reagan, 11% gave as their primary reason
"he's a real conservative." In Reagan's "landslide victory" of 1984,
with just under 30% of the electorate, the percentage dropped to 4%
and a majority of voters hoped that his legislative program would not
be enacted.
What these prominent political scientists describe is part of the
powerful backlash against the terrifying "crisis of democracy" of the
1960s, which threatened to democratize the society, and, despite
enormous efforts to crush this threat to order and discipline, has
had far-reaching effects on consciousness and social practices. The
post-1960s era has been marked by substantial growth of popular
movements dedicated to greater justice and freedom, and unwillingness
to tolerate the brutal aggression and violence that had previously
been granted free rein. The Vietnam war is a dramatic illustration,
naturally suppressed because of the lessons it teaches about the
civilizing impact of popular mobilization. The war against South
Vietnam launched by JFK in 1962, after years of US-backed state
terror that had killed tens of thousands of people, was brutal and
barbaric from the outset: bombing, chemical warfare to destroy food
crops so as to starve out the civilian support for the indigenous
resistance, programs to drive millions of people to virtual
concentration camps or urban slums to eliminate its popular base. By
the time protests reached a substantial scale, the highly respected
and quite hawkish Vietnam specialist and military historian Bernard
Fall wondered whether "Viet-Nam as a cultural and historic entity"
would escape "extinction" as "the countryside literally dies under
the blows of the largest military machine ever unleashed on an area
of this size" - particularly South Vietnam, always the main target of
the US assault. And when protest did finally develop, many years too
late, it was mostly directed against the peripheral crimes: the
extension of the war against the South to the rest ofIndochina -
terrible crimes, but secondary ones.
* State managers are well aware that they no longer have that
freedom. Wars against "much weaker enemies" - the only acceptable
targets -- must be won "decisively and rapidly," Bush I's
intelligence services advised. Delay might "undercut political
support," recognized to be thin, a great change since the
Kennedy-Johnson period when the attack on Indochina, while never
popular, aroused little reaction for many years. Those conclusions
hold despite the hideous war crimes in Falluja, replicating the
Russian destruction of Grozny ten years earlier, including crimes
displayed on the front pages for which the civilian leadership is
subject to the death penalty under the War Crimes Act passed by the
Republican Congress in 1996 - and also one of the more disgraceful
episodes in the annals of American journalism.
The world is pretty awful today, but it is far better than yesterday,
not only with regard to unwillingness to tolerate aggression, but
also in many other ways, which we now tend to take for granted. There
are very important lessons here, which should always be uppermost in
our minds - for the same reason they are suppressed in the elite
culture.
Returning to the elections, in 2004 Bush received the votes of just
over 30% of the electorate, Kerry a bit less. Voting patterns
resembled 2000, with virtually the same pattern of "red" and "blue"
states (whatever significance that may have). A small change in voter
preference would have put Kerry in the White House, also telling us
very little about the country and public concerns.
As usual, the electoral campaigns were run by the PR industry, which
in its regular vocation sells toothpaste, life-style drugs,
automobiles, and other commodities. Its guiding principle is deceit.
Its task is to undermine the "free markets" we are taught to revere:
mythical entities in which informed 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
to delude consumers to choose their product over some virtually
identical one. GM does not simply make public the characteristics of
next year's models. Rather, it devotes huge sums to creating images
to deceive consumers, featuring sports stars, 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 to
provide information. The famed "entrepreneurial initiative" and "free
trade" are about as realistic as informed consumer choice. The last
thing those who dominate the society want is the fanciful market of
doctrine and economic theory. All of this should be too familiar to
merit much discussion.
Sometimes the commitment to deceit is quite overt. The recent
US-Australia negotiations on a "free trade agreement" were held up by
Washington's concern over Australia's health care system, perhaps the
most efficient in the world. In particular, drug prices are a
fraction of those in the US: the same drugs, produced by the same
companies, earning substantial profits 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 in deceit. Part of the
reason for the efficiency of the Australian system is that, like
other countries, Australia relies on the practices that the Pentagon
employs when it buys paper clips: government purchasing power is used
to negotiate prices, illegal in the US. Another reason is that
Australia has kept to "evidence-based" procedures for marketing
pharmaceuticals. US negotiators denounced these as market
interference: pharmaceutical corporations are deprived of their
legitimate rights if they are required to produce evidence when they
claim that their latest product is better than some cheaper
alternative, or run TV ads in which some sports hero or model tells
the audience to ask their doctor whether this drug is "right for you
(it's right for me)," sometimes not even revealing what it is
supposed to be for. The right of deceit must be guaranteed to the
immensely powerful and pathological immortal persons created by
radical judicial activism to run the society.
When assigned the task of selling candidates, the PR industry
naturally resorts to the same fundamental techniques, so as to ensure
that politics remains "the shadow cast by big business over society,"
as America's leading social philosopher, John Dewey, described the
results of "industrial feudalism" long ago. Deceit is employed to
undermine democracy, just as it is the natural device to undermine
markets. And voters appear to be aware of it.
On the eve of the 2000 elections, about 75% of the electorate
regarded it as a game played by rich contributors, party managers,
and the PR industry, which trains candidates to project images and
produce meaningless phrases that might win some votes. Very likely,
that is why the population paid little attention to the "stolen
election" that greatly exercised educated sectors. And it is why they
are likely to pay little attention to campaigns about alleged fraud
in 2004. If one is flipping a coin to pick the King, it is of no
great concern if the coin is biased.
In 2000, "issue awareness" - knowledge of the stands of the
candidate-producing organizations on issues - reached an all-time
low. Currently available evidence suggests it may have been even
lower in 2004. About 10% of voters said their choice would be based
on the candidate's "agendas/ideas/platforms/goals"; 6% for Bush
voters, 13% for Kerry voters (Gallup). The rest would vote for what
the industry calls "qualities" or "values," which are the political
counterpart to toothpaste ads. The most careful studies (PIPA) found
that voters had little idea of the stand of the candidates on matters
that concerned them. Bush voters tended to believe that he shared
their beliefs, even though the Republican Party rejected them, often
explicitly. Investigating the sources used in the studies, we find
that the same was largely true of Kerry voters, unless we give highly
sympathetic interpretations to vague statements that most voters had
probably never heard.
Exit polls found that Bush won large majorities of those concerned
with the threat of terror and "moral values," and Kerry won
majorities among those concerned with the economy, health care, and
other such issues. Those results tell us very little.
It is easy to demonstrate that for Bush planners, the threat of
terror is a low priority. The invasion of Iraq is only one of many
illustrations. Even their own intelligence agencies agreed with the
consensus among other agencies, and independent specialists, that the
invasion was likely to increase the threat of terror, as it did;
probably nuclear proliferation as well, as also predicted. Such
threats are simply not high priorities as compared with the
opportunity to establish the first secure military bases in a
dependent client state at the heart of the world's major energy
reserves, a region understood since World War II to be the "most
strategically important area of the world," "a stupendous source of
strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world
history." Apart from what one historian of the industry calls
"profits beyond the dreams of avarice," which must flow in the right
direction, control over two-thirds of the world's estimated
hydrocarbon reserves - uniquely cheap and easy to exploit - provides
what Zbigniew Brzezinski recently called "critical leverage" over
European and Asian rivals, what George Kennan many years earlier had
called "veto power" over them. These have been crucial policy
concerns throughout the post-World War II period, even more so in
today's evolving tripolar world, with its threat that Europe and Asia
might move towards greater independence, and worse, might be united:
China and the EU became each other's major trading partners in 2004,
joined by the world's second largest economy (Japan), and those
tendencies are likely to increase. A firm hand on the spigot reduces
these dangers.
Note that the critical issue is control, not access. US policies
towards the Middle East were the same when it was a net exporter of
oil, and remain the same today when US intelligence projects that the
US itself will rely on more stable Atlantic Basin resources. Policies
would be likely to be about the same if the US were to switch to
renewable energy. The need to control the "stupendous source of
strategic power" and to gain "profits beyond the dreams of avarice"
would remain. Jockeying over Central Asia and pipeline routes
reflects similar concerns.
There are many other illustrations of the same lack of concern of
planners about terror. Bush voters, whether they knew it or not, were
voting for a likely increase in the threat of terror, which could be
awesome: it was understood well before 9-11 that sooner or later the
Jihadists organized by the CIA and its associates in the 1980s are
likely to gain access to WMDs, with horrendous consequences. And even
these frightening prospects are being consciously extended by the
transformation of the military, which, apart from increasing the
threat of "ultimate doom" by accidental nuclear war, is compelling
Russia to move nuclear missiles over its huge and mostly unprotected
territory to counter US military threats - including the threat of
instant annihilation that is a core part of the "ownership of space"
for offensive military purposes announced by the Bush administration
along with its National Security Strategy in late 2002, significantly
extending Clinton programs that were more than hazardous enough, and
had already immobilized the UN Disarmament Committee.
As for "moral values," we learn what we need to know about them from
the business press the day after the election, reporting the
"euphoria" in board rooms - not because CEOs oppose gay marriage. And
from the unconcealed efforts to transfer to future generations the
costs of the dedicated service of Bush planners to privilege and
wealth: fiscal and environmental costs, among others, not to speak of
the threat of "ultimate doom." That aside, it means little to say
that people vote on the basis of "moral values." The question is what
they mean by the phrase. The limited indications are of some
interest. In some polls, "when the voters were asked to choose the
most urgent moral crisis facing the country, 33 percent cited `greed
and materialism,' 31 percent selected `poverty and economic justice,'
16 percent named abortion, and 12 percent selected gay marriage" (Pax
Christi). In others, "when surveyed voters were asked to list the
moral issue that most affected their vote, the Iraq war placed first
at 42 percent, while 13 percent named abortion and 9 percent named
gay marriage" (Zogby). Whatever voters meant, it could hardly have
been the operative moral values of the administration, celebrated by
the business press.
I won't go through the details here, but a careful look indicates
that much the same appears to be true for Kerry voters who thought
they were calling for serious attention to the economy, health, and
their other concerns. As in the fake markets constructed by the PR
industry, so also in the fake democracy they run, the public is
hardly more than an irrelevant onlooker, apart from the appeal of
carefully constructed images that have only the vaguest resemblance
to reality.
Let's turn to more serious evidence about public opinion: the studies
I mentioned earlier that were released shortly before the elections
by some of the most 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 the
jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court and the World Court,
sign the Kyoto protocols, allow the UN to take the lead in
international crises, and rely on diplomatic and economic measures
more than military ones in the "war on terror." Similar majorities
believe the US should resort to force only if there is "strong
evidence that the country is in imminent danger of being attacked,"
thus rejecting the bipartisan consensus on "pre-emptive war" and
adopting a rather conventional interpretation of the UN Charter. A
majority even favor giving up the Security Council veto, hence
following the UN lead even if it is not the preference of US state
managers. When official administration 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 assumption that popular
opinion is irrelevant to policy choices by those in charge.
It is instructive to look more closely into popular attitudes 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
of the 2004 elections, "three quarters of Americans say that the US
should not have gone to war if Iraq did not have WMD or was not
providing support to al Qaeda, while nearly half still say the war
was the right decision" (Stephen Kull, reporting the PIPA study he
directs). But this is not a contradiction, Kull points out. Despite
the quasi-official Kay and Duelfer reports undermining the claims,
the decision to go to war "is sustained by persisting beliefs among
half of Americans that Iraq provided substantial support to al Qaeda,
and had WMD, or at least a major WMD program," and thus see the
invasion as defense against an imminent severe threat. Much earlier
PIPA studies had shown that a large majority believe that the UN, not
the US, should take the lead in matters of security, reconstruction,
and political transition in Iraq. Last March, Spanish voters were
bitterly condemned for appeasing terror when they voted out of office
the government that had gone to war over the objections of about 90%
of the population, taking its orders from Crawford Texas, and winning
plaudits for its leadership in the "New Europe" that is the hope of
democracy. Few if any commentators noted that Spanish voters last
March were taking about the same position as the large majority of
Americans: voting for removing Spanish troops unless they were under
UN direction. The major differences between the two countries are
that in Spain, public opinion was known, while here it takes an
individual research project to discover it; and in Spain the issue
came to a vote, almost unimaginable in the deteriorating formal
democracy here.
These results indicate that activists have not done their job effectively.
Turning to other areas, overwhelming majorities of the public favor
expansion of domestic programs: primarily health care (80%), but also
aid to education and Social Security. Similar results have long been
found in these studies (CCFR). Other mainstream polls report that 80%
favor guaranteed health care even if it would raise taxes - in
reality, a national health care system would probably reduce expenses
considerably, avoiding the heavy costs of bureaucracy, supervision,
paperwork, and so on, some of the factors that render the US
privatized system the most inefficient in the industrial world.
Public opinion has been similar for a long time, with numbers varying
depending on how questions are asked. The facts are sometimes
discussed in the press, with public preferences noted but dismissed
as "politically impossible." That happened again on the eve of the
2004 elections. A few days before (Oct. 31), the NY Times reported
that "there is so little political support for government
intervention in the health care market in the United States that
Senator John Kerry took pains in a recent presidential debate to say
that his plan for expanding access to health insurance would not
create a new government program" - what the majority want, so it
appears. But it is "politically impossible" and has "[too] little
political support," meaning that the insurance companies, HMOs,
pharmaceutical industries, Wall Street, etc. , are opposed.
It is notable that such views are held by people in virtual
isolation. They rarely hear them, and it is not unlikely that
respondents regard their own views as idiosyncratic. Their
preferences do not enter into the political campaigns, and only
marginally receive some reinforcement in articulate opinion in media
and journals. The same extends to other domains.
What would the results of the election have been if the parties,
either of them, had been willing to articulate people's concerns on
the issues they regard as vitally important?Or if these issues could
enter into public discussion within the mainstream?We can only
speculate about that, but we do know that it does not happen, and
that the facts are scarcely even reported. It does not seem difficult
to imagine what the reasons might be.
In brief, 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 it is natural for
doctrinal systems to try to induce pessimism, hopelessness and
despair, the real lessons are quite different. They are encouraging
and hopeful. They show that there are substantial opportunities for
education and organizing, including the development of potential
electoral alternatives. As in the past, rights will not be granted by
benevolent authorities, or won by intermittent actions - a few large
demonstrations after which one goes home, or pushing a lever in the
personalized quadrennial extravaganzas that are depicted as
"democratic politics." As always in the past, the tasks require
day-to-day engagement to create - in part re-create - the basis for a
functioning democratic culture in which the public plays some role in
determining policies, not only in the political arena from which it
is largely excluded, but also in the crucial economic arena, from
which it is excluded in principle.
Noam Chomsky is the author of Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest
for Global Dominance (now out in paperback from Owl/Metropolitan
Books)
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