(This is a 3-part essay divided here into a total of 4 installments, with the first part divided into two)
By Michael Hoexter, Ph.D.
Attracting Popular Discontent
The basic structure of concentric circles of the discourse
and ideological “space” of a political party or partisan organization,
described in the foregoing could apply to almost any political party or for
that matter any group with a relatively passionately held set of beliefs
against which they believe others are opposed.
Using this schematic diagram of a group, the specific role of
“containment vessel for popular discontent” is more likely to be, in the now
almost 50 year old neoliberal era, to be slated for a party like the Democratic
Party or one of the Parties of the
Socialist International, like the British Labour Party, the German SPD, the
Australian Labour Party, etc.
On the other hand, when such center-left parties fail to
attract popular discontent and they in agitating outside governing roles or
acting in governing roles generate more popular discontent, other political
actors, including center-right and far right political actors and movements,
can capture popular discontent for their own purposes. Such was the case in
2016 in the United States, in Great Britain through the Brexit process with the
emergence of UKIP and then the “Brexit Party”, the Northern League in Italy,
the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany, the National Front in France,
the BJP in India, etc. Less successfully
or durably, other newer left of center parties like Syriza in Greece, Podemos
in Spain, La France Insoumise, or various Green Parties have attempted to
represent discontents at one point or another which the traditional parties of
the Left have failed to address.
As a party cannot build physical “containment” walls around
itself, it first must establish its core zone of attraction and, in discourse
and activity, array around itself, again in discourse, its zones of repulsion
and critique if not taboo. Members,
adherents and voters must be drawn to it and repelled from other alternative or
opposed organizations and ideologies.
The specifically “left” or “left-of-center” appeal of an
organization like the Democratic Party, even though in reality currently its
leadership is center-right, is premised on the idea that it will help “the
people”, middle, working class and poor people, gain a better standard of
living and better life via the application of reason, empathy with others, and
better, more modern government policy.
In the further left wings of these mass parties, the emphasis is more on
justice and egalitarianism, with increasingly the oncoming climate catastrophe
playing an ever-larger role in at least discourse if not policy proposals and
action. The Democratic Party, as other
nominally “left” parties in other countries, is more the party of the
Enlightenment than its right-wing opposition, at least in relative terms. We see this demonstrated for instance, in the
rabidly anti-science posture of the current Republican Party versus the
relatively pro-science and pro-Enlightenment stance of Democrats. Being “left” or “left of center” means one,
in theory, is applying rationality to improving government policy and
institutions, using logical entailment united with ethical commitments to go
from “bad” to “good” or “good” to “better”.
This application of rationality can sometimes seem politically bloodless
and dispassionate as compared to the irrationalism embraced by the right-wing:
it might be argued that only where the left holds a passionate view of social
justice and a compelling vision of a better society, often in some version of
socialism, can the dispassionate application of rationality be made politically
vital.
As capitalism creates, outside of a few exceptional
geographical places and historical times, alienation and impoverishment of a
majority of the people, a variety of deepening ecological crises, as well as
the oppression of racially or ethnically marginalized groups, a lot of
discontent is created or disparities between content and discontent, which can
affect the politics of most nations and can be mobilized by ambitious political
actors. Tapping into that discontent or
disparities for political reasons can be achieved by a range of techniques by a
variety of political actors, but it is certainly the left-of-center’s “game to
lose” to try to appeal to those who have economic or systematically-based
discontents, including those related to racism and sexism.
Over the past couple decades, during the height of the
neoliberal era, the Parties of the (nominal) Left in the US and elsewhere have
attempted to signal sympathy with discontent often via two main techniques:
proposing technocratic incrementalist reforms based on “market” principles that
court support of parties to the right of them, and playing the left version of
identity politics (there are also right-wing versions as well), while
abandoning class conflict-based and anti-corporate stances. The parties of the nominal Left have offered
voters and constituents a somewhat Faustian bargain: give up some economic rights
in the favor of a feelgood tolerant, nominally anti-racist, anti-misogynistic,
anti-homophobic cultural identity that has come recently to be called
“woke”. Some left-of-center versions of
identity politics dovetail seamlessly with the neoliberal vision of a
meritocratic market-based society, where people no matter their ethnicity or
gender can fully draw on their individual resources to succeed or not succeed
via the instruments of the market.
While challenging corporations and the widening gap of
wealth and income inequality have become largely taboo to Parties such as the
Democratic Party, the British Labour Party, etc., the Establishment “left” has
signaled indirectly to the discontented that they are “their” party by standing
behind successful individuals from systematically marginalized or oppressed
groups, such as Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, and using their identities as
a symbol (mostly in reality a distant echo) of empathy and understanding for
the downtrodden and persecuted. These
individuals such as Obama or Clinton that make it to the top levels of the
Democratic Party, unlike for instance the more dissident, Bernie
Sanders-supporting Keith Ellison or Nina Turner, have politics and policy views
that are sympathetic to those of the corporate and donor classes that fund the
Party Establishment. In Great Britain,
Chuka Ummunna had a similar function within the British Labour Party to such a
degree that he has now abandoned left-tending Corbyn-led Labour for the
centrist Liberal Democrats.
As there are principled progressives and leftists who are
from marginalized identity groups (in the US, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar,
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, aforementioned Keith Ellison and Nina Turner), the
deployment of identity as wedge against universalistic progressive,
anti-corporate ideas is not a necessary feature of recognizing and defending
identity-based rights or political advocacy more generally.
Still the neoliberal “Left” playbook is not only identity
but also very cautious reforms that do not challenge the fundamental economic
and social status quo that also attract some of the discontented to the
Democratic and like parties in other countries.
The Affordable Care Act and Clean Power Plan were two such cautious
though, by Republicans, vociferously opposed policy initiatives that politically
were attempts to establish the credibility of the Democratic Party (under Obama
and thereafter) as the party of the economically distressed and environmentally
aware. Each of these plans were
compromises from the start and constituted efforts to woo a mostly non-existent
moderate Republican over to the Democratic side, rather than solve in the best
way possible social problems and win over the broad electorate and the
disaffected to the Democratic Party. That
these were opposed by the now utterly reactionary GOP were also used as signs
for reinforcement of the sense of righteousness and “left”-ness of the
Democratic Party, even as it occupied and occupies a center-right position on
policy.
A Discourse of Self-Doubt: Containing Popular Discontent
Once attracted into the Democratic Party sphere of influence
and identifying with the various political stars of the Democratic Party,
including the charismatic Barack Obama, Democratic elites and their most loyal
followers have set about containing and policing discontent. More than mobilizing discontent, once within
the safe precincts of the Party organization and discourse, paradoxically most
efforts are exerted to stymie and defuse discontent and its mobilization for
further political gain.
Notable events that reinforce the view of the Democratic
Party as a containment vessel for popular discontent are several over the past
decade, events that seemed contradictory to the aims of a political party
attempting to grow in political power.
After his 2008 electoral win, Barack Obama demobilized
his mass following and dismantled his substantial grassroots campaign
organizations turning instead to (attempts at) elite horse-trading and vain
attempts at courting the increasingly fanatical Republican Party as the primary
political strategy of his Administration.
These attempts to water-down his campaign message and to work against popular
discontent were rewarded with catastrophic political results in 2010 and
thereafter in almost every electoral contest except for Obama’s re-election
campaign of 2012. Obama, including via
siding with bankers and against distressed homeowners in the crash of 2008-9
and appointing Establishment figures to his Administration, signaled that
popular discontent was more of a thin rhetorical twist and marketing strategy
for him rather than a motive force of his Administration. Some have tried to trace this to
idiosyncrasies of his personality, which may be the bedrock for him
specifically, but he
was reproducing here a broader pattern in the Democratic Party elite. Obama’s rise, though controversial to Hillary
Clinton supporters in 2008, was facilitated as was Clinton’s by the confidence
of ultra-wealthy donors, like the Pritzkers, in his fundamental philosophical
sympathy and non-antagonism to their business plans and goals.
Obama would often take the attitude of a
chiding, disapproving “adult” vis-à-vis the wishes of his constituents for help
from government, claiming that the government had a deficit problem and
turning mostly in the direction of Republican or Wall Street Democratic
lawmakers, academics and pundits for approval and guidance. Even as he proposed a fairly large stimulus
package in 2009, that package was trimmed so that its effects were more muted
and less durable than they might have been in the near-Great Depression
downturn of the Great Recession of 2008.
More recently and quite explicitly, as noted in the
introduction, the current Democratic Congressional leadership has been actively
attempting to demobilize and defuse popular anger at Trump and work against the
insurgent freshmen Congresswomen, called “the Squad” (Ocasio-Cortez, Omar,
Tlaib, and Pressley). While riding a
wave of discontent into power in the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi has
been signaling to the base that she would try to limit the power of her office
and of the new Democratic Congressional majority. Pelosi’s adherence to the
nonsensical budget rules (pay-go) inspired by the Republican austerian Pete
Peterson are in line with her attempts to dampen public outrage at the Trump
Administration, even as she has mocked and chided Trump verbally. In November 2019, Pelosi has renewed her
assault on progressives, calling into question the marquee policy of Medicare
for All, a not-so-veiled shot at two of the frontrunners for the 2020
Democratic Presidential nomination.
Pelosi’s strategy is analogous to Obama’s semiotic efforts to signal
“progressivism” relative to the GOP while at the same time holding up a hand of
warning that the “base” must not mobilize for their own interests or that other
Democrats must not attempt to mobilize that base.
The handling of the Trump impeachment inquiry and process by
the elite Democrats has similar dimensions and warning signs that may lead to a
catastrophic failure of that effort.
Pelosi in opening the inquiry, finally, seems to have been backed
into it by the more right-leaning parts of her party, including veterans of
the national security Establishment now in Congress, defecting to a
pro-impeachment stance. The occasion she
chose is Trump’s effort to recruit the Ukrainian government for a political
favor to expose the Establishment Democratic candidate, Joe Biden and his son,
who had been using standard run-of-the-mill and still-legal political influence
to gain lucrative contracts and positions for relatives. Rather than expose the elite and business
corruption of the Trump Administration, much of it illegal, almost from the
start, Pelosi and her allies are trying restrict the inquiry in a way that
emphasizes only the national security Establishment’s beefs with Trump and has
the appearance of payback to defend the privileges of the political
Establishment of both parties. An
impeachment inquiry, so restricted, opens the Democrats and that inquiry,
easily to “populist” right-wing attacks by Trump and his supporters. The easy route of exposing all manner of
corruption by the Trump Administration is made by the Democratic Establishment
and their media allies to seem to be difficult and dangerous when it is the
opposite.
Elite media, think tanks and center-right academics have
reinforced these strategies by the Democratic Establishment and the remaining
wisps of moderate Republican elites, providing a reinforcing echo and support
to the views of people like Pelosi, Tom Perez, Chuck Schumer, and Hillary
Clinton. One of the key recent “moves”
in media and punditry has been the strange redefinition of the
concept of “populism” in the era of insurgent far right candidates and
political leaders. The recent and unfortunate equation of “populism” largely
with the stoking of nationalist and white racist sentiment by the far right,
including Trump, creates in the mainstream press and
in academic circles, an equation between ugly anti-modern elites and
propagandists and popular uprisings of all sorts. The intellectual operation of equating
populism with crude right-wing social attitudes makes popular grassroots
actions and maverick candidates taboo within Establishment media, because they
are made to appear always potentially racist, intolerant and
anti-Enlightenment, reinforcing the self-image of the status quo elite as the
only rational and enlightened groups on the political spectrum. In historical
reality, populism
started out on the Left (in the United States) and has tended to have a
left-ward center of gravity, as well as a history of left social movements that
have shaped many societies, however the current media and academic campaign
against “populism” then instead makes it seem always anti-democratic and
vaguely fascistic via re-definition and re-framing.
What is created via a combination of the strange
machinations of Democratic Party leadership and the discourses created by
pundits and academics of the late neoliberal era is a discourse of popular
self-doubt and cautious self-monitoring of wants and needs, within the middle-
and working-class base of the Democratic Party.
Party leaders are there to attract, beguile with virtue signals and
clever gestures of superiority over the increasingly ham-fisted, sociopathic
Republicans but at the same time to demobilize and “contain” popular
discontent.
The rage directed by some Democratic loyalists,
within the Democratic Party’s elite central zone and its “zone of identity”, at
Bernie Sanders and his supporters throughout much of the 2016 election cycle
and thereafter is, in my opinion, a product of the frustrations formed by this
self-imposed self-containment of wishes for a better life and a more
straightforward moral-political stance.
Sanders and his supporters are considered by these supposedly savvy
insiders to be hopelessly naïve and disruptive of the elaborate game of
political horse-trading in which only the Party elite is deemed worthy enough
to engage. On the level of the Party elite, of course, livelihoods are at stake
for Party insiders, if the symbiosis between the donor class and Democratic
political leaders and operatives is broken by a progressive turn in the
Party. For those in the more peripheral
“zone of identity”, the core of the Democratic Establishment base, admiration
for “finesse” in the containment and diffusion of discontent by elite leaders
is a framing assumption, while Sanders and those who place open, direct demands
on government leaders and corporations are considered to be uncouth and/or
hopelessly naive.
Nietzschean “Super-People”, Self-Doubt, and the Death of the “American Dream”
The sometimes-perceptive commentator Umair Haque, has
pointed us in
the direction of the philosopher Nietzche to understand our era. Haque can at times be impressionistic and
off-base in his commentary, biased now against everything associated with the
United States, but he has had a number of blindingly acute insights into the
cultural malaise of our society and other developed societies more
generally. One of the aspects of
Nietzche’s philosophy which Haque highlights is Nietzsche’s notion of the Übermensch or “over-person”, the inspiration, as well,
for the comic book and movie character Superman. (Übermensch is sometimes
translated as “superman”.). Nietzsche
also pioneered or promulgated notions of a superior race, the “blond beast”,
and biologistic ideas about the “poisoning” of supposedly pure superior races
by among others, Jewish “blood” that had
a strong influence on Adolf Hitler and the Nazi ideology that ruled Germany
in the period 1933-1945. The influence
of Nietzcheanism cannot however be confined to specifically Nazi or
Nazi-tending political tendencies.
The “American Dream” up until the late 20th
Century was a dream that one did not have to be an “over-person” to achieve
happiness and prosperity in the United States, abundant land (often stolen by
genocide of the native peoples), the spoils of unpaid or underpaid
African-American labor, and in the mid-20th Century the formation of
a semi-generous, semi-just welfare state, created some of the possibility for
many ordinary people, particularly though not exclusively of white ethnicities,
to achieve a modicum of economic security and prosperity, without being or
becoming some approximation of what they or others would call a “superman” or
“superwoman”. Some lucky few in
oppressed groups also achieved a portion of the American Dream, always with
lesser security than with those considered to be of the white majority. In the late 20th Century and early
21st Century, in the neoliberal era, that Dream has mostly died,
leaving still standing the mythos of Übermenschen (super-people).
With the death of the American Dream, Americans, striving as
they have been for superiority in both innocuous and highly oppressive, deadly
ways, are attracted to the idea of the Übermensch but, most, failing
themselves to achieve the status of the “over-person” can be wracked with waves
of rage, anxiety, depression that can lead to irrational and deadly outcomes on
political and cultural levels. If the
sole model of the legitimate person is now only a superperson, then a pervasive
cultural and political discourse that implies self-doubt, despite the
boilerplate and increasingly irritating urgings of politicians and cultural figures
like Tony Robbins to be the most successful and fulfilled individual you can
be, is to be expected. Increased
expressions of and exacerbations of racist sentiments are to be expected as
people try to claim the booby prizes for not being “super-people”.
There is a cultural divide at the top, in terms of the
preferred image of the super-person: the Republicans have put forward the lucky
(mostly white European-origin) heir, lottery winner, pumped-up muscleman,
military hero, gun-slinger or businessman, while the Democrats are totally
invested in the supposedly meritocratic person (of any ethnicity or gender) who
“wins” over others in the market or elsewhere via merit, mostly measured or
enabled by being book-smart, by educational attainment or at least credentials. Both visions lead different groups of people
to feel “left behind” and badgered by the promoters of the “super-person”
narrative. In those people, an
underlying narrative of self-doubt and questioning of their own interests as
undeserving has had political uses for elites who are intent on keeping “the
(political insider) Game” going in their favor for just a little bit
longer. The Democratic Establishment and
their media allies have then intimidated people, to doubt their own
self-interests and to leave them outside their political decision-making.
A Leadership That Doesn’t Lead
The promotion of the culture of self-doubt, while reinforced
by the media and Party elite, seems to have penetrated almost the entire
leadership of the Democratic Party, as witnessed its performance in the face of
the rampaging Trump Administration and Republican Party majority in the
Senate. Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer,
disastrously, have, until very recently, shown almost no resistance to the
Trump Administration and GOP’s continued plundering, anti-worker policies,
neo-fascist actions especially directed at immigrants, and violations of rule
of law and procedure. Pelosi’s, until
September 2019, steadfast, avoidance of taking any concrete action against
Trump, shows a fundamental lack of courage and of political imagination, as
she, for 8-plus months in 2019, shirked her Constitutional duties to hold the
Executive Branch accountable.
Fundamentally, the Democratic
elite lawmakers see themselves as the beneficiaries of and the keepers of
comity between their party and the Republicans, even as the latter would be
almost immediately impeaching a Democratic President for far lesser crimes than
Trump.
The current Democratic Party leadership is an unmitigated
disaster for the middle- and longer-term viability of the Party, seeking as it
has, to avoid all substantive efforts to form a durable party ideology. Such an
ideology would give coherence to the Party and motivate the Party base. Consequently, the current Democratic
leadership mostly avoids or is backed into fighting for what is right, be it
their own ideology or as above, for fighting for upholding generalized rule of
law independent of ideology. The Party’s
strategy, such as it is, is to limp from one event to the next, hoping to draw
subtle contrasts with the Republicans as a means to maintain a sliver of party
identity and electoral success, without taking risks on Big Picture policies or
simply representing and upholding the law against an increasingly lawless Republican
opposition.
Many prominent 2020 Presidential candidates started out
their campaigns, differing from the established Party leaders at least, in
embracing many of the Big Picture policies proposed by Bernie Sanders in 2016
and championed now by “the Squad”. Since
the beginning of the 2020 campaign there has been some shaking out and
differentiation, as well as changes of allegiance within the field with the
current leadership of the Congressional Party attempting to steer candidates,
with some success, away from Big Picture change and ambitions. The leading candidate favored in the early
running by the Establishment, Joe Biden, has views consonant with the Party
leadership and there are a row of less convincing advocates for Big Picture
change between, on the one hand, Biden and, on the other, Elizabeth Warren and
then Sanders.
A Junior Partner in the Neoliberal Firmament
Despite the rumblings of change in the 2020 Presidential
field, the Congressional and DNC leadership, by contrast, have continued the
new tradition of the Democratic Party seeing itself, even with polling
advantages and now a large Congressional majority in the House, as a junior
partner to the GOP. Obama, ever touted
as the master politician and a political powerhouse (in winning two
Presidential elections) has still always on a policy front courted the
Republicans assiduously and to the great detriment of his Presidency and the
American people. On a policy front,
there was not much fight in him, endorsing Republican ideas, like Romney-care
(later Obamacare) as the starting point for policy initiative. Facing the 2020 election and drift of the
Democratic Party to the Left, Obama seems to be hinting that he
will throw his still-substantial personal influence against the progressive
contenders.
Since the “Reagan Revolution” and the triumph of neoliberal
ideology, the Democratic Party via the Clinton and Democratic Leadership
Council take-over of the Party in the 1990’s, has treated itself, its base, and
its policy efforts as subsidiary to the Republican Party’s ideology and donor
base. The tortuous efforts of Democratic
Party leaders to conform to the mold laid down by Reagan (government is the
“enemy” and markets [code for the private sector/big corporations] will fix
everything by themselves” in combination with massive subsidy to the wealthy)
were again borne out by Pelosi feeling the need
to gratuitously quote Reagan in her acceptance of the House Speakership
this year. This was no isolated incident
as Pelosi continually
refers to Reagan in a laudatory manner.
Pelosi’s ideology about the federal budget is
entirely defined by the Republican “deficit hawk”, Pete Peterson, whom she
also feels the impulse to repeatedly praise at random intervals.
Pelosi is not an outlier in the Democratic Establishment for
these views, as Obama was also equally
prey to deficit- and public-debt-hysteria.
The actions of the leadership in 2019 are entirely consistent with this
view. The current Democratic Party leadership seem to think of themselves as
helpmeets, the “conscience” of the Republican Party not as an independent,
self-defining political force.
Establishment Democrats also have an uncritical distance to and corrupt
relationships with the national security Establishment and the
military-industrial complex, both of which need to be seriously reformed or
excluded from critical decision making about foreign and fiscal policy.
The Usefulness of a Self-Defeating, Self-Limiting “Left” Party
The question remains then, why a party so at odds with what
might be its historical mission and so seeming uninterested in exerting
political power to that end, would exist and maintain itself over several
decades. Also, in a related question,
why would that party be so hostile to the few politicians that believe strongly
in the mission and potential of that party to be a majoritarian and powerful
party for the common good? Clearly loyalty
to the plutocratic donor class plays a role…but how?
To contemplate this requires that one allow for
Machiavellian motivations and maneuvering to exist even in an era of supposedly
Enlightenment-based, democratic governance.
We invoke the Renaissance Florentine diplomat and writer, Niccolo
Machiavelli, the author of The Prince, as
representative of murky pre-Enlightenment forms of governance and
politics. In feudalism/absolute
monarchies, where rulers and courtiers maneuvered behind the scenes and in the
open, often against the interests of their peoples and sometimes with great cruelty,
these political actions violated what we now hold to be universal human rights
and the requirements for popular rule inscribed in numerous constitutions
throughout the world. The popularity of Game of Thrones
is a cultural expression of an interest in Machiavellianism without using
social science terminology; GoT fans (I have watched only a few episodes) have
perhaps understood that Machiavellian maneuvering has relevance in the 21st
Century.
Machiavellianism has come to mean the desire and willingness
to act by any means necessary to acquire more personal power, be it in
political or other contexts, often via intrigue rather than transparent dealing
and open conflict. There are those who
would wish to look away from this dark maneuvering and greed for power, in the
service, they think, of countering Machiavellians. I think that instead we need to divide a
prescriptive from a descriptive view of Machiavellian activity: one can observe Machiavellian activity and
describe it, without endorsing or admiring that activity, something that those
committed, as am I, to democratic governance, tend to shy away from. For those attaching hope to the Democratic
Party or at least some progressive political vehicle that might replace it as
some point, it is often hard to soberly look at the Party as it is, in all its
gruesome detail. In other words, to
describe Machiavellian machinations is not to endorse them or praise them.
Contemporary Machiavellian activity takes place within a
context, of course, where political actors have goals and political systems
continue to evolve or devolve. For the plutocratic billionaire and
centimillionaire class that now finance most of the elite political class in
the United States, the presence of the junior-partner, twisted-against-itself
Democratic Party has the effect of legitimizing an order that has made these
plutocratic individuals and families multifold richer in the last several
decades. The legitimation
of a political and legal order is important for its continued functioning,
otherwise it can easily fall apart. While people in general have an interest in
maintaining a functioning society, the prime or luckiest beneficiaries of that
social order are particularly invested in its ongoing functioning at least in
appearance or the functioning of the circuits of reward within that social
order that benefit them specifically.
That junior partner Democratic Party has the function in what looks like
an increasingly “Soviet” (in the sense of inauthentic and unrepresentative sham
parties invented to legitimize the one-party state that engage in Kabuki style
maneuvering) political system of capturing popular discontent and giving the
impression of political representation to less-privileged groups in the social
hierarchy, either by class, race, ethnicity, or sex/gender identity.
The Democratic Party functions as the “caring face” of the
plutocratic donor class, including the military-industrial complex, and
Establishment Democratic politicians are literally paid to “perform” a caring
veneer and offer a thin dribble of “caring” actions and legislation while
supporting a basically pro-corporate, pro-ecocidal, pro-imperialist/militarist,
pro-wealthy agenda, as do their Republican colleagues automatically and more
ruthlessly. This is, scandalously but
unsurprisingly, a massive political scam that nevertheless persists because, in
part, of the (antiquated) structure of the US political system that has become
increasingly corrupted by ever more obscene concentrations of wealth. Also rampant global economic inequality and
the global nature of the billionaire, donor class, the existence of transnational
media networks owned by billionaires, means that other, less antiquated,
political systems (many parliamentary systems for instance) are also endangered
by some of the same forces.
The stubborn fighting of progressive ideas and leaders and
the hatred shown to them by both Establishment Democrats and the media
sympathetic to them becomes then more understandable. Progressives’ straightforward and, to the
contorted, turned-against-itself rationality of the supporters of Democratic
Establishment narratives, naïve-seeming belief in representative government and
social progress exposes the elaborate, twisted scam of Establishment and local
machine Democratic politics for what it is: often a self-limiting Kabuki
theater of “supporting” and pseudo-representing constituents and their
concerns. Establishment Democrats and
local machine pols are in this view, actors who are paid to appear “caring”
while doing the political dirty work of the donor class, consisting of large
corporations and wealthy individuals.
Their “act” is endangered as is their entire career trajectory, if a
class of politicians emerges that are doing real actually-caring work for their
constituents by changing laws and government institutions to better serve the
people. Or certainly, if some within the
Establishment and local machines are doing some actually-caring work, the
competition for definition of what is political caring and service for one’s
constituency is a bothersome thing for an Establishment politician, as they by
definition cannot challenge powerful uncaring and anti-caring interests
directly. Furthermore, the challenge to
their often-monopoly position on being the “caring” politician (as opposed to
the harsh sadism or bully-boy, bully-girl identities of the Republican politicians)
is a source of intense irritation.
While certainly there are some Machiavellian schemers helping organize this scam, a majority caught up in the centrist Establishment of the Democratic Party and affiliated media do not think of themselves as operatives in a political machine or scam. Instead, a constant flood of discourse is created that normalizes the career goals and trajectory of the median Democratic Establishment politician or political consultant. The progressive alternative of seeing government as a tool for improving the lot of the people overall often in conflict with corporate interests is constantly placed into the “taboo” zone of political discourse, so those caught up in the Democratic Party and Establishment media discourses, do not think much or hard about a progressive, really-caring alternative to the largely, merely performative [there are other, more profound definitions of the word “performative” but here I mean its now-popular usage, “for appearances only”] caring of Establishment Democratic Party operatives. A social reward system has been set up in both culture and politics that makes belief in the Democratic Party Establishment “story” comfortable while disbelief and critical distance from it, uncomfortable and potentially socially isolating. The model of small-donations or banning Big Money from politics as a campaign has created an existential challenge in the form of actually-progressive candidates and office holders for the would-be junior partner in the neoliberal political duopoly and these battles between progressives and Establishment are likely to continue. Let’s hope the twisted Machiavellian machinations or simple political bungling of the Democratic elite against the progressive insurgents do not enable the complete takeover of US government by the still more corrupt and malignant Republican Party, discussed in the next section of this piece. That Democratic Party elite and media allies constantly blame the progressives for any Republican wins (like Trump’s) while disowning all of their own incompetence, a topic of endless debate over the past few years.
Sham Politician Caring Creates (Paranoid) Enemies
Defenders of the Democratic Establishment blame progressives
for as many losses as possible by the twisted-against-itself Democratic Party
but ignore the pretty much inevitable role that the sham-caring of the
Democratic Establishment has in fueling far-right paranoia, political strength,
and random gun-toting terrorist attacks. The Democratic Party’s appearance of
caring is, of course, a routine target of Trumpists and before Trump, the
right-wing leadership and base more generally.
It was Reagan after all, who promoted the canard that the most
terrifying words in the English language were “I’m from the government and
I’m here to help”. Reagan’s words
express the rampant paranoid culture of the current right-wing as drilled into
them by countless hours of television and radio commentary. That right-wing
discourse is built around (also) neoliberal assumptions of the inherent
fallibility of government and the perfectability of the private sector and by
extension, private individuals, functions also as an implied ego boost for much
of the population, who, after all, make up the private sector (and even public
employees as individuals, who when at home are part of the private
sector). In the paranoid right-wing
culture that attracts many disaffected but incurious and not book-smart people,
the canard that government is “always wrong” except when engaged in brutal
killing and suppression of hated others, the contradictory discourse of
government’s inherent fallibility provides a temporary elevation in
self-esteem: “I can do better than
‘those fools’ in government”.
The Democratic Party Establishment has decided not to
challenge the myriad-times-repeated nostrums of the right-wing about
governments’ fallibility, with perhaps the exception of the intelligence and
national security apparatus, with whom they have now allied themselves. At the same time, the Democratic Party
Establishment play exactly into their opponents’ vision of government as
corrupt, by being corrupt and inauthentic in their caring for their
constituents. Over the past three
decades, the wholesale abandonment of large swaths of the United States via
disinvestment, austerity, globalization was a bipartisan effort, but the
Democrats played the role often of the hatchet men and women, which in turn
created the appearance of duplicity, which fed popular hostility, both
exaggerated by paranoia in some but with some substantial realistic basis in
the Democrat’s support for bipartisan policy and political decisions. The Democrats, stupidly, have played the
fall-guys or frontmen and -women for the bipartisan, anti-popular economic
policies of the last 40 years.
It is only via a political faction, like today’s upstart
progressives, that are committed to consistent public service and combatting
big-donor influence that this vicious cycle of self-reinforcing paranoia about
government and cynicism about prospects for a brighter future can be at all
challenged and beaten back in the political sphere. Breaking through that paranoid culture via
positive, disconfirming action, rather than empty words, is the only way
forward to rescue and enhance something like democracy and civilization in the
United States.
