By Michael Hoexter, Ph.D.
In the final section of this essay, I will look at the
combined effect of the conflicts and collusion between the two types of
Machiavellian political actors that dominate the higher offices and influential
media organizations in the United States and to a lesser degree in other
countries today. Looking solely and
narrowly at one party or the other encourages myopia and the creation of a “voodoo
doll” in which all manner of evil is thought to be embodied, i.e. projected
onto. Thus our tendencies towards psychological “splitting” from our childhoods
are supported by finding the supposedly single locus of “bad”. The process of
collapse of our democracy is more complex and encompassing than just the
description, criticism and/or demonization of one party or set of actors.
The focus on just one actor as the primary source of
political evil has split progressives and the Left in the period 2016 to the
present: there are some who focus almost exclusively on the neoliberal
Democratic Party and its neoconservative militarist allies as essentially the
“worst human beings” in or near seats of political power. Others focus almost exclusively on Trump, the
Trumpist Republicans and/or the far right outside the Republican Party. These essays here are an attempt at synthesis
of what might be called a “two-front” battle for the future of American democracy
and, in an era of rapid climate deterioration, generalized to other nations,
the future of human civilization on the planet.
I will at the end offer an outline of what an anti-Machiavellian
politics and policy orientation would look like.
Common Threads Across Right-wing and Centrist Machiavellianisms 1: The Billionaire Class
The most important common feature shared between Machiavellians
in the two Parties and their peripheries is the power and patronage of
ultra-rich donors and large corporations, biased towards the Center and the
Right, with hardly any portion of an actual Left receiving patronage of
significance. The donors may issue
“orders” to the political actors who they fund, their “front people”, but most
of the time they can construct an elaborate system of incentives that include
direct payments or “donations” of cash or employment opportunities but also the
conferring of social prestige via pseudo-independent funding institutions that
are supposedly solid, glamorous, or lofty in their goals. For media
organizations, these same donors can, in other capacities, buy or influence the
buying of advertising (for a variety of purposes, including direct commercial aims)
and therefore sustain or improve the bottom line of for-profit media or, via
large donations, the operating budgets of donation-dependent non-profit media corporations,
like National Public Radio.
The subtle, now neoliberal, system of incentives and
disincentives is, as discussed previously here, a Gramscian “war of position”
that leads to hegemonic forms of power, forms that rule mostly by constructing
a “common sense” favoring plutocratic rule rather than, more rarely, by direct
exertion of force, coercing many of the governed. Hegemony is usually a stronger form of
governing and social dominance than direct governance by threat and force, i.e.
direct domination.
There are however no pure expressions of one Gramscian type
of rule or the other in reality: the
mostly hegemonic neoliberal system is bolstered by, now increasingly, direct
exertion of force in many countries around the world and was, as well, at its
infancy in 1973 in Chile, “birthed” by a violent, CIA-organized coup d’etat by
General Augusto Pinochet overthrowing the socialist government of Salvador
Allende. That coup d’etat provided an
economic “playground” for the “Chicago Boys”, economists taught by Friedman and
Hayek, to construct a brutal market-based economy designed to further enrich
the fortunate in the name of market “efficiencies”.
The neoliberal era in the more central, wealthier-than-Chile
capitalist countries didn’t require the exertion of such brutality on
populations that were still beneficiaries of the long post-World War II
economic boom with post-War Keynes-influenced economic policies supporting
generous welfare states in many nations.
Subaltern populations, internal colonized peoples in the central
countries, like African-Americans and Algerians and Sub-Saharan African
immigrants in France, however have almost always been ruled more by the direct
domination of the state. Now,
increasingly the exertion of force is spreading to entire multi-racial
populations of working people, including the vicious police attacks on the
gillets jaunes and other anti-austerity protestors in France. Increasing reliance on direct domination by
state power within the still-neoliberal regimes and era, does not erase the
hegemonic “sleights of hand” of neoliberal politics and policy. Neoliberalism still creates “buy-in” for
certain more comfortable parts of the population, forming an ideological veil and
loyal middle-class client groupings (the
professional managerial class) behind which ruling elites and increasingly
oligarchs have enriched themselves and hollowed out the welfare systems of a
variety of countries with the assent of many of the governed, in the name of
“modernity” and “efficiency”.
Almost the entire donor class abhors the actual, functioning
left wing, the progressive Left, as represented in electoral politics in the US
by such figures as Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and
Rashida Tlaib. The donor class and their
political employees and allies try to exclude progressives or at least their
ideas from the common sense they and their emissaries attempt to construct. In
Great Britain, Jeremy Corbyn was recently treated to a barrage of smears and an
almost unified media front of scorn and opprobrium. The class interests of the owners of the
supposedly “free” press have come to the fore in attempting to “ring fence” and
sideline progressive politicians that, among other things, would raise the
taxes of the wealthy and speak of plans to more stringently regulate capitalism,
if not replace it with either a worker-owned-enterprise market economy or a
more public-sector-led left-social democratic or socialist economy.
The ultra-rich donor class and their desires for still more
control over their circumstances, their assets, and still greater accumulations
of wealth can be said to be the central rationale and, such as it is, planning
instance of the current political system.
Their front people, the politicians, do not stand at the center of the
operation; they must constantly maneuver, change positions and improvise or
fall out of favor. The most precise, brief
way to label our emergent political-economic system is that of a hegemony-based
neoliberal oligarchy that is increasingly turning to authoritarianism and
outright fascism to maintain nascent oligarchs’ positions of power and wealth,
i.e. turning increasingly to more direct forms of domination over working
people and the population more generally.
The disruptions of social “business as usual” via the increased levels of
migration of war- and climate-refugees, create multiple occasions to stir
xenophobic nationalism that can be used to bolster authoritarianism and
neo-fascism.
These plutocrats however rest their rationale
for dominance and their businesses/investments on an inherently unstable and
short-sighted system, the unchecked capitalist economic system that is
immiserating billions and mining-out and thus undermining the ability of the
natural world to support humanity much longer.
While, as in the above description of hegemony, these billionaires do
not often issue direct commands, they have, especially since the fall of the two-pole
world of the Cold War, constructed a system of political and cultural patronage and media ownership and
consolidation, which creates an almost all-encompassing system of discourse and
action that, in turn, justify actions by others (the many non-billionaire and
non-centimillionaire employees and operatives) that support and further their
interests out of a combination of ideological blinders or direct patronage and
corruption.
Common Threads Across Right-wing and Centrist Machiavellianisms 2: Anti-Democracy
Another common thread in the current bipartisan (though
internally varied) Machiavellianism is that democratic, transparent decision
making is weakened or entirely circumvented in favor of “back room” dealing,
leading to little significant popular input into the actual policies
enacted. Machiavellianism by its nature
is a hold-over/recurrence from pre-democratic forms of government and tends
towards court politics, the preservation of existing personal privileges and
powers in a pyramidal or radial configuration around “royalty”, in this case
the neoliberal oligarchs/donor class.
Court politics contrasts with and tends to undermine democratic politics
decided via parliamentary or transparent executive deliberation, supported by
more-or-less fair, adequately informative, and wide-ranging media coverage. The tendency of the last two decades for both
American political parties to strengthen the executive branch at the expense of
the deliberative parliamentary branch, has created increasingly the
approximation of a monarchic Presidency, leading to an increasingly radial
configuration of political life around the executive, who is able, between
elections, to make inscrutable and quasi-dictatorial decisions around a whole
host of issues.
Without constant effort to work against Machiavellian court
politics, it seems that political systems tend towards increasing
non-transparent insider jockeying and trading of favors. The powerful favor shielding their jostling
with each other and deal-making behind closed doors rather than opening up
their deliberations to the broader public, i.e. a democracy. If left to themselves, they would increasingly
rely on Machiavellian methods.
Contemporary journalism and media conglomerates have supported the trend
towards Machiavellian maneuvering by focusing on personalities, small
incidents, and trivial distinctions between political factions, all distractions
from the core substantive issues and power dynamics as described here.
The United States Constitution and the subsequent U.S. democratic
experiment can be viewed as one such monumental effort to replace a court
politics (most specifically the politics of the court of the English King George
III) in favor of a democratic system, including the fostering of a more or less
free press. The US system (among others)
is in need of renewal as it has not evolved enough to address numerous
challenges to its now 230-year-old institutions, including social,
technological, economic and ecological developments. Some of the most antiquated parts of the
current system that reinforce the power of plutocrats and neo-royalists are the
following: first-past-the-post
voting systems, the electoral college, the Senate filibuster as well as the
Senate as an institution as a whole, money as speech, corporations as
individuals with rights, stalling since 1959 on inclusion of former colonies
and Washington DC from statehood. Predatory
actors have so undermined the current system that it no longer approximates the
more benign and foresighted aspects of the founding vision of the writers of
the Constitution.
Common Threads Across Right-wing and Centrist Machiavellianisms 3: Public Cynicism and Fatalism
Still another common thread shared by Machivellians of both
the right-wing and centrist persuasions is the promotion of and shared
semi-conscious cynicism about public service, about human rights and the shared
destiny of humanity. The cynical belief
that public service and a shared project of the betterment of humanity is
laughable can be observed in the hostility with which the progressives, as well
as some others are treated. Bernie Sanders, for instance, a lifelong public
servant and relatively selfless for such a successful politician, is treated by
those who view the world via neoliberal ways of thinking, as (paradoxically but
unironically) a full-blown narcissist, a starry-eyed idealist or a boring nag. Sanders is so characterized within neoliberal
“common sense” because of his stubborn insistence that public service has value
and his insistence over decades on taking principled stands on a variety of
issues. ‘Surely,’ thinks the
neoliberally indoctrinated, ‘Sanders is virtue-signaling, trying to feed his
ego by claiming to be better than ordinary self-interested people’.
The pervasive cynicism of our era is a direct product of the
neoliberal ideology that suggests that the natural state of society, including
government, is in the form of markets driven by individual self-interest. The existence of people driven to serve the
public or humanity at large in a sincere, dutybound manner must be blotted out
of the cognitive universe of those enmeshed in neoliberal ways of thinking. Various forms of psychological denial are
used to marginalize or suppress the possibility that there could exist
principled public service or citizen engagement in politics. To acknowledge that those are real and
distinct possibilities undermines the cynical but very common neoliberal
assumption that “everybody is in it for themselves”.
Another way to describe cynicism-as-norm, is that deontological
ethical systems, moral systems based on a sense of duty to abstract rules
of right-and-wrong and following “good”
rules of conduct, are considered quaint, dangerous, or, in assumption, non-existent.
Another operative metaethics in contemporary society is consequentialism,
which, in its purer forms, leads to an undecidability with regard to what are a
priori good rules of conduct: consequentialism is all about good outcomes that
cannot be known from the beginning of taking any action. Consequentialism, which is almost always
utilitarianism in practice, justifies any means to achieve a good outcome: it’s motto is “what works is what’s
good”. In practice, a pure
consequentialism tends towards amorality, as no rules of conduct are accepted
as good, valid or binding.
Consequentialism is closely tied to both neoliberalism and more
generally the ethics of capitalists: outcomes matter more than rules. Machiavellianism, if it can be said to have
any ethical justification, would rely on consequentialism to explain why the
pursuit of individual power can under some circumstances lead to good effects
overall: the “ends will justify the means”.
A true Machiavellian, however, would only use the supposed targeting of
good outcomes as a ruse or cover for the advancement of their own
interest. However, political operators
who use consequentialist ethics as a justification are closer to Machiavellian
strategies than deontologically or virtue-ethics oriented individuals.
Related to the encouragement of public cynicism,
paradoxically both right-wing Machiavellians and centrist Machiavellians deploy
the vision of moral perfectionism as a bludgeon or an excuse to do nothing
about the world’s problems. Cynics often
operate with unrealistic ideas about what a truly moral person would be doing,
ideas so unrealistic that no good actions are undertaken. The cynic tells themselves and advertises
loudly to others that taking action is useless because moral perfection is
impossible. Right-wing Machiavellians,
who are deeply cynical and sometimes aware of it themselves, use such an
unrealistic vision of perfection to savage any attempts to better the world, as
a bludgeon. They don’t tend to hold themselves up as paragons of some moral
virtue but seem to despair, often with crocodile tears, of any efforts to realize
a moral vision in the (secular) world.
Some religious cynics, often adhering to some fundamentalist sect,
locate their particular morality within the confines of otherworldly ideas
about deities or scripture, but maintain the moral passivity of secular
cynics.
Centrist Machiavellians also use visions of
moral perfection, particularly with regard to individual behavior, to attack
most often progressives who are trying to drive
Common Threads Across Right-wing and Centrist Machiavellianisms 4: Anti-worker, Anti-Union, Anti-Socialist
Both centrist and right-wing Machiavellians also share a
common anti-worker, anti-union, anti-socialist and anti-Communist perspective
though here there is some variety between the two Machiavellian tendencies.
Centrist Machiavellians believe in the fundamental goodness
of what to them appear to be meritocratic hierarchies where they envision that the
smartest and most deserving people are at the top of the social pyramid and people
are financially and socially rewarded based on their inherent worth and
contribution to society. The lower level
manual workers in that hierarchy are, in the view of the neoliberal centrist,
are already getting their just rewards, so agitating for greater pay or more
benefits for them (via unions or political change) disrupts centrist elite’s
idea of fairness of reward. They are
also particularly sanguine about replacing workers with robots, as they do not
see themselves (generally white-collar workers or wealthy owners) as being ever
primarily dependent on manual or service work for their livelihood. The increasing automation of some forms of
white-collar work, undermines their self-image as elite, less vulnerable
workers who identify with the aims of capital rather than labor.
The anti-worker, anti-socialist and anti-Communist attitudes
of, mostly now neofascist-tending, right-wing Machiavellians is more confused
and emotionally-laden. 20th
Century fascism emerged as a right-wing response to Communism and the European
worker’s movement, that cribbed some of the symbology and political techniques
of left revolutionary movements of the early 20th Century for the
purposes of restoring old social hierarchies and racist exclusion of
minorities. The official name of the
Nazi party was “National Socialist Worker’s Party” after all, a naming which
right-wingers now attempt to use as a means of disowning the crimes of the
Nazis as “left-wing”. Right-wing
Machiavellians deal with a biologistic view of value, where membership in the
national community via “blood” is the primary appeal to working people. Meanwhile, as with others on the right-wing,
fascists reinforce social hierarchies and are obedient authoritarians, prone to
worship the charismatic leadership of their movement.
Right-wing Machiavellians of the neofascist type, such as
Trump and the new alt-right, attempt to appeal to fear- and aggression-based instincts
and a somewhat outdated “common sense”, romantic notions of national belonging,
while at the same time, in action, serving the interests of wealthy elites. They use paranoia-tinged language to warn of
the possible “encirclement” and encroachment on “freedoms” via socialism,
communism. As the fascist leadership are
mostly scam artists and pure sociopaths, they are comfortable acting at
complete variance to their “ideology” with regard to explaining to working
people why they should believe in the demagogue, while simultaneously
supporting legislation that accelerates the material decline of working
people’s living standards.
The anti-intellectual US right-wing leadership is
anti-socialistic by instinct because they are also threatened by the idea in
socialism that rationalistic improvement via government action will be based on
scientific understanding of society and the natural world. The secular nature of most socialistic
approaches to the world threatens the faith-based but extractivist ideals of a
providentialist (believing in divine providence rather than earthly events) anti-agape
love Christianity which has been the matrix for many in the US who are now
tending towards or embracing neofascism. The notion of a ordered, human-created,
democratic system by which people are guaranteed basic rights also closes down
much of the parasitic “opportunities,” the social space, that scam-based
businesses, religious and political operations thrive. The sociopathic leadership of much of the
right-wing preys on people’s vulnerabilities, instinctive fears of physical
violence and pollution/infection and sense of powerlessness: to empower people
by giving them enhanced rights and freeing them from private debt-peonage is a
direct threat to the leadership at least.
Speculatively, much of the base of right-wing authoritarian
and neofascist movements, are timid and conventional people who feel empowered
by identification with the wild, paranoid-tending revenge fantasies spun by
their leaders. They are enfolded in the
irrationalism and “passion” of submission to their leaders and are threatened
by the claims of socialism or progressive social change because it means for
one, change, and also it means embracing a more rationalistic view of how human
beings can operate in the world. They
are assured by their “common sense” that all of that thinking and change will
lead to naught or worse, threatening the cultural identities and practices they
hold dear; the narrative they hold fixedly to is part depressive and part vengeful
lashing out at the new and the other. So
while many of them are beneficiaries of past “socialistic” policies, like
Social Security or Medicare, they are also strongly motivated by resentment and
racism directed at others: they want to exclude others from benefits and from
society as much or more as gain benefits from a socialistic program of change
and improved social services.
There are also strong paranoid elements of American culture
and society expressed in right-wing politics for which the notion of a
socialistic collectivity working together functions as a trigger for paranoid
fears of encirclement and shutting off forms of escape. That humans are social animals and that
paranoid people already benefit from being part of collectivity are, in the
narratives that paranoids tell themselves, partitioned off from their
conceptions about what is good in the world and what keeps them safe: they only want to focus on routes of escaping
feared others who are “out to get them”.
The right-wing leadership plays endlessly with these fears typical of
paranoia-tending people, who are sure they are persecuted as they attempt to
hide the benefits and privileges they enjoy.
Claiming victimhood is always very close to the surface and is deployed
by the authoritarian leaders in narratives like the Nazi
“Dolchstosslegende”(stab in the back) and Trump’s constant claims of his own
and his followers’ victimhood.
Common Threads Across Right-wing and Centrist Machiavellianisms 5: Media Alliances Create Opportunities to Covertly Manipulate Public Opinion and Attack Opponents
Both the right-wing Machiavellians of the Republican Party
and alt-right/neofascists as well as centrist, neoliberal Machiavellians have
ample access to and interaction with various highly influential broadcast and
Internet media “properties”, i.e. organizations that have substantial influence
and control over the flow of information to certain segments of the population. Both the GOP and radical right and the
centrist Machiavellians can in different ways create “echo chambers” that
reinforce their preferred views of the world or the views which their animating
segments of the donor class/plutocracy want to project out into the world. The reinforcement of donors or politicians’
political views via media “sock-puppets” creates a way for politicians to
disown or seem to be “independent” of views that overall support their
worldview and political agenda.
It has become clearer that media organizations have been
sacrificing their journalistic ethics and missions to become public relations
arms of various political agendas or candidacies. A cycle of mutual recriminations by these
media outlets and the politicians themselves hides the overall systemic problem
of media abandoning their truth-telling functions for propagandistic
missions. Pre-emptively Trump, for
instance, has picked up the accusation of “Fake News” and directed it at
unfavorable (often truthful) coverage of his politics and policy. But he is supported almost exclusively by
various propaganda channels that masquerade as supposedly independent
information sources: “fake news” is the norm on these pro-Trump channels
reflecting Trump’s own propensity to lie much of the time. Trump himself was helped by channels such as
CNN during his candidacy, that he now calls “fake news”: they broadcast his
rallies often in their entirety, giving his campaign billions of dollars in
free publicity.
The “fourth estate” is functioning as a “fifth column” for a
variety of political actors, with for instance, editors and journalists being
schooled on “talking points” by campaigns or at least giving off the impression
that they are both a workshop for the talking points as well as a faithful echo
chamber for those talking points. In
Great Britain, we have just witnessed one of the most coordinated campaigns by
media and good portion of the political spectrum against Jeremy Corbyn, replete
with false accusations of anti-Semitism that were echoed on both sides of the
Atlantic. The British media is even more
concentrated than the US media, but supposedly left, Labour-friendly newspapers
magazines were also part of the coordinated campaign against Corbyn.
An Ultra-Corrupt System Teetering Near Collapse
While the prime beneficiaries of the current political
system can be seen to be continuing to amass more power and wealth both openly
and behind the scenes, the world in general, including the political front the
plutocrats have shaped to their benefit is in a state of near-collapse. The legitimized post-War Keynesian
political-economic system of the period 1945-1973 which lent respectability and
solidity to political-economic institutions is now being completely gutted by
plutocrats intent on sucking out the last profits, before, perhaps, attempting
to retreat to some island, tax-haven, or imagined fortress. The current billionaire technology fantasy
shared by Bezos, Branson and Musk is to occupy other planets, as an escape from
the mess humans have made of the earth.
Analogous to the economist Hyman Minsky’s Financial Instability Hypothesis
about financial markets, ‘stability has bred instability’ in the entire
political-economic system. Out of greed
and carelessness, powerful political and business leaders have tended to assume
that all the benefits (to them) and stability of the managed capitalism of the
post-War era, would trail them and, by accident, the rest of us into the
neoliberal era (1973-present) of deregulation and looting of the institutions
of developed countries. Alternatively,
the looters and deregulators believe that they, if they accumulate enough
wealth or maintain friendly connections with the ultra-wealthy, they can spare
themselves from the chaos and impoverishment they help create via their own
actions. All key actors seem to believe
they can escape to a refuge from the disorder and degradation they create in
the society and biosphere that nourished them and their businesses or
institutions. Some entertain the more
modest fantasies of withdrawal to an own-home or a retirement retreat, while,
as above, billionaires commandeer islands, vast ranches, or foolishly contemplate
escape from the Earth itself.
With the exception of a few political actors that show a way
forward, mostly concentrated on the progressive Left, both major U.S. political
Parties have deep structural problems that put them on the edge of
disintegration as important political forces.
The Republican Party has become a center of neo-fascist, white
supremacist authoritarian leaders that are also scam artists. Contrary to the image of the regimented
fascists of mid-20th Century Europe that emerged from the ranks of
disaffected ex-soldiers after WWI (Hitler and Mussolini were both veterans of
WWI), the neofascists of the Republican Party and their supporting media
infrastructure are short-sighted sociopaths, always compulsively lying and
attempting to gain short-term economic advantage for either themselves or their
impatient donors. Their strategy to
“deconstruct the Administrative State” looks sometimes a lot like sheer
incompetence and a general lack of curiosity and interest in all but the most
basic matters and fundamentals of their ideology. Many of them appear to be unintelligent,
impulsive and short-sighted. With a high
percentage of sociopaths in their ranks, their tendency to scam and rob makes
them difficult to regiment into a functioning organization and creates
scandals, where and when media or a political opposition has the wherewithal to
expose wrongdoing.
The complete and open corruption of the right-wing makes it
then an unstable and vulnerable political structure: they are prone to be
delegitimized by self-dealing and by exposure either by elite institutions that
are still not entirely “bought” or by popular movements that emerge from those
that have been bilked and are now, rightfully, angry. The GOP and right-wing then totter as a
political force because of their constant need to create a world of unreality
via propaganda to divert the attention of the electorate from their actual
actions in government, their monomaniacal pursuit of their own self-enrichment,
and their alliances with the most-anti-social fringe groups on the far right.
Despite this fragility, the corruption and cluelessness of
the media and the predatory nature of the newly emergent neo-fascist right-wing
means that it is an ongoing struggle to maintain the democratic institutions
and public sphere from complete corruption by the right-wing. Trump and his team have shown an ability to
utilize the degraded political information systems of the United States to
further “gas-light” the public and keep their opposition buffaloed, despite a
weakening position.
The meekness and subservience of the Democratic Party and
the center-right/center-left that it now represents is also a huge political morass
and stumbling block to social progress.
The Democratic leadership as now constituted can in most situations be
exposed as weak, with now only a few of its actually-left representatives in
Congress, in statehouses, and on the campaign trail, being determined fighters
for political causes that transcend politician self-interest. The Pelosi-Schumer-Perez led Democratic Party
has no apparent inclination to consistently fight against the agenda of the
Republicans and seem to think that “competing” on greater cooperativeness and
civility is the golden gateway to political success. It seems, though, far more likely that the
Democrats are not targeting anything like political power or success in the
same way as do power-hungry Republicans.
Democrats are also hampered by the loose coalition of
interest and identity group structure of the party as faced off against the
ideological core of Republican beliefs and the White-Christian core identity of
the GOP. The diversity of the Democratic
Party that could be a strength under some conditions, creates the ability for
the donor class that run the Party to “divide and conquer” inside the Party,
laming any reform efforts and development of ideological unity. The ability to divide progressives among
different causes was
on display at the August 2019 summer meeting of the Democratic National
Committee where the most contentious issue was whether the Party would
sanction an official climate debate, pressed by the Sunrise Movement in
particular and by some insurgent delegates.
At that meeting, a succession of delegates claiming to represent issues
other than climate change as priorities and often claiming represent
historically oppressed groups, were successfully mobilized to vote against the allowance
by the DNC of an official climate debate, because it would show favor to only
one of the many constituencies of the Democratic Party.
The Democrats can then, even in the face of the existential
threat of climate change, be divided into sub-constituencies, each of them
thinking that their cause merits them breaking would-be solidarity despite facing
a common threat. The Democrats are then quite
easily divided, under the banner of one sectoral but righteous cause or another. The same dynamic has been mobilized against
efforts to institute radical reforms such as Medicare for All or Free College
for All, not so much because of ideology but because the Party has developed
cadres of corrupt individual leaders and operatives who can represent a
sectoral cause, with justified historical grievances, as a tool to block reform
and the development of a common program across interest groups.
Unfortunately, the figures of Barack Obama and Hillary
Clinton were deployed as such dividers of progressive causes driving wedges between
social liberalism and economic progressivism.
Obama and Hillary Clinton were figures that were trusted by the donor
class and deployed their personal identities as respectively an
African-American man and a woman to signal “caring” and progressivism while
selling or implementing a pro-corporate or pro-imperialist agenda. While “identity politics” has become a loaded
term, as has “populism”, the use of such a politics, or any sectoral political
concern beyond identity, to block fundamental reform efforts is a central device
and use of the Democratic Party and its surrounding social milieus for and by
the plutocratic ruling classes.
In summary then the Democratic Party is a complex chimera
that has valuable functions to ruling elites, though not often to its
constituents. The Establishment
Democratic Party with its obsequiousness to the opposing Republicans, its
avoidance of governing, supported by elite media, educational, and cultural
institutions, functions
- as a mechanism to divide political forces that
would challenge plutocratic power around worthy but controversial causes,
creating a movement divided against itself, intentionally. - as a form of legitimation of the plutocratic
neoliberal, neo-fascist tending order by offering a nominally “caring” face to the
plutocrats and a means for the “left” of the elite donor class to appear also
“caring”, “woke”, and philanthropic.
Thus popular discontent is better contained and the pro-plutocratic economic and political order is shored up by the twisted, divided-against-themselves Democrats.
Collapse or Explosion?
The waves of mass demonstrations around the world in the
last few months of 2019 are showing to discontented people that there are ways
of at least expressing discontent and hope for a better future that might
change regional, national or world history.
The failures of both sides of the current neoliberal political spectrum:
increasingly fanatical ethno-nationalists and guardians of the economic status
quo as well as incrementalist but often fatally compromised reformers to offer
meaningful change and the prospect of human betterment has led to a potentially
explosive situation. In this explosive
situation, political institutions and parties have made themselves mostly
irrelevant to the the broad masses of people and their aspirations for a better
life.
While disruptions of the status quo are welcome coming from
the streets, without organized political groupings and eventually parties that
can wield political power, not much will be changed in the longer run. The spontaneity of demonstrations and crowds
is important but cannot replace the need in complex societies for the
coordination of social services and actions that, in their best forms,
political institutions can help shepherd or lead in times of crisis. Social movements need to be constantly
challenging the status quo but at the same time cannot by themselves organize
the myriad details of the complex, internationally-linked societies in which
people now live.
The challenge of effective climate action is as
“Janus-faced” as it will get in terms of the need for disruptiveness as well as
for competent public administration. New
ways of life will need to be invented that at the same time, emit net zero
carbon, which is something that only can be build and then measured by careful
social organization, communication and guided by public entities, like
governments. Some spontaneous changes from
the ground up will yield the desired outcomes and some spontaneous, ground-up
changes will not yield desirable outcomes and both will need to be measured for
their impact on the global commons. People’s
intuitive “gut” senses of what is right or sustainable will need to be subjected
to some forms of measurement in order for the net-zero or negative greenhouse
gas emissions goals to be achieved.
Rather than create social disruption for its own sake, the
movement towards a net-zero emitting society must also salvage or create new
institutions that facilitate sustainable development and the creation of an
entirely green social metabolism with high levels of coordination across
regional and national boundaries. Before
that happens, the polluting ways of life we now engage in will need to be
disassembled, mostly by majoritarian public agreement that we cannot go on
treating the basis of our and co-evolved species lives with disregard.
Social collapses or social explosions are
possibilities but recovery must be quick for humanity to rescue its own chances
for survival as
Anti-Machiavellian Strategies
Bringing the discussion back to the matter of political
practice, it is highly unlikely that a Machiavellian-led politics will help
effect the self-rescue of humanity from it’s fossil fuel addiction and
self-destructive economy. Machiavellians
focus is on their own personal benefit first, narrowly defined, and, depending
on the type of Machiavellian, only thereafter applying a veneer of “leadership”
or “concern” with which they beguile others, including voters to support them.
Prime anti-Machiavellian strategies include:
- Exposure of the meta-strategies of powerful
political actors in public events and in media where possible - Supporting independent media that is chartered
or founded upon a truth-telling function and on investigation for the public
good - Reforming political institutions so that they
reflect popular will via democratic processes, including updating voting rules
to expand the franchise (proportional voting/rank choice voting, election days
as holidays, same day registration, prosecution of voter suppression via
government officials) - Banning private funding of elections, starting
with limiting the influence of large and corporate donors. In the interim, run
small-donor funded campaigns as do the Bernie Sanders-influenced progressive
candidates. - Field candidates on local, state, and federal
levels that replace corporate- and plutocrat-funded candidates with small-donor
funded candidates. - Create and build social and citizen’s movements
that pressure governments to build the future society we need as well as
pre-figure, as much as possible, social changes that are beneficial to human
survival
The road is long and hard: none of this is or will be easy. But understanding the machinations of Machiavellians is necessary, not to admire them and their cunning, but to expose their plans to the light of day and to public discussion and/or condemnation where needed. Their privatization of political discussion, influence and power is unacceptable and must be stopped by enhanced, more widespread, and more truthful discussion and engagement.
