What Then Must Be Done?

The political system of the United States is a house of cards, built by the Republicrat-Democan duopoly and stacked in its favor (and that of its underwriters, the militarized corporatocracy) against the best interests of the American people. It is the belief of this writer, however, that the American people retain at least one card that, if placed upon the "house," has the potential of dismantling it to the point where the people themselves may actually effect a non-violent revolution, take control of their government and, for perhaps the first time in their history, make it their own.

The following article contains my arguments and recommendations for what must be done.

No longer riding on the merry-go-round/I just had to let it go—John Lennon, “Watching the Wheels” (1980)

In 2012, defining insanity as “doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result” has become proverbial. It was already proverbial in 2008, but that didn’t stop the American electorate from demonstrating the proverb’s clear applicability to American politics. True, in 2008, many Americans went to the polls thinking that they were bringing about authentic change by voting for Barack Obama: and, in a sense, by electing an African American President, they did usher in a new era. Obama is the Jackie Robinson of American Presidential politics. From a politically progressive standpoint, however, this comparison is only too accurate. Jackie Robinson was, as is well known, politically conservative. Without denying Robinson’s clear gifts as an athlete, one may legitimately question whether a ball-player who was not only black and athletically gifted but also politically leftist would have been permitted to cross major league baseball’s infamous “color line.” Likewise, without denying Obama’s clear gifts as a politician, one may legitimately question whether a black candidate who was genuinely progressive would be permitted to take up residence in the unfortunately (but accurately) nicknamed “White House.”

In any case, what the American body politic needed in 2008 is needed no less in 2012: structural political change. In 2008, Obama appeared to promise that kind of change—what with his appeal to grassroots organizations like MoveOn.org. Four years later, however, it is clear that the President is not only incapable of delivering structural political change, such change is not even part of his vision. Indeed, one wonders if he even has a vision—other than re-election. And, for their part, most people in the United States who identify themselves as “politically progressive” are in much the same position as the President: their “vision” does not appear to extend much beyond re-electing Obama. As far as the proverb goes, American Progressives fit the definition of insanity to a T.

What then must be done? To begin, we must finally acknowledge to ourselves the absolute futility of electoral politics under the current system. The plebiscite is a placebo. It is a reassuring (and yet perennially disappointing) distraction. It funnels creative political energy away from effective action and re-directs it to a government-sponsored (but not Constitutionally prescribed) ritual: one in which our votes merely ratify the choices made for the electorate by the two dominant political parties.

Wait a minute: Is it true that this process is not Constitutionally prescribed? In fact, it is not. Provision is made in the U.S. Constitution for the election of the President and members of Congress, but there is no provision made for the current “two-party” system. Space does not permit the rehearsal of how the current system evolved, but, for present purposes, all that is necessary to keep in mind is that the two-party system is not Constitutionally authorized and, therefore, the American people are under no legal obligation to retain it. Even if it were Constitutionally authorized, the American people would still be under no legal obligation to retain the current system—however, under those circumstances, systemic change would require a Constitutional amendment—an onerous process by any measure. The time has come to break the two-party stranglehold on the democratic aspirations of all Americans. That means that it is time to demand fundamental change of the American electoral system.

But wait again: What is wrong with having a two-party political system? In theory: nothing. In theory, the two parties that currently share real power in the United States are broadly enough constituted that they can plausibly represent a wide spectrum of American political opinion. The problem is that the two parties do not, in fact, represent a wide spectrum of American political opinion—at least when it comes to crafting and implementing policies that might reflect that spectrum. Indeed, I used the metaphor of a funnel when describing the effect of the electoral process upon creative political energy—in the sense of “funneling” that energy away from channels in which it might threaten the present political status quo. This metaphor is equally apt for describing the effect of the two-party system upon the process by which the spectrum of American political opinion finds enactment into law and government policy. A wide range of ideas and opinions are poured into the top of the two-party funnel but, by the time they reach the spout of effective enactment, they are narrowly “expressed” and, in fact, represent only a very thin band of political interests. Whose interests do they represent? Since at least the end of World War Two, they represent the interests of the military and the business class.

This is not news to anyone—or ought not to be. The sociologist C. Wright Mills described the present configuration of American politics quite accurately almost six decades ago in his book, The Power Elite. By the time that Mills published his book in 1956, the mutual investments and interdependence of the military, the civilian government, and big business were already established and entrenched. The passage of time has only made those ties ever deeper and more Byzantine. The Republican and Democratic parties do not represent the broad spectrum of political opinion in the United States: they represent the very narrow interests of the power elite. One might even describe the two parties as “wholly owned subsidiaries” of that elite insofar as all of their activities are financed by a relatively small (and extremely wealthy) proportion of the American electorate. So long as the electorate continues to cooperate with the two-party system as it exists in 2012—and as it has existed since at least the Second World War—it will continue to exemplify by word and deed the proverbial definition of insanity.

But what choice do we have? Despite the self-congratulatory story that we love to tell ourselves about the American political system, about our government “of, by, and for” the people, the truth is far less attractive. The simple fact of the matter is that we have very little choice at all. And the one option that most (if not all) of the readers of this article are expecting me to advocate—voting for a third party candidate—is a proven loser. That option has been tried repeatedly and has changed nothing. The reason it has changed nothing is that, by definition, a third party can have no genuine purchase upon a two-party political system. Voting for a third party candidate in a two-party system is like arriving at a gunfight armed with a knife. A vote for a third party candidate in a major American election is, at best, a weak gesture of protest. Of course, one can always pretend to have a multi-party political system in the United States, but to do so would be to live in a fantasy world. Just as I am not advocating the repetitive behavior that proverbially defines insanity, I am not advocating electoral self-delusion. I am writing to counsel the abandonment of those kinds of behaviors—if possible, once and for all. I am counseling sanity.

Sanity resides in the dismantling of the two-party political system. The difficulty that the American people face with regard to this challenge—besides the obvious difficulty of out-maneuvering the lawyers, guns, and money of the power elite—is that, since this system evolved in the relative silence of the Constitution upon the conduct of electoral politics in the United States, there is no Constitutional mechanism in place to end what Howard Zinn rightly termed the “duopoly.” The American electorate cannot go to the polls in November and “vote out” the two-party political system for the simple reason that electoral politics in the United States presumes that very system. Nor can the electorate effectively prevail upon Republicans and Democrats to dismantle the system themselves: to do so would be to ask them to commit political and professional suicide and is not, therefore, a serious option. It is interesting to note, however, that when the elected representatives of those two parties—I do not say the elected representatives of the people, but of those parties—feel the “heat” of the public’s dissatisfaction with the system, they inevitably feign frustration with “partisan politics” and give lip-service to the need for “greater bi-partisanship.” The irony of this rhetoric is that there is far too much “bi-partisanship” in American politics today. What we need is a new political pluralism that will fairly represent (and thereby enfranchise) the increasingly diverse interests of the American people.

We are stuck then. Trapped. We have created a Leviathan in the two-party system and are now completely in its thrall. I would like to suggest otherwise but I believe that, to do so, would be dishonest. Our options are really quite limited. Now, it is true that, by virtue of a twisted and de-historicized reading of the Second Amendment of the Constitution, the people of this country do have the option of arming themselves and marching on Washington. That would result, however, in a blood bath and no change. Despite the assertions of right wing gun enthusiasts, no amount of firepower in the hands of U.S. citizens could match the U.S. military’s ability to quell any armed rebellion in this country. Remember: I am counseling sanity. The lunatic fantasies of the militia movement (or, to shift to the “progressive” side of the political spectrum, the now-defunct Weather Underground) will get us nowhere.

Our only genuine options are what I would call “metapolitical.” They are both moral and non-violent. And they center on the one instrument that has proved effective, historically, in the hands of any people with democratic aspirations who face a powerful, entrenched, and violent minority: the general strike.

I recognize that this was the preferred tactic of the Occupy Movement. I also recognize that the Occupy Movement’s employment of this tactic has, thus far, failed. Sorry: it needs to be said. But the general strike—if not the Occupy Movement itself—has history on its side. What it needs is to be directed to the heart of the problem: the Leviathan itself—the elite authorized and financed Democan-Republicrat duopoly. The question that Progressives face in 2012 is how to apply the technique of the general strike to the political system itself.

Here is my proposal: a national movement to generate a “Vote of No Confidence” in the political system as presently arranged. This November, instead of going to the polls to ratify the two-party system’s continued stranglehold upon American democratic aspirations, the American people should go on strike. Not from their jobs or their classrooms, necessarily—although that, too, would send a message. No, what I have in mind is something different: we should go on strike from voting. Speaking personally, I have voted in every Presidential election since I first became eligible to do so in 1980. But, in 2012—nine Presidential election cycles later—I have finally decided to take the cure: I wish to be delivered from my own proverbial insanity. I argue, therefore, that we should begin now to organize “non-voter drives”—knocking on our neighbor’s doors and urging them to stay at home on Election Day as a form of popular revolt against the political system as it stands. Politics as usual must come to a halt. In accordance with the 9th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution—the Amendment which assures us that the explicit language of that document does not exhaust the fund of rights inherent in the American people themselves—we have it within our power to refuse to participate in a system that no longer belongs to the vast majority of us: a system which belongs, instead, to the very wealthy and politically connected. In my view, 9th Amendment power is, really, the only potentially effective power that the vast majority retains. If the people desire systemic change, they must exercise what effective power they have—and they should do so consciously, according to principle, vocally, and en masse.

Now, this should not be too difficult. After all, the number of Americans who actually go to the polls in any given election, compared to the numbers who are eligible to vote, is not impressive. Over the past half century, doing the math yields a statistic that has hovered in the range of 50-55 percent. Not surprisingly, it is the duopoly that strenuously encourages and facilitates voter turnout. The reason that it does so (as with everything else it does) is self-serving: on the day after the election, the two parties want their victorious members to be able to claim the popular legitimacy necessary to govern in a democracy.

I say: the time has come to refuse them that legitimacy and to provoke an electoral crisis that would bring into bold relief the Constitutional crisis under which our system has labored, without acknowledgment, for the past two centuries. All patriotic fantasies about the godlike foresight of the Founding Fathers aside, the U.S. Constitution is a human, all-too-human, document in need of repair. The primary obligation of Progressives in 2012 is to provoke a national conversation about (1) the evolution of our political system in the absence of clear Constitutional directives, (2) how that system obstructs and enervates American democracy, and (3) where to go from here. The way to do that, in my view, is to reduce voter turnout in November to well below 50% of registered voters. I would like to see voter turnout as low as it can possibly go—which I imagine to be in the teens.

Think about it: a government elected by, say, 12% of registered voters—that would represent an even lower percentage of the actual number of Americans of voting age. Those elected would have the legal right to govern, but they would lack all political and moral legitimacy. The system itself would be rebuked. A cloud hanging over the government, a crisis of legitimacy would ensue. A general voter’s strike would finally give the American people some leverage over Leviathan.

If such a crisis could be provoked, then it is my hope that, in its wake, my fellow Americans might begin to dream again about what a functioning democracy actually looks like. In the process, I would also hope that they might embrace the notion of a vigorous, Constitutionally authorized, multi-party democracy like those enjoyed by the citizens of democratic polities throughout the world.

Of course, I am not so naïve as to think that the mere multiplication of political parties will achieve the objective of placing power in the hands of the American people; for so long as the political system itself is financially underwritten by the power elite, two parties or two dozen parties will not provide the genuine change that is needed. Consequently, the Constitution must also be amended in such a way as to finally strip our politics of “hard” money and “soft” favors. Naturally, the Constitutional abrogation of the anti-democratic Citizens United decision of 2010 is only part of the process I am contemplating. The financing of the American political system requires not reform but a complete, top-to-bottom overhaul. Those who enter “public service” in order to create or augment a personal fortune ought not only to be disappointed: they should be considered enemies of the people and treated accordingly under federal criminal law.

Politics as usual will not produce the radical overhaul necessary to wrest the American electoral process from the hands of the power elite. There can be no compromise with the two-party system: it must be dismantled completely and with prejudice. The place to begin this demolition project is the popular de-legitimation of the existing, anti-democratic power structure. Under the 9th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the legitimacy of any power structure in the United States not specifically defined in, or provided for, by the Constitution, reposes in the people. If we, the people, choose not to use our right to confer or withhold legitimacy on any given, extra-Constitutional power structure (such as the two-party system), we have no one to blame for the sorry state of our nation and our politics but ourselves.

If self-identifying political Progressives lack the stomach for this kind of non-violent, counter-intuitive, guerrilla action against the system that perennially stifles their most noble dreams and aspirations, then the proverbial definition of insanity will remain their lot. Deny it, as they will, all their remonstrations to the contrary will be, to this writer’s ears at least, little more than the ravings of the mad.

Remember the sage observation of Emma Goldman:

Some Vital Statistics

Voter turnout in American Presidential elections.

A Guest Lecture

Noam Chomsky on the history of the American ruling class's relationship to education.

The Noose

In 1956, the sociologist C. Wright Mills published his now classic study, The Power Elite. Mills was, as I say, a sociologist. In other words, he was a student of present social conditions in the United States--a present that is, today, close to 60 years in the past. Let us attend to the United States he described for us so long ago:

"The economy--once a great scatter of small productive units in autonomous balance--has become dominated by two or three hundred giant corporations, administratively and politically interrelated, which together hold the keys to economic decisions."

"The political order, once a decentralized set of several dozen states with a weak spinal cord, has become a centralized, executive establishment which has taken up into itself many powers previously scattered, and now enters into each and every cranny of the social structure."

"The military order, once a slim establishment in a context of distrust fed by state militia, has become the largest and most expensive feature of government, and, although well versed in smiling public relations, now has all the grim and clumsy efficiency of a sprawling bureaucratic domain."

"As each of these domains becomes enlarged and centralized, the consequences of its activities become greater, and its traffic with the others increases. The decisions of a handful of corporations bear upon military and political as well as upon economic developments around the world. The decisions of the military establishment rest upon and grievously affect political life as well as the very level of economic activity...There is no longer, on the one hand, an economy, and, on the other hand, a political order containing a military establishment unimportant to politics and to money-making. There is a political economy linked, in a thousand ways, with military institutions and decisions...If there is government intervention in the corporate economy, so is there corporate intervention in the governmental process. In the structural sense, this triangle of power is the source of the interlocking directorate that is most important for the historical structure of the present."

NOTES:

1. All of the above quotations are from C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, Oxford: Oxford University Press (1956), pp. 7-8.

2. The phrase "interlocking directorate" is a technical term in sociology for "the noose that was placed around your neck when you were born."

3. In the nearly six decades that have come and gone since Mills made these salient observations, the noose that he described has only tightened.

4. If you believe that you can somehow conduct your life unaffected by the fact that you rise from bed each morning with such a noose pulled tight around your neck, you have fully accepted the condition that Etienne de la Boetie described as "voluntary servitude." You are, in effect, a willing slave.

5. The noose is ordinarily employed as a leash. Only if one steps out of line does it become a hang-man's rope. Your willing compliance is what is wanted, not your execution. A dead slave is to no one's advantage.

6. "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Domestic Counter-Insurgency

Success is a funny thing. It fathers humility on some, arrogance on others. By the year 2007, the ruling class of the United States had become giddy with its successful run of damage control. Concessions that had been made throughout the first 3/4 of the 20th century to members of the lower and middle classes, to women and people of color, to immigrants and ethnic and religious minorities--concessions forced through political activism in American schools, churches, factories, and streets--had been slowly rolled back during the final 1/4 of that fateful century--thanks, in large part, to the election in 1980 of Ronald Reagan.

Some slight amelioration of those regressive trends had been effected during the two terms of the Clinton Administration, but, by and large, Clinton and Gore had demonstrated to the militarized corporatocracy that they had no intention of altering the power-sharing arrangement of the Republicrat-Democan duopoly. Furthermore, they were personally invested in the economic basis of the American ruling class: Clinton as a nouveau riche member of the establishment, Gore, the son of a U.S. Senator, as something of an "old money" Southern patrician. In any case, their two terms in office provide ample evidence that they had no intention of biting the corporate hands that fed them.

Little wonder, then, that the theft of the election of 2000 by the Bush family in Florida hit Al Gore like a ton of bricks. Had the previous eight years not amply proved to the more arrogant (not to say paranoid) elements of the ruling class that he could be counted on? What more did they want from him? He was entitled, damn it! Just as George H. W. Bush had been entitled after eight years of Ronald Reagan.

Alas, when you bed down with thieves you had better be prepared to awaken one fine morning with your boon companions gone and your purse and spurs with them. Be thankful on that morning if you awaken at all: for your throat is likely to be cut as part of the bargain. In the wake of his betrayal, Al Gore, as so many Americans before him, turned for solace to the Dream Factories of Hollywood and, lo and behold, was presented with the consolation prize of an Academy Award (2007). The Nobel Peace Prize Committee also contributed further reassurances (2007). If you keep your mouth shut, the plutocracy takes care of its own. Witness the Prize bestowed upon the current occupant of the Oval Office, Barack Hussein Obama (2009). Consider the award of those two Peace Prizes in light of the fact that Mahatma Gandhi, the non-violent liberator of the Indian sub-continent, was never awarded one.

But let us return to 2007. For after stealing the election of 2000 and very possibly repeating that crime through vote tampering in southern Ohio in 2004, the Bush-Cheney White House's signature combination of arrogance, naked greed, and incompetence had finally soured the mood of a significant percentage of the American electorate. People were genuinely angry with the state of the nation and began to question the prerogatives of the ruling class. At that point, the business of damage-control-as-usual would no longer suffice. The corporatocracy understood that something had to be done: and it would have to be something both daring and decisive.

And what they chose to do was both daring and decisive.

Now, in retrospect, the meteoric political rise of Barack Obama ought not to have surprised anyone. After all, he had been groomed in some of the most distinguished institutions of higher education that the American ruling class provides to its members (Columbia University and Harvard Law School). Moreover, his family background is obscure and there have been suggestions of parental involvement with the Central Intelligence Agency. But his vetting by the Chicago Democratic Party's political machine--the same political machine that helped to undermine the Presidential bid of one of the very few establishment candidates ever to present a genuine threat to the status quo, George McGovern (1972)--ought to have set off bells of alarm.

Only it didn't--or couldn't--because of the brilliant way in which the corporatocracy branded Obama, taking advantage of his race, his vague, childhood experience with Islam in Indonesia (a non-Arab Muslim majority country with a ruling class that has deep and firm ties to the U.S. corporatocracy), personal charisma, and the blinding determination of people throughout the United States to effect authentic political change. In 2007, no one--absolutely no one--in the political class of this country presented better credentials as Agent-of-Change-in-Chief than Barack Hussein Obama.

And that is precisely the wager that the ruling class made in order to accomplish its stunning victory in the domestic counter-insurgency operation of 2007-2008. As the architects of the counter-insurgency divined, no one would suspect Obama of being the savior of the power elite. Indeed, to this day, despite a term in office that has been, by any standard, astonishing in its slavish devotion to the prerogatives of Wall Street and the Military-Industrial complex, many middle class Americans, cut off from reality by their enduring hatred for the man--a hatred that I presume to be racist to the core--accuse him of being a "socialist" or "crypto-Muslim" (terms that denote, in the topsy-turvy Wonderland world of Tea Party members and fellow travelers, "anti-American"). Would that Obama had such tendencies in his personality: they would make him a far more interesting and thoughtful politician. Instead, he has consistently demonstrated himself to be something much less attractive: a condottiero of the ruling class.

So all the Tea Partyesque noise and stink about Obama as a "leftist" and a "traitor" is subterfuge. It is designed to prop up support for him among the more sensible and well-meaning elements of the American body-politic and allow them to overlook the painfully obvious evidence of his true Presidential legacy: more ruling class damage control. Greater disenfranchisement of the poor, of people of color (ironically), and of the middle class. For as long as Obama retains the good-will of those who might potentially object to the continuing disenfranchisement of the so-called "99%," it can proceed according to schedule.

The most important component of this counter-insurgency operation has yet to be made explicit: Obama (to whom we might as well refer from now on as "Obamney") is just the counter-insurgency's poster child. The real weapon that the ruling class used against a discontented populace was its most ingenious one: the ballot box.

Damage Control

Let us, then, consider our present situation.

The United States has a "two-party" system of government. Where has this state of affairs been legislated? Search the U.S. Constitution: you will find no mention of the "two-party" system. In fact, you will find no mention of any system of political parties anywhere in that document. This is because the framers of the Constitution, in their "infinite wisdom," wished to spare this nation the troubles that they associated with party politics.

This is not as noble as it sounds. The truth is that the framers of the Constitution did not trust democracy: their opposition to political parties was an expression of elite (not "enlightened") self-interest. Remember that the framers were landed gentry. They did not believe that an urban rabble of middle class renters could be trusted to act in their own "best interests"--and they were quite certain that, given the chance, the rabble would not act in the best interests of the framers themselves. So they provided for a paternalistic electoral college to intervene on behalf of the political elite should democracy endanger its interests. And they omitted any mention of political parties in the country's founding document.

Things went quite smoothly for a short while: until republican democracy reared its ugly head in the form of Thomas Jefferson's opposition party (the virile ancestor of today's Democratic Party).

Now, you may ask yourself: how could Jefferson have founded an "opposition party" in a party-less political system? Great question. The answer is that there was a "party" in place--the ruling party--only its members never referred to themselves as a "party" and, probably, did not think of themselves as such. As far as they were concerned, they were simply in charge. They had instigated the revolution against the British crown--some had even fought in the war. They had formed the government and had taken positions within it. There was no party, only a ruling class. And there would be no parties--especially no "opposition parties" composed of the unfiefed--so long as they all stuck together and watched each others back.

Jefferson turned out to be a wild card. He was an anomaly. He was Virginia gentry, but his imagination had been fired by radical Jacobin ideals imported from France. He believed in democracy and the fairly even distribution of what Noam Chomsky calls "Cartesian common sense"--at least among white males. And it was this common sense and not property ownership that, in his view, entitled an individual to a share in governance. He saw the political potential of the "great unwashed" and turned to them to form his opposition "party of the people." This move infuriated the likes of Alexander Hamilton but, once the bottle was opened, the genie was out; now the only option left the ruling class was to engage in damage control.

There is no need to rehearse the complicated history of party politics in the United States any further except, perhaps, to say that, over the course of the last two centuries, the efforts of the ruling class to control the damage wrought by Jefferson's "radicalism" have been largely successful. In the year 2012 of the Common Era, two parties (and only two parties) control the political life of over 300 million people. Their "opposition" to one another has become the set piece of American political theater, but lacks any genuine substance. The ruling class is no longer the "landed gentry" but a militarized corporatocracy. As a consequence, this is what "damage control" looks like in 2012:

Do not be fooled by the public theatrics of our professional political class. Whenever you see Republicans and Democrats posturing about their differing political positions, recognize that what you are in fact witnessing is ELITE DAMAGE CONTROL.

Or, in the alternative, the "theater of the corrupt." The players in this drama--Republican and Democrat alike--share a common political philosophy of "Anglo-American Whig liberalism" (Michael Lind, The Next American Nation, 273) that promotes capitalist corporate welfare at home, military adventurism and imperialism abroad. The two parties are wholly owned subsidiaries of a corporatocracy that is staffed by individuals who fully subscribe to Whig liberalism. If you don't believe me, review the public records of monetary contributions made to the campaigns of candidates for both parties in any election cycle. You will notice that the same donors routinely appear in the lists providing financial support to candidates of BOTH parties. This is true in elections on the local, State, and Federal levels. And these are just the disclosed "hard dollars." Our political system is awash in "hard" dollars and "soft" favors--I.O.U.'s as it were, collected by the lobbyist-donors in the form of enabling legislation, executive orders, court decisions, no-bid contracts, etc.

As if this were not problematic enough, the Whig liberals serving as Justices on the United States Supreme Court have declared that monetary contributions made by business corporations to political candidates represent Constitutionally protected "free speech" (the infamous Citizens United decision of 2010).

What more can one say? The principle of "one citizen, one vote" has finally been exposed, pragmatically, as a fraud: the emperor of American democracy has no clothes.

In the year 2012, the two-party system of the United States does not enact a democratic polity so much as contain one.