[Media-watch] FW: Chomsky on 2004 Elections

[David Miller]

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From: "Ed Herman" 
Date: Thu, 2 Dec 2004 15:25:38 -0500

Subject: FW: Chomsky on 2004 Elections

Pretty long but enlightening.

 

Ed herman 

 

Subject: Chomsky on 2004 Elections

 
The 2004 Elections 
by Noam Chomsky 
 
The elections of November 2004 have received a great deal of discussion,
with exultation in some quarters, despair in others, and general lamentation
about a "divided nation." They are likely to have policy consequences,
particularly harmful to the public in the domestic arena, and to the world
with regard to the "transformation of the military," which has led some
prominent strategic analysts to warn of "ultimate doom" and to hope that US
militarism and aggressiveness will be countered by a coalition of
peace-loving states, led by - China! (John Steinbruner and Nancy Gallagher,
Daedalus). We have come to a pretty pass when such words are expressed in
the most respectable and sober journals. It is also worth noting how deep is
the despair of the authors over the state of American democracy. Whether or
not the assessment is merited is for activists to determine.

Though significant in their consequences, the elections tell us very little
about the state of the country, or the popular mood. There are, however,
other sources from which we can learn a great deal that carries important
lessons. Public opinion in the US is intensively monitored, and while
caution and care in interpretation are always necessary, these studies are
valuable resources. We can also see why the results, though public, are kept
under wraps by the doctrinal institutions. That is true of major and highly
informative studies of public opinion released right before the election,
notably by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations (CCFR) and the Program
on International Policy Attitudes at the U. of Maryland (PIPA), to which I
will return.

One conclusion is that the elections conferred no mandate for anything, in
fact, barely took place, in any serious sense of the term "election." That
is by no means a novel conclusion. Reagan's victory in 1980 reflected "the
decay of organized party structures, and the vast mobilization of God and
cash in the successful candidacy of a figure once marginal to the `vital
center' of American political life," representing "the continued
disintegration of those political coalitions and economic structures that
have given party politics some stability and definition during the past
generation" (Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers, Hidden Election, 1981). In the
same valuable collection of essays, Walter Dean Burnham described the
election as further evidence of a "crucial comparative peculiarity of the
American political system: the total absence of a socialist or laborite mass
party as an organized competitor in the electoral market," accounting for
much of the "class-skewed abstention rates" and the minimal significance of
issues. Thus of the 28% of the electorate who voted for Reagan, 11% gave as
their primary reason "he's a real conservative." In Reagan's "landslide
victory" of 1984, with just under 30% of the electorate, the percentage
dropped to 4% and a majority of voters hoped that his legislative program
would not be enacted.

What these prominent political scientists describe is part of the powerful
backlash against the terrifying "crisis of democracy" of the 1960s, which
threatened to democratize the society, and, despite enormous efforts to
crush this threat to order and discipline, has had far-reaching effects on
consciousness and social practices. The post-1960s era has been marked by
substantial growth of popular movements dedicated to greater justice and
freedom, and unwillingness to tolerate the brutal aggression and violence
that had previously been granted free rein. The Vietnam war is a dramatic
illustration, naturally suppressed because of the lessons it teaches about
the civilizing impact of popular mobilization.
 
The war against South Vietnam launched by JFK in 1962, after years of
US-backed state terror that had killed tens of thousands of people, was
brutal and barbaric from the outset: bombing, chemical warfare to destroy
food crops so as to starve out the civilian support for the indigenous
resistance, programs to drive millions of people to virtual concentration
camps or urban slums to eliminate its popular base. By the time protests
reached a substantial scale, the highly respected and quite hawkish Vietnam
specialist and military historian Bernard Fall wondered whether "Viet-Nam as
a cultural and historic entity" would escape "extinction" as "the
countryside literally dies under the blows of the largest military machine
ever unleashed on an area of this size" - particularly South Vietnam, always
the main target of the US assault. And when protest did finally develop,
many years too late, it was mostly directed against the peripheral crimes:
the extension of the war against the South to the rest of Indochina -
terrible crimes, but secondary ones.

* State managers are well aware that they no longer have that freedom. Wars
against "much weaker enemies" - the only acceptable targets -- must be won
"decisively and rapidly," Bush I's intelligence services advised. Delay
might "undercut political support," recognized to be thin, a great change
since the Kennedy-Johnson period when the attack on Indochina, while never
popular, aroused little reaction for many years. Those conclusions hold
despite the hideous war crimes in Falluja, replicating the Russian
destruction of Grozny ten years earlier, including crimes displayed on the
front pages for which the civilian leadership is subject to the death
penalty under the War Crimes Act passed by the Republican Congress in 1996 -
and also one of the more disgraceful episodes in the annals of American
journalism.

The world is pretty awful today, but it is far better than yesterday, not
only with regard to unwillingness to tolerate aggression, but also in many
other ways, which we now tend to take for granted. There are very important
lessons here, which should always be uppermost in our minds - for the same
reason they are suppressed in the elite culture. Returning to the elections,
in 2004 Bush received the votes of just over 30% of the electorate, Kerry a
bit less. Voting patterns resembled 2000, with virtually the same pattern of
"red" and "blue" states (whatever significance that may have). A small
change in voter preference would have put Kerry in the White House, also
telling us very little about the country and public concerns.

As usual, the electoral campaigns were run by the PR industry, which in its
regular vocation sells toothpaste, life-style drugs, automobiles, and other
commodities. Its guiding principle is deceit. Its task is to undermine the
"free markets" we are taught to revere: mythical entities in which informed
consumers make rational choices. In such scarcely imaginable systems,
businesses would provide information about their products: cheap, easy,
simple. But it is hardly a secret that they do nothing of the sort. Rather,
they seek to delude consumers to choose their product over some virtually
identical one. GM does not simply make public the characteristics of next
year's models. Rather, it devotes huge sums to creating images to deceive
consumers, featuring sports stars, sexy models, cars climbing sheer cliffs
to a heavenly future, and so on. The business world does not spend hundreds
of billions of dollars a year to provide information. The famed
"entrepreneurial initiative" and "free trade" are about as realistic as
informed consumer choice. The last thing those who dominate the society want
is the fanciful market of doctrine and economic theory. All of this should
be too familiar to merit much discussion.

Sometimes the commitment to deceit is quite overt. The recent US-Australia
negotiations on a "free trade agreement" were held up by Washington's
concern over Australia's health care system, perhaps the most efficient in
the world. In particular, drug prices are a fraction of those in the US: the
same drugs, produced by the same companies, earning substantial profits in
Australia though nothing like those they are granted in the US - often on
the pretext that they are needed for R&D, another exercise in deceit. Part
of the reason for the efficiency of the Australian system is that, like
other countries, Australia relies on the practices that the Pentagon employs
when it buys paper clips: government purchasing power is used to negotiate
prices, illegal in the US. Another reason is that Australia has kept to
"evidence-based" procedures for marketing pharmaceuticals.
 
US negotiators denounced these as market interference: pharmaceutical
corporations are deprived of their legitimate rights if they are required to
produce evidence when they claim that their latest product is better than
some cheaper alternative, or run TV ads in which some sports hero or model
tells the audience to ask their doctor whether this drug is "right for you
(it's right for me)," sometimes not even revealing what it is supposed to be
for. The right of deceit must be guaranteed to the immensely powerful and
pathological immortal persons created by radical judicial activism to run
the society. When assigned the task of selling candidates, the PR industry
naturally resorts to the same fundamental techniques, so as to ensure that
politics remains "the shadow cast by big business over society," as
America's leading social philosopher, John Dewey, described the results of
"industrial feudalism" long ago. Deceit is employed to undermine democracy,
just as it is the natural device to undermine markets. And voters appear to
be aware of it. 

On the eve of the 2000 elections, about 75% of the electorate regarded it as
a game played by rich contributors, party managers, and the PR industry,
which trains candidates to project images and produce meaningless phrases
that might win some votes. Very likely, that is why the population paid
little attention to the "stolen election" that greatly exercised educated
sectors. And it is why they are likely to pay little attention to campaigns
about alleged fraud in 2004. If one is flipping a coin to pick the King, it
is of no great concern if the coin is biased.

In 2000, "issue awareness" - knowledge of the stands of the
candidate-producing organizations on issues - reached an all-time low.
Currently available evidence suggests it may have been even lower in 2004.
About 10% of voters said their choice would be based on the candidate's
"agendas/ideas/platforms/goals"; 6% for Bush voters, 13% for Kerry voters
(Gallup). The rest would vote for what the industry calls "qualities" or
"values," which are the political counterpart to toothpaste ads. The most
careful studies (PIPA) found that voters had little idea of the stand of the
candidates on matters that concerned them. Bush voters tended to believe
that he shared their beliefs, even though the Republican Party rejected
them, often explicitly. Investigating the sources used in the studies, we
find that the same was largely true of Kerry voters, unless we give highly
sympathetic interpretations to vague statements that most voters had
probably never heard.

Exit polls found that Bush won large majorities of those concerned with the
threat of terror and "moral values," and Kerry won majorities among those
concerned with the economy, health care, and other such issues. Those
results tell us very little.

It is easy to demonstrate that for Bush planners, the threat of terror is a
low priority. The invasion of Iraq is only one of many illustrations. Even
their own intelligence agencies agreed with the consensus among other
agencies, and independent specialists, that the invasion was likely to
increase the threat of terror, as it did; probably nuclear proliferation as
well, as also predicted. Such threats are simply not high priorities as
compared with the opportunity to establish the first secure military bases
in a dependent client state at the heart of the world's major energy
reserves, a region understood since World War II to be the "most
strategically important area of the world," "a stupendous source of
strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history."
 
Apart from what one historian of the industry calls "profits beyond the
dreams of avarice," which must flow in the right direction, control over
two-thirds of the world's estimated hydrocarbon reserves - uniquely cheap
and easy to exploit - provides what Zbigniew Brzezinski recently called
"critical leverage" over European and Asian rivals, what George Kennan many
years earlier had called "veto power" over them. These have been crucial
policy concerns throughout the post-World War II period, even more so in
today's evolving tripolar world, with its threat that Europe and Asia might
move towards greater independence, and worse, might be united: China and the
EU became each other's major trading partners in 2004, joined by the world's
second largest economy (Japan), and those tendencies are likely to increase.
A firm hand on the spigot reduces these dangers.

Note that the critical issue is control, not access. US policies towards the
Middle East were the same when it was a net exporter of oil, and remain the
same today when US intelligence projects that the US itself will rely on
more stable Atlantic Basin resources. Policies would be likely to be about
the same if the US were to switch to renewable energy. The need to control
the "stupendous source of strategic power" and to gain "profits beyond the
dreams of avarice" would remain. Jockeying over Central Asia and pipeline
routes reflects similar concerns.

There are many other illustrations of the same lack of concern of planners
about terror. Bush voters, whether they knew it or not, were voting for a
likely increase in the threat of terror, which could be awesome: it was
understood well before 9-11 that sooner or later the Jihadists organized by
the CIA and its associates in the 1980s are likely to gain access to WMDs,
with horrendous consequences. And even these frightening prospects are being
consciously extended by the transformation of the military, which, apart
from increasing the threat of "ultimate doom" by accidental nuclear war, is
compelling Russia to move nuclear missiles over its huge and mostly
unprotected territory to counter US military threats - including the threat
of instant annihilation that is a core part of the "ownership of space" for
offensive military purposes announced by the Bush administration along with
its National Security Strategy in late 2002, significantly extending Clinton
programs that were more than hazardous enough, and had already immobilized
the UN Disarmament Committee.

As for "moral values," we learn what we need to know about them from the
business press the day after the election, reporting the "euphoria" in board
rooms - not because CEOs oppose gay marriage. And from the unconcealed
efforts to transfer to future generations the costs of the dedicated service
of Bush planners to privilege and wealth: fiscal and environmental costs,
among others, not to speak of the threat of "ultimate doom." That aside, it
means little to say that people vote on the basis of "moral values." The
question is what they mean by the phrase. The limited indications are of
some interest. In some polls, "when the voters were asked to choose the most
urgent moral crisis facing the country, 33 percent cited `greed and
materialism,' 31 percent selected `poverty and economic justice,' 16 percent
named abortion, and 12 percent selected gay marriage" (Pax Christi). In
others, "when surveyed voters were asked to list the moral issue that most
affected their vote, the Iraq war placed first at 42 percent, while 13
percent named abortion and 9 percent named gay marriage" (Zogby). Whatever
voters meant, it could hardly have been the operative moral values of the
administration, celebrated by the business press.

I won't go through the details here, but a careful look indicates that much
the same appears to be true for Kerry voters who thought they were calling
for serious attention to the economy, health, and their other concerns. As
in the fake markets constructed by the PR industry, so also in the fake
democracy they run, the public is hardly more than an irrelevant onlooker,
apart from the appeal of carefully constructed images that have only the
vaguest resemblance to reality.

Let's turn to more serious evidence about public opinion: the studies I
mentioned earlier that were released shortly before the elections by some of
the most respected and reliable institutions that regularly monitor public
opinion. Here are a few of the results (CCFR):

A large majority of the public believe that the US should accept the
jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court and the World Court, sign
the Kyoto protocols, allow the UN to take the lead in international crises,
and rely on diplomatic and economic measures more than military ones in the
"war on terror." Similar majorities believe the US should resort to force
only if there is "strong evidence that the country is in imminent danger of
being attacked," thus rejecting the bipartisan consensus on "pre-emptive
war" and adopting a rather conventional interpretation of the UN Charter. A
majority even favor giving up the Security Council veto, hence following the
UN lead even if it is not the preference of US state managers. When official
administration moderate Colin Powell is quoted in the press as saying that
Bush "has won a mandate from the American people to continue pursuing his
`aggressive' foreign policy," he is relying on the conventional assumption
that popular opinion is irrelevant to policy choices by those in charge.

It is instructive to look more closely into popular attitudes on the war in
Iraq, in the light of the general opposition to the "pre-emptive war"
doctrines of the bipartisan consensus. On the eve of the 2004 elections,
"three quarters of Americans say that the US should not have gone to war if
Iraq did not have WMD or was not providing support to al Qaeda, while nearly
half still say the war was the right decision" (Stephen Kull, reporting the
PIPA study he directs). But this is not a contradiction, Kull points out.
Despite the quasi-official Kay and Duelfer reports undermining the claims,
the decision to go to war "is sustained by persisting beliefs among half of
Americans that Iraq provided substantial support to al Qaeda, and had WMD,
or at least a major WMD program," and thus see the invasion as defense
against an imminent severe threat. Much earlier PIPA studies had shown that
a large majority believe that the UN, not the US, should take the lead in
matters of security, reconstruction, and political transition in Iraq.
 
Last March, Spanish voters were bitterly condemned for appeasing terror when
they voted out of office the government that had gone to war over the
objections of about 90% of the population, taking its orders from Crawford
Texas, and winning plaudits for its leadership in the "New Europe" that is
the hope of democracy. Few if any commentators noted that Spanish voters
last March were taking about the same position as the large majority of
Americans: voting for removing Spanish troops unless they were under UN
direction. The major differences between the two countries are that in
Spain, public opinion was known, while here it takes an individual research
project to discover it; and in Spain the issue came to a vote, almost
unimaginable in the deteriorating formal democracy here.

These results indicate that activists have not done their job effectively.

Turning to other areas, overwhelming majorities of the public favor
expansion of domestic programs: primarily health care (80%), but also aid to
education and Social Security. Similar results have long been found in these
studies (CCFR). Other mainstream polls report that 80% favor guaranteed
health care even if it would raise taxes - in reality, a national health
care system would probably reduce expenses considerably, avoiding the heavy
costs of bureaucracy, supervision, paperwork, and so on, some of the factors
that render the US privatized system the most inefficient in the industrial
world. 
 
Public opinion has been similar for a long time, with numbers varying
depending on how questions are asked. The facts are sometimes discussed in
the press, with public preferences noted but dismissed as "politically
impossible." That happened again on the eve of the 2004 elections. A few
days before (Oct. 31), the NY Times reported that "there is so little
political support for government intervention in the health care market in
the United States that Senator John Kerry took pains in a recent
presidential debate to say that his plan for expanding access to health
insurance would not create a new government program" - what the majority
want, so it appears. But it is "politically impossible" and has "[too]
little political support," meaning that the insurance companies, HMOs,
pharmaceutical industries, Wall Street, etc. , are opposed.

It is notable that such views are held by people in virtual isolation. They
rarely hear them, and it is not unlikely that respondents regard their own
views as idiosyncratic. Their preferences do not enter into the political
campaigns, and only marginally receive some reinforcement in articulate
opinion in media and journals. The same extends to other domains.

What would the results of the election have been if the parties, either of
them, had been willing to articulate people's concerns on the issues they
regard as vitally important?Or if these issues could enter into public
discussion within the mainstream?We can only speculate about that, but we do
know that it does not happen, and that the facts are scarcely even reported.
It does not seem difficult to imagine what the reasons might be.
 I brief, we learn very little of any significance from the elections, but
we can learn a lot from the studies of public attitudes that are kept in the
shadows. Though it is natural for doctrinal systems to try to induce
pessimism, hopelessness and despair, the real lessons are quite different.
They are encouraging and hopeful. They show that there are substantial
opportunities for education and organizing, including the development of
potential electoral alternatives. As in the past, rights will not be granted
by benevolent authorities, or won by intermittent actions - a few large
demonstrations after which one goes home, or pushing a lever in the
personalized quadrennial extravaganzas that are depicted as "democratic
politics." As always in the past, the tasks require day-to-day engagement to
create - in part re-create - the basis for a functioning democratic culture
in which the public plays some role in determining policies, not only in the
political arena from which it is largely excluded, but also in the crucial
economic arena, from which it is excluded in principle.
Noam Chomsky is the author of Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for
Global Dominance (now out in paperback from Owl/Metropolitan Books)


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