The U. S. Election of 2012

(The following is an extended and modified version of a talk given to the Southern Alberta Council on Public Affairs on Nov. 8, 2012)

Sound and Fury, Signifying What?: The Elusive Election Campaign of 2012 and the Fundamental Political Culture Behind It

The U. S. election of 2012 was very important – for what it prevented. It prevented the formulation of a U. S. Supreme Court that would have had a decided majority on the far right. That court would likely have wreaked havoc on women’s rights and affirmative action. That court almost certainly would have made necessary government regulations beyond the reach of Congressional legislation. The election possibly prevented a mindless assault on entitlement programs like Medicare and Medicaid. And, it prevented a new president with reckless and idiotic views on taxation and deficit-debt reduction from doing something that might have caused the Great Depression II.

Political vision and progressive reform were not victors in that election. Because Mr. Obama seemed to promise so much in 2008 (without specifying what grand visions he proposed to initiate), and because Mr. Obama stood in such sharp contrast to possibly the worst president in American History – George W. Bush, it was assumed that the differences in governance of Mr. Obama and the Democrats from the Republicans would be vast. He seemed to have a mandate, despite Republican control of the House of Representatives. Reform and reformers should have been in a position from 2009 forward that would have made Bill Clinton’s derisive mockery of the Republicans in 2012 -- “We left him a total mess, he hasn't finished cleaning it up yet, so fire him and put us back in” – the first, last, and only words necessary to re-elect Mr. Obama and the Democrats. They were not. Mr. Obama and the Democrats instead squandered their moral authority with modest accomplishments, timid compromises, and half measures. Aside from a modest stimulus, a no-brainer salvaging of the auto industry, and a confusing Affordable Health Care Act --- all of which merely represented shoring up private, consumer capitalism as it has been promoted by the Republicans during the last 30 years – Mr. Obama and the Democrats did not take on any massive re-working of the economy or initiate any substantial vision for the future.

Mr. Obama has been astoundingly vague and bland about the vision thing, allowing political low life like Sarah Palin to taunt him with comments like, “How is that hopey, changey thing going for you Mr. President.” Mr. Obama speaks with the glib solemn voice and tone of nineteenth-century politicos (not with an academic voice, as he is sometimes accused) about what Americans need and want and where the country should go. Bill Ivey, author of Handmaking America, a just published book that addresses the sorry matter of how directionless Americans have become, quotes an address the President Obama gave in 2010:

What has defined us as a nation since our founding is the capacity to shape our destiny – our determination to fight for the America we want for our children. Even if we’re unsure exactly what that looks like. Even if we don’t yet know precisely how we’re going to get there. We know we’ll get there.

How glib, how empty, how visionless, even how befuddled, are words like those. Ivey correctly calls this statement one of “vision vacuum” and “leaderly drift.”

The fact that Mr. Romney was even worse about vision and reform provides little comfort. His 2012 primary and general election campaign represented the most extreme use of delusion and flip-flopping that presidential politics has ever seen. He seemed to support both the most reactionary Republican positions on abortion and women’s rights to their own bodies while hinting that he would not actively promote the radical Republican campaign platform on which he was nominated. He promised to overhaul entitlements but to protect Medicare and Medicaid in manner that suggested a shell game. To further his shell game “now-you-see-it-now-you—don’t, he promised to lower the deficit while not raising taxes -- in fact lowering taxes by 20% on the middle class – although he offered no evidence as to how this would happen, despite the undisputed evidence of independent researchers that Mr. Romney’s numbers simply did not, and could never, add up. Chameleons would be embarrassed to be compared to Mr. Romney; they don’t change color that fast or often. It is no coincidence that “fact-checking” media, as re-reported by Michael Enright on the CBC program “Sunday Morning,” have determined that Mr. Romney’s campaign was filled with contextual lies, lies, and “pants on fire” lies in 46% of pro-Romney advertising; Mr. Obama’s campaign, it is sad to say, did so 28% of the time.

In short, neither Mr. Obama nor Mr. Romney offered anything approaching a vision for the future of the U. S.

It came as no real surprise, therefore, that they also dodged the issues. Because the economy and jobs are so important in the U. S. today, both candidates seemed to be focused in addressing economic matters almost exclusively in their campaigns. But did they? Mr. Obama talked about the past – saving the auto industry, and banks, and Wall Street. But what did he propose for the future? Almost nothing – no new stimulus, no new health care reform, no entitlement reform, etc. He promised, essentially, to “stay the course,” whatever that is. Paul Ryan, the Republican V.P. candidate, was right to challenge Mr. Obama by asking what would be different in the next four years if Mr. Obama was elected. He has not answered, and we do not know.

As I have already said, Mr. Romney dodged the issue of the economy even more, simply arguing by the end of the campaign that as a successful business man, his election would, in and of itself, instill confidence in American business and lead to the revival of the economy and the restoration of jobs in the old trickle down fashion Republicans have argued since the 1870s. David Brooks of the NYTimes, a usually intelligent if misguided analyst, declared without a shred of evidence that he thought Mr. Romney better able to make “big changes.” This was blind hope at its worst.

Look at what issues the candidates did not address at all. First, despite the fact that the campaign ended with an enormous super storm – “Sandy” – neither Mr. Obama nor Mr. Romney raised the issue of climate change, despite the fact that storms like this one are predicted as a likely consequence of ocean temperatures rising. Secondly, while the infrastructure of the U. S. crumbles, neither candidate this time around suggested a program or programs to address this matter. Dwight Eisenhower was a staunch private enterprise Republican who hated federal government spending, but even he suggested, and helped bring into existence a vast interstate highway system through a combined private-government effort. Thirdly, despite the blatant villainy of banks and Wall Street in initiating the economic crisis, and despite the fact that they were bailed out, neither campaign took up the public cry for new and necessary bank and Wall Street regulations. In the New Deal, some bankers and Wall Street criminals were at least prosecuted, and the public today would support such action if either party had courage enough to pursue those cases. Finally, they refused to mention the Supreme Court. The new president will be making swing vote appointments to the Supreme Court, meaning that court would have become radically right wing under Mr. Romney but now probably moderately centrist under Mr. Obama.  All of these, and other issues, are of immediate importance.

In short, both candidates either avoided the very big issues altogether or were glib about what they might do on the matters they did raise.

The candidates also campaigned locally to a very small sliver of the American electorate, those found in swing states. Among these, the states of Ohio, Florida, and Virginia received most of the attention, along with Colorado, and to a lesser extent Wisconsin. Why? Analysts tell us it is because all of the other regions of the U. S. were already decided, and they were already decided because like-minded voters have tended to clump together, either in large cities or gated communities, leaving whole states already secured in the pocket of one party or the other. Thus, presidential candidates have not even bothered to speak to the vast majority of American voters, except indirectly, and indirectly means glibly, without having to ponder regional and local matters of federal import.

The Electoral College, with its winner-take-all application in most states, is partly to blame. Remedies for that have been suggested but will unlikely pass since it is not in the interest of the dominant party in such states as California or Alabama to change it.

A culture of ideology -- which forms when social discourse has broken down and no good, pragmatic, workable ideas are available -- is also to blame for these two political worlds that do not meet and do not speak to one another. The goal of unrestrained, unregulated corporate capitalism became the real religion of most of America with the election of Ronald Reagan, who declared government to be the problem, not the solution. So, from the late 1980s onward, all Republicans and then, slowly, most Democrats subscribed to this new version of how economies are superior to societies and promoted again – as they had in the 1870s through the 1890s, and in the 1920s -- a kind of rugged individualistic, almost libertarian view of how life should be lived. Behind the scenes, modern, corporate capitalism and consumerism, which have infected almost every nook and cranny of public life, were the real benefactors.  The opposing ideology, of some Democrats, does little to challenge this Ayn Rand idea of laissez faire joined to hyper-individualism. But the only “liberal” thing left about the Democrats has flowed out of the “New Left” movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which disdained the old left’s concern for economic issues and instead promoted culture issues social liberation, including racial equality, women’s rights and equality, pro-choice, and the rights of the marginalized.

In other words, democratic dialogue has ended in the U. S., and it was astounding to watch Barack Obama spend his first four years trying to restore it among people who have not even begun to think outside their ideological boxes and move toward cooperation and compromise.

Lack of vision or major issues, and a campaign that addressed a small part of the electorate, did not lessen the ferocity of the campaign or its extraordinary cost. All of this reminded me of the politics of the Gilded Age (between the late 1870s and the late 1890s). In that period of poorly regulated industrial capitalism and unrestricted Wall Street power, the Democrats and the Republicans shared the same fundamental beliefs and interests. Both major parties supported the Robber Barons of industry. By the late 1880s, for example, John D. Rockefeller had bribed almost all of Pennsylvania’s legislators, including those of both parties. Pork barrel and earmarked legislation prevailed, as it has in our own time. Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney both have ties to Wall Street. Both parties are lobbied by the same financial interests, and both receive campaigning financing support from those interests. Therefore, Mr. Obama does not speak like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who, upon election in 1932, immediately pushed bank reform, condemned the “economic royalists,” proposed and had passed a “Wealth Tax,” spent enormous sums to employ the unemployed, and attacked the Supreme Court for its backward ideas and malicious obstructionism. Mr. Obama has preferred to fashion himself after Abraham Lincoln (a Republican), in his constant quest to shape his own personal character even though the urgent matter is the political, economic, and cultural condition of the U. S. as a whole. Mr. Romney, emulating the Rockefellers and Carnegies of the Gilded Age, has been more brazen and unapologetic, paying a mere 15% in taxes on his enormous wealth, and sending some of his assets to safe tax havens offshore.

In the Gilded Age, the narrowness in the essential differences between the two leading parties meant that elections were closely contested, and thus more angry and violent. In 1876, Rutherford B. Hayes, the Republican, gained fewer votes than his rival, Samuel Tilden, yet became president after a tangled and corrupt recount of votes (remember G. W. Bush and Al Gore in 2000, when Gore got a half million more popular votes than Bush but was defeated by a Supreme Court that ordered an end to the recount in Florida?). In 1880, Winfield Scott Hancock (Demo.) lost to James A. Garfield by .1% of the vote. In 1884, Grover Cleveland (Demo) beat James G. Blaine (Rep.) by .3%, after which Cleveland lost to Benjamin Harrison in 1888 despite beating Harrison by .8% in the popular vote. Then Cleveland came back in 1892 to be the only president to win a second term after losing the previous one, through a split election among the Democrats, Republicans, and Populists. The 2012 election looks like a comfortable win for Mr. Obama when one considers the electoral vote, but any examination of the popular vote, especially in swing states, shows that Mr. Obama’s two million odd majority was in fact a slender victory, not a mandate.

The big issues of the Gilded Age were the currency (hard or paper) and the tariff (high or moderate). (I once had to take a course on the currency and the tariff in this period in grad school :  at 8am!!). In other words, despite starving farmers, militant workers, rich new economic and social reform ideas, and cities and towns in disrepair, the Gilded Age only aroused currency and the tariff as central issues because both parties and their leaders were wedded to banks and Wall Street. Elections were tight because the two parties were so similar, or at least appeared to be. From 2000 to the present, elections have also been tight, but the candidates have not appeared to be all that different in where they are coming from and the extent of reforms and changes they propose.

So, both presidential candidates offered no vision, avoided some of the biggest issues of our time, campaigned narrowly, and, in kowtowing to the large financial interests of the U. S., presented themselves as latter-day Gilded Age politicians.

Why have we come to this state of affairs? What cultural underpinnings have brought us to this point of political stasis and compromised democracy? Let me offer three, sometimes linked, reasons.

I. The Tyranny of Corporatism

In the 1870s through the 1890s, and in the 1920s until the Great Depression, Americans embraced the rule of the unregulated corporate capitalism instead of democratic choice. After the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, first the Republicans and then many Democrats re-opened the pandora’s box of corporatism. The New Corporatism first promoted the view that privatization was usually superior to public ownership or control, and has now built to privatization always being superior to public ownership or control – of anything. Now there is no acknowledgement that anything falls within the public interest. Secondly, corporatism has come to claim that democracy succeeds to a free market system, that is, democracy is born from the free market and is dependent upon it. Therefore, as John Ralston Saul put it in his 1995 book, The Unconscious Civilization, “the citizen is reduced to the status of a subject at the foot of the throne of the marketplace.” (p.76) The marketplace is to be the eternal mother of democracy. All things flow from the economy, and all things are secondary to it. Thirdly, corporatism holds that individualism is the most important thing to be protected, in fact, almost the only thing to be protected. Again, as Saul has said, “There are those who talk about individualism as if it were a replacement for government.” (p. 73). The individual, unencumbered by society and government, is trumpeted as the hero of a mythical corporatist world. Corporatism even suggests, in contradiction of thousands of years of intellectual reflection on the nature of society, that the individual and their families are the only reality, with society being a mere fiction.

This time around, corporatism has not meant economic corporations and businesses exclusively. This time, corporatism is more total, including big labor unions, whether auto workers or teachers; the media, which seeks truth second, if at all, to satisfying their advertisers and getting more of them; institutions of higher education, which seeks the shaping of students into able citizens and members of society second, if at all, to selling credentials for employment; and, organized radical religions, which sometimes proclaim that the only truth is the Bible, which somehow is made to comport with corporatist goals, “God’s Will,” which is used as a last retort to democratic action on any issue whatsoever. “We are – almost all of us – employees in some sort of corporation,” John Ralston Saul says, “public or private, . . . . [and as such our] primary obligation is loyalty to the corporation.” (p. 91).

The idea of a collective society, real and necessary, has largely been abandoned. How many times did you hear Mr. Obama or Mr. Romney use these phrases:  “the general welfare,” “the public interest,” “the public good,” “the common good,” or “the improvement of society as a whole.” Corporatists have conducted a long smear campaign against these phrases, suggesting that the public good is code for “big government spending, “liberalism,” or worse – “socialism,” or even worse than that – “communism,” and thereby have succeeded in repressing any viable notion of the public good. 

Meanwhile, the U.S.A., outside of this corporatist framework, exists primarily as a shell, its individuals alienated from nature and society alike. The United States of America languishes in emblematic form – as the American flag or Uncle Sam or the pledge of allegiance; or as a slogan – as “the greatest nation ever”; or as a chant at sporting contests -- “USA, USA, USA”; or as the leading military power in the world, able to impose “shock and awe,” even if directionless and impotent in creating peace, justice, and liberty.

II. “Entertaining Ourselves To Death”

   It is compulsory nowadays to first recognize every American election for what they have become:  day-after-day, month-after-month, sometimes year-after-year soap opera entertainments, or what media folks call, without apparent embarrassment, “horse race politics.”

“Horse Race Politics” are the consequence, in part, of fixed date elections, which allow parties and candidates to maintain permanent campaigns between elections. The rise of American popular political journalism in the 1790s, made even more loud and anxious over the last two centuries, has given us one political campaign after another of bombast, ballyhoo, and feigned importance. Modern factors have made matters worse. The rise of television, and even computer networking, has elevated things like a candidate’s “appearance” and “likeability” quotient into the most important elements in a campaign. In 1789, George Washington was elected the first president of the U. S. on the basis of his character; few would argue that he was likeable, personable, or attractive. The addition of PACs (Political Action Committees) in the 1970s and 1980s gave candidates access to “arms length” negative advertising whereby dubious “truths” taken out of context could be applied to one’s opponent. The U. S. Supreme Court’s decision in Citizen’s United v. Federal Election Commission in 2010 extended the recognition of corporations as citizens to include the 1^st Amendment free speech rights of individual citizens (for whom it was intended), thereby allowing even more enormous funding by PACs – at even further “arms length” from candidates – to say almost whatever they wanted about candidates. Of late, this decision seems to have further distended the idea of free speech, and who should have it, to allow employers to recommend strongly to their employees for whom they should vote (with all of the threats to advancement or employment that may imply).

The consequence of these developments has not been to create an electorate richly informed about candidates and politics, but to distort ideologies and issues and personal characteristics further. In the main, they have furthered a “dumbing down” in politics, or what Neil Postman called “entertaining ourselves to death” in his 1985 book of that title (Entertaining Ourselves to Death:  Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business). According to Postman, Americans have traded rights and responsibilities for medicated bliss. “Form” in the television age, he argued (and I’m certain he would agree, in the age of the internet and twitter), “excludes the content,” or, as Marshall McLuhan put it, “the medium is the message.” Any new edition of his book would have to have the title:  Entertained and Now Dead. The public is now fully anesthetized insofar as they pretend to be citizens.

III. The Myth of Exceptionalism

During his first term as president, Mr. Obama was accused by his opposition of “apologizing” for America abroad, and, of not believing in American “exceptionalism.” He campaigned doggedly to reverse that impression, often alluding to “America as the greatest nation,” one imbued with “exceptional” qualities and having an “exceptional” future.

“Exceptionalism” is, of course, code for, “we are better than everybody else”; if otherwise, Americans would readily admit that other nations are also “exceptional” in their own specific ways. They do not.

“Exceptionalism” also suggests that Americans have shared a culture amongst themselves apart from the rest of the world. They live in, and want to live in, an isolated culture. It began with John Winthrop telling the Puritans before arrival in New England that, they “would be as a City upon a Hill for all to see.” They were to be a religious example, a superior religious example. The American Revolution of 1776-1783 was fought by those who believed the U. S. to be more “virtuous” than England. Americans deluded themselves into believing that they were less corrupt and could be freer than any other people. Europe was their the evil, degenerate other (as it still is), thereby allowing Americans to forget that they won the Revolution in 1781 because of French military and supplies support. When Thomas Jefferson sent the Lewis and Clark expedition west, he envisioned an “empire of liberty,” unlike any other imperialist take over of land in history. The “Empire of Liberty” was justified imperialist conquest. Pretending that the west was uninhabited, or largely so, Americans later embraced the “Manifest Destiny” of their western settlement. Still later yet, during WWI, President Wilson proposed that only the U. S. could “make the world safe for democracy,” after which Americans proceeded to claim victory in WWII and the re-building of Europe as a consequence of their special genius and beneficence (which it partly was).

With the receding of America as a world empirical power, and with what I think is a retreat from military adventurism for the foreseeable future (as I argued upon Mr. Obama’s election in 2008, and repeat here again), American exceptionalism seems to me an excuse for further isolation and isolationism from the outer world. But the increasingly lavish displays of American exceptionalism in all sorts of flag waving and other gestures, seems to me to be filled with fear as well as isolationim. Winthrop did not tell the Puritans on the ship the Arabella that they were to be a “City upon a Hill” because he thought they were morally stronger than other humans, but because he feared they were not. And, that unconscious fear seems to me to be the case with exceptionalism today.

What does this have to do with American politics? It means that image is vastly more important than reason, that politicians must always appeal to this now bizarre idea of exceptionalism, and that the scope for offering vision or new ideas is so limited as to strangle real democracy.

What do Americans need? They must restore some ideas about the public, collective good. Regulations and restraints will not be enough. Qualities of freedom joined to equality, of social community joined to opportunity, and of individual autonomy joined to public responsibility, must be established.

My next blog will attempt to address in more particular fashion, the new progressive era that must be established if the U. S. is not to languish as a riven, angry, alienated, dangerous nation.