Presidential Elections: "If Voting Were Important"

Presidential Elections: “If Voting Were Important”

P. Schultz

            Although we Americans like to think that our presidential elections are important events, even perhaps the most important democratic political events in our political order, it is difficult to make that case. Below is a list of those presidential elections in my lifetime that I would rank as meaningless from the viewpoint of facilitating political change. That is, in these presidential elections little or nothing changed and/or the established political class – which of course encompasses the ruling cliques of both political parties – was further entrenched or fortified. These elections are:

1956, 1964, 1968, 1972, 1980, 1984, 1988, 1992, 1996, 2004, 2012, and probably 2016 should Clingon II be elected, as seems certain.

            In other words, in 12 of the 15 presidential elections that have occurred in my lifetime, nothing or very little changed or the established political class used the election to fortify its power.

            So why is it that we Americans like to think that our presidential elections are important political events? One could say that even though these elections were in fact as I describe them, they were still important political events not because of the change they facilitated but, rather, because of the change they prevented. These elections have become, with a few exceptions, another way for the established political class to fortify the status quo.

            This phenomenon is visible, say, in the election of 1968, when Richard Nixon was elected president and continued waging war in Southeast Asia for four more years, pretty much as LBJ had been waging it previously. It is also visible even in 1980 when Ronald Reagan was elected president and the Democrats pretty much folded up their tents in order to restore the political order that had been temporarily short circuited by the election of Jimmy Carter in 1976. The fabled “Reagan Revolution” was really little more than a “Reagan Restoration.”

            The myth though about our presidential elections being important harbingers of change, change that reflects the wishes and desires of the people, is an all-important myth. It is how we convince ourselves that we live in a democracy, where politics reflects the will of the people and not the will of the elected few who control the levers of power. Mark Twain, who once said, “If voting were important, they wouldn’t let us do it,” had it partly right. For although voting could be important, it isn’t, which is why they let us do it.

           

American Apartheid: The Times They Are A' Changin'

American Apartheid: The Times They Are A’ Changin'

P. Schultz

            “It’s” all unraveling. The American apartheid regime, instituted in the midest of what was and is called “the civil rights revolution” of the 60’s, is unraveling, is coming apart at the seams and it is unclear what is to replace it. What seems clear is that there is no “Nelson Mandela” on the horizon to try to put things back together again.

            From the presidencies of JFK and LBJ, despite their good intentions and best efforts, policies of occupation, surveillance, incarceration, and deadly force have been used to defuse what in the 60’s was seen as coming explosions in our “inner cities.” Unfortunately, such explosions did happen, in Detroit, Newark, Washington, D.C., and Watts, which led to the fortification and extension of these policies of occupation, surveillance, incarceration, and deadly force. Moreover, as these explosions occurred, the softer sides of these policies, occupation and surveillance by social workers, were compromised and made to look naïve and unrealistic. The darker side of the American apartheid took over as the war on poverty morphed into the war on crime, fueled by disguised racist sentiments such as Daniel Moynihan’s “tangle of [black] pathologies” that made it seem clear that the potential explosions could only be controlled by increasingly nationalistic and militaristic policies.

            As should not have surprised anyone, however, such policies were bound to fail as the occupied, the surveilled, the incarcerated, and the threatened would rebel eventually. And “eventually” has arrived, as illustrated by the phrase and movement, “Black Lives Matter.” This is, it seems to me, a rebellion and, insofar as it is, the police will not be able to suppress it, no matter how thoroughly militarized or “professionalized” they might become. Rebellions are political phenomena and require political responses if they are to be defused or pacified. And political responses, to be adequate, have to address issues of justice, issues of accountability, and issues of class.

            As Bob Dylan once sang:

“Come senators, congressmen please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt will be he who has stalled
There's a battle outside and it's ragin'
It'll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls
For the times they are a' changin'!”

What the Anti-Federalists Knew

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What the Anti-Federalists Knew

P. Schultz

            As our national situation seems to be descending into violence, both official and “unofficial,” it is worthwhile to recall or recognize that when the Constitution was being debated in 1787 and 1788, those called “the Anti-Federalists” predicted just such an outcome as we are witnessing should that constitution be ratified. For example, some Anti-Federalists predicted that armies of national officials, both military and civilian, would swarm over the land, invading citizens’ privacy and forcing them to obey the laws.

            What underlay these Anti-Federalist arguments were some rather simple propositions: (1) Human beings have a choice to make, either found their governments on consent or on force. (2) The only realistic foundation for what the Anti-Federalists called “the consolidated government” prefigured by the Constitution was force, not consent. Such a government would be too “distant” from the people, i.e., “distant” both geographically and psychologically, for the people to obey the laws voluntarily. As I use to say to students to illustrate this argument: “Think of the differences between ‘The Andy Griffith Show’ and ‘Law and Order’ regarding ‘law enforcement.’ Whereas in Mayberry, no one needed a gun, in New York City it often seemed like an army of occupation was needed to keep the peace.”

            Those forces we call “the police” are, of course, actually military forces. They wear uniforms, they carry weapons, and they are authorized to employ “deadly force” in order to execute the laws. Whereas Mayberry could be governed without such a force, no large city or metropolitan area could be. Consent or force: That’s the choice, always and everywhere.

            Not surprisingly then, we were better off as a people before “the feds,” agents of our “consolidated government,” got involved in law enforcement. We were safer as well, both physically and politically. Beginning with President Kennedy and ever since, law enforcement has been nationalized and, as a result, increasingly militarized. As I read human history, militarization via occupation, surveillance, and the use of deadly force always leads to resistance, always leads to civil unrest, as people seek to protect themselves from the occupiers and seek to preserve some degree of freedom. So we can, as a nation, go on as we have since the 60’s or we can choose a different road. Consent or force: That’s still the choice, always and everywhere.

Democratic Awakenings

Democratic Awakenings

P. Schultz

            Matt Taibbi has a marvelously revealing article in the latest edition of Rolling Stone magazine in which he argues that the establishment oligarchs, who are railing against Trump mightily, will use the Trump candidacy to further their power and further compromise popular government. “Trump is going to lose this election, then live on as the reason for an emboldened, even less-responsive oligarchy. And you thought this election season couldn't get any worse.”

            Taibbi has hit the nail on its head. And he could have pointed out that such a response is nothing new. In the 70’s, after Nixon’s Watergate meltdown, after the debacle in Vietnam, after revelations about the fact that the CIA was not only engaged in all kinds of assassination attempts overseas but was also spying on American citizens in dissent, there was another democratic awakening. One result of this awakening led to the presidency of Jimmy Carter, who was promptly and without much fanfare destroyed politically – with him helping out those who would destroy him.

            But take note of how this democratic awakening was described by the established oligarchy, including the media. In its 1976 special edition, Newsweek said that “Americans are sunk in malaise.” The New York Times said that Americans were suffering from “self-doubts uncharacteristic of the nation.” In other words, as Walter Karp put it, “The democratic awakening, in short, is a spiritual disease.” [Liberty Under Siege, p. 7] The people’s response to the debacle in Nam, that is, a refusal “to go abroad in search of monsters to destroy” was labeled “post-Vietnam trauma” and the “Vietnam syndrome,” something we needed to “kick,” as Bush the First put it after Desert Storm. For Henry Kissinger, the American people were in a “Spenglerian gloom” and had lost their “will and resolve.”

            Even the popular response to Watergate was referred to as “post-Watergate morality,” as if “popular lawfulness [was] yet another spiritual illness of the people.” Post-Watergate there was, it was claimed, a great “appetite for scandalous implication” and vigilance and mistrust of government officials was deemed a vice. One eminent social scientist feared that “popular participation in public affairs [was] a menace to ‘constitutional democracy.’” The same eminence also concluded that “we [the American people] [were] becoming moralistic and extreme in our politics.”

            These “blatherings” led Karp to ask: “How is it that the democratic awakening can be so readily distorted and reviled?” It is time, or will be very soon, to raise this question again when the oligarchic establishment once again asserts itself after November 2016.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/in-response-to-trump-another-dangerous-movement-appears-20160630#ixzz4DbujG8p7
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What Were We Witnessing? Iraq's WMDs

What Were We Witnessing? Iraq’s WMDs

P. Schultz

            The following is based on a reading of Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA, where Weiner quotes George Tenet, once head of the CIA, as saying that the agency was wrong on its conclusions that Iraq had WMDs not because of “’political reasons or a craven desire to lead the country to war,’” but because of its incompetence. “’We didn’t get the job done.’”

            Let me propose an alternative to Tenet’s claim that it was “incompetence” that led the CIA astray, viz., that it was the very “competence” of the agency’s experts that led it astray.

            It is, in some senses, too easy an assessment to attribute this failure to incompetence, which leads to the conclusions that “mistakes were made” and, in the future with better agents, these could and would be corrected. These “mistakes” were not endemic but aberrations and, therefore, easily correctible. The harder assessment of this failure rejects incompetence as the cause or, put differently, looks further into this incompetence and finds a critique of experts and expertise. It asks: What do experts see? How do they see? Does an American who is an expert on, say, Iraq actually understand, know, or see Iraq by virtue of her expertise?

            Experts are focused; they only see parts of the phenomena that are in front of them. So consider: Some experts, intelligence experts in the CIA, are assigned to determine if Iraq possesses WMDs. That is their focus; that is what they are looking for, signs of WMDs, and so they focus their seeing on such signs. And if they find such signs, that constitutes success. They have successfully completed their assignment, proving that they are, in fact, experts.

            And ask yourself: What would happen to the bona fides of these experts were they to say, “We found no signs of WMDs,” and then there turned out to be such weapons, discovered when they were used? It is fair to say that their bona fides, their expertise, would vanish into the thin air. They would lose their authority as experts. And so experts are inclined, when asked to look for signs of WMDs, to find signs that such weapons exist. That result is safer, both for the enemies of those alleged to possess such weapons and for the experts themselves, as it protects their status, their authority, their professionalism.

            We have the idea that experts are concerned with, as Joe Friday would say, “Just the facts, ma’am, just the facts.” That is, we think there are no incentives for experts to interpret “just the facts” in controversial ways. But that isn’t the case at all. Intelligence experts have incentives to find “the intelligence” they are looking for, to find signs of the phenomena thought to be hidden from view, at least from the view of non-experts. By finding such hidden phenomena, these experts prove their expertise, their professionalism, their competence. It is then their desire to succeed, to prove or demonstrate their competence that makes them, frequently, out of touch with the reality they claim to know, to see.

            So, if politicians or governments establish policies that are dependent on experts and expertise, the expectation should be that such policies will prove to be less than satisfactory because they will be, frequently, out of touch with reality. George Tenet was reputed to be a decent man and there seems to be no reason to doubt this reputation. But perhaps his decency was part of his shortcomings insofar as it led him to accept, as decent people do, what the experts told him. “My experts tell me it’s a slam dunk!” And if they tell him and us that, why doubt them?

So although it might seem and even might be indecent to say so, it should be said anyway: Decency and expertise are not enough, ever.

Post-Orlando: What Are We Witnessing?

Post-Orlando: What Are We Witnessing?

P. Schultz

            What are we witnessing transpiring in the United States these days? Could it be the culmination of our political order and could this culmination be indisguishable from a collapse, the inglorious end of what was to have been “national greatness?” At the end of WW II, such greatness seemed secured, as it did when the Soviet Union disappeared. Some even proclaimed “the end of history,” meaning the final and permanent triumph of “the American way.”

            It is difficult for many Americans to imagine that the end now in sight is an inglorious collapse rather than a glorious triumph. For the latter is how Americans have been taught to view themselves and their history, as participants in a story with a happy ending where all could revel in their virtue and the greatness that virtue created. So, to even suggest that our story doesn’t end that way, isn’t ending that way, seems unimaginable, even treasonous. To suggest such an ending seems, to borrow a word, “un-American.” You cannot be an American, a proper American, unless you embrace the national mythology according to which the American empire represents the culmination of those universal desires that when fulfilled raise humanity to its highest point.

            But it seems in light of certain recurring phenomena necessary to wonder whether the desires the American empire feeds off and draws strength from are those desires that raise up human beings, that make them and their souls the best they can be. For example, the violence that permeates our society, high and low, forces us to confront this possibility. When this violence is disguised as a “gun problem” or, more generally, as a problem requiring some policy or policies to be “solved,” it is easy to overlook the deeper implications of the mass killings that permeate our society. Or, a policy like our “war on drugs” only makes sense insofar as the use of drugs is treated superficially, i.e., without realizing that our “drug problem” is much more than that, that it is a reflection of a way of being in the world that is empty or without promise.

            How is it we have created a world that is permeated with violence, deadly violence, and with thrill-seeking but destructive drug use? These are phenomena that define us and, as such, they cannot be legislated away; in fact, they are not susceptible to control no matter who or which party wields the government’s power. As Sheriff Bell asserted [in No Country for Old Men]: “It takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people can’t be governed at all.”

            So, we are currently reaping our crop and, of course, we are reaping as we have sown. The only important question is: How have we sown, so as to make people good or to make people bad? Perhaps, though, we are where we are because we have forgotten that this is the only important question.  

Poor Trump: You've Been Played

Poor Trump: You’ve Been Played

P. Schultz

            Oh, poor Donald Trump. Apparently, he didn’t realize he was being played, being set up by the ruling class in order to fortify and even extend its power. And after 9/11, Bush’s fiasco in Iraq, the “great recession,” and the almost completely uninspiring and inconsequential presidency of Barack Obama, not to mention Bill Clinton and his impeachment, Trump is exactly what the established mainstream politicians needed to re-establish their “creds.”

            But now that Trump has secured the nomination, all of kinds of stuff will be dropped on “the Donald,” while he implodes, thereby ensuring his defeat in the upcoming presidential election. And having defeated Trump while elevating the utterly banal and mediocre Hillary Clinton to the presidency, the ruling elites will have gone a long way to re-legitimizing themselves by illustrating once again that there is only one kind of politics that “works,” viz., their kind of politics which, of course, serves their interests more than anyone else.

            We can all relax now because the ruling elites have “it” all in hand now and will, no doubt, prove as competent governing as they have in the past 25 years or so. And, lo and behold, by the time 2020 rolls around, we will be most grateful to those elites, even as they pick our pockets in order to pay for the wars that make them seem indispensable.