[Mb-civic] Noam Chomsky on The 2004 Elections

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

Noam Chomsky's writings are always a bit dense because they are 
packed with so much information and revelation....and this is a bit 
long...but well worth reading to expand understanding and vision...
________________________

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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