Elections Matter … Right?
Elections matter … Right?
from Peter Radford
Well, only if those being elected have an inkling of what their constituents actually want. And it seems that, here in America at least, there is a considerable gulf between what those who are elected think are the key issues and what those who do the electing think of as the key issues. The lack of overlap is distinctly upsetting.
We are constantly being told that the US is a relatively conservative nation. This is why some of the more obvious social democratic remedies for our economic and social ills are considered as beyond the pale. They won’t fly here, we are told, because Americans won’t go for them.
This is odd when we think about how extremely popular programs like Social Security for retirees and Medicare for the elderly are. Despite the regularity with which the Republican party derides such programs, and despite the dire predictions that said programs will reduce America to some version of abject Soviet-style penury, the voting public simply loves them. Getting rid of them is impossible. This is why the only approach that remains to our political right is to starve the government of revenue sufficient to pay for “entitlement programs” so that the debate is shifted away from their efficacy and towards their affordability. No one doubts their efficacy. But we seem always to be discussing their affordability. The US, we are told, despite being the wealthiest economy on earth, just can’t afford entitlements.
Even that word: “entitlements” is an attempt to pervert the narrative. It makes the programs in question sound as if they are gross luxuries that require the pillaging of one person’s wealth in order to satisfy that of others who feel entitled to something that is not rightly theirs. So instead of being a reward for, or right of, citizenship social programs are presented purely as a burden on those unfortunate enough to have sufficient wealth to pay taxes.
The poor dears!
In any case, the gap between the perspective of our elected officials, their staffs, and the commentariat who opine on such matters, and the actual perspective of voters has reached a critical level. I submit that the gap accounts for a substantial portion of the motivation driving what is thought of as populist politics.
If it is true that our elected officials, and the bureaucracy that administers policy, are tone deaf to the real world experience of the voters, and if officialdom persists in executing policies directed to solve problems that the voters don’t think they have, disillusion will inevitably result. On both sides.
Officialdom will become cynical as to the apparent surliness of the electorate, and voters will become increasingly cynical about the motives of officialdom. An opening will exist for the truly cynical populists we see cluttering politics right throughout the western world.
The disconnect is dangerous for the health of democracy.
Today’s New York Times has two columns (one analysis and one opinion) devoted to this issue, so I don’t need to go any further with it.
Except.
For anyone remotely aware of the stranglehold corporate America has on the legislative process via its lobbying efforts none of the above is at all surprising. As the inestimable work of Gilens and Page so clearly informs us, corporate America exerts an undue influence in Washington, and one consequence of that influence is the extraordinary bias it gives to the issues deemed important to policymakers. This is not a question of money in elections, it is more a matter of corporate ability to dictate the legislative agenda subsequent to elections. The corrosion of officialdom’s ability to understand the needs and/or wants of the electorate is due to the extraordinary capture of the legislative process by a small minority. Of course policy is ineffective or non-responsive to widely held opinions. Those opinions are being crowded out. There is a giant blockage in the workings of our democratic machinery.
Let me leave you with the final paragraph of the Gilens and Page paper I linked to above:
“Despite the seemingly strong empirical support in previous studies for theories of majoritarian democracy, our analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts. Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association, and a wide-spread (if still contested) franchise. But we believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.”
Yes, elections matter. But, apparently, lobbying can neutralize them.
This is why the only approach that remains to our political right is to starve the government of revenue sufficient to pay for “entitlement programs”
That hasn’t really worked, that hasn’t been what has been done, except theatrically. What they do is cut taxes on and direct enormous welfare to the 1% and the .01% enough to make it sound like the entitlements are spending too much. In reality they aren’t. There is no inflation and there would be none if we made the entitlements more generous. There is still a great deal of room for extra spending, so enormous is the demand for the US dollar, so productive is our economy, so crazily austerian is much of the rest of the world.
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Even that word: “entitlements” is an attempt to pervert the narrative.
No, No, No! The narrative has been so perverted that reasonable people can suggest crazy things like ‘ “entitlement” is a perversion, a pejorative’.
For what does “entitlement” actually mean? That the holder has a TITLE to something.
Of course you are ENTITLED to Social Security & Medicare (& Medicare for All & a Job Guarantee etc.)
Just like you are ENTITLED to the money in your bank account. The house or car you hold a TITLE to. The wages for the hours you work. The TITLE deed of the property you land on and pay for in a game of Monopoly. You play by the rules, you are ENTITLED.
These all are or have been seen or should be seen as PROPERTY of the entitlement-holder, that cannot be taken except by due process of law. People who try to take away entitlements, property are called “thieves”.
The rich are so good at brainwashing that they convince everyone that only the property of the rich is sacrosanct, only the rich are truly entitled to property. People cannot even see the property of the poor, of ordinary people, as Property. Read Crawford MacPherson’s magnificent anthology on Property or anything else by him to start looking at such things logically, philosophically, correctly.
Yes, elections matter. But, apparently, lobbying can neutralize them.
Once in a while they do matter. An enormous amount. People who always belittle the power of politics and politicians and exaggerate the power of the plutocracy are replete with excrement.
No lobbyist or adviser controlled or neutralized Lincoln or FDR. LBJ for all his faults, was the one who made the decisions, sometimes bad, like for Vietnam, sometimes good, as on Medicare, civil rights, etc. Read Caro’s biography – some of his plutocrat and political supporters who thought he was in their pocket, with liberal aims the window-dressing, eventually realized that Johnson had tricked and controlled them, not vice versa.
Thank you for this comment. It needs to be said whenever this type of confusion is arises, which is too often of late.
Ethnologists, anthropologists, folklorists, economists. engineers. consumers and users never see objects. They see only plans, actions. behaviors, arrangements, habits, heuristics, abilities. Collections (associations) of practices of which certain portions seem a little more durable and others a little more transient, though one can never say which one. steel or memory, things or words. stones or laws guarantees the longer duration. Everything is about controversies and uncertainties in associations. No matter how uncertain or controversial they may be, humans rest their lives and their cultures on these collections of associations. This of course includes physical matter.
In 930 AD. chieftains in Iceland gathered in a natural amphitheater and formed the world’s first parliament, the Althing. The meeting place was called Thingvellir (“parliament plains”), and over the next 300 years representatives journeyed here once a year to elect leaders, argue cases, and settle disputes. Recognizing that practices, thoughts, habits, actions, etc. are provisional in all respects, these representatives did not argue or discuss “facts.” Rather, they argued and discussed “assertions,” and concluded their deliberations to settle disputes and makes rules based on “disputable” assertions. This is the highest achievement humans can expect. After all, when Aristotle – surely not a cultural relativist! – introduced the word “rhetoric” it was precisely to mean proofs, incomplete to be sure but proofs nonetheless. Where matters-of-fact have failed, let’s try what Latour calls matters-of-concern. This is a major sea change in our conceptions of science, our grasp of facts, our understanding of objectivity. For too long, objects have been wrongly portrayed as matters-of-fact. This is unfair to them, unfair to science, unfair to objectivity, unfair to experience. They are much more interesting, variegated, uncertain, complicated, far reaching, heterogeneous, risky, historical, local, material, and networky than the pathetic version offered for too long by philosophers. Which most social scientists have accepted without ever a second look. Rocks are not simply there to be kicked at, desks to be thumped at. “Facts are facts are facts”? Yes, but they are also a lot of other things in addition. When we move this way, gone are the days when debates are won by simply insisting “we have the facts on our side.” This puts us all on a level playing field. This surely makes all our lives more difficult. We are now forced to enter into the new arenas for good and finally make our point to the bitter end. We must publicly prove our assertions against other assertions and come to a closure without thumping and kicking, without alternating wildly between indisputable facts and indisputable shows of violence and terror. We can no longer escape into facts and ridicule. I want to suggest a new eloquence. Is it asking too much of our public conversation? It’s great to be convinced, but it would be even better to be convinced by some evidence! We need is to be able to bring inside the assemblies and voting places divisive issues with their long retinue of complicated proof-giving equipment. No unmediated access to agreement; no unmediated access to the facts of the matter. After all, we are used to rather arcane procedures for voting and electing. Why should we suddenly imagine an eloquence so devoid of means, tools, tropes, tricks, and knacks that it would bring the facts into the arenas through some uniquely magical transparent idiom? If politics is earthly, so is science. This is how elections could matter.