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And how fake democracy is paving the way to “reasonable fascism”
PATRICE GREANVILLE Jan. 20, 2011
Revised and expanded 5/12/11
Revised and expanded 5/12/11
The perfect pseudoleader.
PROGRESSIVE ACTIVISTS are duly concerned about the evaporation of [the remants of] American democracy. Never as perfect or strong as our ceaseless narcissistic propaganda would have it, the whole scheme has been on a suicidal dive during the last four decades, particularly since that ludicrously revered mountebank, Ronald Reagan, assumed the titular helm of the empire in 1980. Now, the dilapidated structure is in danger of winning the dubious world historical prize for the widest chasm between rhetoric and reality—ever. In other words, the US is becoming the foremost example of what political scientists aptly call a “formal democracy.” Below an excerpt from the Wiki entry on the topic:
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The United States, especially from 1980 on under Ronald W. Reagan, is also said to fit the description [of formal democracy], as all levers of government were effectively controlled and often directly staffed by members of the plutocracy. The visible manifestations of this mode of government seemed to have peaked during the administration of George W. Bush, who went so far as to seek to undermine the US Constitution itself. However, government by manipulated consent is a problem afflicting the entire US political system, regardless of party affiliation, and is likely to continue until extensive radical reforms are implemented to overhaul or bypass the business-controlled mass communications system, inaugurate proportional representation, root out corporate lobbying and overwhelming corporate influence on all sectors of national policy, and embrace other measures designed to make the satisfaction of the well-informed ordinary citizen’s interest the chief object of political activity.
As I have pointed out in numerous occasions, the quality of a democracy—its legitimacy—is tested and measured by its responsiveness to citizens’ needs. Obviously I’m talking here about ordinary citizens, working Americans, people who have to work to keep from falling through the myriad cracks in our Darwinian system, and not the billionaires that run this rigged game from their globule of privilege at the top of the social pyramid.
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This sector of the population is scandalously small in the US, redolent of feudalism, but the public—even progressives—remain mostly unaware of the actual depth of the inequality canyon. I was recently reminded of this as I watched Bill Maher’s show with a panel that included the fiercely lucid Chrystia Freeland, who happens to be Global Editor-at-Large of Reuters. When someone on the panel declared (I’m paraphrasing) that about 1% of Americans control an obscenely big slice of the total pie (I guess”1%” is an easy number to remember and useful to make a point, since it’s bad enough), Chrystia immediately jumped up to correct the attribution, indicating that wealth was far more concentrated than that, in the order not of 1/100 but 1/100,000 or worse. In other words, this super privileged, puny minority constitute about .00001 of the invisible apex of a miniscule pyramid inside the larger pyramid of inequality…multi-billionaires all. Wrap your mind around that.
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Of course, this is not a comfortable topic for the soi disant dedicated “professional journalists” and the affluent commentariat toiling in the nation’s mainstream media. Which may explain why there’s so little agitation among the populace. I mean agitation by an informed, progressive public, not the astroturf legions of the right. Timothy Noah asked himself that obvious question in a fine piece he filed last year in Salon, Why don’t Americans pay more attention to growing income disparity? After some due diligence, he uncovered some credible suspects, but the truth is likely to shock anyone who has drank too heavily from the poisoned cup of chauvinist mythologys:
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One reason may be our enduring belief in social mobility. Economic inequality is less troubling if you live in a country where any child, no matter how humble his or her origins, can grow up to be president. In a survey of 27 nations conducted from 1998 to 2001, the country where the highest proportion agreed with the statement “people are rewarded for intelligence and skill” was, of course, the United States. (69 percent). But when it comes to real as opposed to imagined social mobility, surveys find less in the United States than in much of (what we consider) the class-bound Old World. France, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Spain—not to mention some newer nations like Canada and Australia—are all places where your chances of rising from the bottom are better than they are in the land of Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick.
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Apparently half disbelieving, Noah probed deeper, this time marshalling an impecable source:
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All my life I’ve heard Latin America described as a failed society (or collection of failed societies) because of its grotesque maldistribution of wealth. Peasants in rags beg for food outside the high walls of opulent villas, and so on. But according to the Central Intelligence Agency (whose patriotism I hesitate to question), income distribution in the United States is more unequal than in Guyana, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, and roughly on par with Uruguay, Argentina, and Ecuador. Income inequality is actually declining in Latin America even as it continues to increase in the United States. Economically speaking, the richest nation on earth is starting to resemble a banana republic. The main difference is that the United States is big enough to maintain geographic distance between the villa-dweller and the beggar. As Ralston Thorpe tells his St. Paul’s classmate, the investment banker Sherman McCoy, in Tom Wolfe’s 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities: “You’ve got to insulate, insulate, insulate.”
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I should add that the geographic distances separating the classes, important as they are, are not the sole nor the most important cover for the reigning plutocracy. There’s also the fact that most ordinary people—reality TV shows notwithstanding—can’t begin to fathom how the superrich really live, let alone understand how they look upon society at large from their high perch and unlimited sense of entitlement, nor what their extravagant habits really entail.
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Let’s say it’s a case of stunted imagination, generously abetted by the corporate media, the ubiquitous accomplice in today’s major social deformations which in this case is happy to function as a tall and impregnable fence keeping random political voyeurs well out of range. Apparently social tranquillity can rest on lies and invisibility, as well as justice. (Napoleon might agree. Prevention of social unrest is far more efficient than repression. He famously remarked that you could do almost anything with bayonets, except sit on them.)
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Tremendous inequality of course is antithetical to true democracy, except that ours was never a true democracy, but a bourgeois democracy of traders, merchants and large landowners, with emphasis on capitalist. And in any capitalist scheme, huge inequalities are part of the natural DNA. This point is usually flogged into our pea brains with alacrity on conservative and reactionary blogs, where there’s never a shortage of savants willing to remind us that this country is merely a republic. Obviously such quarters believe no great debt is owed to the democratic ideal. (When uppityness threatens to get the better of you, try to recall that minor detail, buster!)
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The incredibly shrinking democracy
Reflecting apparently upon the recent unexpected turn of events in Tunisia, the New York Times commented on the extremely fragile situation in the Middle East, predicting doom for western-backed Arab nations:
“…Arab states looked exhausted, ossified and ideologically bankrupt, surviving merely to perpetuate themselves. Never has the divide between ruler and ruled seemed so yawning, and perhaps never has it been so dangerous.”
The megaphone for American liberalism could have been speaking about the United States. The label “shrinking democracy” may sound like cheap science fiction movie, but the above sums up the situation we are facing here—minus the street eruptions—rather accurately. We began our discussion by asserting that American democracy —what’s left of it at this point—is quickly evaporating before our eyes. Obstinate nonresponsiveness and repeated, suspicious incompetence by the top elected officials in the face of clear and pressing needs (especially in a nation as rich as America) is the ultimate tipoff that something is awfully rotten at the center of the national covenant, and that the American democracy we grew up with (despite being badly flawed) is melting as fast as the neglected polar caps.
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With the country and the world sailing straight into a tsunami of lethal crises—environmental, political, economic, infrastructural—the absence of real, courageous, and capable leadership is now more obvious than ever. Incidentally, the paralysis of effective government can’t be explained away by recent phenomena like bipartisan bickering, or malicious Republican filibustering. The roots of the problem are far older and lie far deeper, in the innermost folds of the capitalist dynamic, which in turn generates the fraudulence of the current setup. Hence Obama’s “solutions”—had they been enacted by Congress even without an iota of partisan dilution— would have solved exactly nothing. (The standing gallery of paid establishment pundits and apologists will naturally paint a different picture, tell you otherwise. It will be the usual murky picture pointing at irrelevancies, superficialities, false leads, scapegoats, and dead-ends. Pay no heed to it. This time simply tell them to piss off.)
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In the way of evidence
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If you’re feelin a bit wobbly after reviewing these unpleasant realities, take heart. Identifying the disease is the first step toward the cure. The facts are irrefutable. The class divide between the superrich and their shills (who rule) and regular people is now so vast (and getting vaster, like receding galaxies) that there’s little congruency of purpose left, only political theater, albeit the best political theater around, a type of stagecraft perfected over many decades of manipulating consent under the watchful eye of expert marketing whores. (Dick Morris is perhaps the poster boy for this unprincipled breed, but not by much.) David Michael Green, a professor of pol sci at Hofstra, and one of our frequent contributors, has become something of a specialist at inventorying the astonishing number of ways the American system is failing the American people. In his latest volley, Christina Green’s Civics Lesson, he states unequivocally:
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Serving the interests of the plutocracy is no longer merely American government’s bias or even its mission. That function has in our time now become its full-on raison d’être, and the government is therefore capable of anything in pursuit of that purpose.
- It has created a gigantic military machine, completely out of proportion to any actual national security need.
- It has launched an endless series of wars, based on lie after lie.
- It has shifted ever greater tax burdens onto the middle, working and under classes, and onto future generations – without, of course, their acquiescence.
- It has created and defends a health care system that condemns tens of millions of its citizens – including children – to a lack of health, and to shortened lives.
- It built a massive for-profit prison industry, incarcerating more of its citizens than any other country in the world.
- It allowed its financiers to deploy every manner of crooked scam imaginable, in a context of almost completely absent regulation, wrecking an entire global economy in the process as these bunkster banksters enriched themselves before, during and after the meltdown they created. Then it covered their losses one hundred cents on the dollar, using taxpayer funds, even as these private sector privateers continued to flog that very same government as public enemy number one.
- It gave corporations tax credits for shipping American jobs overseas, decimating the middle class on the altar of free trade.
- It stood by silently, permitting banks to throw people out of their homes en masse, based on foreclosure documents that are utter garbage.
- It declared corporations the equivalent of human beings, and then used the doctrine of free speech protection to cover for the unlimited political purchasing power those predators employed to buy the government of their liking.”
The list goes on quite a ways, and you can examine it here, along with the rest of the piece. I hope you do. Green concludes somberly: “The government of this country has done all these things and much, much more for one simple reason: It serves the overclass, not the people.” It is a realization that no intelligent person can dispute.
But why has the plutocracy—native and global—decided on this perilous course? Why are they “tempting fate” by pushing the masses to desperation? Is fascism really in store? And if so, how will it descend upon America? Stay tuned, because that will be the topic for the second part of this essay.
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PATRICE GREANVILLE is The Greanville Post‘s editor in chief. He also serves as publisher for Cyrano’s Journal Today.
